People who haven't studied guns tend to assume that the evolution of small arms towards an assault rifle was in someway inevitable.

I'm here to say that this doesn't follow.

In this thread, I'll pickup on the US crossovers I referenced but didn't cash out in my last thread

1/

If you look closely, there is a tendency among some scholars to erroneously link 3 things:

-the qualities of the infantry

-the soldier's capacity to think & use weapons independently

-& the notion of a democratic values

2/
This really struck me when reading Stephen Biddle's really interesting (but obvs I don't agree with it) book:

3/

https://t.co/3pYHztTqD8
The problem with that argument is its underlying technological determinism that implies only democracies can really produce the type of soldier capable of employing weapons like assault rifles.
4/
The argument makes little empirical sense but it also demonstrates a misunderstanding as to how technologies emerge into the military organisation.

5/
From my point of view it also fails to explain how the US Army managed to conjure the relevant myths to allow it to switch allegiance from the rifle to the M-1 Garand to the M-16.

6/
After all, each one of these weapons symbolised the nation and its martial prowess even as it switched from a weapon for marksmen to a weapon used by conscripts in Vietnam.
7/
In this respect, the US Army needed to re-frame the institutional markers of its professionalism from marksmanship to something higher up than skill at arms.

8/
& there can be little doubt that this is reflected in the changing qualities of those soldiers it has recruited over time.

9/
This points to the need to be attentive to the demographic profiles of those being recruited.

But it also means paying attention to how the military mythologises its weapons & how they redescribe these myths in new stories about the systems they create.

10/
So while there's a tendency to assume the assault rifle was inevitable, there's a whole heap of social & cultural referencing that needs to be accounted for that explains why these things are in no way inevitable.

After all, US commanders didn't want to replace the Garand.

11/

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Following @BAUDEGS I have experienced hateful and propagandist tweets time after time. I have been shocked that an academic community would be so reckless with their publications. So I did some research.
The question is:
Is this an official account for Bahcesehir Uni (Bau)?


Bahcesehir Uni, BAU has an official website
https://t.co/ztzX6uj34V which links to their social media, leading to their Twitter account @Bahcesehir

BAU’s official Twitter account


BAU has many departments, which all have separate accounts. Nowhere among them did I find @BAUDEGS
@BAUOrganization @ApplyBAU @adayBAU @BAUAlumniCenter @bahcesehirfbe @baufens @CyprusBau @bauiisbf @bauglobal @bahcesehirebe @BAUintBatumi @BAUiletisim @BAUSaglik @bauebf @TIPBAU

Nowhere among them was @BAUDEGS to find
"I lied about my basic beliefs in order to keep a prestigious job. Now that it will be zero-cost to me, I have a few things to say."


We know that elite institutions like the one Flier was in (partial) charge of rely on irrelevant status markers like private school education, whiteness, legacy, and ability to charm an old white guy at an interview.

Harvard's discriminatory policies are becoming increasingly well known, across the political spectrum (see, e.g., the recent lawsuit on discrimination against East Asian applications.)

It's refreshing to hear a senior administrator admits to personally opposing policies that attempt to remedy these basic flaws. These are flaws that harm his institution's ability to do cutting-edge research and to serve the public.

Harvard is being eclipsed by institutions that have different ideas about how to run a 21st Century institution. Stanford, for one; the UC system; the "public Ivys".