[FairWitness]

For anyone who has not paid attention, Bellesiles is the fraud who wrote a book contending that guns were actually quite rare throughout American history, until recently when the "gun culture" invented the myth of the well armed american populace. (e.g., see: Bellesiles resigns as fraud investigation ends; Fall from Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal)

I post this for those who might be wondering what this guy is up to these days - maybe this article outlines the thesis for a new book. He is partially right; victory in war depends as always in putting troops on the ground to occupy territory, but I hope we are always the ones with the biggest and bestest new weapons ("shock and awe") in addition to having the best troops. He may not say it explicitly, but I get the feeling that Bellesiles thinks we should not bother to have the best technology.

[sauropod]

He is a fraud.

[the gillman@blacklagoon.com]

...As early as 1609, John Smith, a leader of colonial Virginia, told his troops that if they just discharged their muskets at the Indians, "the very smoake will bee sufficient to affright them."...

But Mikey B! You told us the colonists didn't have any guns!

[68skylark]

I guess this guy had to crawl out from under his rock some day.

[Prodigal Son]

The originator of the policy of "shock and awe" was not a Pentagon employee but Giulio Douchet, an Italian advocate of air power in the 1930s.

The author should do his homework. Achieving shock and awe on the battlefield has been around a lot longer than this. Sun Tzu gives examples for achieving it.

Shock and awe isn't about bombing per se nor does it have to involve hi-tech gadgetry. Shock and Awe is about achieving rapid dominance- so much so that the enemy decides it is useless to fight. Some historical methods of achieving this dominance didn't even involve a single shot being fired. Shock and Awe can be achieved purely through psychological means.

It isn't just a system of bombing though.

[coloradan]

Many of his other examples of "shock and awe" were of military attacks against civilian targets, which we didn't do in Iraq. (Fraud!)

American air power did enormous damage to the Iraqi military, destroyed numerous key government structures and killed uncounted numbers of civilians. In the process, the United States alienated millions of people around the world, including, it seems, a great many Iraqis.

He says there were "uncounted numbers" of civilians killed, as if it were uncountably many. But the number of civilians killed vs. enemy government agents + enemy military was lower in Iraq than in almost any other conflict ever in history.

[Live free or die]

bump for later reading of the cubicle bound

[Tijeras_Slim]

As early as 1609, John Smith, a leader of colonial Virginia, told his troops that if they just discharged their muskets at the Indians, "the very smoake will bee sufficient to affright them."

I guess he forgot that nobody in colonial times had guns, or is he distancing himself from himself?

[Adder]

I thought that was who this was: the fraud.

He sure has a thing about guns, doesn't he? He sorta misses the point that the troops on the ground didn't carry sticks and rocks but carried better "technology" if you will, than the enemy.
Patrick Ferguson died because he chose the wrong ground and his "new" technology was not sufficiently advanced over that of his opponents.
He COULD have seen that it was the technological superiority of the North that led to the defeat of the South in the Civil War, if he weren't so blinded by his premise.
Better technology led to pin-point bombing in Iraq: so much so that people were able to travel daily as the war progressed, left the infrastructure intact, for the most part, and enabled them to watch the progress of the Allies come right to the gates of Baghdad before their TV's went out.
What more should technology do?
This guy is a loon.

[Maelstrom]

Waitaminute...I know this guy.


He is a fraud.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Yet newspapers still publish his drivel.

[Snuffington]

The originator of the policy of "shock and awe" was not a Pentagon employee but Giulio Douchet, an Italian advocate of air power in the 1930s.

You'll have to take his word on this one. He had the evidence to back it up, but his dog ate it. And then the dog was drowned when his office flooded. And if the Italians claim he was never there, maybe he meant France. He can't recall.

[Billthedrill]

What utter banality. While it is certainly true that many inventors of the next weapons technology (Gatling, Nobel, and Oppenheimer, for example) felt that their invention would make war too terrible to fight, only the latter was actually correct, and only up until now. When the first Islamic bomb gets thrown Oppenheimer will have been proven just as wrong as the others.

Bellesiles has constructed a particularly flimsy straw man here. "Shock and awe" was not a new technology and nobody promised it would stop the fighting all by itself. This is merely an attempt to discredit the planners of the Iraq intervention by putting false words in their mouths.

[wildbill]

Lets find out who the History News Service is--and whether Bellesiles has their imprimatur after being exposed for making up stats in his book. I think he was suspended from his university job.

[wildbill]

I sent the following letter to the editors of History News Service:

Dear Ms. Appleby and Mr. Banner:

Michael Bellesiles recently published an essay in STLToday.com where he claims to be a writer for History News Service. Considering Mr. Bellesiles proven reputation for making up information, I was wondering if his connection with HNS was current and valid---or if his contract was among those items damaged by water in the office where he formerly taught.

It will be interesting to see if I get a reply and what it says.

[an amused spectator]

His confidence cost him his life in the South Carolina forests at King's Mountain, where American peasants carrying old-fashioned weapons wiped out his forces.

Rewrite: His confidence cost him his life in the South Carolina forests at King's Mountain, where American peasants, though totally unfamiliar with the very few old, broken guns carried by every tenth militia peasant, wiped out his forces.

[.38sw]

Oh, THAT Michael Bellisiles, the paragon of truth and integrity...I'm sure his research is impeccable.