He had an abrasive personality (at least online - I’ve been told he was much more mellow in person) Sad that I never got to meet him; one of the most prolific board game designers ever, both in terms of number of games and substance in those games. Truly one of the legends of the hobby.
SamS
6576
Nice, Dien Bien Phu 2ndE is finally shipping!
I’m of the opinion that this one is truly an improvement on the original. I think, in retrospect, that the original was a bit too pro-French (balance-wise, not culturally).
Every time I think of Dien Bien Phu I have to dig out Fall’s Hell in a Very Small Place. What a great book.
But with substantial flaws!
What book doesn’t have them? One thing about Fall, even though he’s definitely “of a time” and has a lot of baggage from the era, is that he’s a great writer, and manages to capture a lot of the human element that some historians miss. Of course, he’s not an historian, so much as a deep journalist.
As I get older, I am less and less interested in the sort of battle and campaign level military history I grew up on. I gravitate more towards I guess meta issues and broader cultural and social history. I still like reading the occasional more traditional military history, but I have very little interest these days in the stuff that really absorbed me thirty years ago,.
I agree with your overall reading interest proclivities and empathize. Specifically regarding the conflict in Indochina in particular my problem with the Military Historiography to date is that it is dominated by “deep journalists” and hasn’t had hardly any proper battle/campaign works completed on those subjects. Max Hastings’ excellent new volume included.
Yeah, there’s a need for both. One thing that’s kind of interesting is that Vietnam may well be the last of our wars where there is substantial printed archival material available in the quantity and quality to support traditional historical research. And even then, the political sensitivity of so much of that era may well shape the archival landscape for Vietnam studies today. But for subsequent conflicts, the predominance of electronic communications and records–easily deleted, hard to track, hard to verify–and the growing culture of secrecy (ironically increasing as the objective risks/threat decreases, compared to the Cold War era) may well leave historians of the current era damn little to work with in traditional ways.
This. Agree. The worm is at least starting to turn there, but I think we’re still 5-10 years away. Battles for the narrative in the academy still dampen these efforts but that is starting to change. The access to Politburo materials is there for those who can jump the language hurdle and the US records are all there, and accessible for those who want to do the work.
I thought so too, but Leavenworth’s amazingly and damned (and shockingly) frank two volume lessons learned on the Iraq War at least gives me hope.
As someone with a history degree who does not do history these days, I would have thought the opposite. The sheer volume of information generated in an era of electronic communication and transmission, along with the fact that a lot of electronic information would not be deleted (in a way that the only paper copy often would be just physically thrown away) would possibly mean there would simply be much more there to research.
It would be a different type of research. Not going to the archive and looking at all of the printed material that a given institution has, but instead getting server access, etc. A different set of technical skills would be needed, as well.
I also think it probably will make classification and access harder to figure out. I’m not sure, for example, if the military has the same ability to just give access to declassified electronic information, as it probably is more likely mingled in the same storage as still classified information, and may be harder to pull out.
It’s actually an interesting question, and one I’m sure professional historians are grappling with.
Having worked most of my adult life with these sorts of materials, very much so 1996-2018, that is the primary problem. Along with the more familiar problem of reams and reams and reams and reams of data (more of an age old problem there). Classified = No Access. Period. For 25-75 years, unless specifically granted.
That is why the Leavenworth Lessons Learned shocked (in a good way) and heartened me. A LOT of classified and sensitive material was declassified to write them (aside from the very critical self-reflection in the operational analyses, which also shocked me in a good way). Stuff from CENTCOM and MNF-I/USF-I in particular.
Having said that, it is a Lessons Learned, and thus is very much Army “Inside Baseball”. But it’s a start.
That’s one direction it could go. Certainly the potential volume of material is vastly greater than before. But the quantity of stuff we can actually use, or sort through, or practically work with, may well be a different story.
There are several issues that we don’t have a real grasp of yet, though. One is technical. We’ll always be able to read paper stuff or even microfilm/fiche. Once it’s digitized, the ability to read stuff depends on a lot of factors, from media deterioration (CDs for example do go bad) to having the right machines or the right devices hooked to the machines to actually read the media stuff is stored on. Even with fairly standard data types, it’s gotta reside somewhere, and it’s oddly pretty easy to lose digital stuff, maybe even easier than losing boxes of physical records.
Another is that it’s very easy to delete digital stuff, on purpose or accidentally. It’s one thing to physically requisition a file and shred it. It’s another to simply click on the folder and hit delete. Also, the possibility of altering digital info is much greater than with paper, especially if you want to do it so that only a professional cyberforensics examiner could tell.
But yeah, theoretically, we generate so much stuff that there should be a treasure trove of material to work with. The problems really are at the human level, I think. We have gone from a culture that valued our records as things that preserve our history and the story of our society, to seeing records as potential evidence of our misdeeds, or potentially useful material for our rivals/enemies. Also, in a more practical vein, we now conduct business across so many devices, using so many communications channels, that even if everyone used only approved means I think the variety and extent of stuff would be mind numbing. When I was working in the defense area, we communicated important stuff by one or two ways. Now, who knows?
I think that even if we get access to the bulk of the records in the future, sorting through it will be an order of magnitude more difficult. But I really do fear that our CYA culture and the increasingly bitter, nihilistic partisanship in Washington will create an environment where we are far less certain of our records than ever before.
SlyFrog
6587
Definitely. But I would also add that we valued records that we wanted to preserve. Paper records are often a function of what someone saw fit to preserve (which is not always what historians are interested in). They are voluminous, and in some ways much more costly to preserve (on a square footage basis, if nothing else) than digital records.
There is a parallel with litigation in law firms, and discovery in connection with lawsuits, that I have seen first hand. People seem much more willing to say and write stupid, damaging things in emails and texts that are constantly being flung about, and often they don’t disappear. Years ago, those would have been telephone calls or in person meetings lost forever.
That’s an interesting point. On the one hand, t’s possible that the sheer ubiquity of digital correspondence could result in totally unintentional creation of vast archives of stuff of immense value to historians. On the other, it’s also possible that there will be so much generated that no one will be able to sort through it, creating a sort of hidden in plain sight type of obfuscation. On the gripping hand, though, it’s also possible that someone will use the digital nature of such correspondence to alter the record so that, years later, what people find in the bits and bytes will be what someone wanted to show, not what happened.
But really, I think the biggest thing is going to be the sheer volume of crap that ends up lying around, in a vast array of systems and protocols, under an equally vast system of clearances and access privileges.
SamS
6589
Almost all of the petabytes of information that is created each year will have been destroyed 100 years from now, let alone 1000 years (except for those embarrassing photos of you when you were a kid).
Is it weird I find that thought quite comforting?
We think. Maybe. I’m not sure, really. It could go either way.
I’m more concerned that, because we are in an age where nothing ever goes away–I mean, thirty year old pop culture stuff is instantly available on YouTube and elsewhere–the government will start to think about the timeline for declassifying things in “Internet years,” which means that instead of, oh, 25 or 30 years we will have to wait, um, forever to get anything declassified. If people’s sense of the passage of time is so skewed by the permanence of stuff on the Internet, I am more than a little concerned that the powers that be will internalize this and stuff that would routinely have been declassified in a relatively timely fashion will now never see the light of day. After all, the Internet makes yesterday seem like today.
You know what I mean :). For instance, when I was in college, the idea of listening to music recorded 30 or even 40 years previously was, to put it mildly, insane. Today, my students come to class wearing Zeppelin t-shirts and have some of the same music on their playlists that I had on my cassettes and 8-tracks. Why? Because on the Internet, nothing really is ghettoized by date. It’s all “there.”
