Milstack Saturday (16 November 2024)
The best articles on military subjects I read (or listened to) in the past week
He who grasps the problem as a whole
Has calmed the tempest raging in his soul.The second week of November, of the year 249, found me reading posts in ‘complementary couples’. That is, I engaged pairs of articles, each of which dealt with a different subject, so that one might enhance the lessons that I drew from its partner.
In one instance, the two posts that shed light on each other appeared in the same Substack . In the other, the two essays did not interact until after I had arrayed them on adjacent browser tabs.
Reading Field Artillery in the Italian Wars after A Look Back at the Nagorno-Karabakh Drone War, both of which appeared on the front page of The Bazaar of War, reminded me that it’s easier to make sense of great changes that have run their courses than ongoing revolutions.
Diving into Think Outside, Lead Inside after immersing myself in The Limits of the Military Profession presented me with a fruitful paradox. ‘Why was it’, I found myself thinking, ‘that the military officers of the German Empire, who practiced tactics based on “thinking two levels up”, did such a poor job of thinking about the highest levels of warfare?’
Note: The couplet at the start of the page comes from my own translation of a passage from The Homage of the Arts [Die Huldigung der Künste], a theatrical poem by Friedrich von Schiller. I first encountered it in Germany and the Next War [Deutschland und der nächste Krieg], where Friedrich von Bernhardi used it to conclude a chapter on the organization of field formations.
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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