Shrike
11hr ago
I've met at least one guy younger than me who was like "yea I'd fight for the Confederacy." It wasn't a pro-slavery stance, it was essentially regional patriotism.
You've got to understand that a lot of the people who fought for the South didn't fight for slavery in the sense that they did not stand to benefit by it and had little or zero economic investment in it. Like, plenty of poor people who basically did not benefit from slavery at all still fought for the South because they were invaded by a hostile foreign power. And by 1860, the culture war over slavery had grown beyond slavery in the sense that it had become about whether slavery was right or wrong or should be legal or illegal, but about a clash of cultures and ways of living. (You can see this in today's culture war as well, arguments as soldiers and all of that.)
And in the South, moreso than most other parts of the United States, those people didn't go anywhere, they had kids and grandkids and those great-grandkids still live there and still have an emotional attachment to their ancestors (who fought bravely despite very long odds and were defeated) and their land (which was economically devastated by the war) and their culture (which has been mocked in popular culture ever since). So (despite your assertion about political fights in the US today) the differences in the cultures and ways of living never really went away. Many, perhaps most people in the South, are still regionalized patriots. I think (particularly in the past) people were likely to display a Confederate flag similar to how someone in Texas might display the Texas flag instead of the United States flag. (Not that I would suggest there was zero correlation between wearing the Confederate flag and certain beliefs about race...!)
Perhaps the best way I might explain this to someone who is either too close or too far from the question to understand it might be: imagine a patriotic Englishman who strongly supported the Saxons at Hastings (I suspect a pretty common position) despite modern England being fundamentally a Norman invention.
This is not Confederate apologia, by the by, I'm just trying to explain something to you. Happy to elaborate to the best of my ability.
Shrike
18hr ago
This might not be the case today, but my guess is that by 2036 our serious peer opponents will be able to knock out even swarm constellations like Starlink in a serious war. Being able to put stuff on the ground still matters.
Shrike
18hr ago
This would almost certainly not have avoided the war, as Lincoln was determined to keep the nation together. It might have taken the wind out of the sails of some of the Radical Republicans and made the CSA more popular in Europe, but Lincoln had a plenty good casus belli already.
Shrike
18hr ago
I mean, probably the same thing he did in real life. It's very hard to fight a war against a larger enemy without an offsetting advantage. The only offsetting advantage that the South had was that their troop quality was superior.
Since troop quality tends to equalize over the course of a war (very noticeable change, for instance, in the capabilities of Southern cavalry relative to their Northern peers over the course of the war) fighting an aggressive campaign to rack up as many victories as possible and break the enemy will to fight early on is pretty smart.
I am sure that in hindsight there is a lot of things Davis could have done differently, but my study of the war didn't focus very specifically on him and thus I am likely ignorant of many of them.
I think Lee can perhaps be criticized for being willing to win costly victories early in the war, but ultimately the South was never going to win a war of attrition, and Lincoln basically needed to cycle through commanders until he found one (Grant) that understood this and was willing to throw his own men into the meatgrinder, so fighting to optimize for casualties probably doesn't help you win the war if it means you are losing more often - this was basically McClellan's strategy (McClellan as far as I can tell was actually very good at training and loved his men - if anything, this was a problem, he wasn't willing to let them die) and he was pretty evidently ill-suited for actually winning the war.
But it seems to me that there wasn't much Davis could do differently in most cases. What is he supposed to do about Johnston or Jackson, tell them "don't die"? Or tell Lee "good job, try to get fewer people killed"? He could have put Lee in charge sooner, or perhaps put him in charge in the West, but Lee wasn't ultimately capable of beating Grant. Maybe he could have tried to have Grant assassinated after Shiloh, or something similarly off-the-wall.
The one thing I know I would push for if I woke up tomorrow as Jefferson Davis, newly elected President of the Confederacy, is push to free slaves to fight sooner. But a lot of that is because I think such an effort would be better for the postwar South (regardless of who won) rather than thinking that it would win the war. There's also a real problem here in terms of timing - something like this became more politically viable late in the war, but arguably too late to matter. If Davis had been able to free the slaves on Day One, it might have made a difference in terms of Northern political will, and garnered additional support from England. But obviously that was politically impossible. The best he could likely have done would have been to launch pilot programs earlier in the war. Maybe that would have worked well, or maybe not.
Shrike
18hr ago
This is off the top of my head based on what I recall from coursework like a decade ago, but if memory serves:
- Southern troops were exhausted from the battle and the maneuvering leading up to it and not in a condition to pursue
- Washington, D.C. was likely fortified (I know it was later in the war)
- Northern troops were falling back in that direction, would benefit from interior lines, and would have a numerical advantage on the defensive
I'd need to do more research to have a really solid opinion, but it strikes me a lot like the people saying Hannibal should have just thrown his army at Rome after Cannae, ignoring that the Romans had the superior numbers.
Shrike
18hr ago
I'm not sure. I did a course in it, not an entire degree, and to the extent I focused on anything it was actually the naval war, so I don't have a strong opinion on the single most important battle. But Vicksburg, if memory serves, was what really allowed the North to implement Scott's Anaconda strategy on the Southern interior.
were regiments composed of freed slaves actually useful (I don't trust the academy to give me an honest answer here).
I think the answer is "yes" in Union service, and it's unclear how they would have performed in Southern service, since their options were basically fighting for freedom or surrendering for freedom. (However I do think that freeing them was better than the slightly insane plan to conscript the slaves to fight as slaves.)
Even if one agrees for the sake of argument that freed slaves wouldn't perform as well on the battlefield (and setting aside any of the culture war reasons, at least in the South a lot of troops went into the war with a deep familiarity with firearms we would not expect most slaves to possess) being able to use them in logistics, screening, and garrison roles is useful.
Definitely the south should have never fought outside of an intrenched position
See Fort Henry and Fort Donelson for what happen when you adopt this tactic. Fortifications are force multipliers, not a replacement for maneuver.
Perhaps the Union could have fought its own defensive war and just starved the South out over time via naval blockade without taking a lot of casualties.
The South was an agrarian society. You could have made them poor this way, but not actually starve them out. Furthermore...although the Union blockade was successful, the Confederacy's commerce raiders punched above their weight and imposed real economic losses on the North. Northerners might not have seen a "sit and wait" strategy as politically acceptable while the South was tearing through their commerce and whaling. However see Winfield Scott's similar Anaconda Plan, which was ultimately essentially implemented because Scott was more correct than most other early war leadership about the length and cost of the war.
I'm not sure Northern naval dominance was quite as inevitable as one might imagine. Certainly they had the superior manufacturing, but the Confederacy's early war goals were to procure European ironclads and obliterate the Northern wooden-hulled fleet. However they were unable to procure a European ironclad until late in the war. I doubt buying a few ironclads would have prevented a resolute North from eventually beating them at sea with their greater manufacturing capabilities, but it might have set the blockade back at a crucial time.
Shrike
23hr ago
I studied the American Civil War in graduate school, and the books I read (and my professor) did not think highly of the Fabian thesis. They pointed out that
- The material and morale cost imposed by having a hostile army rampaging all over your countryside was extremely high (this is part of the reason Lee invaded Pennsylvania, Virginia had been marched over by armies of both sides so many times).
- A standing army was a necessary symbol of the legitimacy of the South to its people (and also helpful to foreign sponsors) as a nation-state.
- Aggressively defending its territory was necessary as the South was a slaveholding state, and the North was freeing slaves in territories it entered. This is a pretty serious problem when you are at war, the men are off fighting it, and you need to make sure your armies are fed. Allowing retreating in the face of their superior armies meant that the Southern economic base would evaporate.
There are also some who suggest that the South was unable to wage a guerrilla campaign (e.g. in the aftermath of Lee's surrender) because of poor or brittle morale. This is untrue; the South accepted an outrageous percentage of casualties that would probably have folded up other nation-states, including the Union.
Highly recommend Gallagher's Union War and Confederate War on this question.
If I was going to try to win the Civil War for the South as a time-traveler, I would have used the tourniquet in Albert Sidney Johnston's pocket to save his life and do my best to make sure the Union troops were routed at Shiloh on the second day. Johnston was regarded by many as the best commander in the United States going into the war, and American literature over-indexes on the fighting in the East. The truth is that the Western campaign was arguably the most decisive. (Focusing on Gettysburg is arguably a bit of pro-Confederate myopia that glorifies the South's high-water mark in the East while overlooking their relatively poor generalship in the West, although you aren't wrong about the potential electoral consequences.) A victory over Grant there could have removed the North's most effective commander.
Of course, saving Johnston's life might not really matter in the long run – I like it because it's an interesting "what if," a small change of the sorts that spawn alternate-history books. There are lots of other things an effective time traveler could do, such as ensure Grant did not get the early sweep at Forts Henry and Donelson (possibly more important than saving Johnston), pick up Special Order 191 before it was recovered by Union forces, give advice on how to win/not lose at Gettysburg, kick the early trial plans to free slaves to act as soldiers into higher gear, or possibly even persuade South Carolina not to fire the first shot.
I also do think that the South could have used more effective defensive tactics without going purely Fabian. Lee (who had an early war nickname of "the King of Spades") imposed massive costs on the North via effective trenchworks and defensive tactics later in the war. But at the end of the day, particularly in premodern war, "eating the other guy's corn" versus "letting the other guy eat your corn" is a big difference.
Shrike
23hr ago
That was my suspicion, but I hadn't seen any good literature on it. Thanks for chiming in!
Shrike
1d ago
You obviously don't have any obligation to do so but as someone who hasn't been closely following the Canadian plotline and isn't super familiar with Canadian politics, I'd love to better understand what you mean. Maybe there's an article you could point me towards?
Alternatively I'd love to read a write-up (past or future) by you on it.
Shrike
1d ago
Yeah, this has been about my experience.
Are you using any of the legal harnesses (e.g. Harvey)?
One of the things that is a little annoying is that it's very hard to tell exactly how well something will perform (or muck up) without a lot of stress-testing, which takes up more time than you would save if it works as advertised. Although on the plus side the need to do stress testing is probably at the end of the day nice for my job security, so there is that.
Shrike
1d ago
I think the quietness of modern submarines makes the GIUK gap more important. With a quiet submarine in, say, the middle of the Pacific or the Atlantic, it could be anywhere and finding it could be tricky. The GIUK gap is (from what I understand) a bit more shallow than the middle of the ocean and it is a much more finite space. If you can carefully observe it you can pick up submarines and try to track them before it becomes a needle-in-a-haystack race.
If there's anything that makes GIUK less important it would be US technological developments making it easier to find submarines in the middle of nowhere. And some of the Cold War SOSUS intelligence suggest US capabilities can be scary in this regard. But I am not sure how reliable that is (there are a lot of technologies that are amazing in ideal conditions and quickly turn to mash if you look at them the wrong way) or how much more recent quieting measures have eaten into it.
Shrike
1d ago
I think the Germans were censoring free speech since before Germany was unified; certainly they were doing it in the interwar period, when Hitler was censored.
This isn't a claim against the US using that for their own purposes, but the cultural or political tendency predates American involvement in German internal affairs.
Shrike
1d ago
Applying this epistemic standard to the Greenland situation, the only thing I conclude is that he probably had some concessions so that Denmark would not simply go on record stating there is no deal. This does not mean that there is, in fact, a deal.
Denmark (and Greenland) are on the record stating that there is, in fact, a deal.
Shrike
2d ago
I am familiar with this dynamic, but (at least from where I sit) a mostly-functional program is different from a mostly-true thesis, or what have you.
Shrike
2d ago
I think that AI has been gravitating towards software development (perhaps to the detriment of other skills), in part because software development helps develop AI! But software development is fairly validation oriented – code runs or it doesn't. Someone who is lazy enough to have an AI write text with their name on it may also be too lazy to validate that text, or even too lazy to have another AI fact-check it.
You can say "yeah they are a poor user" and fair enough, but people will say things like "AIs have PhD level intelligence" or "AIs can act as a smart research intern" and then (in my experience) from time to time they go and make stuff up. Certainly lazy PhDs and research interns do this, all the time, but I don't think that demonstrates intelligence.
I'm not an AI-denier, I use it relatively consistently and I like it for research – but a lot of that is because Google is bad now (and their AI overview is atrocious, I've seen it present conflicting information), and you can use AI to get you links that you can check with your own eyeballs, and you can give it specific prompts that help mitigate other bad tendencies. But the fact that you have to do these things means that you cannot necessarily just expect AI cruising around on its own recognizance (or in the hands of someone who is not intelligent and/or used to using AI) to operate at that high level.
Shrike
2d ago
There is no place for a conspiracy theory about secret stockpiles.
I don't think there are like 1,000 SM-6s tucked away somewhere but the US develops and even IOCs entire weapons systems in secret SAPs. Every so often (bin Laden, Maduro) you see a glimpse of what SOCCOM is playing around with, and SOCCOM is arguably one of the least useful organizations in the event of a peer conflict. It's true that SOCCOM gets an unusual (and some would say untoward) amount of shiny toys headed their way, but they are hardly the only US military branch to have secret weapons development in progress.
Shrike
2d ago
Oh no, I've tried AI lots more than twice. Definitely witnessed more than one hallucination.
I'm not in software. The mistake I'm talking about wasn't made by me, so I don't have any insight into how it was made or how often the user was using it, or what model.
To give you the sort of idea of what happened without doxxing myself, imagine someone turned in their PhD dissertation and it (or parts of it) turned out to be AI written, and the AI had made stuff up.
Was he using a "cutting edge" model? No idea. I've had Opus goof stuff up for me before, so I don't necessarily trust even the higher-end models not to make mistakes from time to time.
Shrike
2d ago
For Russian (or American) kit, I figured you would have good most-angle photos from parades, demos, and such. You're right though that these are mostly taken from the human level.
I imagine that another obvious issue distributing RFID tags to your troops is that they can be used by both sides. I realize that in theory they will only respond to coded radio signals that in theory only one side can transmit, but if you're putting them everywhere and then putting the transponder in something as failure prone as a kill-drone your enemy's going to be reverse-engineering your IFF on like day 2 of the war.
I've speculated, based on my knowledge of machine imaging, that we'll see "wartime camo" become a thing in future wars, with "peacetime camo" designed to be something maximally different from operational paint schemes to confuse ATR. Apparently the Russians are already using a variety of disruptive paint schemes in Ukraine. We can only hope it results in making razzle-dazzle great again!
Shrike
2d ago
Very interesting! I actually thought that open-source imagery would be better resourced than that (although of course it's pretty easy to mess with the profile of a tank with a can of spray paint or a camouflage mesh, which I guess is part of the problem).
Always very heartening to have an industry professional tell me I haven't gone completely off the rails, thanks.
Shrike
2d ago
I think it's worse. In the case I am familiar with, (sample size of two) as far as I can tell, when a guy did something on his own, he did okay. When he tried to use AI to do about the same thing, SNAP!
So either the AI screwed up big time 50% of the time, or 100% of the time. Either way, not great, and seems worse "per task" than self-driving cars.
A cynical and short answer is that American politics did (the South stopped voting for Democrats).
There's always going to be a sort of romance and pathos in defeat that I think is attractive, and I think that US culture went from elevating rebels to viewing them as an insidious threat. In fact, I think it's super interesting the degree to which US establishment culture grew extremely censorious while still pretending to be the old rebellious culture, but of course the easy answer is that they are the same culture, just all growed up.
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