Fire in the lake

What Hacker News says

1. smogcutterNov 2020
   (Edit: Cut a response about the Mongols here bc I felt it came out a little snide. My understanding is the Mongols had no writing until Ghengis Khan, nowhere near the written culture of the chinese, but don’t know we’ll enough to argue the details)

   > Military techniques that work transcend culture.

   Material culture, ie no guns or steel armor. Military technique is highly contingent on the society and technology that gives rise to it: the army is always in some fashion a mirror of the state. For example Fire in the Lake is a really fascinating analysis of (in part) why transplanting western military practice to south Vietnam (as ARVN forces) failed while the Viet Cong flourished.

   Ignoring that requires reducing military knowledge to contextless aphorisms like “decapitate the command structure”. I’m open to seeing evidence, but I’d be shocked if the Inca actually never thought of “kill the leader”.

   I’m not saying that military history isn’t valuable or important. Obviously it is. My point is that the transmission of practice and the study of history are not the same thing. Calling the study of military history the decisive factor in military history is a strong claim that calls for strong evidence. Just identifying having a highly developed material culture with having greater access to historical knowledge doesn’t cut it.

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2. smogcutterJun 2020
   No, I’m not missing that. To quote myself: “the state obviously depends on a monopoly on violence to sustain itself.” The point is that violence is not the source of state power, but its instrument. This is a real distinction, not just word games, and it often gets elided when people talk about the state as a monopoly on violence. You said it yourself: “In a power vacuum, the group that has the most weapons...” Violence reigns in the absence of state legitimacy. Governments that forget this tend to fall into chaos, lawlessness and corruption. For example, Somalia. Or read Fire in the Lake for an examination of the way all the violence in the world couldn’t make up for the lack of legitimacy of the US-backed South Vietnamese government.

   When Weber is talking about the state being defined by a monopoly on violence, he’s talking about the definition of the modern state as opposed to the pre-modern, not an inherent feature of all human organization and government. The medieval king, for example, certainly didn’t hold a monopoly on violence.

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3. smogcutterNov 2020
   I realize I’m making more of this than it warrants, so I won’t go any further after this post. We agree that military history is valuable, we disagree that it’s the causative heart of a unified theory of the history of conflict. To me, the original thought reads like a pithy observation meant to underscore the value of military history. To push it to the point where it is itself historically decisive and includes all forms of the transmission of military knowledge is unwarranted. A key that claims to fit every lock should be treated with suspicion.

   > Not having a plan on transfer of control in case the leader is dead or otherwise unable to lead is, for intents and purposes, the same thing as never thought of it.

   This is beginning from a result and working backwards to infer possible causes. You can raise interesting questions that way, but it isn’t evidence that the inference is correct.

   Rome was sacked by the Gauls in 390, came right to the edge against Hannibal and Pyrrhus, was never really able to come to grips with the Parthians or push meaningfully past the Rhine, and in the west was finished by an invasion of Goths. It’s not so cut and dried—-events rarely are, which is why we should be suspect of one size fits all theories. Chalking Roman organization, tactics, and discipline up to historical study means including a host of technological, social and economic systems which one could easily argue were themselves decisive. My original point was that the claim is reductive, not that it’s flat out wrong.

   > [Vietnam] was not a conflict between a society with military history knowledge and one without.

   Yes, that point was aimed at the claim that military knowledge transcends culture. The argument in Fire in the Lake doesn’t have anything to do with the US’s willingness to do “what was necessary” (ie the old “if they only let our boys off the leash” saw). It’s about how the VC approach to recruitment, organization and indoctrination was congruent with Vietnamese cultural and philosophical practice in a way that the US imposed South Vietnamese government and ARVN organization failed to match. We modeled ARVN on US military practice because that’s what our generations of military history and institutional knowledge told us to do, and it was a mistake.

   I’m not interested in refighting Vietnam on HN, but Fire is a really interesting book. Whether you come out agreeing or disagreeing with her conclusions, it’s a strong recommend.

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4. busterarmJun 2020
   Sekigahara, as a board game duel, is an experience approaching the divine. It is a very, very, very fine game.

   Pictured behind him is a fine collection. A lot of great and interesting games, though I would have expected more war games...stuff like Fire In The Lake, Sword of Rome, etc.

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5. VLMMay 2015
   "gave way to capitalist corruption"

   Those anecdotes read like someone who never read "Fire in the Lake". The article anecdotes sound less corrupt than BAU in in the urban areas during the war.

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6. VLMSep 2014
   Fire in the Lake, which boils down to Ho Chi Minh was the "best" world leader of the 20th century? Best as in most capable and effective and intelligent not necessarily best as in matches my ideal of leadership?
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