I'll be presenting my first ever conference papers during the Spring semester, and rather than be content with just one excursion into the world of professional historians, I'm presenting four times between now and Memorial Day.  No easing into things for me.

First up is the Phi Alpha Theta biennial conference in January, where I'm presenting a paper on honor, chivalry, and the Vietnam War.  in March I present two papers on the South's attitudes toward George Armstrong Custer - at the 2nd University of Alabama Graduate Conference on Power & Struggle I'll be discussing how Southerners used Custer in conjunction with the Election of 1876 to end Reconstruction, while at the 2010 Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery Conference at CSU-Pueblo I'll talk about Custer's changing image among Southerners from the beginning of the Civil War through his death in 1876.  To cap of the semester, I'm jumping into the deep end of the pool, and presenting at the Society for Military History's Annual Meeting at VMI, where I'm presenting a paper about Masculinity in the Vietnam War.

All of this presenting brings up a question: the SISSI Conference publishes a conference proceedings.  Does that count as a publication credit?  I would hate to stick it on my cv as one, only to look like an idiot for doing so.

        

After an unintentionally long hiatus I am finally back to blogging.  There are no real explanations other than life getting in the way - the press of teaching, taking classes, writing, and moving my lovely wife to her law school really distracted me from anything not mission critical.

With the holiday season come new resolutions - an early one being to get this place back up and running.  Over the next week I'll be updating links and adding new content while juggling things like grading for my online classes, putting up the Christmas tree, and putting the final touches on a conference paper before sending it off to the panel chair/commentator.

        

Last week David Axe reported that the U.S. Navy finally did something that USAF needed to do years ago - leased four Super Tocano light attack planes to support Special Operations.  The Super Tocanos can't operate off carriers, but at least the Navy understand that flexible air to ground capability is a must in the modern threat environment.  This fits with the normal Navy and Marine Corps approach to aviation - it's a necessary tool used to address multiple problems.  To be effective you need multiple types of aircraft, not just super expensive fighters and bombers.  This is why the Navy is getting the P-8, the EA-18G, and the F-35 on top of their other airframes, at a a time USAF is focused on the F-22 and F-35 to the exclusion of almost everything else, even the necessary support aircraft like tankers.

        

Two weeks ago the Graduate History Association here at UA hosted it's first conference for graduate students.  Other than a few small issues - the remote didn't advance slides during Matthew Connelly's keynote, the university's tech folks rolled out a radical new update to the PCs we were using for conference presentations over night on Friday, which had me and Kerry Cohen scrambling to figure out how to get things running again.  Despite these snags, things went pretty smoothly.

        

The complete conference program for the University of Alabama Graduate Student History Conference on Power and Struggle is now online both as a web page and a pdf file.  While setting it up, I just happened to notice that Chris Bray of historiblogography and Cliopatria is scheduled to talk about settler paramilitaries in Early America.  I hope that I can catch his panel in between tech support requests.

        

Normally, the causes I promote here are related to Veterans or active duty troops.  Today, I have something a bit different to request everyone's help with MS Softserve.

MS Softserve is a 501(c)(3) that works to educate people with MS about how to live with their disease.  Like anything else, MS is not a monolithic, static condition that affects all people equally.  The goal of MS Softserve is to provide MS sufferers with the information they need in a safe environment that allows them to access resources in ways that work for them.  There are between 250,000 and 350,000 people with Multiple Sclerosis in the United States, so by supporting MS Softserve, you have a chance to help a large group of people who really deserve our help.  I have both friends and family with MS, so this is as important to me as the veterans (more friends and family)  causes I also support.

You can get more information about MS Softserve on Facebook or at the MS Softserve website.  You can also watch the video below:





I'll be back to normal posting after I finish the current batch of exam grading.

        

LTC John Nagl's Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife deals in large part with the United States Army as a learning organization during the Vietnam War, and compares it to the British Army's performance in Malaya.  His contention that in order to successfully wage war, particularly when fighting insurgencies, military organizations need to learn from their experiences.  In his estimation, during and after the Vietnam War the U.S. Army became a learning organization.  I saw the types of behavior in the limited training I received as an Army ROTC cadet back in 1990-92 - after action briefings, training scenarios, lessons learned, etc... were a big part of what we did.  You would think that with this background and the difficulties faced in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army would be pushing the concepts of learning through experience even more.

Unfortunately, as Abu Muqawama (aka Andrew Exum) points to Tom Ricks' new series of articles at Foreign Policy's website about the experiences of part of the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Wanat and Elizabeth Rubin's New York Times February, 2008 story about Battle Company's problems in the Korengal River Valley to show that this may not be the case.  The official investigation of the 173rd's problems at Wanat seem to bear out this interpretation.  While Abu Muqawama saw a parallel with Bernard Fall's Street Without Joy, which I'm still working through, I see parallels not only with the French efforts to build small-heavily defended outposts throughout Vietnam during the First Indochina War and the siege of Dien Bien Phu, as illustrated by Fall's Hell in a Very Small Place.

The troops at Wanat particularly seem to fit the bill.  Like the legionnaires at Dien Bien Phu, the platoon (Second Platoon, Chosen Company, 503rd Infantry regiment) at Wanat did not get anything like the amount of materiel needed to build proper fortifications, reducing the height of the barriers so that they could be filled with earth by hand.  Second Platoon also didn't have adequate water available to them onsite, lacked observation posts, and didn't have dedicated surveillance or air support.  One explanation is that th effort was part of an effort to do counterinsurgency "on the cheap" by using too few troops to provide security and then not providing enough support in case things went bad.

It seems obvious that lessons learned from Vietnam and Iraq, or even elsewhere in Afghanistan would limit both these types of situations and the instinct to sweep issues under the rug so that good men would not die in vain, but go read the investigation comments and see what you think.  Maybe the folks in the 173rd are learning from the incident, but what about the rest of the Army?  When and how do this get disseminated to them?

A positive note does appear in this article in The Weekly Standard, which points to efforts to repeat the success of "The Awakening" that was the key to the success of the Surge in Iraq (don't kid yourselves, 20,000 more troops was not enough on its own, a combination of factors was required).  The obvious question is whether an Awakening type of phenomenon is even possible in Afghanistan, which presents a radically different problem that that found in Iraq.  Can the United States and NATO find charismatic local leaders who are willing to stop the violence and support the Karzai government, which has limited legitimacy to begin with?  If Western military forces pull back and avoid conflict or even visibility that could antagonize people, does that really fix the problem, or actually worsen it?  These are all things that people more familiar with Afghanistan than I am are going to have to answer.

Regardless, the Army and the DoD need to get back to the hard hitting lessons learned process that the National Training Center was famed for, and start looking at Afghanistan with a critical eye so that mistakes are avoided in the future.  This can only be good for both the troops and the Afghanis.

        

It looks like the ordeal is over for the Highland High School students who donated an impressive diorama of the Battle of Palmetto Ranch to the Texas Military Forces Museum at Camp Mabry.  Director of the museum at the Army National Guard post in Austin, Jeff Hunt, decreed the diorama inaccurate, and destroyed large portions of the work without discussing perceived problems with the students or their adviser, Glenn Frakes.  Rather than acting responsibly to further the education of the students involved and to fix the diorama, Hunt first claimed that the piece was dismantled, and would be used in smaller exhibits.  Later, Hunt fell back on his authority as curator of the museum to destroy the work or change it as he saw fit.

Most of the students involved in the original project have graduated, but Frakes and a new group of Gilbert, Arizona students, will build a replacement diorama of the battle for Forth Worth's Texas Civil War Museum, which is donating $25,000 for the project.  I hope that this outcome will help some of the students who became victims of the debacle with the TMFM at Camp Mabry regain their enthusiasm for history, and that the opportunity to make things right will promote it in the group that builds to new diorama.  it is obviously too late to hope that Jeff Hunt will face any sort of official censure from either the National Guard or the State of Texas.

        

Repeat after me - using aircraft to fire missiles at suspected terrorists and insurgents is counterproductive to success.  Using unmanned aircraft for same is worse.  Giving armed unmanned aircraft to the CIA with looser rules of engagement is just stupid.  This time Predator drones firing missiles over Afghanistan got some of the people they were shooting at in Waziristan.  Unfortunately, they also got a whole pile of innocent civilians, too.

We have to start asking ourselves when we cross the threshold from enhancing security by removing dangerous people from the field of play, and reduce security by actively recruiting for the enemy.  Is it any surprise Pakistanis are pissed that we are still shooting people in their country without declaring war?  Especially after Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari told his people that they would stop in the Obama administration.  If we get less cooperation from Pakistan in the horribly misnamed "War on Terror" due to these actions, how doe that makes us safer, or Afghanistan more secure and stable?

How is it that we've still not learned this lesson?  Killing innocent civilians with artillery and airpower, forcing their survivors into the hands of the opposition, is a problem facing the United States since the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) was doing it in the early 1960s.  John Paul Vann railed against it until he died while working on CORDS in that country.  This is not new, and it undoes any claims by USAF that airpower has a legitimate and useful softpower component.  When you kill innocent people from the air in a spectacular and highly visible fashion, it doesn't really matter how many schools you build, how much medicine you deliver, or how many cross-cultural ties you create.

        

Almost all of the girls that were victims of a November Taliban acid attack are back at school this week.  This is a move that takes great courage on the part of the girls and their parents, the teachers, and government officials, and provides some hope for Afghanistan's future.  The question that remains is whether the Afghan authorities, local Afghans, and NATO forces can provide enough security to schools and hospitals that more schools can open, and stay open.  Education, an improved economy, and physical security are three of the key ingredients for lasting stability in the country, which also needs other basic infrastructure.