Milstack Saturday (12 October 2024)
The best articles on military subjects I read (or listened to) in the past week
In The Joys of Weakness, Valentinius joins forces with G.K. Chesterton to remind us that ‘the bad thing about mortars is that they have a short range … But the good thing about mortars is that they have a short range.’
In The Kaiser and His Men, Kiran Pfitzner and Secretary of Defense Rock provide a useful corrective to the widespread notion that the Prussian General Staff managed the armies of the German Empire like Gosplan ran the Soviet Union. (For a deeper dive into that subject, see the much-too-modestly-titled Meisterstück of Tony Cowan, Holding Out: The German Army and Operational Command in 1917.)
In Unfolding Next Chapter of the Israel – Hezbollah War, Phil Gentile provides a handy précis of operations conducted by the Israeli Defense Forces in Lebanon over the course of the past half-century.
In a splendid piece with a somewhat misleading title, Commander Salamander looks at the effect of Houthi anti-access operations on the commercial ships affiliated with various countries around the world. (The big surprise, for me at least, was the number of merchantmen flying the flag of Switzerland.)
In Doomed to Fail!, my podcast buddy Mark McGrath distinguishes between the real OODA loop and the silly diagrams people make with the curvy arrows found in the ‘shapes’ menu of PowerPoint.
In Understanding Drone Swarming, Democura explains that, when it comes to flying robots, quantity has a quality all of its own.
Did I miss anything? Please use the comments section to post links to recently published articles that might interest readers of The Tactical Notebook.
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For the soul of the faithfully departed, John Boyd may he rest in peace, blessedly deaf to worldly incantations, 🙏.