The Education of the Enlightened Soldier
The Early Life of Gerhard von Scharnhorst
The Education of the Enlightened Soldier tells tales of the youth of Gerhard Scharnhorst, who would grow up to be a mighty foe of Napoleon, a teacher of Clausewitz, and the poster child for the Tactical Notebook.
Great painting. A wonderful, Byronic-Romantic depiction of Scharnhorst, evocative of his era, so different from the rationalism and stateliness of the ancien regime.
Thats a great article you wrote on the education of the Enlighted soldier. Regrettably the Army placed mor emphasis on Clausewitz, Rommel, Guderian, Liddell Hart and T E Lawrence at that time. Not an entirely bad thing but they missed they missed the point about the context and foundation of training, and the genesis of the 5-paragraph field order and of course we entirely missed the deeper meaning of Ausbildung and Auftragstaktic. This condition had not been corrected during the period of 2006 to 2010 while I was a COIN instructor and advisor in Afghanistan. I dont think its any better today. in fact, the Big Army has done what it did after Vietnam; it dug in its heels and has gone back to big conventional war doctrine. This is not entirely the Army's fault. DoD and DoS failed the combatant commanders and never provided the leadership and coordination required to synch humanitarian and nation building efforts with military operations, by default, the US Army had to do it all. And sadly, the best units to implement COIN were the MArines and the US Army and NG units that were activated. they provided the balance and nuance above the kinetic operations that the regular units never understood - hell, the Big Army never even read the COIN history or manuals before deploying. NOw that i have digressed, Its a shame that the Army never would embrace Scharnhorst and how he got to where he was. if they had, they would have been better at understanding Clausewitz and the key features of what these two men created that has become the foundation for every Western Army in the world.