A large part of trust is dependent on transparency, because knowledge about events helps build a case for integrity.
On that note there’s an important New America blog post that highlights a change in the U.S. policy; AFRICOM has returned its procedures to reporting death toll details of drone strikes.
Transparency regarding all casualties and not just those assessed to have been civilians is important for efforts to check the accuracy of AFRICOM’s assessments regarding the civilian toll. It is also important in its own right. Whether or not classed as civilians by the U.S. military, alleged militants are still people the United States killed. Regardless of one’s stance on U.S. military operations in Somalia, Americans should know and be able to face the impact of their military actions abroad.
The Japanese used deep intelligence networks within British territory to realize rapid jungle invasion would be best on bicycles and tanks using existing roads. Note the rubber tires and how much these cyclists look like like rugged U.S. mountain bike soldiers of the late 1800s.
The February 1942 Battle of Singapore after the Malay campaign by the Japanese is perhaps the worst defeat of British arms in history. A core technology in the battle was the bicycle, used by Japanese troops in the jungle — despite having little to no prior relevant experience — to apply rapid and constant pressure in relentless pursuits of spooked defenders.
In retrospect it seems likely that if the British had been more scientific in Singaporean risk assessment (e.g. they blindly de-prioritized Malay strengh, bungled communications and lacked counter-intelligence), had the distracted British left in place any kind of competent resistance to over-confident and aggressive Japanese, then rapid assaults on Singapore might have failed.
Riding loud bike rims clustered together on confined paths into battle could instead have been a story about how it made the Japanese obvious and easy targets.
A blog post by Campfire Cycling makes a couple seemingly important psychological points about the swarm sound made by Japanese bicycles attacking at night.
The sound of a single squeaky chain, a rubbing brake pad, or a wheel rolling on the rims is bad enough. But by the dozens and the hundreds, they sounded to the beleaguered, undermanned British troops like the lightweight Japanese tanks. Time and again, Japanese bicycle infantry advanced past abandoned British defensive points. Broken-down bicycles were an unexpected psychological weapon.
This story telling is captivating. The squeaky chain definitely brings tanks to mind. Yet something else sounds slightly off in their narrative.
Set aside the fact the British had far more troops, so nobody should be calling them undermanned. Also set aside the fact that you need as few as three well-placed soldiers to eliminate a battalion on bikes. The other more nuanced errors are interesting.
Ok, just one important question about that fact before I let it go (for a minute). Wouldn’t someone realize the loud slow-moving upright clusters of bicycles on open roads made them trivial to anticipate and shoot like fish in a barrel?
Campfire Cycling analysis begs whether bikes were really intentionally broken-down or deconstructed into a louder and more resilient mode of operation and why? Was the effect of loud sounds planned, or an unexpected benefit later discovered by brash invaders?
Despite numeric superiority, the British troops were supposedly so spooked by the thought of tanks coming through the jungle that they withdrew apathetically and foolishly.
A quick check of 1920s records from the U.S. Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce suggests bicycles predominantly used coaster brakes so that sound would have been familiar to defenders, for example.
All bicycles imported into the Netherlands Indies [Indonesia] have a coaster hub on the rear wheel without a braking device. […] Quotations are usually made for bicycles without tires.
Squeaky coaster brakes still could be ginned up to be some kind of “kiai” for the Japanese bicycles exported to countries they planned to invade, but there’s no evidence that squeaking brakes during attack helped them.
Chains… seriously if you can’t tell a street full of bicycle chain squeaks from light tanks, you probably don’t want to.
Likewise, official ledgers of bike imports from Japan say they came without tires, which hints at the opposite of loud rims being an “unexpected” noise. Dozens of tire-less bikes on roads in the dark was allegedly transposed into a belief tanks were coming out of the jungle, but again maybe those defenders didn’t really want to distinguish.
Element of surprise seems to be missing given small groups were bodily announcing themselves in a constrained and exposed position to attack “fortified” British.
As counter-intuitive as it sounds, it’s possible. Loudly pounding horse-shoes in a gallop and yelling “charge” brought unexpected psychological benefits during a mounted attack against heavily fortified defenses as I’ve written about here before.
A better and simpler explanation than advance planning for loud frontal assault is that Japanese Colonel Tsuji Masanobu, one of the Singapore Battle planners, had set in motion two infantry divisions equipped each with six thousand bicycles (as well as five hundred motor vehicles) to move quickly regardless of obstacles.
A violent racist and mass murderer, [Colonel Tsuji Masanobu] escaped prosecution as a war criminal with the help of American authorities and went on to work for the CIA. […] A CIA assessment judged him unreliable and ineffective.
Tsuji’s lies and arrogance served his campaign well as he stopped at nothing, throwing away the lives of his men. Tubes or not, loud metal rims or not… war crimes or not, he pressed forward. Resistance would likely have torn him to pieces. Thus among milquetoast and blind Bitish defenders lacking strategy other than withdrawing to leaky “strongholds” (compromised by Japanese informants) we can see more of why Tsuji’s reckless metal rim assaults worked.
The British sloppily sabotaged supply depots, roads and bridges in advance (instead of when bicycles were on them) to stop assault and the Japanese went through or around anyway because that’s what bicycles were known to do for decades before those roads and bridges existed. When conditions were blamed for flat tires, it was the impatient brutality of Japanese leadership that meant soldiers were expected to ride only rims.
Early battle upsets came as expected from Japanese intelligence aggressively targeting Indian Urdu-speaking troops being led by inexperienced British officers who only spoke English (experienced and competent ones had been rotated into defending the Middle-East).
I say expected because the Japanese leveraged an extensive “refined” network of informants on the ground. British weakness such as communication barriers was no secret. It’s hard to overstate in that sense just how thoroughly compromised British defensive positions were, especially given how susceptible British intelligence and communication lines were to murderous Japanese invaders who shifted local “support” (according to Tsuji).
When engaged in battle, the troops left their bicycles in the rear with a few soldiers on guard. As soon as the enemy began to retreat, our troops had to follow in close pursuit. The men guarding the bicycles would obtain cooperation of the Malay, Indian and Chinese residents of the locality to carry the bicycles forward to our advancing troops. Such bicycle transport units would be commanded by a Japanese soldier, not even understanding the languages of the mixture of races following him as he went forward carrying the Japanese flag at the head of his bicycle column. The men who trotted along the well paved roads, leading hundreds of silver wheels, were surely an army in the form of a cross for the emancipation of East Asia.
I want to highlight that such a weird pseudo-fascist perspective about achieving willing “cooperation” from locals (e.g. people being violently tortured and pressed into service) is the opposite of truth and a good example of Tsuji’s lies.
Japanese aggression in Southeast Asia was an extension of the Sino-Japanese War. Among Japanese military officers and men there was a culture of prejudice toward the Chinese and other Asian people. These attitudes had deepened following the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 and were embedded within the Japanese population as a whole by the 1930s. […] Clearly, then, the Singapore Massacre was not the conduct of a few evil people, but was consistent with approaches honed and applied in the course of a long period of Japanese aggression against China and subsequently applied to other Asian countries.
Back to the questions about planning for loud rims, Japan had allocated at least a couple mechanics to each company to repair flats. That does make it seem like they had intended to keep stealthy rubber rolling.
Yet obviously to an impatient liar like Tsuji the upsides ftom tire repairs (averaging dozens per day) were deemed less desirable versus driving forward on noisy metal before his strategic bluster could be unraveled. Brazen squeaky pursuit of a fast-withdrawing British line meant slowing down for repairs made no real sense.
The Malay peninsula was in fact defined by British laying down a paved road system that meant bicycles on the invading warpath didn’t need rubber to ride. The British had setup a veritable open back door into Singapore that may as well have included red carpet…. Far from being a heavily-fortified stronghold, weich the British thought they had engineered, the country was wide open to assault.
“Curiously enough, throughout all these years of bickering and indecision, it had occurred to barely anyone that Malay had over 1,000 miles of coastline, half of it exposed to Japanese attack,” writes author Arthur Swinson in Defeat in Malaya: Fall of Singapore. “It had occurred to no one either that the defence of the naval base on Singapore island was bound up with the defence of the whole Malayan Peninsula.” Or, as Churchill recalled, the possibility that the fortress would have no landward defenses “no more entered into my mind than that of a battleship being launched without a bottom.”
This sounds a lot like France thinking nobody would drive tanks through a forest, opening the door to invasion. Oops. It also sounds like the French believing hype and nonsense instead of immediately countering. A whole peninsula of roads near beaches not only helped the British in their retreat, but also facilitated the incoming attacks… on those noisy bike rims.
Because of Malaya’s intense heat, the bicycles’ tires blew out. However, the resourceful Japanese learned to ride down the paved motor road trunk on the rims of the bicycles. The sound of metal to pavement sounded like tanks and the peninsula’s defenders, notably the relatively inexperienced Indian troops who were terrified of armour, often broke for the rear.
Heat is blamed. Let me jump down this rabbit hope for a second.
Heat was certainly a known factor in local tire survival, especially given heavy loads (each Japanese soldier carried as much as 90 lbs) and of course distances traveled during the day or even night. There also may be some hidden history here if locals pressed into bike maintenance hid or sabotaged tires as a form of resistance to Japanese invasion. We have evidence of sympathizers and intelligence assets, yet not much research on the opposite.
Tire technology from before the war in any case was very unlikely designed to handle demands of any military campaign, as documented in postwar reporting.
Source: Popular Mechanics Feb 1947, pg 141
So the rims were common, and were a known sound. Inexperienced soldiers lacking command who weren’t sure what tanks sounded like (there weren’t any tanks to defend and morale was linked to the false hope attackers couldn’t use them either) is probably the real key to this story.
All that being said about the psychological effects of bike rims on pavement, it was just one symptom among devastating morale events in Singapore.
Foremost was the pride of the British Navy expected to magically protect Singapore — battleship HMS Prince of Wales — quickly was disabled and then sunk by Japanese torpedoes. That turnabout alone opens a huge topic of British strategic technology planning and decline of naval strength; risks from overconfidence in large and slow “fortress” thinking versus the “101” of agile and irregular smaller forces.
Aside from such naval mistakes, there’s also an important footnote that the British entirely missed the boat on keeping land armor ready.
Light-weight tanks landed and maneuvered by the Japanese through jungle beg a rather obvious question why Allied armor was missing in response, even though it could have been decisive. It certainly could have helped educate defenders to the real sound of tanks coming.
The British War Cabinet (believing tanks wouldn’t serve hills and jungle, let alone have the parts and crews to maintain them) transferred hundreds away from Malaya to Russia in a diplomatic lift that likely helped defend Moscow. If that sounds like France surprised when Nazis drove tanks around the Maginot line through the Forest of Ardennes, or Rome surprised when Hannibal Barca crossed the Alps for that matter… the British should have known better.
It was exactly this kind of a refocus to other parts of the world and belief in natural obstacles, opening a clear gap in exposed, mismanaged and inexperienced Singaporean defenders, that Japanese intelligence keyed on as the moment to roll.
For quick comparison to better prepared resistance, when a Japanese bicycle unit of about 300 moved on the Luzon Plain on Manila in December 1941 they were easily handled by defenders.
Filipino riflemen accompanied by American armor made quick work of Japanese cyclists as they attempted to ride into withering fire. Even as bikes scattered or turned to ride in retreat nearly all were eliminated.
Ironically the Japanese scattered propaganda leaflets to intimidate their targets from using the kind of tactics the Japanese had just been engaged in themselves.
A similar scene unfolded with Australian rifle fire from the far side of a bridge in Malay; Japanese rode up exposed and many were killed before turning their bicycles around to withdraw. At that point the Australians detonated the bridge killing the rest.
American soldiers with captured Japanese bicycle in 1944, perhaps reminding them of Army mountain bikes of 1896.
In other words the “tanks are coming” sounds generated by bicycle rims on asphalt at night is more accurately a reference to psychological warfare, exploring an imbalance of intelligence. Japanese propaganda about “unexpectedly” landed tanks for driving through jungle went unanswered…. It was outsized and uncontrolled fear of the possibilities of armor coming that thoroughly spooked unarmored defenders into falsely believing loud rim sounds alone were a reliable signal to withdraw.
There’s so much going wrong in a May 2022 story about a horse in Ohio taking its drunken passenger home, I don’t know where to begin.
That poor horse.
Surely Ohio police could be better trained in assessing the options here? I know it’s easy to emphasize the risk of a horse when a human isn’t controlling it, like saying dogs shouldn’t be off leash. But police fail at controlling the horse almost as if to prove their own point.
Imagine instead…
1) police wake a passenger non-violently (e.g. water spray)
2) control the buggy to slow or direct it (e.g. even aid the horse to take someone home more safely)
3) stop pretending like parking a car with flashing lights is going to mean something to a horse.
It’s the same story as in 2019, except the last time the officers managed to wake the passengers who then ran into the woods and disappeared.
And that’s the same story as in 2017, except in that case officers were audibly laughing and having a good time jumping into a buggy to bring it to a controlled stop.
All of this begs the question whether AI ever can achieve what horses already have proven can never happen.
A drunk passenger on a horse demonstrates in other words that any drunk in a driverless car still must be charged with DUI. Or does anyone seriously want to take the reins on a debate of whether a sober horse means it was smarter for a drunk human to not be operating it?
An interesting turnabout from the timeline and details of the Uvalde child massacre is how a generic armed defense argument is being proven bogus yet again.
First, a plethora of armed police were on the scene and didn’t respond to an active shooter. We can easily assume from this that future incidents would continue the same unless something changes, and that something is the opposite of an increase in guns.
Regardless of how many armed members of a group showed up on scene to defend, the vast majority repeatedly and predictably failed to deliver the very thing they were tasked with because of a lack of gun regulation to help defenders.
When people say the general population should have access to guns without any regulation then it’s logical to expect an increase of mass murders, which the data clearly shows.
Tragedy is the very real and obvious outcome of blanket “arm the people” sentiment, which is why the following fact is so noteworthy.
…the U.S. appears to be the only place in the world where some want to arm teachers…
Israel for example sometimes comes up as a place where guns are carried by a general population. Some try to argue America should emulate this, however they overlook or ignore the fact that school teachers there are definitely NOT armed.
Amos Shavit, spokesman for Israel’s Ministry of Education, in 2018 put it bluntly:
Professionals deal with security. Not the teachers.
Shavit is talking about armed guards for schools who report into local police. A criminologist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem gives further context in that same article. Although Israel compels most citizens to serve in the military and go through basic weapons training, shootings are rare because:
…it is very, very hard to obtain a weapon in Israel.
If America were to be more like Israel, then it would heavily regulate guns.
This brings to mind questions like who defines professionals, and who sets criteria for success (who do they report to)? Remember 1921 when firefighters in Tulsa refused to respond as they watched an American city burn to the ground?
Saying there should be more firetrucks for everyone, or every teacher should drive a firetruck, sounds crazy because it is so opposite common sense. There’s not only diminishing returns from this kind of saturation, it can generate overconfidence and confusion that impede top professionals from dealing with security.
In fact, after the failure of a security guard in the 1999 Columbine child massacre a very specific armed defense doctrine was attempted to prompt all future dedicated armed responders at schools to immediately engage instead of hiding or holding position.
That doctrine to improve professional success failed tragically.
The Uvalde actions demonstrate unmistakable rejection of the very targeted “never again” principle for schools where guns are easily available, completely destroying a hopeful but unrealistic theory of general armed defense.
People may think increasing open “fire-power” availability could have some inherent technological benefit, yet it tends to have the very opposite effect. Escalating attacker capability means making everyone far less safe unless other essentials factors (e.g. morals or similar regulation in the use of guns) come into play using concepts like respecting laws meant to serve public safety.
To put this another way the very factors that would make guns far more effective in any armed defense model tend to manifest as a form of regulation of guns that reduces their numbers overall. A raw increase in a number of guns thus tends to correlate to a decline in safety and stability, since unregulated the guns always will trend towards permanent improvisation and chaos (violent assertion of power in disrespect for law and order) where armed defense is more and more unlikely and unsuccessful.
Think of it as increasing firefighters trained professionally to run into a burning building. That actually reduces the number of firetrucks per capita by introducing regulation of technology through a training regimen focused on survival.
It’s very different from everyone being expected to come with minimal training, no background verification, keep firetrucks in their driveway and hope some percentage of everyone stuck in a traffic jam to get to a fire would still volunteer to run in. Regulation has to be fit for purpose in that it measures appropriate outcomes (e.g. survival).
Second, failure to respond was only worsened when police used their guns to prevent all others from responding. Police actively detained and disabled rescue groups of parents, and even federal officers — the blue line was doing the exact opposite of protecting or serving public interest (arguably consistent with armed groups in Texas ending on the wrong side of history).
It thus made even less sense for armed defense doctrine at this point since it interfered unjustifiably with those who were actually trying to save lives.
More children arguably would have lived if fewer guns had been used in the armed response, since those defensive guns were turned against people trying to save the children. A natural monopoly effect of improperly incentivized professional armed defense was corrupted by anti-defense confusion directly contributing to higher death toll.
May 25th: Officers immediately entered the school, “engaged the active shooter” and “continued to keep him pinned down in that location”
May 27th: Rather than keeping the gunman pinned down, officials were unable to enter the classroom and stop the rampage, despite the lives at risk
Complete reversal.
Pubic demand to respond immediately was blocked by the guns expected to point the other direction. And public demand for transparency and accountability were blocked by a complete lack of scientific rigor to communications (e.g. corruption).
In the corollary of the firefighter it’s pretty clear when people are roped off and prevented from running into a burning building that it’s meant to be based in research and professional judgment about science of fire and survival.
Active shooters are human adversaries, however. When police balk at the idea of responding to a shooter carrying military assault weapons it’s far from being the same kind of “we can’t let you die trying” sentiment found in fire response.
At this point the police having guns impedes the public from doing what is just and right. And clearly the police changing their statements indicates they couldn’t figure out what to do despite having guns.
In other words police claiming they would wait on negotiators (experts at human interaction) and elite militant troops (experts at killing in close quarters) to arrive demonstrates how those who took charge of the response did not think the guns fit their bill at all. They would have been better off without those guns.
Or from the other perspective, even if a trainload of guns had showed up the police who already were awash in guns still probably would have stood outside and said “we need expertise, we need human science, we need initiative”.
Guns clearly weren’t an answer to guns for even the gun advocates, since the police for at least 30 minutes acted like something far more important was missing. It wasn’t guns they wanted.
Third, unarmed response showed up as more successful than guns (per the above point about initiative and human science). A mother convinced police to remove her handcuffs, then she ran into the building and pulled her two children to safety without harm.
Once freed, she distanced herself from the crowd, jumped the school fence, ran inside the school building and grabbed her two children. The three sprinted out of the school together, she said. […] She said she saw police tackle a father to the ground and pepper-spray another. Officers tasered a third dad, she said, when he approached a school bus with students on it to collect his child. “They didn’t do that to the shooter, but they did that to us,” Gomez told the Journal, referring to herself and other parents. “That’s how it felt.”
Boom. Hero. No guns.
This is like any classic scene from a war movie where someone defies the odds to do what is obviously right with little to no relationship to all the guns blazing around.
It highlights how what mattered most was a fundamental makeup of people involved, rather than this or that model of firearm. Dependence on high quality risk assessment with the right moral framework delivered more than heavily armed defense. Adding more and more people with guns, all who can still do the wrong thing, would not move a dial at all in the right direction.
Fourth, proving this third point in an even more stark way was the arrival of a trained killer from one of the “most violent and racist” federal units.
Dropping his lunch as soon as he heard the radio, driving just 40 miles, a border patrol tactical (BORTAC) agent arrived on scene, disobeyed law enforcement orders and went directly at the threat to eliminate it.
“They don’t exist within the realm of civilian law enforcement,” Budd said. “They view people they encounter in the military sense as enemy combatants, meaning they have virtually no rights.”
No rights, treating Americans as enemy combatants?
That sounds like war more than just guns being present, which makes Texas look like a failed state due to its ongoing inability to regulate its guns.
Grab a gun for defense and what’s to say (in this case it was BORTAC, but there are many other units) a fed responds with prejudice? In such a context these children may as well have been in Rwanda, no? It’s apparently shaking up the “conservatives” who thought spreading guns around like peanut butter would automatically improve their quality of life.
…conservative community is now grappling with the need to square its “back-the-blue” values with law enforcement decisions that have raised serious questions about whether officers’ choices cost the lives of innocent children, delayed vital medical assistance to wounded elementary students and subjected surviving children to over an hour of traumatizing confinement with a murderous gunman…
Texas gun dealers fueling a crisis where enemy combatants generate a need for ever more guns… reminds me of how the NRA pivoted (technically in a “coup”) to bypass sanctions against South Africa and keep apartheid heavily armed and kill Black children.
Talk about poor decisions in America that nobody ever really squared, the real history of the NRA might top the list.
They’ve acknowledged the simple fact if you want peace you have to get rid of the weapons.
Source: Small Arms Survey
So to recap, the people officially given guns and charged with protecting schools ended up making those guns look worse than if they didn’t have them. Members of public who either were 1) unarmed rescuers or 2) highly trained killers made the difference because they read the risks (human adversary) better and responded more appropriately regardless of guns.
Armed defense theory is thus totally broken as the two things that proved viable in an unregulated gun market were having no guns (humanitarian mission to preserve life) or escalating into militant war (combat where targets lose rights).
I guarantee nobody with a child wants to live in the latter, but in both cases the obvious choice and lesson here is to heavily regulate guns (remove them all or require military training).
The middle ground of far too many guns in far too many hands (defenders who are unwilling to go, attackers who are unwilling to stop) is the obvious recipe for continuous mass murder and catastrophe. This is why people look around a world of tragedy and point out that only “America is a Gun“.
Update June 5th: Last Week Tonight explains how armed defense theory in America not only has been unable to decrease harms, it actually increases harms.
