★★★ Abstract: Broken treaties, mutual aid agreements, imperial expansion, and the thirst for economic expansion all come to mind when thinking about the great world wars of 1914 and 1941, but they, in fact, occurred 158 years before. The great imperial powers of the day mustered great armies, deployed strong fleets, and hired mercenaries to... Continua a leggere →
★★★ ABSTRACT: At the height of the Thirty Years War, news from South America, West Africa and the Caribbean was widespread and quickly distributed in the central European peripheries of the early modern Atlantic world. Despite the German retreat from sixteenth-century colonial experiments, overseas reports sometimes appeared in remote southern German towns before they were... Continua a leggere →
★★ The final withdrawal of troops from Iraq in December 2011 left most U.S. military leadership with the desire to shift their focus from counterinsurgency—which had achieved a position of intellectual dominance in the U.S. military during the war on terror in the late 2000s— back to conventional warfighting. The Service chiefs, who were responsible... Continua a leggere →
★★ Guerrilla units operating in cities must solve strictly defined tasks, limited in scale, being, in fact, reconnaissance and sabotage groups. This is due to the fact that, according to their conditions (high population density, dense transport network, active police and counterintelligence activities, etc.), cities, as well as suburban areas, are the most unfavorable terrain... Continua a leggere →
★★ DOZENS of more or less large-scale local conflicts that took place during the 20th century, as well as the experience of using guerrilla methods of armed struggle during World War II, allow us to make some generalizations and conclusions. Despite all their enormous diversity in political, military and geographical conditions, it is possible to... Continua a leggere →
★★ As the affairs of states continue to evolve into a complex web of interdependence, cooperation, and competition, pressure mounts on states to effectively employ the tools of statecraft to attain their political objects. The contention of this essay is that Carl von Clausewitz implicitly defined grand strategy in his magnum opus, On War, as the... Continua a leggere →
Their Doctrinal and Operational Development from 1866-1940 and Mission Order Combat Illustrations from the 1870-71, 1914-18 and 1939-45 Wars ★★★ “Orders are not written out in the minutest detail, a mission is merely given the commander. How it shall be carried out is his problem. This is done because the commander on the ground is... Continua a leggere →
★★ Introduction As what one might term a veteran re-enactor with over twenty-two years in the hobby, I have become very familiar with the debate on the level of accuracy/inaccuracy in the various elements portrayed by participants on the field. I do not intend here to enter into this debate, rather, the object of this... Continua a leggere →
★★ Theodore Dodge wrote in his tome, Gustavus Adolphus, that the Thirty Years War did not have grand tactics. He was not alone in that belief. Dodge served in the American Civil War and studied Napoleon's campaigns, as well as those of the 17th Century. In order to grasp this statement, we must define Grand Tactics.... Continua a leggere →
★★★ General Donn A. Starry made the following comments on the genesis of this March 1981 article and AirLand Battle: “The ultimate lesson of `Active Defense’ and the 1976 edition of FM [US Army Field Manual] 100-5 [Operations] is that it is virtually impossible to substantively rewrite doctrine satisfactorily in a matter of three years,... Continua a leggere →
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