Campaign Assessment and Reassessment

I was reading Abby's blog "Bad Dogs and Such" today. She makes reference to the Army's Counterinsurgency Manual (FM3-24). Looking through it I discover it contains a selection of vignettes. Some of them are entertaining, and they are short, which is good because I don't want to read the entire manual. It is almost 300 pages. I discovered this one in Chapter 4. I enjoyed this one becasue I have read some of Bernard Cornwall's stories about the Napoleonic Wars in the Sharpe's Rifles series. So it's nice to have that fictional account of Napoleon in Spain reinforced from a authoritative source. Anyway, this one sounds a little too much like our experience in Iraq.

Campaign Assessment and Reassessment

During Napoleon’s occupation of Spain in 1808, it seems little thought was given to the potential challenges of subduing the Spanish populace. Conditioned by the decisive victories at Austerlitz and Jena, Napoleon believed the conquest of Spain would be little more than a “military promenade.” Napoleon’s campaign included a rapid conventional military victory but ignored the immediate requirement to provide a stable environment for the populace.

The French failed to analyze the Spanish people, their history, culture, motivations, and potential to support or hinder the achievement of French political objectives. The Spanish people were accustomed to hardship, suspicious of foreigners and constantly involved in skirmishes with security forces. Napoleon’s cultural miscalculation resulted in a protracted occupation struggle that lasted nearly six years and ultimately required approximately three-fifths of the Empire’s total armed strength, almost four times the force of 80,000 Napoleon originally designated.

Update December 2016 replaced dead link.
Update June 2019 corrected spelling of Napoleon.

Stolen complete from "Bad Dogs and Such"

I was going to just quote part of it, but then I decided, shoot, just copy the whole thing. From a soldier in Iraq.

22 September 2008

MORE cultural awareness

We spend so much time studying the way "They" like things that you occasionally have to wonder whether, assuming this is a clash of civilizations, they might already have won.

We were having the Ramadan discussion.

They abstain, the instructor droned, from food, drink and sex from sunup to sundown for a month.

Hell, we've been abstaining from booze, sex and decent food 24/7 for closing in on a month now. It's making all of us pretty cranky, so perhaps that explains the ongoing rage problem from the Islamic world. Food for thought.

Computer Programming Notes

From Iowa:

While suffering through confabulating a interactive webpage...a neuron clicked, causing me to wonder about "Apologists" in the context of popular Computer operating systems. I am increasing upset with my "not getting" the unifying theorem of computing.

Google
"Microsoft apologists" ~5,000 hits
vs.
"Linux apologist" ~300

This link made sense (though not populist and not very satisfying.)

As I reach for more programming features, the programming environment gets more complicated.

The smart "confusitoids" provide what is immediately demanded, but in the rush to provide, they leave these solution s cloaked in the labyrinth of abstraction.

i.e. The programming environment is getting more complex and more difficult.

From Chicago:

It's MY impression that 95% of developers do nothing at all except sit at a desk and play games or watch youtube. Very few of them actually do anything close to 'development', unless you call changing colors for highlight text on style sheets "development".

I read somewhere that only 5% or so of people who call themselves programmers can actually write code. I have seen some evidence of this. But there is another, possibly larger, part to computer systems besides writing code, and that is keeping the systems running. Things are always changing and even the stablest system is going to suffer from a glitch occasionally. When that happens you need someone around who can fix it. In order to be able to fix it, you need someone who understands how it works. I suspect that is why a lot of programmers are employed. Not to do any actual work, but just to be there to fix things in case something goes wrong. Of course business managers hate to have people just hanging around doing nothing, so we have lot's of pretend work going on. The managers would love to fire the programmers except that they know they are totally dependent on them to keep their business operation running.

Zimbabwe

From a report about fact finding visit by the ICC (International Cricket Council):

"The visit comes against the backdrop of freshly-escalating violence inside Zimbabwe as power-sharing talks between Zanu-PF and the Movement for Democratic Change break down, unemployment running at 80%, inflation at 231 million % and the United Nations predicting millions could be starving within months."

Letter from Iowa

Paradigm shift

One of Fairfields largest employers, Books are Fun, is being sold back to it founder and moved to Boulder, CO.

Everyone laid off.

I like the quote "This agreement is in the best interest of Books Are Fun's customers..."

Who are their customers? Anyone that walks into one of their temporary sales displays in lobbys and malls.

Started in 1990 on shoestring, sold to Readers Digest for $390 Mil in 1999. Bought back from RD for $17.5 Mil in 2008

Links:

• Selling to 'Books Are Fun' by Linda Matthie-Jacobs
• Books Are Fun assets sold for $17.5 million to Kaplans by Vicki Tillis
• Imagine Nation Books
• Current incarnation as Collective Goods

Update December 2016 replaced dead link with exciting new links.

Jumble

Jumble

The Daily Jumble Puzzle had two words this week that stumped me. Today's was TAIGEY. I struggled with it for a while, but finally resorted to using the dictionary (a real bound paper one) and discovered that unscrambled it becomes GAIETY. Not a word that gets used much anymore on account of "gay" being usurped by the alternately sexed. Too bad they couldn't have made up a new word instead of stealing a perfectly good old one.

The other day RAMER gave me trouble. I also resorted to the dictionary for this one, but could not find anything that would work. I eventually resorted to using ARMER, as in surely someone uses his arms is arming and is an armer. To my chagrin the actual word is REARM. I needed the first, middle and last letter to solve the quip, and you will note that those three letters in both cases are RAM.

To use the dictionary to decode a Jumble, I arrange the letters in alphabetically order, and then start looking for the first two letter combination, and then going on to three or however many it takes to rule it out. Then we go to the next, which means the first and third letters, and so on through the first and last. Then we go to second and third, and so on and so forth. It's tedious, and little time consuming, but if my brain won't deliver the answer, it's my only hope. And as illustrated here, it doesn't always work.

Update December 2016 replaced missing image.

Blogs I Read

There are five or six blogs I read every day. Not all of them get updated everyday, but a couple usually are. And they post links to other stuff, and if I am interested in the post, I will follow the link. I hardly watch TV at all anymore, except sometimes I wll watch something I have recorded from the military history channel, usually about WWII. That's always interesting.

Blogs I read:

• Dustbury
  
• View From The Porch
  
• The Adventures of Roberta X
• Stu Savory's Blog
• Syaffolee
• Rocketboom

And then there's Elena, who did the photo essay about Chernobyl.