Thomas B. Allen (1) (1929–2018)

Fascinating, if very mid-80s look at the role of war gaming in the defense establishment. Allen managed to FOIA a number of typically classified Pentagon simulation, and these transcripts, along with interviews of the major players and a few made-for-TV public war games with actual politicians, provide a fascinating overview of how the United States trained for political and military crises, up to and including global thermonuclear war. Allen's history leaps around a little bit, from the show more kriegspiel of the Prussian general staff, to pre-World War 2 tabletop naval exercises, to the serious computer simulations of the Rand corporation, and the similarities and differences between military games and hobbyist publishers like Avalon Hill.

The major problem with this book (aside from being a period piece), is that Allen vacillates between three perspectives on war gaming. The most charitable is that they are uncannily predictive and effective tools for preparing for the real world, training government officials to deal with terrorism and political crises, and revealing rigidity and weakness in real mobilization plans. Less charitably, they're a way for a cadre of mid-ranking officers and academics to pretend that they're doing something useful, when really they're just pushing around chits on a board. The array of gaming centers is a waste of resources, but hey, it's a rounding error compared to aerospace procurement boondoggles. The worst perspective is that the games are dangerous lies: based on unverified models, full of outright errors in rules and worldview, biased to support ever higher military budgets, justify an unwarranted sense of American superiority, and a dangerous lack of concern for triggering an actual nuclear war.

All of these perspectives are to some extent true, and I wish Allen had done a better job contextualizing them, but this is still a great little book for any one interested in the use of serious games, of the late Cold War. My favorite little anecdote is Col. Trevor Dupuy, one of the deans of wargaming, explaining how to calculate out the Theoretical Lethality Index for a sword (23) and a one megaton airburst (695,385,000) based on a long series of multiplied statistics based on... guesswork. show less

Hyman Rickover had more impact on the Navy than anyone else in its history. He was enormously effective in manipulating the bureaucracy and political power. Indeed, after being passed over twice for rear admiral normally requiring mandatory retirement, he called in some political markers and he was awarded the promotion. He used his position to try to influence American education, worried that a Soviet leadership in a technological world would disadvantage this country. At one time, he show more controlled more public funds than perhaps anyone else in government, but he was also adamant that contractors be accountable for the way the funds were spent.

Rickover's love of engineering began during his first assignment following graduation from Annapolis. He was assigned to the destroyer La Vallette and spent his time reading in his bunk or crawling around the steam propulsion plant which took up most of the space in destroyers which were built for speed. The Navy was divided into the "black gang," or engineers, and the "white glove" types, who wanted to make a name for themselves leading ships into battle. Rickover's hero was Robert Milligan, engineer of the battleship Oregon, who managed to get his boilers to such efficiency that the Oregon was able to race to Cuba during the Spanish-American war. (In fact, Milligan wrote a well-researched analysis of the explosion on the Maine.) Rickover prided himself in being able to detect faults in the plant by just hearing particular noises and could tell if they were overheating by testing the temperature of the oil with his fingertips. Engineers were Rickover's heroes.

He learned early that he was not command material. Assigned in the early thirties to the Finch, a small minesweeper with a crew of about fifty, he is remembered as being a martinet and was relieved within a few months. He asked to be transferred to engineering duty, traditionally a dead-end for Navy officers. Earlier, as engineering officer on the battleship New Mexico, he had fanatically gone to great lengths to save water in his attempt to win an efficiency award. He plugged the shower heads so that only a trickle of water would be delivered and was known to drag men out of the shower if he felt they were taking too much time.

His fanatical attention to detail and efficiency was an asset during the war. He was appointed to head the electrical section of BuShips (Bureau of Ships), a division of the Navy that was responsible for the design and construction of all Navy ships during the war, an enormous task. His section was soon recognized as one of the most efficient — and controversial. Unlike most of the rest of BuShip sections, Rickover employed as few Navy men as possible noting that the Navy placed rank ahead of competence and that its practice of rotating men in and out of positions led to inefficiencies. It was a prejudice that continued when he was head of the nuclear program.

By the fifties, Rickover’s independent frame of mind was beginning to wear on the Navy brass, who looked forward to passing over his promotion to admiral, making retirement mandatory. Rickover played them like puppets, using the media and friends in Congress to force them to retain him. He became seemingly so indispensable that Congress, by the sixties, was falling all over itself to make sure he was regularly promoted and retained beyond the maximum retirement age of sixty-two. Rickover had learned something very important: congressmen preferred to give money to individuals rather than to institutions that remained abstractions. He prepared rigorously for his testimony before Congress, using epigrams and quotations—in one speech he quoted over forty different people — and one-liners that could be used in headlines, e.g., “Give the Admirals Coloring Books.” He appeared before the committees as an individual, not as a Navy official, and his candor and honesty were appealing. But he was also careful to support his Navy, the nuclear submarine Navy, not the Navy as a whole.

The Enterprise was the first nuclear aircraft carrier. Its advantages were obvious: a cruising range of 200,000 miles as opposed to only seven days steaming at full power in a diesel carrier before refueling was required (destroyers on maneuvers require fueling every other day at sea), and this meant lots more space for weapons systems and stores because fuel bunkers were no longer needed. Rickover lobbied for other nuclear surface ships, as well. The Long Beach was the first nuclear guided-missile cruiser. Typically, officers complained that too much attention was paid to nuclear components at the expense of more mundane things like weapons systems, and when the Long Beach put to sea, the power plant worked perfectly, but the rest of the ship had serious deficiencies.

Rickover’s interview process for nuclear power Navy candidates became notorious. He insisted on interviewing each candidate, and the interviews could become so strenuous that many candidates remembered them verbatim. Each interview had a common thread: the candidate had to prove that he (no women) would willingly sacrifice everything including family to become a nuc. (Rickover’s refusal to allow nuc students at the Academy to have Christmas leave caused a minor scandal.) One problem he posed was to have the candidate imagine he was on a sinking boat with five other men, and only one of them could be saved. “Are you resourceful enough to talk the other five into letting you be the one saved?” The candidate was expected to reply in the affirmative. Rickover would then call five staff members into the room and tell the candidate, “Start talking.” Another favorite ploy was to tell the candidate to, “Piss me off, if you can.” The candidate who swept everything off Rickover’s desk onto the floor passed. One critic later wrote that often the interviews had less to do with finding qualified candidates than they did with letting everyone know who was boss.

Rickover’s professed philosophy of management and leadership, i.e., that there be freedom to “argue and dissent in what concerns ideas and knowledge . . . the foundation of a true system of education,” were challenged in the late seventies by Lieutenant Ralph Chatham in a prize-winning essay published in the Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute. Chatham argued that each nuclear submarine had two captains: its appointed one and Rickover, operating from his office in Washington. Chatham cited instances where Rickover had called a submarine while on station to change the captain’s watch bill. Rickover had created an atmosphere that had officers so worried about making mistakes that initiative was destroyed and trust was eliminated. Despite the public criticism, Rickover was again reappointed in 1979 as “Head of the Nuclear Propulsion Program” for two more years. By this time, more than thirty-five percent of the Navy was nuclear- powered.

He knew what was right about everything. He complained about the “sophomoric drivel” being written about leadership in the Proceedings in 1981. Leadership, he wrote, required four components: “a.) Learn your job. (This involves study and hard work.) b.) Work hard at your job. c.) Train your people. d.) Inspect frequently to see that the job is being done properly."

Rickover constantly complained about the other admirals, arguing that there were too many of them, thereby leading to inefficiency. As the shipbuilding industry was bought up by large conglomerates, he became more and more distrustful, and it was widely known that many of the Navy representatives were nothing more than spies for Rickover's Nuclear Branch. Some shipbuilders, tiring of the constant interference and changes, refused to bid on Navy contracts. In one case, a contractor refused to continue work on an aircraft carrier, and was forced to continue only under court order. Ostensibly Rickover believed smaller was better. "If you really want to get a job done," he once said, "you do not need a large group of people. If you do, the first thing you know your time gets taken up arranging for baseball games, picnics, and Easter parades for your employees; worrying about their morale rather than greeting them to do the job for which they are paid. People who are doing work do not need these trivia for satisfaction."

Unfortunately for him, Rickover, a man of words, found himself in the seventies increasingly in a world dominated by sound bites and images. He disliked the press for their shallowness, but he reserved hatred for television. "No one sitting through these nightly TV shows is likely to make the mistake of thinking that he is participating in a flowering of American culture. He is taking part in the surrender of the will to the conception of society as a captive mass audience. . . . First attracted and then corrupted by the deliberate employment of superficial and meretricious modes of entertainment, this mass audience becomes acquiescent to dishonest and fantastic commercial claims."

It's depressing that as Rickover became an icon, he became more impossible and arrogant, unwilling to admit that his views might not be the only correct views. He was right about a great deal, but, by the end of his life, the manner in which he tried to enforce his correctness hindered their implementation. show less

“War is older than history,” the author, Thomas B. Allen, reminds his readers, and within every raging conflict, vivid in epic poetry and chronicles, is a secret war the actions of which often are not written about. Fortunately for historians and novelists, however, (if unfortunate for spies and intelligence analysts) documents are created in the pursuit of war planning and operations, that eventually do come to light, intentioned or not. Allen’s Declassified: 50 Top-Secret Documents show more that Changed History (Washington, DC: National Geographic, May 2008, $26 Hardcover) is a compilation ranging from the sixteenth-century Spanish Armada against England to an 8 August 2001 routine President’s Daily Brief which discussed the possibility of an attack on the United States by Al-Qa’ida in retaliation for US missile strikes on terrorist training facilities in Afghanistan in 1998, which attack occurred on 11 September.

Each topic is arranged first, with a facsimile of the document or a page there from; secondly, discussion of its background: how it came to be created, encoded, decoded, hidden, transmitted, exposed, etc., and the machinations of the handlers of such, the spies (or “intelligencer” as Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth I’s, principal spy was called); and thirdly, with a succinct summary of the impact of the document’s information on the course of history. In the case of Catholic Spain’s King Philip II, plans to invade Protestant England, devised in 1586 were copied, presumably by a valet employed by the Spanish admiralty, whose brother worked for Walsingham’s intelligencer, Anthony Standen, an English Catholic in exile from England and with access to Spain’s Catholic elite. A letter from Standen to Walsingham included detailed plans (ships, company, equipment, routes) of the armada. England, with such fore knowledge, in July 1588, set ablaze eight “Hell Burners”, old ships loaded with tar and gun powder, amidst the 130-ship Spanish Armada, scattering it in the English Channel and thwarting the attack. The outcome of this battle, Allen informs us, was the end of Spain’s anti-Protestant crusade, a weakening of Papal influence, and the growth of English sea power with Britannia ruling the waves to mid-twentieth century.

Some documents included in Declassified will be familiar to us. One is the encrypted letter of Continental Army Major General Benedict Arnold to British Major Andre that proposed turning the garrison overlooking a strategic bend in the Hudson River – West Point – to the British, which if it succeeded, would have divided General Washington’s forces and broken the Continental Army’s major line of communication, north-south.

Another document familiar to us is the 1917 telegram, sent by the German Foreign Minister, Arthur Zimmerman to the German Ambassador to the United States, who was to relay it to the German envoy in Mexico. The telegram was sent this way to minimize British access to it (Britain had been at war with Germany since 1914) and the Americans were told its contents had to do with a peace offering. Unencrypted, the Zimmerman Telegram so-called, begins: “We [Germany] intend to begin unrestricted submarine warfare on the first of February [1917] . . . .” It also proposed an alliance between Germany and Mexico. By March 1917, President Wilson, recently re-elected to office on a platform that included the policy of remaining neutral with regard to the war then raging in Europe, released the telegram to the public, which became outraged at Germany. In April, the U.S. Congress declared war on Imperial Germany.

Allen has included several declassified documents that provide examples of the complexities of espionage and counter espionage and the operations of double agents, those who work for one intelligence agency while in secret actually work against it in the service of another, enemy agency.

One such is a set of dispatches from Confederate President Jefferson Davis to a Confederate sabotage operation in Canada. The information gathered was intended to influence the outcome of the re-election of Union President Abraham Lincoln. Double agent Richard Montgomery, who couriered secret dispatches for Davis, actually was working for Lincoln’s Assistant Secretary of War, Charles Dana. To keep the Confederates from catching on, Montgomery at one point was intercepted by Union forces, imprisoned, and even fired upon and wounded.

Another is the memorandum for record by the handler of British Double-Cross agent Nathalie Sergueiew, born in Russia, raised in France, and a journalist in Nazi Germany. During her transfer from Nazi Germany to England, ‘Treasure’ (her code name) learned that her dog Frisson, which she had to leave behind, had not been smuggled out of Germany as promised by her British handlers. In her anger, Treasure told MI5 that her Nazi handlers had given her a secret signal that if transmitted by Morse code would reveal that she was sending under duress. This was three weeks before the impending launch of the Allied invasion of Europe. Although Allied intelligence feared the worst, it turned out that Treasure had not compromised the Double-Cross system the purpose of which was the intricate deception plan for D-Day 6 June 1944.


The array of Allen’s declassified documents is varied and extensive, to include four of my favorites:

• Acting Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt’s 1898 cable to Admiral George Dewey ordering preparation for offensive action in the Philippine Islands in the event war is declared against Spain following the destruction of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana Harbor. TR’s boss, President McKinley, at the time was interested in maintaining peaceful relations with Spain!

• The Sykes-Picot Agreement (May 1916) that established British and French “priority of right of enterprise” in the Middle East while unbeknownst to T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) who was leading the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire. The map annexed to this agreement did not show an Arab ‘state’ and when the secret agreement was exposed (by Russia’s revolutionary leader, Lenin) in 1917; Arab distrust of the West was sewn.

• FDR’s letter to his Secretary of State authorizing US ships for the British fleet, August 1940, just a month before the start of the Battle of Britain.

• The legacy of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg’s photocopies of pages from a classified report on US involvement in the war in Southeast Asia, published in the New York Times (1971), and which eventually led to the Nixon administration’s involvement in the Watergate break in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters (1972) and to the resignation of President Nixon (August 1974).

Declassified is an informative, researched account of the murky waters of stealth, intrigue, deception, disinformation, and the business of establishing that essential “bodyguard of lies” around precious truth, to quote Allen’s quote of Winston Churchill. I look forward to its sequel. show less

A fascinating look at the subject of demonic possession, through an examination of the case history that inspired The Exorcist. The author is an agnostic ex-Catholic, so he has the background to understand the ritual and the Church but looks at it critically. He also usually writes about military matters, and his background as a journalist helps him to weigh the facts and consider what conclusions are best supported.

Briefly, the book tells the story of a boy in Georgetown, in Washington, show more D.C. From a Lutheran family, his family was urged by a Lutheran priest with an interest in the paranormal to get the boy to a Catholic after a series of disturbing events. Allen had access to the diary of the priest who exorcised the boy and also interviewed many of those who were involved in the events detailed. He judges claims (like those that the boy spoke in languages he didn't know) based on who made the assertions and what access they would have to information. He also examines critically but impartially the apparently paranormal phenomena that occurred surrounding the boy. And he does all this while also looking at the Church's official stance on demonic obsession, possession, and exorcism. In short, a fascinating and very readable book, and a good introduction to exorcism in the Catholic Church.

(An aside on the made-for-TV film adaptation starring Timothy Dalton: That was a horrible movie which does no justice to the book. Conflicts over the priest's faith that don't appear in the book are invented. The movie sensationalizes the book, rather than do what Allen does, which is take an impartial view and examine the evidence. Perhaps worst of all, the film is bland. I'd rather watch The Exorcist.) show less