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June 18, 2016
Modern armament is exciting, in the sense that cavalry charges once were.
You have to feel it to understand it. On a flight line at night, jet engines howling, hot jet-wash smelling of burned kerosene blowing about,confident and competent men working together, fighters taking off with a thudding roar that you feel in your lungs. It is very hard to imagine such loud, virile machines being defeated by those most dangerous weapons of our times, the AK, the RPG, and the IED, wielded by a tough little peasant pissed off because you are invading his country and have killed his mother and sister. Reviving Napoleon’s Army - The Unz Review
Posted by gerardvanderleun at June 18, 2016 8:48 AM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.
Your Say
Fred is typically offensive, but I have to agree and this from personal experience (my experience is very small, but still it's mine). Most military officers would rather act than think, and there is a paucity of deep thought. We had a revival in military arts after our humbling in Vietnam. Now, before I get flamed @ what I just said, let me hasten to say we ate the North's lunch at unit level in SWA, but the largest possible picture revealed a defeat, and the army, for one, went back to the arts and sciences part of war fighting. Col Sumners wrote a seminal work applying Clausewitz to the lessons of Vietnam.
But, not that many officers enjoyed the task of thinking of war as a theology-what were the existential truths at the core of war? Is there an Ontology of war? What is the secret to winning? The principles of war, which include Initiative, Offense, Surprise, Mass (don't get me started on Mass), were being taught, but begrudgingly, and in the Reagan era it was a sort of revival.
Remember the Gulf War?
Men like Patton were lonely intellectuals (not kidding here) in a cohort of slow thinkers. Petraeus used his noggin (for once) in the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I was an artist in a captain's uniform. Often I felt out of step, but enjoyed the study of strategy and tactics more than my peers. In the last course I took in the army, I aced 100% of all of the non-paper tests, called combat critical, or hands on tests. Also, when I was at Ft Benning, there was this officer there with a quick sense of humor who had gone to West Point. I did not like a lot of the West Pointers, but some were OK. Last month, I saw his face in the newspapers, going before congress to be approved for NATO command.
That's right. I went to school with Eisenhower's kinsman. After the good general took command, his name completely disappeared from the news articles, and NATO has amped up it's activities nicely.
I hope and pray my acquaintance is up to the job, but so far, so good. I think being NATO Commander right now is among the hardest jobs in the universe. God be with him, and our armies in the field.
Posted by: Casey Klahn at June 18, 2016 10:16 AM