Apologies for the delay in posts--I've just started in a new position, and have been running around trying to figure out which end is up. One of the wonderful things about Army work is that as soon as you've got how to do a job down, they move you on to something else.

Anyways, enough excuses. They, whoever "they" are, say that the best way to ensure you actually do things you find difficult, like dieting, is to have an "accountability partner"--someone who you talk to about what you're doing and helps keep you honest and on track. For example, I am much less likely to grab that candy bar in line at the grocery store when I know I have to tell my wife about it; conversely, I'm more likely to get up and go for a run if, when I'm done, I know I can tell her how far and fast I went and get a high five.

With that in mind, each month I'm going to give an outline here of things I'm working on. Even though the vast majority of hits on the blog so far are coming from spambots and ad sites, writing out a plan of posts gives me a reason to actually get around to all of these ideas I have floating in my head, and put them on virtual paper.

I can't promise when I'll get to all these, but for now, this is the road map you can expect to see here on the Sengoku Field Manual. [Subject to change, of course, since I can't control my work schedule]

1. I'll be presenting at the Society for Military History annual conference in New Orleans in March, so I'll write about my preparations for that. I'm presenting two papers--the first, on the historiography surrounding the Battle of Nagashino, will be presented at a specialized meeting of Asian military historians sponsored by the Chinese Military History Association. The second will be actually part of the SMH conference, and it will be the updated/revised version of the Nagashino presentation I've given at the JSA and MARAAS conferences. Both of those conferences were Japan/Asia scholars, so I'm interested to see how it plays with a military history audience.

2. I'm going to write a series on the 5-paragraph operations order and how I think it can be used to look back at historical battles and campaigns. I have no idea how many posts it will take, but it will be at least 6--one intro, and one for each paragraph. It may take more than that, especially for the Situation and Execution paragraphs. This will be the first series in an ongoing theme "Doctrine can be fun and useful....no, really, it can!"

3. Future doctrinal concepts I'll get into include: ASCOPE/PMESII-PT, METT-TC, DIME, Center of Gravity, etc. I'm also going to revisit the Levels of War I posted about over on the Samurai Archives blog Shogun-ki, and relate it specifically to the Oda/Takeda conflict of the 1570's.

4. Part of the doctrinal discussion will focus on explaining what "doctrine" is, and navigating the tricky question of whether premodern armies had "doctrine" at all.

I'll also try to get up some book reviews.

That's the plan--we'll see how long it takes me to work through that. Hopefully I can get 1-2 posts up a week at least, so keep checking back. Yes, you too, spambots from Latvia.

"Sa-meow-rai"

Today, Chris over at the Samurai Archives released a podcast we did discussing the Joint Operating Principles blogpost I did over at the SA blog Shogun Yashiki. Already I've had a few visitors come via that link, so to you guys, welcome. If you like what I had to say on the podcast and are interested in more of that kind of thing, please stop by and check this blog out from time to time. If you didn't like it, my name is "Stephen Turnbull" and I'm an expert on the "sam-yew-rai."

If it weren't for Chris and the rest of the regulars (and some not-so-regular these days) characters at the Samurai Archives, I cannot imagine that I would be writing and thinking about a second career in Japanese history today. Goes to show you what having a solid group of like-minded people as your support base does for you.

As I prepare a couple of papers to present at the Society for Military History conference (and Chinese Military History mini-conference) in a few months, I'm reflecting a lot about audience. One of the papers, of course, I've already presented twice. I've gotten good feedback both times, and even had a professor track me down via email because he saw the Youtube link I posted of the first presentation. That eventually led to the invite I just got to speak at a conference on battlefield archaeology in Texas next October (I'm really excited about that one, by the way).

All of that is fine and dandy. So why am I presenting the same paper again? Well, both times I've given it, the audience was Japan/Asia specialists. They knew Japan, but weren't necessarily historians, or if they were, they weren't military historians. At SMH, they may not know Japan, but they know military history. What they do know of Japan largely builds on sources that were incomplete at best and downright horrid at worst. I think this will be a much bigger test than the two conferences I've been to so far.


Which brings me to something I've mentioned here on the blog before: I'm not sure if I'm a Japanologist who studies warfare, or a military historian who studies Japan. I'm also not 100% sure what the difference is, or how much it matters. It will be interesting to gauge the reaction I get at SMH and see where it leads.

Part where the above becomes a problem is looking at graduate schools for future PhD work. The standard advice is to look for professors that do similar work in a similar area to what you are interested in, and pursue them as possible advisers. That's great advice. But what happens when you want to do the intersection of a geographic region (Japan), time period (premodern, or before 1600) and a subject (tactical and operational warfare in social and political context), and no one at a university offering a program covers those three bases?

There are plenty of historians studying premodern Japan...who focus on culture or literature or gender or social class or economics, etc. (Professor A)

There are plenty of historians studying premodern warfare...of Europe and China. (Professor B)

There are plenty of historians studying Japanese military and politics...from the Meiji Period forward to WWII. (Professor C)

Professor A would be great to work with because they could help me learn to understand access to Japanese original sources, premodern social and economic structures, translation issues, cultural context, etc. They might not understand, and be tempted to push me away from, operational history of military campaigns and detailed tactical analysis.

Professor B would understand exactly the kind of history I want to write about, and would be a great help in developing methodology and conceptual understanding. They'd be little help in dealing with heavy Japanese kambun sources and would likely funnel me more into a comparative context than I want. Comparative analytics are important, but Japanese history should be studied as Japanese history, not simply as an alternate example of developments in Europe (yes, I'm looking at you and scowling, Geoffrey Parker).

Professor C...well, let's say I'd love to have that as a secondary area of expertise, but studying the Japanese Army in Manchuria of the late 1930's is actually more different than studying 16th century European armies contemporary to Nobunaga. Reading prewar Japanese texts is different than reading current stuff, but it doesn't help me read kambun, etc.

Professor C is a Sonny Chiba fan

I guess the ideal, and what I will look for over the next few years, is to find a place that has at least 2 of these professors, ideally A and B. And who knows, maybe Professor AB (a Karl Friday or a Thomas Conlan) is out there to be found at a grad institution. Sadly, neither of them are at the moment.

Oh well. I've got at least 5 years to figure that out, and who knows what will happen at conferences, etc. in that time.

More thoughts of a historical nature to come soon, I promise. It was probably a bad idea to start this blog during the holiday season, but it will start to come more regularly! Thanks for reading!

Hello, everyone. I hope you are having a happy Holiday season, whichever flavor of winter festivity you participate in.

This will be the first post in an ongoing series I've decided to call "Doctrine 101." Military doctrine, specifically that of the US Army, is fundamental to me as an observer of Japanese and military history; it shapes how I see battles, campaigns, and warfare, but also how I see the creation and deployment of forces, the economic structures that support warfare, and combined with international relations theory, how I view the "national" strategies of each competing faction.


As I read, however, I see different competing definitions of "doctrine" and what it means, and it is understandable. Recently I was listening to the New Books in Military History podcast (I've already mentioned this fantastic series before) interview with Jörg Muth, author of Command Culture: Officer Education in the U. S. Army and the German Armed Forces, 1901-1940, and the Consequences for World War II. (University of North Texas Press, 2011), in which he compares, well, exactly what the title says. Before I go on I'll say that the podcast was very interesting, and the book is certainly on my long list of things to get to; it's also worth noting that there is a fascinating dialogue between this podcast and another in the series, with author Michael Matheny and his book Carrying the War to the Enemy: American Operational Art to 1945 (Oklahoma University Press, 2011), because both approach American Army doctrine prior to and during WWII from opposing opinions.



I won't go into too much detail, because I don't want to ruin the podcasts for you--listen to them and enjoy them yourself. But the basic relevance to me is that you see different concepts of what "doctrine" means to different people--both of whom are correct. Matheny believes one of the biggest reasons the US was able to develop an army able to win WWII was the officer educational system at Fort Leavenworth and the Army War College (Carlisle, PA) that taught officers, including Marshall, Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton, etc., how to make decisions and fight a war. He points out that many of the more successful officers spent time in schools not just as students, but instructors, developing and teaching doctrine that they later used to defeat Germany. The lessons learned at sand tables and map exercises in classrooms laid the structural groundwork for the US to fight a global war.

Muth, on the other hand, is very critical of the US Army pre-war educational system in his comparison of it to the Wehrmacht's system; he characterizes it as "teaching the book answer" in contrast to the Wehrmacht's schools that taught auftragstaktik or "mission tactics" which stress tactical decision-making at the lowest levels and flexibility for junior officers to accomplish assigned missions without being "micromanaged." Muth looks at US commanders' notes and diaries about West Point and other schools, noting that none of them ever seem to write that they learned something useful. And if you consider "doctrine" a set-way to do things that must be rigidly adhered to, then he has a point. The "school book solution" mentality is an issue, because real-life tactical and operational problems very seldom fit the "school book".

My rebuttal to Muth (though I want to stress I very much liked the podcast and think the book will be worth a read--it wouldn't be on the Chief of Staff of the Army's reading list already if it wasn't) would be that "doctrine" SHOULD be what Matheny sees it as, rather than a "school book solution". Witness that today much of auftragstaktik as a concept has long been incorporated into the US Army educational system. NCOs and junior officers in the US military are given more responsibility with less micromanaging (though don't try telling them that!) than in the vast majority of militaries in the world; in my experience (and I've worked with soldiers from over 30 countries), only the UK, Australia, Canada, etc. are close to entrusting the level of responsibility that the US does in its junior ranks. Perhaps the Germans still do, but I did not get the chance to see it in Afghanistan. When looking at tactical histories from WWII, we see US junior officers and (primarily) NCO's innovating and thinking outside the "schoolbook solution" to solve tactical problems all the time. Muth may be right in that this wasn't taught in military schools, but perhaps it didn't need to be; Americans are, after all, nothing if not independent problem solvers by nature, and the largely citizen army of WWII probably had plenty of those types without institutionalizing it at Leavenworth. Militaries need a balance of independent problem solving with discipline and understanding of roles--Muth criticizes West Point for focusing on the second and not the first, but for Americans, that is likely what was needed. That said, I have only listened, not read the book, so perhaps he accounts for this. Also, anyone who wants to critique West Point is fine by this ROTC grad. (Just kidding, Ring Knockers!)

I make fun of West Point, but any uniform with the Battle of the Bulge map in it deserves respect.

As you can see, even in the military and military history realms, "doctrine" can mean many things and be pretty contentious. The purpose here is to define how *I* use the term, so that when I describe doctrinal concepts here in the future, the reader can understand where I am coming from. I think it's pretty clear that, at least in the way I view doctrine, I lean closer to Matheny than Muth.

So...what IS doctrine? Quite simply, it's a methodology, and is not unique to the military. Every profession has doctrine. I'll use two very different fields--academia and football--to try to explain it to the widest audience possible. (Plus, I like football).

At the basic level, doctrine is a set of building blocks. Individual tasks are identified and the preferred ways to handle them are selected based usually on efficiency or effectiveness. An infantry soldier is taught how to fire his weapon, move as an individual on the battlefield, and other individual tasks. Similarly, students are taught through grade school the individual tasks required to be successful in communicating ideas; a sentence has to have a subject and a verb at minimum, and one can add adjectives and adverbs and an object to modify the meaning. Football players learn the individual skills needed for their particular positions: a quarterback must physically be able to throw a football, so he practices different throws; a receiver must run and catch, so he learns different routes and practices the motor skills of catching a football; a lineman must learn to block opposing players, so he hits a blocking sled; and a defender must be able to tackle an opposing offensive player, so he hits a tackling dummy. All of these skills are taught to the individual in a certain way, for specific reasons, as the most effective ways to accomplish the task. They provide the fundamental individual skills needed to expand to other things. What gets taught at the individual instructional level is by no means the only way to do any of the tasks involved: a soldier could fire his weapon holding it a different way than taught on the rifle range and still hit the target; a student can jumble the word order in a sentence and still communicate the intended thought; and a quarterback could throw the ball underhanded and still complete a pass. However, none of those are the most efficient ways for most people to learn how to do the tasks, so they are not taught that way, and do not become part of "doctrine". 

Now #1-ranked Notre Dame's offensive blocks on a touchdown run against Oklahoma in October. Getting it done. Did I mention I'm a Notre Dame grad, and I have tickets to the BCS Championship Game? Go Irish. Yes, I did only include this picture to mention that, and not to illustrate any point.

These individual skills then contribute to a larger group. Every member of an infantry squad must be trained on their individual tasks to contribute to success, just like every sentence of a paragraph must make individual sense for the paragraph to be coherent, or every member of the offensive line on a football team has to know how to block to effectively protect the quarterback.  That isn't the whole story, though. These individuals have to fit in with the other individuals with which they are grouped together. The infantry soldier may be proficient with his own weapon, but he also has to function as a member of the squad, and know his role within that squad, and his responsibilities in certain situations. Just like the soldier is taught how to use his weapon, the squad now must be taught as a whole how to handle collective tasks, like reacting to an ambush. Again, doctrine provides a foundation for this, and squads train on the "correct" ways to react to an ambush based on a handful of canned situations: in a near ambush (within hand grenade range), the part of the squad in contact assaults the enemy while the other team attempts to provide covering fire; in a far ambush, the team in contact lays down suppressing fire while the other team attempts to flank the enemy or the whole squad tries to break contact. This does not mean that these solutions will work in every combat situation, but they provide a common understanding and initial reaction for every member in the squad to know what he is supposed to do, and what his comrades can be expected to do, to solve the problem of being caught in an ambush.

Diagrams of how to react to ambush; now write a paper about it.

This holds true for our student writing her paper and our football team as well. A fantastically constructed sentence has little effect if it does not fit within the context of a paragraph. Therefore our student is taught the "doctrine" that a paragraph starts with a topic sentence, and has 3 or so sentences to support that main idea. Eventually the student may learn to construct a paragraph with the supporting sentences at the front and the topic sentence at the end to create an emphasis, but the fundamental task learning has taught her that putting together coherent individual sentence into a coherent collective paragraph is the most effective way to communicate her idea.

 An offensive lineman also must learn to function as part of the offensive line, not just as an individual blocker. Like members of an infantry squad, a lineman has different roles depending on whether he plays guard, center, or tackle, and is on the left or right side of the line. Blocking schemes, the "doctrine" of the offensive line, are taught to the line to maximize their blocking efforts in support of the offense as a whole, and on some plays a tackle, for instance, may block the defender in front of him, while on others he may shift his block to another player, or pull across the line and block someone else on the other side of the field entirely. These different actions may be part of the called play, or may be reads based on what the opposing players are indicating they will do. The interpretation of these cues are all taught to the lineman, much like reactions to ambush are taught to the squad.

You should by now see how this progresses. A platoon leader or platoon sergeant learn how to integrate their subordinate squads to perform tactical tasks like attack, defend, etc. A student learns to put together an introduction paragraph, 3 supporting paragraphs, and a conclusion to write an essay. The offensive line blocks for the quarterback to have time to throw the ball to receivers, and for the running back to run forward and gain yards. Every "doctrinal task" at one level builds skills necessary for larger tasks, providing the fundamental structures of "how things are done." You can continue up the line: platoons form companies, then battalions, then brigades; an essay may form the core of a larger research paper, which then goes on to be a dissertation chapter; the football team's offense combines with the defense and special teams to win a football game. In the training area, or the classroom, or the practice field, the individual and collective tasks are taught a certain way to build the skills necessary for "the real thing", whether the "real thing" is a combat deployment, an author's first book, or the big game against Rival U.

ND beats USC, our main rival, to finish the year 12-0 and #1. Yes, this is another gratuitous Notre Dame picture.

Real life rarely matches training scenarios, no matter where you are. Here is where Muth's criticisms of adherence to "doctrine" come in to play, and fairly. If an infantry squad is taught to react in a certain way to being ambushed by small arms fire, and a different way to artillery fire, what happens when they get hit by small arms fire and artillery at the same time? if a student is taught to write 5 paragraph essays only, and is suddenly asked to write a lengthy research paper? or if an offensive line is taught to block by assignment (meaning each lineman is supposed to block a certain defender), but at the last second the defenders all shift positions?

If doctrine is taught simply as a "schoolbook solution" to a problem as Muth interprets it, then yes, these situations cause difficulty and failure; those trained have not been taught how to handle situations outside of the training examples. However, if you understand doctrine to mean a fundamental set of principles that guide but do not dictate reactions, then you have the opportunity for growth and learning upon the foundation of what has already been taught. In each example previous experience serves as a basis upon which the protagonist can expand to fit the new situation: the squad leader analyzes the threat and reacts first to the greater one or the one he can act on in order to reduce the threat to his squad; the student structures her research paper into an intro, a conclusion, and 3 supporting sections, each of which is constructed of a section intro, conclusion, and 3 supporting paragraphs; the offensive linemen stay calm and recognize that even though the player in front of them is not the one they thought they would have to block, the new defender is taking up that position, and they switch their blocks.

In other words, doctrine should not be taught as a "schoolbook solution"--it should be taught as a set of tools and experiences that a soldier (or student, or football players) can draw upon to evaluate and meet new challenges. I'll come back to this idea again and again as I discuss individual doctrinal concepts, because I see this same sort of view of doctrine again and again. To use an example, I see the Joint Operating Principles (or Principles of War) criticized with statements like "you can't make war like a cookbook recipe." Those statements are 100% correct--you can't run through the Principles like a checklist, trying to make sure you have each of them, and if you do it means you'll always win. They are concepts that describe different aspects of different successful military operations; it's impossible to always have all of them, and often times a commander must sacrifice one principle in favor of another. For example, a commander may decide to move before he can gather all of his forces (mass) because he sees an opportunity to catch the opponent off-guard (surprise) and gain more of an advantage. Sometimes it works--sometimes it doesn't. Like every other doctrinal concept, it's best to incorporate the Principles into your planning, but by no means a guarantor of success.


This is exceedingly long for a "Part I" of an introduction, so I'll stop here. In Part II, we'll look at a related issue--if there is a system built on the individual tasks that has been determined to be the best way to do a task, then should not everyone do things the same way? In other words, is US Army doctrine the "best" doctrine, and if so why doesn't everyone use it, and if not why does the US Army use it? I'll continue with the student and football metaphors, as we take this discussion to the macro level. Until then, Happy Holidays!

For readers wondering where this discussion of "doctrine" and the US Army fits in with Japanese history...it doesn't. At least, not yet. In any monograph, the author has to set up his observations and conclusions by detailing his methodology. To use a mathematics example from elementary school, it's "showing your work" so that the audience, like a math teacher, can see how you arrived at your answers. As I've said previously, this blog is my scratch paper--where I work out my problems, so that I can present a cleaner product to my math teacher, as it were.



Arguments like Muth vs. Matheny aside, most of the military history/military studies world would be familiar with my uses of doctrine, even if they don't agree with the methodology per se. And that's fine--part of why I am presenting at the SMH conference in March is to put myself out there and get negative feedback on my methodology from people who can understand and critique it.





That said, military historians are not my only, or even primary, audience. Part of where I want to go with my research is forcing the issue of premodern Japanese warfare into the greater discussion of premodern Japanese academic history, and not just as a catalyst for political, social, or economic change, but on its own terms. This is a different set of eyes, for the most part, from the military historians, and so it's more important to define my terms and explain where I come from, methodologically. To go back to the math teacher analogy, if a military historian is the math teacher who wants to see me "show my work" to doublecheck that I used the right steps, a Japanologist is the science teacher who needs me to "show" my mathematical formulas I used to arrive at the conclusion for my physics experiment.

Further, I've been asked to speak at a conflict archaeology conference next October in Texas, partially as an "expert" (though I am far from one) on Asian warfare, but mostly because of my methodology incorporating contemporary military and doctrinal concepts into historical research. The organizers, based on my Nagashino research, feel that the way I approach terrain analysis and commander decision making can assist archaeologists excavating sites of conflict, like battlefields and fortifications, in determining where and how to look at the physical evidence they find. I'm probably more excited to learn from them than they should be to learn from me, but more on those possibilities later. The point is, in preparation for that, here on the blog I'll be looking at a lot of different concepts in an effort to "try them out" before I present them at the conflict archaeology conference. Since I'll be focusing on the concepts and using my research on Nagashino as supporting argument, rather than the reverse as I have to date, it's even more important for me to talk through all of these concepts and round them into solid ideas.

All of which brings us back to our initial question "What is Doctrine?" which I looked at in the last post. The basic idea, which I got to in rather long-winded manner (see a trend?), was that rather than a prescribed way of doing everything, doctrine provides a foundational base from which a soldier (or student, or football player) can then adapt and recombine concepts to meet the challenges they face. Every discipline has a doctrine of some sort that gives it structure.

Today, we're going to go further with the concept, and ask if there is a system built on the individual tasks that has been determined to be the best way to do a task, then should not everyone do things the same way? In other words, is US Army doctrine the "best" doctrine, and if so why doesn't everyone use it, and if not why does the US Army use it?

So, we've talked about how doctrine builds on itself from smaller levels to larger levels in the last post. A soldier is taught the "right way" to fire his weapon, which then combines with other soldiers firing their weapons to create a "right way" to react to an ambush by a squad, etc. (This is where readers in the Army will immediately think "there's the right way, the wrong way, and the Army way"...) The assumption may be that because these concepts, or "right ways" were developed over time and refined through application in combat, they progress in a linear manner from "older, not as good" to "newer, and therefore better". After all, why would a military commander willingly choose to do things in an older, and therefore "not as good" way, when that could mean the difference between success and life vs. failure and death?

If only things were that simple, which they never are. Sometimes the "best way" is not possible for material, ideological, cultural, or other reasons, sometimes it is because goals are different, sometimes . The reason we do not have every military in the world following the same doctrine is that every military is different. If one assumes that "the way we do things now" is better than the way things were done by Oda Nobunaga or Takeda Katsuyori in 1575, then of course one falls into the trap of evaluating things unfairly. The historiography of Nagashino is full of this, as modern authors decry Katsuyori's hubris and poor generalship in choosing to attack an entrenched enemy army possibly twice the size of his own. Few of them give more than a passing thought as to WHY he does this, typically writing it off as simply a dumb move. After all, anyone, not just an armchair general, can look at the facts of Nagashino in hindsight and see that attacking a larger enemy armed with guns, behind field fortifications, is just not smart, and end of story, let's move on, right?

I won't dwell on Nagashino and Katsuyori too long here, but when you remove the assumptions and try to put yourself in the position of a historical commander and analyze why he made the decisions he did, you come to different conclusions. Katsuyori could have simply made a dumb mistake, but he was not some neophyte general with no experience, despite what after the fact characterizations may tell us. He did not have the benefit of hindsight to know what the Oda were doing--and therefore, choices for him would not have been as obvious. I go into much more detail in papers and presentations, but the bottom line is Katsuyori made decisions based on a distorted view of the situation, a view that Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu did much to distort for him.

Now, if one had the view that doctrine is "the right way to do things" and any deviation from that is wrong, Nagashino is a cut-and-dried, simple case of a stupid general doing stupid things. Clearly, that's not how I view doctrine. Bringing it back to the general discussion, every organization shapes its doctrine to confront its specific challenges and accomplish its specific goals, utilizing its specific assets to do so. I asserted in the last post that every organization has a form of "doctrine". Here, I will assert that every organization's doctrine is different, and should be evaluated on its own terms, rather than head to head.

We Will Bury You, Comrade

For military doctrine, consider the differences between the US and the Soviet Union doctrines during the Cold War. I choose this example because as a young intel officer way back in the pre-9/11 days, old Soviet doctrine was what I cut my teeth on, especially in Korea where the North Koreans still used it. US tactical doctrine emphasized a few key things: flexibility, decision making at the lowest level (auftragstaktik, anyone?), conservation of forces, advanced technology, and mobility, both on the battlefield and getting to it. The Soviets, by contrast, were more rigid, emphasized centralized control of decision making by officers, broad offensives designed to find weak points in a defense and then exploit them, emphasis on mass and manpower over technology, etc. So, which was better? The answer is neither, because neither would have worked for the other, as doctrine is a product of social, political, material, and other forces.

(I apologize in advance, as this analysis will be very, very general. I'm not an expert on the Soviet Army, and only include this very crude comparison to illustrate the greater point. Historians of the Red Army and sociologists/anthropologists, please don't hold these generalizations against me!)

When you look at the context in which each nation designed its doctrine, you can start to see this. The United States, in general, values individuals and grants them equal status. Hence it's only natural that even though there is a rank structure, the opinions of lower level soldiers are valued, and decision making is extended down to NCO's and junior officers. Ideologically, there is little concern that US soldiers will be "against the cause", so there is less need to reign them in. Contrast that with the Soviet experience, in which the Red Army was an agent of communist ideological change; giving NCOs and junior officers, who have not had the education or shown the "loyalty to the cause" the ability to make decisions could be a threat to Party control. The US focus on the individual also manifests itself in the emphasis on conservation of forces and technology as a means to do that. Losses in Vietnam reconfirmed the value American society placed on individual life, and showed the public would not support the wasting of those lives; further, compared to a potential Soviet "Red Horde", the US simply couldn't match the Russians soldier for soldier. Therefore, the doctrinal system had to educate them better and equip them with better high-tech weaponry to make them more effective than their Russian counterparts. The succesful American economy was poised to support this. The Soviets, on the other hand, had population in excess, and the means to control it (again, back to ideology) in support of the collective whole rather than individual desires. This allowed their doctrine to shape in ways that emphasized mass, like the broad front attacks as part of their offensive strategy. Men were cheap, so it didn't matter if they lost some in one area if it meant breakthrough in another. Since men were cheap, less had to be spent on R&D to keep them alive, hence the different foci in Soviet tank design (lightly protected fuel tanks, for instance) and so forth. Money was more precious than men. While a generalization, it does contribute to the assertion that the Soviets could not catch up once Reagan upped the arms race and outspent them; trying to match US technological advances with a state-controlled failing economy took them away from their strengths.

Even in other fields, "doctrine" is specialized according to purpose and situation. For the student from yesterday's example, she'll write differently if she's a history PhD candidate vs. a biochemistry PhD candidate. Papers will be structured differently, based on the "doctrine" of how each field expects authors to write. Even citation style can be a form of "doctrine"--APA vs. Turabian vs. whatever is expected in a certain field. Every student that has ever had to do a research paper at some point has thought with exasperation "does it really matter which style of citation I use, as long as I use one that allows the reader to go to my source?" The answer is "yes"--not for any discernible functional reason, because all citation systems meet the basic requirements. It matters because that is what [insert particular academic field] does, and if you want to fit in with that field, you do it their way.

Not convinced? Fine, twist my arm, make me go back to the football analogy. I'm a college football fan, unabashedly, and I love it more so than the pro game, because a. I went to Notre Dame, a school where football is woven into the very fabric of college life, and b. major college football has 120 teams, which provides a much more diverse field than the 30 or so in professional football.

Now, if you remember from yesterday, football has "doctrine" just like the military or education. Players are taught their individual position, then how to fit in with their position group, then the offense or defense, then the team as whole. Coaches help develop players along this path in order to get the most out of them collectively as a team.

Often, when watching college football, one will hear the announcers talk about "scheme" or "offensive/defensive philosophy". What does that mean? These terms refer to the "doctrine" of a particular team. But, you ask, is it really necessary for a football team to have different "doctrine?" After all, each team is trying to do the same thing--advance a football down the length of the field to score, and prevent the opponent from doing so. How much variation in that can there be?

The answer, as any college football fan could tell you, is "a lot." Different schools have different resources, different player pools, different fan expectations, different climate, and a host of other things that help determine what will lead to success at that particular school. Let's take 4 schools that all run very different types of teams and look at what their "doctrine" is.

ALABAMA

Great coach, but hope he loses on Jan. 7th.

Boo...hiss! Alabama is playing for it's third national title in four years on January 7th. (Here's hoping they lose to my Irish). Coach Nick Saban has rebuilt a traditional power into a current powerhouse. Alabama is known for getting the best athletes, playing outstanding and complex defensive schemes (Saban's specialty), and being a physical, punishing offense that wears down opponents over the course of a game. A history of success means that expectations for the team are always high, but also means that high-profile high school recruits want to go there, in the belief that they will win games against high level competition that prepares them for professional football success. The rabid fanbase guarantees there is always support (moral and financial) for the team. Because they can get the best athletes, they can go straight at their opponents, confident they will win all of their individual matchups. The head coach is defensive minded, concentrating on stopping the other team from scoring; this allows the offense to be conservative, since they rarely get into high-scoring shootouts. The defense protects the offense by holding opponents to low scores, and the offense protects the defense by grinding out long drives, minimizing mistakes, and keeping the ball away from opponents.

OREGON

West coast flash! Oregon is another team ranked at the top of the college football ranks over the last few years, with one title game appearance. In the minds of college football fans, Oregon = points. The Ducks' high scoring spread offense takes advantage of lightning-quick playmakers in space, getting the ball to receivers and backs quickly so they can use their speed to escape defenders and make big plays. Where you might see Alabama routinely win games 21-3, Oregon game scores are typically 54-21 or so. Score fast, score often, and dare the other team to keep pace is Oregon's mindset. With the flashy offensive numbers and uniform combinations that would make Paris fashion models jealous, Oregon is able to attract west-coast speedy skill players from California who want to put up big numbers, despite not having a long and storied history as a program. Oregon's offense scores so quickly sometimes, the defense gets tired from always being on the field. Their defense is not as dominant as Alabama's, but when your offense puts up over 50 a game, who cares? Oregon doesn't.

I'd say Oregon had recognizable uniforms, but they seem to change them every game.

WISCONSIN

Midwestern Beef. That's what Wisconsin brings to the game. The Midwest does not have the same caliber of skill athletes that Alabama gets in the South or Oregon can recruit in California, and it's hard to get kids from Florida or California to come to snow-bound Madison. What it does seem to grow in yearly crops are beefy, strong linemen. Wisconsin builds it's success on strong offensive line play and large, punishing running backs that run behind them, gobbling up yards on the ground. Considering they play an outdoor sport in the Midwest, their team is perfect for a snowy Saturday afternoon contest. A quarterback who can make the occasional throw and protects the ball is all that is required--they don't need a superstar to make plays. Give it to the back, let him run behind that mammoth line. Play solid defense. This is Wisconsin football, and it has been very successful for them.

Beef: It's what blocks for Wisconsin Running Backs

NAVY

Military academies like Navy can't get athletes with aspirations for the NFL. What star recruit would want to delay NFL millions by serving an active-duty military commitment for 4 years after graduation? What star player, fawned over as a high school kid, would want to submit to the tough regimen of life at an Academy? Navy will never be able to just line up athletes like Alabama. Nor will they get the speedsters of Oregon. Military weight restrictions mean that a line of bruisers like Wisconsin isn't possible. Yet Navy still manages to field a competitive team with winning records. They leverage what their players must have to get in--smarts and discipline. Navy (and the other 2 academies) plays an offense called the triple option, which relies on precision, deception, and intelligence to run. When run well, it's hard to stop even if the defense has much superior athletes. It stresses the defense and forces them to play mistake free, because it gives the quarterback several "options" (run himself, hand the ball off to a running back, or pitch it to another running back, or even throw downfield) based on what he sees the defense do. This offense chews up clock as it methodically goes down the field, protecting the Navy's typically undersized defense from the opponent's offense.

If Alabama is so successful, why doesn't everyone just copy what they do? As you can probably see, culture (of the football program) and resources have a lot to do with it. Oregon started out as a smaller program without much traditional success, and needed to be entertaining to draw in fans. Scoring lots of points with a potent offense and flashy uniforms attracted fans and recruits, and became part of who they are as a program. If Oregon brought in a new coach that tried to do things the Alabama way, it might not work as well. Same for Wisconsin or Navy--they can't get the same types of skill athletes as easily as Alabama, so while they might get one or two and be okay for a few years, it wouldn't be sustainable. Neither could they get the Oregon systems to work easily--Wisconsin's weather and Navy's athletic limitations mean that Oregon's speed system would be less effective for them than it is for Oregon. On the other hand, if Navy's offense has success with less-athletic players, why doesn't Alabama run it with superior athletes? Wouldn't it then be that much better? The answer is no--for one, it's hard to get star athletes to play with the same kind of discipline that the option attack requires; for another, it's not attractive to high school talents looking to go to the NFL, since pro football doesn't run Navy's style of offense.

The point is, successful "doctrine" at one football program does not necessarily translate into success at another. The same goes for militaries: while "national defense" is the primary mission of most militaries, that means different things in each case. For Japan, which has a constitutionally limited military and historical controversies which limit overseas deployment, "national defense" includes disaster relief as a much larger part of its mission set when compared to an overseas deployment focused force like the US military. You cannot simply interchange them, or transpose them onto each other in an effort to compare and determine which "is better"--neither would suit the national goals or resources of the other.



So, to summarize: In Part I, we said that "doctrine" is a fundamental structure of how do do set tasks, that provides a basis for any organization or group to draw upon to meet future challenges. In Part II today, we've said that doctrine is based on unique characteristics, like goals and resources, and what works for one group may not work for another. In Part III, I'll look at how doctrine CAN be used to compare organizations. By the end of this, I will hopefully make a dent in the criticism that looking at premodern Japanese warfare through modern (postmodern?) "Western" military doctrine is Eurocentric/modernist/biased/etc. I certainly will not argue that it COULD BE, but we'll get to that.

I'm still new to this blogging thing, and figuring out what Blogger can do. A couple of housekeeping notes regarding the site:

-- "Widgets", or those little blocks of links, info, etc. on the sides of the blog, may be added, subtracted, or disappear as I determine what I want to have and if they are useful. For the moment, the most important thing to me is the blogroll, as it shows the most recent post in each blog I follow, and thus I know to go read. If you own one of those blogs, and for whatever reason don't want your posts highlighted there, let me know and I will take them off.

-- Formatting on Blogger seems...well, painful sometimes. It appears the best thing to do is write my posts in the Blogger compose field and hit "publish." The problem with this is I have yet to figure out how to insert non-English standard characters. For anyone that paid attention, the character ö in Jörg Muth's name (in Doctrine 101: Introduction Part I) was italicized but the rest of the letters in the name were not. This is because Blogger won't let me type in characters like ö, û, ô, etc. Prior to today, I was finding them on other webpages, copying them, and pasting them here. However, pasting something into Blogger seems to alter the formatting, and you cannot change it.

Today I discovered I can use the character map to copy and paste the special characters in where needed, so hopefully that problem is fixed. However, if I copy and paste writing I've done elsewhere, like the Ikkô Ikki as Fortified Compound Warfare article, it affects the entire post. That's why that particular post looks different than everything I compose on Blogger. Not a huge deal, but it's annoying.

-- Pictures sometimes seem to disappear on me after I post them. They'll be fine in the Blogger composition view, and will show up the first few times I view them on the page, but after a day or so the picture disappears, and I have just a floating caption. The "Sa-meow-rai" picture in the Podcasts and Professors post did this to me. I've gone back in and re-added the picture, but if anyone sees floating captions, please let me know.

If you notice something that doesn't look quite right, please let me know in the comments. This is all still new to me, so I may be slow to catch and fix things. ありがとう！

Moving into the actual book, we continue our look at Noel Perrin's "Giving up the Gun". My first impressions are here. For the background, etc., read that first and then return here.

So, to review what we learned from the cover, foreword, and so forth:

1. Perrin is self-admittedly not an expert on Japan or Japanese history, and borders on orientalizing in his incorrect descriptions of aspects of CURRENT Japanese culture, much less anything historical. I'm afraid of what we will find going forward.

2. Perrin's focus isn't on the facts of Japanese history at all; he clearly approaches the subject from an anti-nuclear weapons perspective, and is looking for an analogy to justify his stance. That he cherrypicks facts to support his view shouldn't be surprising to anyone who reads the Foreword alone.


Anyways, moving on...

Chapter One

Perrin begins (p. 1) with a description of a US surveying mission commander's comments on his visit to the island of Tanegashima in 1855, shortly after Perry's celebrated (depending on your view) "opening" of Japan the previous year. We'll ignore the whole "opening" misconception and stick to the specific subject here.

Perrin quotes this passage from Commander John Rodgers:

"These people seemed scarcely to know the use of firearms," he noted in his report to the Secretary of the Navy. "One of [my] officers caught the Japanese word for gun with which a very learned man was displaying his knowledge to his companions. It strikes an American, who from his childhood has seen children shoot, that ignorance of arms is an anomaly indicative of primitive innocence and Arcadian simplicity. We were unwilling to disturb it."

He then proceeds to tell us how CDR Rodgers was "almost as Arcadianly simple as the Tanegashimans themselves," by proclaiming that this was an "acquired innocence, not a primitive one." He's right in pointing out the irony that the islanders Rodgers  observed were the descendants of those present when the Portuguese landed in the same place in 1543, bringing the first Western-style firearms mentioned in textual sources. He spends considerable energy telling us how Rodgers could not have known much about Japan at all from contemporary Western sources, citing examples of vague and misleading encyclopedia entries available at the time. Perrin's point in all this is to show that Rodgers could not have known that the Japanese at one time used guns on a prodigious scale, only to turn "back to swords and spears." (p.5)

Perrin, in his lack of knowledge and experience (he's not even a historian, after all) falls into the same trap with Rodgers' words that he points out. Yes, of course Rodgers did not know much about Japan--so why should Perrin take Rodgers' description as evidence that there was any "acquired innocence"? The officer mentioned caught the word for gun (presumably teppô) in the conversation between the two Japanese; based on that one word, are we to assume that this was one learned person explaining the entire concept of what a gun was to his counterpart? Could it not have just as easily been one person describing to another that these weapons carried by the American foreigners were teppo, just like those that they were familiar with, but much more advanced?

Of course the Japanese here had never seen the type of modern guns carried by the American Navy personnel. That is in no way an indication that they had no conception of what guns were. Rodgers, as Perrin points out the lack of knowledge available to him, can be excused for this; Perrin, however, cannot.

Perrin next moves into a description of Japan's first supposed encounter with guns. This is the story of the three (two?) Portuguese traders who show up and show Lord Tanegashima Tokitaka, the daimyo of the island, their magical new weapon. I won't criticize too deeply on the details here; Perrin gives us a commonly accepted version of the story, and just because specialists debate different interpretations and versions in the primary textual sources like the Teppô-ki, the Tanegashima Kafu, and the Peregriniçam doesn't mean Perrin should be expected to wade through these. As we have noted, he couldn't if he wanted to. Most importantly, this is backstory, and not crucial to his argument other than establishing how Japanese received the art of shooting and gunsmithing.

Next Perrin notes (p. 8) the spread of firearms, to the extent that Oda Nobunaga could place an order for 500 of them in 1549. "By 1560, the use of firearms in large battles had begun (a general in full armor died of a bullet wound that year), and fifteen years after that they were the decisive weapon in one of the great battles of Japanese history." (pp. 8-9). I'll ignore the reference to Nagashino for now; as with the Tanegashima story, Perrin can't be held accountable that most of the literature in English on Nagashino is wrong. What bothers me is the first part of the statement--guns were used in Japanese warfare way earlier than 1560, and saying that their use "begun" based on the fact that a general was killed by a bullet in that year ignores quite a lot of other poor souls dispatched by guns prior to that point. The Shimazu were using guns in battles in the 1540's (not surprising, since they were the overlords of the Tanegashima where guns "arrived"), and guns of some type and origin were used in 1548 at the Battle of Uedahara. Perhaps a more charitable reviewer would write it off to poor phrasing, but poor phrasing like that leads to inaccuracies being perpetuated.

All this represents what would now be called a technological breakthrough. As present-day Japanese writers like to point out, the Arabs, the Indians, and the Chinese all gave firearms a try well ahead of the Japanese, but only the Japanese mastered the manufacturing process on a large scale, and really made the weapon their own. (p. 9)

 Since Perrin doesn't provide a citation for this, I don't know who these "Japanese writers" are. But it's hardly surprising that writers of one nationality would try to point out they were "more advanced" than those of other nationalities. Apparently these writers are unaware of Maharatha Confederacy cannon foundries in India, Arab gunsmithing, and the fact that the Chinese are where gunpowder weapons originated in the first place. Sadly, it seems Perrin is unaware of these things as well.

Perrin next leads into a description of Japan at the time of the introduction of guns with a passage from St. Francis Xavier noting the preoccupation with military matters common amongst the Japanese. Hardly surprising that in a time of chaotic warfare with little centralized authority, the members of a society took a keen interest in weapons and warfare.  On p. 10, Perrin notes the high-level of technological sophistication by the Japanese and the abundant copper and steel shipped all over the globe "just as Japanese electronic equipment is now." Summary of the next few pages is that Japan produced significant raw materials, and also excelled in refined goods such as paper; the larger point is that this is no primitive society here. Perrin is certainly right in that regard. On p. 13, he tells us that Japan was the premier exporter of weapons in the "Far East," and explains how wonderful Japanese swords were, using period European witnesses that attest to their superiority to their own blades. Next Perrin quotes population statistics to tell us that Japan was a healthily booming country, tells us of the Buddhist "universities" and high interest in artistic matters which show Japan was an educated to a higher standard than their European counterparts. None of this is at all eyebrow raising to anyone familiar with Japanese history, but apparently Perrin felt it necessary to establish that Japan was not like many other countries that Europeans encountered during this period. One point of annoyance is the footnote on p. 17:

Certainly this [that Japan had higher rates of literacy than European countries] was how it struck the Japanese. They could hardly believe how widespread illiteracy was among their visitors. In fact they found our ancestors fairly simple in most respects. The earliest Japanese account of the three original Portuguese adventurers is typical. The Japanese chronicler wrote in a superior way, "They eat with their fingers instead of with chopsticks such as we use. They show their feelings without any self-control. They cannot understand the meaning of written characters...."

First of all, "our" ancestors? Is everyone reading this book a descendant of Portuguese traders? If so, I guess I was not the intended audience, as that is not my own heritage. But more important is the conclusion he draws from the statement "they cannot understand the meaning of written characters..." How is it surprising that a Portuguese trader did not understand Japanese or Chinese written text? The Japanese author here of course describes this as a negative trait, since anyone educated in Japan at the time would be able to read characters. That does not, however, mean that the Portuguese could not read at all; what basis would a Japanese observer have to understand that? While it is well documented that Japan had a high rate of literacy, and most European countries of the time did not have nearly the breadth of literacy, it troubles me that Perrin would draw such sweeping conclusions from this statement, or rather use this statement in support of those conclusions. Were I to write something like this, my favorite professor at UH would have written in the margin "well, no #%@$!" It's blindingly obvious that the Portuguese wouldn't have been able to read Chinese characters.

On p. 18-19, Perrin gives an anecdote of poetry saving the life of a feudal lord condemned to death. Who this Lord Tameakira was is not made clear. The footnote cites George Sansom's "Japan and the Western World". Knowing Sansom, it likely came from one of the gunkimono, the so-called "war tales" which describe warfare of the Medieval period much like the Song of Roland, for example, in Europe. While Sansom and some of the older generations of historians based much of their history on these texts, most historians writing now view them with a skeptical eye as romantic idealism rather than factual accounts of events. Early historians like Sadler and Sansom accepting the gunkimono as factual bases for their work is unfortunately how a lot of the idealized orientalist/nihonjinron mythology of Japan as "unique" came to be. Is Perrin at fault for using it? No, like other points I can't fault him; however, it points to his own interest in romanticizing Japanese history to fit his agenda. I don't have that particular Sansom book, so if anyone can provide me the reference it would be appreciated.


We will stop there for now, and get into Chapter Two in a few days.

Hello everyone--it's been a pretty busy few weeks at work, and I'm now at Day 1 of the Society for Military History conference. Preparing two papers for that (a paper for the Chinese Military History society today, and then one on Saturday in the regular SMH sessions) has taken up a lot of my time as well. My apologies, and I promise to get back to my dissection of Mr. Perrin sometime next week, along with conference reports of all the military history madness here in New Orleans. Last night I had the pleasure of dining with Dr. Peter Lorge of Vanderbilt, and Dr. Elisabeth Kaske of Carnegie Mellon, who is on my panel for this morning. Here's how it looks:

8:45-10:15   Panel One: Demythologizing Asian Warfare

Andrew R. Wilson (U.S. Naval War College),
"The Three Myths of the Sanbao Eunuch: Re-conceptualizing the Voyages
of Zheng He"

Nathan H. Ledbetter (U.S. Army),
"Reifying the Barricades: Historiography Issues in the Study of the
Battle of Nagashino (1575)"

Elisabeth Kaske (Carnegie Mellon University),
"Is there a Counter-history of the Hunan Army?"

It was a quite educational and enjoyable time. Probably the first time I've had dinner with someone I cite in my papers!

Anyways, to tide you over I'm going to put up a couple of papers I did for classes at UH. The first I did for Dr. Lonny Carlile in his Asian Security Cultures class. He was kind enough to let me take a crack at applying IR theory (specifically, neo-realism and liberalism) to the Sengoku Period. The result was fun to do, and let me use a lot of the extra material I'd come up with for the Nagashino papers, but just couldn't work in. The second paper I did for Dr. Patrice Flowers in her Japanese Politics course--again, my professors were so accommodating to let me tackle Sengoku period work from a modern perspective. For that paper, I continued my thoughts from the first paper, extending to a look at domestic pressures and constructivism. I'm just throwing these up here for now, so if the formatting is off when I cut and paste, well...sorry.


So with that, here's Paper #1: Enjoy!

And here's the second paper--again, just copying and pasting at the moment, so ignore any formatting issues. Enjoy, leave feedback, and I'm sure you'll be able to see the differences and some inconsistencies from the last one to this one. One day I'll edit them and stitch them together. Or I'll can them and start all over...



security, but guaranteed (for the most part) “domestic” freedom of action.[23]What, however, of constructivism? In my previous paper I made the following statement:

[EDIT: My apologies to anyone coming to this post looking for my video presentation. I've decided that I will be using it as a baseline for a presentation at the AAS conference next year in Chicago, and as such having it freely available on the internet is probably not a good idea. Thanks for your understanding, and feel free to contact me through the blog if you have questions.]

So, it's been a long time since I posted some frantic filler on my way to New Orleans for the Society for Military History conference. My apologies to those waiting for new posts, as I fell victim to the perfection trap. The above video, which hopefully you all can see, is the result of that trap, as it took me forever to figure out how to make this work from a technical aspect. This was complicated by traveling for work extensively in the time between then and now, so it's been over two months since I've been able to get to anything publishable. Hopefully, this works and you all can forgive me.

This will be the first of two video presentations. This video, as I explain in the video, is the presentation I gave as part of the Chinese Military History Society's annual conference, held in New Orleans the day before the main SMH event. The second video is the slides from my actual SMH presentation. Unfortunately, technology got the better of me during the first presentation (somewhat ironic, given my stance that Nagashino was not a victory of technology), so I ended up talking through the second half of my presentation (from where I start the videos here) without the slides. I will be sending this link to the wonderful people I met at the conference who wished to see more of the video links.

All in all, I had a very enjoyable and productive time. Several projects may come out of this in the future, who knows. I hesitate to talk in detail about possibilities, but these conferences are all about making connections when it comes down to it, and I made some very good ones. I'd like to first of all thank Dr. David Graff, Dr. Ken Swope, and Dr. Peter Lorge, for putting together the CMHS conference and allowing me, a JAPAN specialist, to participate. Also, I thank all the participants for welcoming me and making me feel like I was not out of place. Quite the opposite, actually--as military historians, we're a small corner of our respective country-oriented fields, and as China/Japan specialists, we're again a small corner of the heavily Euro/American-centric military history field. For once, I felt I had people who really understand ALL of what I'm talking about, and it was very gratifying.

I'll save the comments on the SMH conference for the next post. Once these two videos are up, I'll get back to some of the projects I was working on prior to conferencing (the Perrin book, etc.) and start ramping up for the Conflict Archaeology conference at which I will speak in October. I'll be in Japan for a good portion of the summer, quite near to Nagashino, so expect some fun posts from there as well. With that, enjoy the video, and comments/feedback are welcome as always.

Hello, everyone. It's your all-too-infrequent author, back from 6ish weeks in Japan, where the Army sent me because speaking Japanese is critical for my job, and amazingly enough I do not get too many opportunities to practice here in Podunk, Louisiana. I attended a business Japanese course, saw friends and family, had a few work meetings, traveled up to Tohoku to volunteer and sight-see, and generally had an awesome time. I'll cover some of that in later posts--particularly some of my historical related sightseeing, and my trip to Tohoku. Things are better up there, but there is still a lot to be done.

Anyways, the beautiful thing about this trip was that I got to pick the school and program, and I found one perfect for me in many ways. I won't bore you with the details of the class (though if you're interested, feel free to ask in the comments), but it was in Okazaki, Aichi Prefecture, Japan. Location-wise, it couldn't have been better: 30 min by express train from Nagoya, where I spent a year in college and still have close ties with my hostfamily; a neat little town in and of itself, with Okazaki Castle and the only two hatchô miso factories in the world; and...an hour and change from a certain battlefield I may or may not be obsessed with. (Spoiler alert: I am).

So without further ado, we'll get to what all two of you who visit this site come here for. I took a trip to Nagashino for a day and change during our week-long Obon break. I arrived in the afternoon, went to the castle to take pictures, and then stayed over night in Shinshiro. Early in the morning, I got in my rental car and was on the battlefield (picture above) at dawn. The picture above was taken at 4:58 AM, 12 August, and gives a good approximation of what it was like looking across Shitaragahara as visibility improved enough to fight a battle. I then spent 7+ hours roaming around the battlefield, driving and walking to all the different points of interest. The video below (1 hour long...a lot packed in there) is the mashup of all my recorded thoughts and sights as I walked around. I also took about 350 pictures, some of which will be uploaded into an album and made available here for people who are interested.



So, what did I learn this trip that I had not observed in the previous two trips to Nagashino?






Great question.

First, let me explain how this time was different. You see, I'm married with kids. Wonderful, beautiful children, and a wonderful, patient, and loving wife who indulges my hobby by allowing me to plan trips to random battlefields in the hinterlands of Aichi prefecture into our family vacations.

Our first trip to Nagashino was as we were moving back to the main US Army base in Kanagawa from my remote assignment out in Kyushu; we took a 2 hour detour off the highway to go spend a couple of hours at the museum at Shitaragahara and Nagashino Castle. Our second trip was after I returned from Afghanistan, and we took a long trip around central Japan, visiting friends in Nagoya and traveling all around the Chubu region. We stayed in a ryokan about 45 minutes from the battlefield, and again all we really saw was the center of the battlefield at Shitaragahara, the museum, and the castle. With a (at the time) 4 year old and 1 year old, it was about all we could manage.



This time, however, it was just me. No limitations on my time, no naps to plan around, no "I'm bored, can we watch a movie on the iPaaaad..." And it was beautiful.

If you follow my blog and research (and I know there are at least a whopping two of you who do), you already know my approach to Nagashino and my general concept of what happened. I won't rehash that, because if you haven't read this before, all you have to do is scroll through the blog (and go listen to our podcasts (http://samuraipodcast.com/) to get the whole shebang. For this post, I'm going to concentrate on three new observations that I had, directly due to having the opportunity for an extended examination of the battlefield.

1. The role and effect of light on the battle

Why was I up at 3AM in order to get out of my hotel and onto the battlefield by 4:30? Because the battle started at 5AM (the Hour of the Hare), according to contemporary accounts. I wanted to see what it looked and felt like standing on the terrain at that time, and it was incredibly en"light"ening.

Summer in Japan, for those who have not experienced it, can be a disconcerting time. There is no adjustment for daylight savings, no "spring forward, fall back". Consequently, in the peak of the summer it's bright light out at 4:30 AM, which is really strange when you wake up and see the sun streaming in your window that early. In my research in grad school, I looked up the historical averages for first light (BMNT, or Before Morning Nautical Twilight in military speak--essentially, when does it first get light enough to see anything), and for the 29th of June (the date of the battle) historically it's 4AM. Full sunrise is 4:37AM. These historical values vary by a grand total of 4 minutes from 1695 until 2011 (when I conducted the research), so it's a fairly straightforward assumption that they'd vary only slightly for 1575.

Now, I was not at Nagashino on June 29th; I was there on August 12th. And sunrise shifted 31 minutes, from 4:37 on June 29th to 5:08 on August 12th. However, I still was able to capture what the light conditions were like, viewing from Danjoyama, at the time the battle started. The cover photo for this blogpost, above, shows what the light conditions would have been like looking across at the Takeda positions, right as the Takeda began moving forward. With first light at 4AM, and sunrise at 4:37, it makes sense that combat started an hour later; the armies would have gotten up before light, and moved into position between 4 when they could start to see and 5 when the various chronicles say combat started. There's not really any grand conclusion to be drawn, other than yes, the light conditions I observed at 5AM confirm that this makes sense.


Here we see two pictures taken between 0550 and 0600, about an hour after "sunrise", when the sun really started to rise over the eastern ridgeline.  These were taken in the open area south of Ieyasu's position on the southern flank, looking east towards where the Takeda were coming from. I'm not sure how well it comes out in the pictures (darn you auto-adjusting camera and software), but it's BRIGHT. BLINDINGLY bright. So bright it would be very, very hard to face due east, standing in a line with, say, 2,999 of my closest teppô-wielding friends, and aim my gun at any random Takeda who just happened to be charging directly at me. You could make the argument that 16th century firearms had limited accuracy, and you'd be right; however, you still have to actually look at your target to point your gun in its general vicinity.

What does this mean? It would have been extremely difficult, for about a 45 minute period of time, to face due east and aim at targets coming at you. Given that this 45 minute period of time would have been from about 0515 to 0600, if we adjust for the light-timing difference from June to August, we're talking about the first hour of the battle. IF, as conventional historiography would have us believe, the Oda and Tokugawa lined up 3,000 (or 1,000) gunners and had them rotate in line, firing at the charging Takeda, then they wouldn't have been able to see (or hit!) anything for the first hour of the battle! It's hardly likely that the Takeda began the attack, only to pull back and politely wait for the sun to clear from the Oda troops' eyes. Had the Takeda attacked straight east with the sun at their backs, we wouldn't have had the story book mowing down of Takeda cavalry; they would have closed and engaged.

It's one more data point suggesting that rather than a line running north-south in front of Danjoyama, the Oda and Tokugawa defenses (and the Takeda attacks) were oriented on the flanks. Let's take the southern side for example--it makes sense that Tokugawa's forces were oriented more south-east than south, as they A. could see in that direction, rather than staring into the sun, and B. Yamagata Masakage's attack across the southern avenue of approach, if slowed by barricades, would present an open flank to not only arrow and gunfire, but infantry charging off the hillside.



2. Danjoyama is steeper, higher, and more heavily wooded than you can tell on a map, making it easier to defend than I had thought

My previous two trips to Nagashino were in 2009 and 2010, before I spent hours and hours poring over maps of the area and reconstructing the battle in graduate school. As I said before, I had limited time to explore the area, and so concentrated on the castle and the open area between the ridgelines at Shitaragahara, because that's where "the battle was fought". The very photogenic reconstructions of the babôsaku barricades draw attention to the front of Danjoyama facing east. Consequently, I didn't really pay much attention to Danjoyama itself.

Looking at maps and Google Earth, Danjoyama does not appear to be that high. And in reality, it isn't exactly a mountain. It appears very climbable, and in my terrain assessment I asserted that it could have been assaulted and taken by foot or by horse. Because of this, I disagreed with the statement by Dr. Thomas Conlan** that there was no need for barricades in front of Danjoyama. He calls the positioning there "nonsensical"; I felt this was extreme. While I obviously agree that the vast majority of the fighting took place on the flanks, and that is where the obstacles really did their job of disrupting Takeda movement, my map reconnaissance led me to believe that the Oda would have placed at least some barricades in front of Danjoyama as well, if only to assist in blocking any potential (if unlikely) advance against it that could split the Oda lines.

Which brings us to this visit. I climbed Danjoyama. I climbed all over Danjoyama. I climbed the north end, the south end, the back, and walked the length of it. And while I COULD climb it, it was much harder than I thought. It was much steeper than I thought. The picture at the top of this section should give you some idea. The picture below, if you imagine the road not being cut out and the slope continuing down, should also show you.

I'm getting ready for another conference in October: “Battlefield Archeology: Global Perspectives on Research and Preservation”, in Palo Alto, Texas. This time, I'm an invited speaker, complete with everything being paid for and an honorarium. Really and truly--I can't believe it either. But with that, there's a bit of added pressure. After all, why would they want to pay money for me to speak at the conference, if I'm just going to sound like an idiot?

Which brings us to this post. My original idea for this blog was as a "scratch pad" where I could simply word-vomit my thoughts out on various things in order to try to make sense of them before I needed them to make sense. And after spending several hours yesterday talking to myself as I tried to carve some sense of coherence into the random thoughts floating around my head for this conference, I realized I needed to do exactly what I originally intended to do in this corner of cyberspace.



Therefore, this post is going to be a stream-of-consciousness, off the cuff flow of my thoughts that I want to go into this upcoming presentation and paper. As I've stated on the podcast and here (I think), I have gone back and listened to the podcast episodes on Nagashino and read blogposts I did over at the SA forum in order to review ideas I wanted to get into my work. So, here we go again...

The conference organizers found my Nagashino presentation from the JSA conference two years ago online, and tracked me down at UH. We've corresponded since then, and they've asked me to review some pieces for them, which I've done and enjoyed. They particularly like my approach using military analytical methodology to both describe and then fill in the gaps of what happened on a historical battlefield. I'm pretty sure this is why I've been invited. In the tentative program, I'm listed as speaking on Japanese 16th century firepower. This is problematic, as I'm in no way an expert on Japanese firearms. I've held one, once, and certainly seen a lot of them in museums, but I'm not an expert at all from a technical or technological standpoint. Hopefully no one is expecting me to show up and demonstrate Japanese firing techniques from the period.

What I am interested in, though not an expert in yet, is how they were employed; more specifically, how did commanders organize and deploy their arquebus troops on the battlefield, in concert with those carrying other weapons, to achieve the desired tactical effects? When it comes down to it, my interest is in command and decision making, not technology. My feelings on the arquebus are the same as my feelings on M4s, or UAVs, or cruise missiles: technologically advanced weapons shape decisions with how they can be employed, but the underlying concepts of how to defeat an enemy change very little, regardless of what century you are in. New weapons are merely new ways to achieve the same desired effects. Facile conclusions that "Side A beat Side B because they had X weapon" are simplistic even in cases where it seems obvious: having guns and horses helped Cortez conquer the Aztecs, but so did smallpox, a host of lesser tribes tired of being controlled by Tenochtitlan, and dumb luck; the atomic bomb likely overcame the last obstacles to the decision for the Japanese to surrender, but negotiations for the war to end had been going on for months, and submarine warfare combined with firebombing did much more to destroy the Japanese war machine.

Ultimately, I want to spend future decades of my life analyzing how samurai commanders commanded their troops. I like Nagashino because on the surface it seems a very easy case, and yet if you do any digging the layers of information that get glossed over show that it was anything but simple. Once I no longer have this dreadful day job consuming my time (sarcasm), I'd like to expand beyond Nagashino and do a comprehensive look at how samurai commanders, particularly those of the Sengoku period, learned and then exercised leadership and command.

The problem, or perhaps the benefit, is that "command" is such a nebulous term, and like most everything else is far from simple. Even if you boil it down to the choices made on the battlefield (so, tactical command), you still must know things like how many troops a commander had, where they came from, who the subordinate commanders were and their levels of skill/experience/reliability/loyalty, how much food/water/ammunition/horse feed/medical supples/etc. were on hand, how much rest (or not) they'd had, whether you could give orders by flag/conch shell/runner, what was the ground and weather like, do I have anyone who 's been here before, who is the enemy and what are they like, who are their subordinate commanders and are they reliable, what equipment/food/etc. do they have, what do they typically like to do, etc.....etc.....etc....

Which means that in order to study command, you have to at least become knowledgeable about all of those things--or at least as knowledgeable about them as the commanders you are studying. If you don't, then you will likely find you don't understand why a commander did the things he did. It's easy, as many people have done with Katsuyori, to write off a decision as "well, that was just stupid", but even in flawed reasoning there is reasoning. Just because the logic that led Katsuyori to attack a superior force wasn't correct doesn't mean that there wasn't a logic to the thought process, and THAT is what interests me. Nobody does things randomly, and very very few people do things that make no sense to THEM. What many historians and analysts fail to do is try to understand the mental constructs that guided a historical actor to a particular decision, rightly or wrongly. It's usually easy with the winner--Oda Nobunaga did it because it worked. But this is somewhat circular logic. Nobunaga did it because he THOUGHT it would work. To say that Nobunaga executed his plan at Nagashino the way he did because it worked presupposes that Katsuyori executed a plan he didn't think would work. Both of them obviously thought their plans would work, or they wouldn't have gone forward with it. The trick is in evaluating what factors led Katsuyori to believe his plan would work, and why missed the signs that it wouldn't, without simply rationalizing it away as "he was a bad commander," or "he was dumb." That's laziness.

All of which is well and good, but not germane to my conference other than the fact that my focus is on command and decision making, not really the technology of firepower. However, because you have to look at so many things when examining the information a commander would have had in front of him while making a decision, it forces you into practically every area of the battlefield. In order to understand why Nobunaga's guns were employed a certain way, you have to at least know the basic capabilities and limitations of them, have a rough idea of the numbers, and how they typically were used prior to that battle.

It then leads in several directions:

1. how did a teppo-ashigaru learn to fire his gun? How much training did he have? Was it enough to execute complicated tactical maneuvers, or was it simply "here's how you load it, and aim at the other guy," based on time and the simple firearms technology? What was this soldier's life like in garrison, on the march, and during the battle?

  See, now we're straying into historical anthropology and ethnography as we talk about the lives of individual soldiers during the period. Institutional historians, who typically at least in English are the ones covering military history, don't care so much about this, because it doesn't affect the overall historical narrative of Big Events. But it does, because details like this affect how a commander makes up his force, the limits of what it can and can't do, and how he arranges them. Which then affects how and where he can maneuver his force and employ them against enemy forces. In other words, the tactical level details of individual soldiers affect the operational options a commander would have. Operational options then set limitations and options on the strategic choices a commander might make. It's all connected, and looking at only one part of it, like an institutional historian who only cares about who won and lost and who got knocked out of the political race to the top, is missing half the story.

2. Where did the gun come from? The ammunition? the gunpowder? What was Nobunaga's supply chain for this and other things? How did he pay for them? Did he pay for them? Were the guns made in Sakai, or Kunitomo, or Tanegashima, or Portugal? Whichever it is, what does it tell us about his economic base and/or control of certain areas? 

Now we're getting into the material, and that's something an archaeologist and a technology historian would be focused on. But it tells us things that affect the individual, and sheds light on the larger picture of Nobunaga's wealth and power. That these specific things can shed light to different groups interested in Nagashino shouldn't be news to anyone, but it's amazing to me how provincial and narrow different groups can be. "Historians" of Japan often focus on written documents to the exclusion of all else, and usually written documents only cover the elites of society. Anthropologists, and some of the newer generations of "historians", focus on the individual, especially the lower classes, because "OMG EVERYTHING WRITTEN BEFORE ONLY TALKS ABOUT THE ELITES THAT IS SO CLASSIST LET'S TALK ABOUT FARMERS AND FARMERS AND FARMERS." Technological historians mainly, and somewhat with archaeologists, talk about objects and their development, and prioritize the effects of TECHNOLOGY on PROGRESS.

Speaking as someone who's interest (command decision making) sits at the nexus of all of these things, it drives me nuts. You can't understand any of it if you don't try to understand all of it. This is why, for centuries, people have looked at Nagashino and thought "OMG, NEW GUNS KILL TRADITIONAL DUMBASSES WHO RIDE HORSES". "Historians" read the documents and draw facile conclusions from them (see this blogpost for what I think about that). "Anthropologists" want to focus on individuals or traditionally under represented members of society, to the point that they almost try to ignore larger political and social developments as if they don't have any effect on Joe Peasant. Techno-nerds see OMG GUNZ and run with the simplistic conclusions that historians who have no idea about warfare make, and off we go with "Guns won Nagashino, see, Military Revolution(tm) at work!"

I'm not the only one who sees this, obviously, and of course I'm simplifying and generalizing different groups of academia. Many do not fit those stereotypes at all. But the fact remains that there is disconnect. How do we look at it from a holistic viewpoint?

Back to command decision making--as I said, it requires you to look at every detail. Gotta know what weapons you have and when you'll get your next meal, but you also have to know the large "why are we fighting again?" questions to determine what you'll do.

This is why some type of comprehensive framework, ANY type, is vital. Mine just happens to be the 5 paragraph op order/military decision making process steps I grew up with in the Army. It makes you look at everything, in detail, to make sure as a commander you're not forgetting a vital step. As an analyst looking at a battle, it also focuses you on details--so you can see where a historical commander forgot something and lost, for example.

But BEYOND that, it can show us a whole RANGE of things that I don't really think anyone has considered. Sure, for a military officer in a military history course, the goal of using our current analytical frameworks is to determine "this is what went right/wrong, and therefore we should/should not do this in our future as commanders." This is how it is taught in military courses in military academies and schools around the world. However, that's barely the tip of what we can learn.

For instance, what if I'm an archaeologist, and I want to dig up Nagashino to learn more about it? I'm sure archaeologists do all sorts of terrain and alluvial analysis prior to digging, but my impression is that they normally begin by someone finding something, and then digging around that to find more. Wouldn't it be more efficient to look at what the likely plans were at Nagashino for each side, and then dig at sites that would confirm different theories, depending on what you found there?

This range, really, appears to be what I need to talk about, in order to demonstrate the value of MDMP as a framework. Basically, I've written a ton of words here, and will pick out 4 sentences that will be my introduction. Blargh.

So, um, yeah. Now I need to talk about the methodology, huh? More on that later.

Well, %^@#*!!

Why is a picture of a closed Lincoln Memorial on a Japanese military history blog?

Because the conference I've been prepping for next week is "postponed" for the time being. It's being held at the Palo Alto Battlefield National Historic Park. As the US Congress has decided to solve their disagreements by acting with less maturity than my 4-year old daughter, all National Parks are closed as part of the government shutdown. So until further notice, our conference is "postponed". Hopefully that doesn't become "canceled".

Sometimes when you're struggling with a problem, a solution arrives from a source you never would have seen coming.

For the last few days I've been working on my presentation for the Palo Alto conference--it's been postponed indefinitely, and I'm using the time I would have been giving it (today, in fact) to refine my thoughts a bit more coherently. As I've said before, give me a white board and an hour and I can explain it all to you, but limit me to 25 minutes and make me put it in slides, I'm...struggling to find effective, succinct ways to express my methodology and explain how I use it to understand Nagashino.

This morning, as I started to work, I checked my email and found my regular H-Net Warfare discussion group weekly blogpost rollup. Normally I open the email, scan through the titles, and find that 95% of it is the usual rehashing of Napoleon, the US Civil War, WWI & WWII, and so on and so forth. There's occasionally something premodern, but usually it has to do with Rome. Very rarely there's something 1500-1600's-ish, but always European. I'll read these sometimes to get a global perspective on what's going on in my own time frame, but there's never anything focused on Asia, at least outside of the Japanese as antagonists to whatever American topic is being studied in WWII blogs, or the Chinese serving that role in more recent "security" debates.

Anyways, this morning I was perusing and I found a blogpost entitled "Cavalry Operations: Moving an Army Is Difficult and Dangerous" by Gavin Robinson, at his blog Investigations of a Dog. Before several hours ago, I hadn't read Mr. Robinson's blog, but if this three-part series on cavalry operations is a hint of what he is all about, I will be picking through it quite often. A quick search turns up his book Horses, People and Parliament in the English Civil War: Extracting Resources and Constructing Allegiance (Ashgate Press: London, 2012). Looks fascinating, and will be going on my Christmas list.

Reading through the three-part blogpost (which I'll get to specifically in a moment), I see a lot of similarities in the issues Mr. Robinson describes in researching the English Civil War and my own work on 16th century Japan. Some of that is to be expected--premodern historical analysis has the same sort of obstacles no matter what language your research is in. But he sums up a lot of the problems with the ways "historians" have created enduring narratives about historical events that perpetuate despite being wrong. Now...where have I heard a similar theme....



Anyways, quite specifically, I think Mr. Robinson has inadvertently provided me with the exact arguments so troubling me as I put together the Palo Alto presentation. So let's get into that.

"Early modern military history tends to be split between two views of how wars were decided. Thetraditional view, recently revived by Wanklyn and Jones for the English Civil War, was that wars were decided by decisive battles, and that these battles were decisive because of the superior ability of Great Captains and/or their soldiers. For the English Civil War, this usually means Oliver Cromwell and his Ironsides. This kind of history does narrate campaigns, but tends to treat them like moves in a board game, without paying much attention to logistics. Wanklyn is good on geography and makes vague allusions to ‘cavalry support’ being necessary on the march, but hasn’t really got to the bottom of how operations worked. The other view, associated with the War and Society school, is that battles are not important because wars are determined by economic resources. These two opinions also happen to coincide roughly with Whig and Marxist views of history. It might be going too far to say that there was a debate between them, because they’re more like two sets of unquestioned prejudices which casually dismiss each other."

 This pretty much sums up the different audiences I see on the Japanese history side of things, the exception being that the "War and Society" approach de-emphasizes the "War" part even more than in European history. Both approaches that Robinson describes here encapsulate aspects of the three groups I see myself stuck between.

The "traditional" view that Robinson describes hits on the Institutional Historians (those that study institutions like government, etc.--not historians that need to be put in an institution, though I could name a few). I would add that frequently in Japanese history that success in battle is just another aspect of the "Great Captains" being "great", and the details get glossed over so much that the "Battle" disappears. Oda Nobunaga was a great political, economic, and wartime leader, and Takeda Katsuyori was a horrible political, economic, and war leader, and therefore of course Nobunaga won and Katsuyori lost at Nagashino. As Robinson states in one of the following posts, this logic is circular: Nobunaga was great because he won at Nagashino (or organized free markets, or built Azuchi Castle), and he won at Nagashino (et al) because he was great. Robinson is right that this "traditional" view frequently identifies "Battle" as the decision point of warfare, but in my experience in Japanese history, at least, the actual conduct of "Battle" gets short shrift, especially when conclusions like "oh, Nobunaga had guns, Katsuyori had horses, so it must be that 'modern' guns beat 'traditional' cavalry" are so easily and lazily put forth without having to get one's hands dirty actually comparing textual sources, or looking at the terrain, or heaven forbid GOING to the battlefield.

The "War and Society" crowd falls in with other "Historians of the Masses" like the Marxists as he points out, or the Annales School (I'm looking at you, Souryi), or, shoot--any of the recentish pushes on gender, population, etc. Everything is a social movement, or a general trend, and the individual matters much less than the group. Which isn't a bad thing--especially because it does drive a focus on population (from which an army is drawn) and economics (the conditions of how an army is supplied and equipped and paid) and so on. I actually have a lot of respect for historians on this side of the equation--William Wayne Farris, one of my instructors at UH, is one of them, as are people like Pierre Souryi or Hitomi Tonomura or a lot of other well-known, well-respected scholars. Even the heirs of Jeffrey Mass, like Karl Friday or Thomas Conlan, who could be called more "Institutional", incorporate at least some of this approach into their work. Purely "traditional" history like that above has probably been left behind with the likes of Sansom, Varley, and JW Hall, and as much as I love the latter two, that's probably for the best.

However, the "War and Society" approach ALSO tends to take the "battle" out of warfare. If, as Robinson describes it, to these historians it's all about economics resources, then battle is nothing more than the playing out of economics. But if that were true, then Oda Nobunaga would have died, outnumbered 20:1 and overrun, as the Imagawa swept him aside on their way to Kyoto in 1560, rather than outmaneuvering and killing Imagawa Yoshimoto at Okehazama. Yes, everyone likes to point out that the US Civil War was a case of Northern industry and population eventually overwhelming Southern command superiority and tactics, but that overlooks the fact that, at ONE particular point (Gettysburg), Southern command superiority failed to show up; had Lee made different decisions (or Stuart been...around), the battle and subsequently the war could have been quite different. I do not wish to argue specific points of the US Civil War; my point is that both approaches to history are important: armies have to be raised, fed, equipped, and moved, but they also have to be led. Poor use of population or economics or whatever can doom great tactical commanders, but on the other hand fantastic economic and/or population advantages mean little if the command is inept. As Robinson's last line says in the quote above, rather than come together to put together a full picture of "warfare", these two sides "casually dismiss each other." And people like me are left in the middle.

There is one party to this whole discussion that Robinson does not identify explicitly, but mentions when he says "superior ability of Great Captains and/or their soldiers": Material historians. Both of the frequent readers of my blog will know I absolutely LOVE these people. "Superior ability of...their soldiers" could manifest itself due to superior technology. In a way, these folks draw from both of the groups above; economic/technical superiority leads to inherent superiority in battle. Unlike those groups, they actually do focus on "Battle", because "Battle" is where the "proof" of technological superiority is "shown"...at least if you choose to read it into texts, but I digress. This group includes the Military Revolutionists, and we all know my problems with Geoffrey Parker and his gang. However this also includes another group--the group I will (hopefully) be addressing at Palo Alto when that gets rescheduled: Archaeologists, who do historical research through material, rather than textual, record. 

This is all relevant to me, not only because the current audience focus of mine is a conference of archaeologists I've been asked to address, but because one of the things I've been asked to talk about is the "Levels of Warfare" concept. Military historians, at least in modern and/or European warfare, are pretty well-versed in this, but it's rather new to archaeologists of conflict sites. The organizers of the conference published an article in the Journal of Conflict Archaeology last year (Jan 2012) which explained this, among other contemporary military doctrinal concepts. One of the points I'm trying to make in my talk is that using the LoW framework helps to bridge the gap between the Institutional Historians at the Strategic "what was the political result" level and the Mass Historians/Material Historians at the Tactical "how did it affect the people/what did they use?" level. As an Army officer particularly interested in command decision making, these come together at the operational level to be actualized. "Battles" are important, but only in how they further or fail to further the political "strategic" goals of the political entities waging war. The Operational Level ties these two together, and is the story of how armies are built from the population, economically fed and equipped, and moved about in a manner that meets, or at least is intended to meet, political goals. In other words, it SHOULD be a focus of study for everyone involved above; and yet, few in Japanese history, at least, go anywhere near it. Thomas Conlan does a great job in State of War (which I'm currently re-reading), but even he has to cloak the discussion of how 14th century Japanese armies were assembled and motivated in terms of social, economic, and religious macro-trends to "camouflage" the fact that he's talking about WAR.  

And you know what? That's FINE. Honestly, I'm just starting to come to grips with the fact that my paper was rejected by Monumenta Nipponica because I didn't do a good enough job of that sort of "camouflage." My next project is to rework it and make it "academia friendly" (less US military stuff), but that's for after Palo Alto. Let's continue on. 

"I tried to critically analyse and synthesise [the two viewpoints he describes above] in my book, making the point that resources are both as important and as contingent as battles, but perversely for a book ostensibly about horses, I failed to emphasise how uniquely important horses were to military operations. I think this is because the battles versus resources split has had an insidious influence on my intellectual development. I always wanted to study cavalry charges, but Frank Tallett and John Childs pushed me into studying horse supply instead. I can now see that this was a false dichotomy: going either way, or even trying to study both at same time, provides no obvious way into the operational level. Even when I recognised that there was a big gap in my knowledge, I kept getting pulled in other directions by what people wanted to read about and debate."

I feel your pain.  Yes, it's absolutely a false dichotomy. And studying both at the same time could be difficult, considering that generally speaking secondary historians fall on one side or the other. However, I would argue that you can't understand the operational level of any conflict without understanding the strategic or tactical, and you can't understand those without the operational. This, in my very humble opinion, is why so much of military history is completely and utterly wrong. If you're reading this, Mr. Robinson, I would ask you to think about your frustrations you express with how other historians have categorized Essex's campaigns in the English Civil War. I am no expert on this conflict at all, but from reading your posts it appears that "traditional" historians right him off as a bumbler or failure because he, well, didn't succeed; wouldn't that conclusion fail to stand up to an integrated approach that looked at how his command decisions were shaped by his economic, political, and tactical options? Again, having not read your book, it appears from your criticisms that this is EXACTLY what you are doing, much like the approach I am taking regarding the Battle of Nagashino in Japan.

The cavalry screen protects a marching army from threats. I didn’t fully appreciate the importance of this until I read Erik’s blog, especially this post about cavalry and armoured divisions. The screen consists of cavalry units moving around and ahead of a marching army to deter attacks and fight off any attacks that do happen. When it works properly, the infantry, artillery and wagons can move safely and with minimal delays. When it doesn’t work properly, the army is in danger.

 As a modern cavalryman, this warms the cockles of my heart. So many "historians" try to write about what happens in warfare, and yet they have absolutely no knowledge about anything tactical. This is why, as I've pointed out here before (and will be the central piece in a paper I'll write and present at next year's Chinese Military History conference, assuming they accept my submission), where social/institutional historians see Ieyasu's troops at Nagashino moving forward ahead of their Oda allies as some sort of social honor to be "first in battle" accorded the "local force" (this was, after all, Ieyasu's domain that was invaded), as soon as I looked at the positioning on the map I could tell that they were performing a dismounted counter-reconnaissance screen. At least from reading Mr. Robinson's pieces, the English were a bit more sophisticated in unit separation and the use of cavalry in the 1640's than the Japanese were in 1575 (or really ever were, since not much development happened past 1600), but traditional "cavalry" missions like screening or reconnaissance can be accomplished, albeit more slowly, on foot.

Robinson describes some use of cavalry during the campaigns he studies, and it's a good description, though I cannot comment too much as I know nothing about the campaigns or period. Worth reading though. He ends the first post with this:

I hope I’ve shown that battles and sieges are only part of the story. The way the campaign went was heavily influenced by the operations of cavalry screens.

 Bravo, sir. 1000 cheers, for you certainly have. And at least for me, you've helped me in my quest to tackle explaining the relevancy of the operational to an audience just beginning to understand it. Because as you say, battles and sieges are only part of the story; so, also, are the political, economic, and social forces which shape (and are shaped by) conflict. Harnessing and applying these forces to localized conflict (on the "battlefield) is the realm of the operational, and the prime focus of military commanders throughout history and across oceans.

 I will briefly look at his following two posts, because I found some nuggets in there as well. The second in the series, "Cavalry Operations: A question of balance", looks at two simultaneous operations and how in each the examined force did not have enough cavalry to accomplish the tasks they attempted. It's a good read, and the details are really interesting, but what struck me again was how "traditional" historical accounts make facile decisions about what happened without viewing things from the level of the on-site commander. Robinson again discusses the "teleological" circular reasoning--Essex's "disastrous" campaign was, contrary to common analysis, not doomed from the start, he argues. More and more I'm starting to think that this Essex character is the English version of Takeda Katsuyori.

The third post,"Cavalry Operations: It’s a raid!", is best summed up in the first three sentences:

One of the many problems with concentrating only on big battles is that it distracts attention from small-scale operations that were more common and can tell us interesting things about how war worked in practice. But studying small wars for their own sake can also obscure links with bigger issues. This post will try to explain why small cavalry raids happened and how they could affect operational decisions.

As many recent historians have noted in an attempt to de-emphasize (or flat out ignore) warfare, "Battles" happen pretty infrequently. Actual full-scale battles are a pretty small percentage of not only history, but warfare in general. As Farris notes in Japan's Medieval Population,  more often than not the purpose of military activity was not to seek and destroy the enemy army in combat, but to raid farms, obtain supplies, and deny resources to the enemy. As I said before, battles are nice, easily identifiable points of OMG SOMETHING BIG IS HAPPENING, but they do not simply occur. Things like raids not only were a vital way to sustain one's own army and deny supplies to the enemy, but as Robinson states here, were part of the tactical and operational environment which shaped commander's decisions.

I won't quote it, but the discussion of Prince Rupert's raid on Essex's quarters, and the death of a John Hampden which resulted, is absolutely fabulous. Again, Robinson really gives it to historians who facilely draw conclusions without stopping to think. One of the underappreciated facts of warfare (or, life in general) is the randomness and accidental nature of so much of it. As a veteran of Afghanistan, I can fully appreciate this, as though I never personally was hit by an IED, there were enough times that I traveled through an area 10 minutes before one went off, or an hour after an attack occurred. Soldiers truly understand that "there but for the grace of God go I."  And while the whole Great Captains ("traditional") concept is fraught with problems as Robinson states, so is assuming inevitable outcomes that have no relation to who is making the decisions (hello, Marxists). I don't know who this Hampden fellow was, though I bet I will once I read Mr. Robinson's book. But apparently his death was significant enough that some historians feel not only it changed the results of the war, but retroactively assign credit to this raid in which he was killed as a turning point. Mr. Robinson quite rightly calls them out on this. Random things happen in war--some good, some not good, depending on your allegiances. Stonewall Jackson is shot by his own troops while returning from a night patrol, suddenly the Confederacy is without it's best commander just a month or so before what later is acknowledged as their high point in the war, Gettysburg. One cannot say for certain (though many have tried) that Jackson's presence would have won Gettysburg and thus the war, but we know they did not, and were hurt tremendously by his absence.

There's a 4th part to this series coming, and I'll comment here if anything strikes my fancy. Seriously, go check it out, it's worth your time.

In emails back and forth yesterday with one of the Palo Alto organizers, I found out that the conference is likely to be pushed back to February or later. This isn't a bad thing for me, because I'll be pretty busy with the day job between now and then. 

In an effort to keep things moving, I'll be posting a series with the rough draft cut of my presentation broken into parts. You can expect that to start in the next few days. Feel free (as always) to leave feedback in the comments of each segment, because that's only going to help me make it better. Honestly, the delay isn't horrible, because right now I think my presentation is about 40 minutes worth of blabbing for 25 minutes worth of time. Putting it up in segments will help me figure out how to pare it down, and see what really needs to be in there vs. what I can gloss over.

Beyond that, I've gotten some questions over the course of the year that I'll try to start answering. Some of it will be in conjunction with the Samurai Archives podcast. One question that comes up pretty regularly is "what books should I read?" In the next few months we'll put together a podcast on that, and I'll have a blogpost up with descriptions of my own recommendations.

The other day I received an email asking about my interrupted series on Noel Perrin's book "Giving up the Gun". Now that the conference is pushed back, you can expect to see me return to that in the next month or so, to finish it up. I halted because in chapter 3 there was a fact I wanted to check, and I never got around to looking it up as work/etc. flared up. But I do plan to return to it.

Other things will get posted as they strike me--just wanted to give all 4 of you loyal readers (hey, it's growing!) a heads-up on what you can expect in the near future. If there is anything you want to see on this page, let me know by email or in the comments, and I'll see what I can do.

I realized that I've never shared my original (though heavily modified over the iterations) presentation on Nagashino, other than the dusty old Youtube version from the Japan Studies Conference. So to put it finally to rest, I recorded it and uploaded it here for anyone who wants to see it. This is the version (mostly) that I gave at the Society for Military History conference last March. Combined with my take on Nagashino's historiography, it's a pretty comprehensive view of my work on Nagashino, though of course there are always things you have to leave out in a conference paper.

I will not be giving this presentation again. I am not leaving Nagashino, but refining what I have. For next year's Chinese Military History conference I've proposed a presentation on the intelligence gathering and deception efforts at Nagashino, to fit in with this year's theme of deception and stratagem. Of course Palo Alto will happen eventually, and Nagashino forms a large portion of what I'll talk about there. But it's time to be serious about putting this into publishable formats rather than merely tweaking it for the next conference.

Enjoy, and as always, feedback in the comments is appreciated.