simonmee's review against another edition
2.0
Some like to come in hot, and some…
The United States and China are at war in the Western Pacific.
…like to light a thousand sparklers doused in jet fuel.
Crashback is a book about how China is bad, America is good, and the only way for the good guy to win is to punch out the bad guy. Or, ram his ship.
There's no point in judging this book as to its strategic overview, relative assessment of each side's material assets, or personnel. There's cavernous gaps in his analysis, such as US responses in an actual war, capability issues with the Zumwalts, or the wonderfully named Fat Leonard. Fabey will know all these things, and has clearly made an editorial choice as part of his framing.
Instead, Crashback is about emphasising the "otherness" of the opposition, with their Little Emperor Syndrome sailors, quick to take offense at any perceived slight, stubbornly illogical in the face of the facts, desperate not to lose “face". The Chinese exceed all others in displays of naval bombasticness:
In sheer size, Admiral Zheng He’s park dwarfs any Western monument to a naval hero; compared with Zheng He’s statue, the figure of Lord Nelson perched atop the spire in London’s Trafalgar Square looks like a hood ornament
Nelson. A guy who literally has a city named after him. And ships. There’s books about him. And movies. His own ship is still parked up in Portsmouth, being maintained for staggering sums. As for America, it has 8 battleships on display. And 5 carriers. I’ve seen them.
They're big.
There’s a run of cultural affectations that could easily be mirrored back onto America’s own psychology with minor contextual changes. Fabey writing Think Maverick and Iceman in Top Gun about the Chinese makes a different point than he thinks it does.
As to Fabey’s statement many twenty-first-century Americans would be more likely to tear such a statue down... ... c’mon.
So aside from this pop psychology, does Crashback achieve its goal? Will you love the US Navy and will you just wish they’d ram something? Yeah, maybe. Fabey pulls together a solid, if not overly coherent, set of stories such as the Hainan Island incident; the harassment of USS Cowpens; and China’s breach of etiquette at RIMPAC 2014 with its spy ship. For sure, I’m not painting the 9 Dash Line on my walls, I’ll leave that to Disney.
The problem is, Crashback is all about provocation without regard to the consequences. It bewails the Obama administration, ever cautious when it comes to China and, in the original epilogue, Fabey got all warmed up again:
America of 2017 is not the America of 2013. And the next time the Chinese navy dangerously confronts a U.S. Navy warship on the high seas, it seems unlikely that it will be the American commander who orders the engine room to execute an “all back emergency full.” For America, and for the U.S. Navy, the era of crashbacks seems to be over.
…only to sheepishly add an Afterword in 2018:
Despite what Trump might like to think, the big global beneficiary during his administration has been Xi
It turns out, just going round ramming things isn’t going to achieve your wider foreign policy goals. I mean, US Navy ships did start ramming ships - unfortunately they were cargo ships.
A good blood pressure raiser.
The United States and China are at war in the Western Pacific.
…like to light a thousand sparklers doused in jet fuel.
Crashback is a book about how China is bad, America is good, and the only way for the good guy to win is to punch out the bad guy. Or, ram his ship.
There's no point in judging this book as to its strategic overview, relative assessment of each side's material assets, or personnel. There's cavernous gaps in his analysis, such as US responses in an actual war, capability issues with the Zumwalts, or the wonderfully named Fat Leonard. Fabey will know all these things, and has clearly made an editorial choice as part of his framing.
Instead, Crashback is about emphasising the "otherness" of the opposition, with their Little Emperor Syndrome sailors, quick to take offense at any perceived slight, stubbornly illogical in the face of the facts, desperate not to lose “face". The Chinese exceed all others in displays of naval bombasticness:
In sheer size, Admiral Zheng He’s park dwarfs any Western monument to a naval hero; compared with Zheng He’s statue, the figure of Lord Nelson perched atop the spire in London’s Trafalgar Square looks like a hood ornament
Nelson. A guy who literally has a city named after him. And ships. There’s books about him. And movies. His own ship is still parked up in Portsmouth, being maintained for staggering sums. As for America, it has 8 battleships on display. And 5 carriers. I’ve seen them.
They're big.
There’s a run of cultural affectations that could easily be mirrored back onto America’s own psychology with minor contextual changes. Fabey writing Think Maverick and Iceman in Top Gun about the Chinese makes a different point than he thinks it does.
As to Fabey’s statement many twenty-first-century Americans would be more likely to tear such a statue down... ... c’mon.
So aside from this pop psychology, does Crashback achieve its goal? Will you love the US Navy and will you just wish they’d ram something? Yeah, maybe. Fabey pulls together a solid, if not overly coherent, set of stories such as the Hainan Island incident; the harassment of USS Cowpens; and China’s breach of etiquette at RIMPAC 2014 with its spy ship. For sure, I’m not painting the 9 Dash Line on my walls, I’ll leave that to Disney.
The problem is, Crashback is all about provocation without regard to the consequences. It bewails the Obama administration, ever cautious when it comes to China and, in the original epilogue, Fabey got all warmed up again:
America of 2017 is not the America of 2013. And the next time the Chinese navy dangerously confronts a U.S. Navy warship on the high seas, it seems unlikely that it will be the American commander who orders the engine room to execute an “all back emergency full.” For America, and for the U.S. Navy, the era of crashbacks seems to be over.
…only to sheepishly add an Afterword in 2018:
Despite what Trump might like to think, the big global beneficiary during his administration has been Xi
It turns out, just going round ramming things isn’t going to achieve your wider foreign policy goals. I mean, US Navy ships did start ramming ships - unfortunately they were cargo ships.
A good blood pressure raiser.
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