The Second World War witnessed two concurrent campaigns by which submarines were used in an attempt to economically isolate and degrade an island nation enemy. One of these attempts was remarkably successful. In the Pacific, US Submariners sunk millions of tons of Japanese shipping — more shipping, in fact, than Japan had possessed at the outbreak of war. A brutally effective submarine campaign against Japanese tankers affected a near perfect starvation of Japan’s war machine: after intaking 40% of East Indies crude production in 1942, only 5% would reach Japanese shores in 1944. This was a cataclysmic decline which Japan could not survive, owed largely to the 155 tankers sunk by American submarines in 1943 and 1944. In the final year of the war, American boats were able to undertake the ultimate dream of submarine theorists: a close blockade of the Japanese home islands, with American submariners prowling practically every inlet and bay.
The success of the American submarine campaign was genuinely astonishing, and created a near perfect asphyxiation of the Japanese war economy, with imports of virtually every vital industrial input plummeting to near zero by 1944. Admiral Charles Lockwood, who commanded the Submarine Force Pacific Fleet, was probably only slightly boasting when he later told an instructor at the Naval Academy:
Now don’t teach those midshipmen that the submariners won the war. We know there were other forces fighting there, too. But if they kept the surface forces and the flyboys out of our patrol areas we would have won the war six months earlier.
Despite the phenomenal success of America’s submarine operations against Japan, the American war on Japanese shipping generally receives scant attention. To take just one example, Francis Pike’s magisterial and colossal tome on the Pacific War relegates American submarine operations to an appendix. In contrast, there is an astonishing volume of literature devoted to the war’s other grand submarine campaign: the so-called Battle of the Atlantic. Germany’s famous U-boats attempted a similarly strategic interdiction war against shipping to the British home isles. Unlike the American submarine force in the Pacific, however, the U-boats failed.
Big Serge, “Wolf Packs: Battle of the Atlantic”, Big Serge Thought, 2025-12-12.
June 26, 2026
QotD: The submarine war against Japan
June 25, 2026
Coenders’ Bolt-Less Last Ditch Bolt Action Rifle
Forgotten Weapons
Published 4 Feb 2026When the German Army tested last-ditch Volkssturm rifles late in World War Two, one of the particularly obscure submissions was August Coenders’ Coenders-Rochling Volkssturmkarabiner. This was a bolt-action rifle chambered for 8mm Mauser with a 5-round magazine. However, instead of using a traditional bolt action system it had a fixed breechblock and the handle was attached to the barrel. Cycling the action meant unlocking the barrel and sliding it forward, while the breechblock held the fired case in place. When the barrel was fully forward, the next round in the magazine would kick out the empty case, and pull the barrel rearward seated the next cartridge, ready to fire. In testing, the rifle was, frankly, terrible.
Thanks to the Springfield Armory National Historic Site for giving me access to this unique specimen from their reference collection to film for you! Don’t miss the chance to visit the museum there if you have a day free in Springfield, Massachusetts: https://www.nps.gov/spar/index.htm
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June 24, 2026
The importance of proper maps on strategic thinking
CDR Salamander considers the use of maps — appropriate maps — to be critical for both military and civilian strategists. And the most common kind of map most people encounter is one of the worst, because it conceals more than it reveals:
If I am ever invited into someone’s personal study, office, or library — especially someone who puts themselves forward as a national security type — one of the things I not-so-subtly look for is maps, charts, or better yet, a globe.
Yes, I will judge you. It matters.
I have seen exceptionally credentialed and powerful uniformed and civilian leadership here and in Europe have an almost comical ignorance of the world in which they hold access to levers of almost unimaginable power. From a complete disinterest bordering on criminal unawareness of the bottom topography of the Baltic and Taiwan Strait, to not knowing where the Cape of Good Hope is, or even what a Great Circle Route is.
That kind of ignorance gets people killed.
They got their positions of power and influence for a whole host of reasons, but an understanding of geography and the ability to read a map was probably not one of them.
[…]
If someone says, “When you look at a map of the world …”, more likely than not, what will pop into your mind will be what is at the top of the post, the Mercator Projection.
That may be one of the contributing factors to inadequate strategic thinking in the modern age.
Of course, any attempt to represent a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional format is going to create some problems.
You need multiple perspectives, and often the one that best serves in helping you understand the challenge of the moment.
As we continue to argue the point here, we don’t need a new force design, or national strategy, we need a national understanding.
We need to understand the fact we are a maritime and aerospace power, and those are the two domains where the majority of fighting in any war against the People’s Republic of China is going to take place.
It has a unique set of challenges that have nothing to do with politics, people, culture or anything from man; it has to do with the interface of land, water, time, and distance.
As we learned and then forgot from WWII, any war in the far reaches of the Pacific requires range, scale, and the logistics system that appreciates both and can sustain the fight forward.
[…]
What are the top-5 even the novice should get?
- AUKUS is a must-succeed. Don’t balk. Don’t stutter. Don’t be difficult. Make it work. It reinforces our left flank. Australia and the Philippines are our shield and redoubt.
- Taiwan is the stopper that keeps the PRC relatively contained. If you lose that, Guam is your new front line.
- A strong Japan and South Korea must be made stronger and closer. They are our right flank.
- What does the PRC want? Once you accept that they want everything from the line drawn from Alaska to New Zealand to their coast under their uncontested control, but are more than happy to let us have everything on the other side, then you understand what they have been doing for decades in the small island nations in the Southwest Pacific.
- People grow up with maps that emphasize Europe and the North Atlantic. This projection breaks that mental fixation, putting Europe and the North Atlantic in a minor corner of the map, almost an afterthought that barely catches the eye.
A slightly more recognizable version [of the Spilhaus Projection] is below.
The Korean War Week 105 – Destroy Suiho Dam! – June 23, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 23 Jun 2026Since the beginning of the war UN air power has studiously avoided hitting North Korea’s hydro-electric complex, since the power the dams provide is mainly for civilian use, but that changes this week! Meanwhile on the ground, the focus has turned to capturing Communist POWs for information, but that task has suddenly proved impossible now that the UN POW camps are firmly back in UN control, and it seems the Communists now prefer even death to capture.
00:00 Intro
00:29 Recap
00:59 Taking Prisoners
03:18 The Shropshires
05:54 Ammunition Shortage
08:41 Targeting Power Plants
14:55 Summary
15:10 Conclusion
15:58 Call to Action
Feeding A Roman Centurion – Pork & Puls
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 30 Dec 2025Farro cooked in wine sauce topped with stewed pork, leeks, and dill
City/Region: Rome
Time Period: 1st CenturyWhile the common Roman foot soldier didn’t often have access to fresh meat, a Roman centurion did. A centurion was in charge of 80 fighting men and 20 servants, and holding such a rank meant that their meals were prepared for them and might include ingredients like garum, defrutum (reduced grape must), and fresh herbs and meat.
The dill and defrutum come through in the pork, and the wine isn’t overpowering. The puls, or wheat porridge, is wonderfully flavorful, and the whole dish is made up of lots of different textures (don’t skip the chopped leek garnish; it adds a wonderful crunch). If you like your puls to be thicker and more porridge-like in consistency, go ahead and crush the farro before cooking it.
… small pieces of meat and fine wheat flour or cooked groats you also season with [oenococti], and serve with small morsels of pork prepared with the same sauce.
Frontinian Piglet [oenococti sauce]:
You bone it, brown, and truss. Put into a pot garum and wine, and tie together a bundle of leek and dill. Halfway through the cooking, add defrutum. When it is cooked, wash it and dry. Sprinkle with pepper and serve.
— Apicius de re coquinaria, 1st century
June 22, 2026
ADATS – Air Defense Anti-Tank System; Canada’s high tech cold warrior
Polyus
Published 19 Jun 2026While designed mainly in Switzerland, over the years its identity became distinctly Canadian. It was produced in Toronto by Oerlikon Aerospace Canada and was operated by Canadian forces from 1988 to 2011. This is the story of the Air Defense Anti-Tank System, or ADATS
ADATS was a very interesting and highly advanced air defense system designed to fight a cold war that never materialized. It was operated for a little over 20 years, so it was by no means a flash-in-the-pan. Unfortunately, Canada has since given up its short ranged air defense capability and all of the human expertise that was built up over the years. Hopefully in the future a new system can be acquired and Canada can again expand its sovereign air defense capabilities.
This video was made without the use of Artificial Intelligence (No AI). Long live people power!
0:00 Introduction
0:29 European Background
2:09 Technical Details
4:05 Engagement Sequence
5:38 Comparison to other Systems
6:06 Canadian Adoption
7:48 American Testing
8:32 Thai Adoption
8:57 Advanced Variants
10:23 ConclusionMusic:
“Denmark” – Portland Cello Project
“Your Suggestions” – Unicorn Heads
QotD: When the US switched to the All-Volunteer Force in 1973
This was a huge change. For such a major change, I find that it draws surprisingly little attention. The 50th anniversary of the AVF passed with relatively little fanfare in 2023. I’ve mentioned For the Common Defense (1984, 1994, 2012) as the dominant textbook for introductory American military history: the shift to the All-Volunteer Force is dealt with in a single page (page 568, for the curious). The textbook I’ve seen most recently used for US Naval history (and which I used), J.C. Bradford and J. F. Bradford, America, Sea Power and the World (2016, 2023), doesn’t even give it that much: the shift is discussed in a single paragraph on page 351 (308 in the 2016 edition).1
The likely impacts of the shift to an AVF were studied prior to implementation in the Gates Commission, a report that had a preordained conclusion – it was convened to provide Nixon the cover to do the thing (end the draft) he had promised to do already in his campaign – and which honestly I find disappointing in its approach, which is mostly “happy talk” designed to justify what Nixon had already decided to do. It is striking to me, for instance, that the Gates Commission did not include a single historian to perhaps discuss how the shift towards fully professional militaries had gone for republics in the past. Instead, the focus is on the economics of the shift, with fairly blithe assertions that the civil-military relationship would remain unchanged despite the fairly obvious implausibility of that given the shift from “everyone serves” to “only a small portion of society serves”.2
As I’ve noted elsewhere, the Romans also seem to have thought that they could professionalize their army without reducing its ability to scale up in an emergency or altering the civil-military relationship and for quite a few decades that more or less worked, while the old norms held. But as those old norms decayed, the institution increasingly became what you’d expect from its institutional structure: a permanent political faction, advocating for its own interests, often with violence, to the point that the emperor Septimius Severus’ advice to his sons as he lay dying in 211 was, “Be harmonious, enrich the soldiers, and scorn all other men”,3 a fairly open admission that the soldiery was not just a political constituency, but the most important one. It took time for those norms to shift, but when one is building or rebuilding institutions, the long-term is the term that matters.
I do not think necessarily that this is the direction the All-Volunteer Force must go. It has two and a half centuries of strong norms pushing it away from this direction. But careful maintenance of the civ-mil bargain is made all the more necessary when the military is effectively fully professional. For my own part, all cards on the table, while I greatly value the service of the United States’ military personnel (there’s that third part of the bargain!) and think they serve honorably, I am quite skeptical of the long-term implications of the All-Volunteer Force. Its creators assumed that fully professionalizing the military would not impact the civil-military relationship and that it would always be possible to shift back to a mass-conscript army in the event of a major war, but historical examples suggest it is not so easy.
But the All-Volunteer Force is not the direction from which I see now the principal threat to the civ-mil bargain.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The American Civil-Military Relationship”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-07-04.
- In that book’s defense, the Navy has a really big set of reforms associated broadly with CNO Elmo Zumwalt that happen at basically the same time and are connected and it opts to focus on those. I will note that the position of the paragraph has changed because the updated 2023 version of the book has opted to grapple more extensively and more successfully with this period as one of increasing diversity in the navy, with a chapter by Kristy N. Kamarck on that specific topic. It is a marked improvement over the first edition, though I think both FtCD and the Bradford and Bradford remain too hagiographic, too willing to sweep the military’s problems under the rug and only comment on military diversity when they can tell the story as a happy tale of progress.
- Especially as that small portion tends to be concentrated, a thing the Commission essentially refuses to consider as a first principle of their analysis; they assume cheerfully that the AVF will naturally continue to reflect a cross-section of the United States. In some ways that is true, but in other ways it is very much not – there certainly are “military families”, where service tends to “run in the family” in the United States now – and the emergence of those patterns would have been a pretty obvious thing to expect, given that the same trend is extremely visible in the Roman army of the early empire.
- Dio 77.16
June 21, 2026
How Britain Made the L1A1 SLR: archive film with intro by Jonathan Ferguson
Royal Armouries
Published 21 Jan 2026Following last week’s look at the very first L1A1 SLR ever produced (1957), we’re sharing a remarkable Royal Small Arms Factory (RSAF) Enfield archive film, shot in the 1960s, showing the key stages of L1A1 manufacture and a rare glimpse of the original Enfield pattern room.
Then we step back and let the film speak for itself, nearly an hour of pure production and engineering process.
0:00 Intro
3:05 Enfield + Pattern Room
3:57 Planning & Tooling
4:37 Rifle body: Heat treat → Machining → Inspection
18:16 Barrels: Drilling, Rifling, Plating & Production line
34:28 Housing/Trigger, Furniture & Magazines
50:16 Assembly → Proofing/Testing → Packing & Dispatch
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June 20, 2026
“Every system on display is an answer to a question the war in Ukraine asked out loud”
Most wars are not significant drivers of technological change and military innovation. The Franco-Prussian War, the Boer Wars, World War 1, and World War 2 are some of the exceptions where the fighting accelerated innovation and adoption of new and untested technologies that were proven or discarded on the battlefield. The Russo-Ukraine war has been going on long enough and requiring new and improved weapons to such a degree that modern arms shows clearly reflect at least some of the technological changes in response to the ongoing combat:
Thales RapidStriker SHORAD, I think. Oddly, what struck me about this image was how much it reminded me of very early WW1 armoured cars, both in general outline and in its being a quick reaction development to a current combat situation.
Photo from Eyes Only with Wes O’Donnell
I was thinking recently about the good ole pandemic days; ah, what a simpler time …
At the time, I was writing for military and cybersecurity magazines about whether NASA spacesuits can be hacked and hypersonic tomfoolery.
Six years ago, a defense expo like this was mostly about better armored boxes. Things like thicker protection, a nicer turret, an upgraded engine, a fire-control system with a new acronym.
The headline acts were tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, things that go very high and very fast, and the unspoken assumption underneath all of it was that war would look roughly like it always had, just with more cowbell.
Then 2022 happened.
Then Operation Spiderweb.
Then a year of Russian glide bombs and Ukrainian refinery strikes and FPV drones turning hundred-dollar quadcopters into tank-killers.
Then the Gulf woke up to Iranian missiles in March. And the entire defense industry got the same text message at the same time, written in other people’s blood.
You can read that message on the Eurosatory floor this year.
Almost every serious system on display is an answer to a question the war in Ukraine asked out loud:
How do I shoot from farther away so I don’t die?
How do I kill cheap drones without going bankrupt?
How do I send a robot instead of a soldier?
How do I keep my tank’s roof from becoming a Thermador pizza oven set to “broil?”
Back then, I also used to write listicles, like “Top Ten Gifts for Veterans!” In that tradition, I’ve put together a hand-picked list of ten weapon systems emerging this year at Eurosatory in Paris, and every one of them is really a story about how much war has changed since 2020.
June 18, 2026
Ross 1912 Cadet: Straight Pull .22 Rimfire Training Rifle
Forgotten Weapons
Published 28 Jan 2026The Ross model 1912 Cadet rifle was introduced in 1912 as a diminutive rimfire companion to the 1905 and 1910 military Ross rifles. It was a single-shot straight pull rifle, with a somewhat unusual locking bolt system. Somewhere between 13,000 and 17,000 appear to have been made, for civilian commercial sale, Cadet Corps, and Militia use. Production ended in March 1917, when the Ross company collapsed. Today these are quite rare rifles.
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June 17, 2026
The Korean War Week 104 – Order Restored at Koje-do – June 16, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 16 Jun 2026The saga of Koje-Do POW camp comes to its end this week after Bull Boatner’s troops crack down hard and finally take full control there. Operation Counter continues with fighting for Hill Eerie, and South Korean President Syngman Rhee is stirring up so much trouble that the US is considering intervening in South Korean politics to stop him.
00:00 Intro
00:40 Recap
01:11 Operation Counter
03:31 The Chinese Account
05:22 Koje-Do
10:46 Rhee Again
12:50 US Presidential Election
15:58 Summary
16:25 Conclusion
18:13 Call to Action
QotD: The artillery
Combat Boot, “So, ‘capbadges’, what’s that all about then?”, combatboot.co.uk, 2020-11-13.
June 16, 2026
The ever-declining (yet still effective) British military
Britain’s military needs have shifted a great deal since the United States took over the unofficial role of “world policeman” after the Second World War. As Imperial commitments overseas were reduced by former colonies achieving independence, the British armed forces have also diminished. In UnHerd, Edward Luttwak considers the current state of the British army, the Royal Air Force, and the Royal Navy in the wake of the sudden resignation of Defence Minister John Healey from Sir Keir Starmer’s cabinet:
Britain’s armed forces have undergone a very long recessional. In 1945, the Army alone had some three million men under arms, with millions more in the navy, air force and various colonial forces. At the start of this year, by contrast, the “trained strength” total of the Royal Navy, RAF, Marines, and Army came to just 126,440, a figure that has actually fallen since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. But it was not just that very low figure that explains John Healey’s dramatic resignation last week.
Until relatively recently, British defence secretaries were much envied by their European counterparts — because they were allowed to conserve as much real combat strength as possible by cutting everything else to conserve money for training and realistic exercises, as well as the continuous maintenance it requires. Typical in that regard was Healey’s namesake Denis, a fiery socialist and decorated beachmaster at Anzio, who served as Labour’s defence secretary from 1964-70. No relation to his 21st-century successor, this elder Healey worked closely with his cabinet colleagues to cut costs on buying warships, aircraft, bases and the like, to focus instead on what really matters: training, munitions and maintenance.
That may seem like mere common sense. But since the post-Cold War drawdown that was underway by 1991, almost every European defence ministry has wasted increasing proportions of their diminishing defence spending to keep increasingly empty bases open — often just to preserve civilian janitors and ground-keepers in a job, and retired NCOs in their attached housing. Also bloated are the officer corps of most European forces, increasingly disproportionate to their shrinking personnel totals. The Spanish army is perhaps the leading champion here. Despite shrinking from 280,000 men in 1990 to just 75,000 today, it has preserved every formation command, and every regional headquarters and geographic command, including one for the Canary Islands, headed by a three-star army general and flanked by navy and air force counterparts.
Altogether, these commands absorb a remarkable percentage of the total armed force personnel: all just to keep up appearances, and jobs for generals and admirals. Nor is the Spanish army unique in this self-sabotage; Madrid’s wasted defence spending, which may even reflect the policy preferences of its pacifist government, is merely an exaggerated version of knowingly wasteful policies across Europe. By a remarkable coincidence, for instance, every branch of the Italian armed forces — as well as the civilian police, the customs police, and the carabinieri military police present in every town — buy almost all of their pistols, rifles and machine guns from privately owned Beretta. The French are arguably even worse offenders: all their combat aircraft are slated to come from the privately-owned Dassault Aviation, and for all the lobbying of British firms they are not allowed to become monopolies.
The root cause of John Healey’s complaint is that to preserve those envied British defence practices, to retain a disciplined focus in using taxpayers’ money to buy actually usable combat capabilities, there are minimum funding levels which must be respected. All concerned know perfectly well that spending on “combat readiness” is like buying cut flowers: which must be bought anew each day, at the expense of furniture that can last for decades or even centuries. In other words, doing defence for real is, much more than anything else a government does, like running a restaurant open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This is true even when compared with health care, in which the vast majority of patients do not require round-the-clock intensive care.
Luttwak pointedly differentiates the way the British armed services operate to most of the other NATO allies: “In sober strategic terms, there is nothing especially important about these examples. But think of the alternative: 3.5 million active NATO personnel, from Canada to Turkey, who eat breakfast, lunch and dinner in uniform every day — almost none of whom is ready to fight in earnest for any reason whatsoever.” The emphasis on the “soft” investment of skills and training has to be contrasted with the kinds of military organizations who boast vast numbers of tanks, artillery pieces, helicopters, fighter jets and bombers, but who lack the crews, maintenance technicians, and parts supply to keep them operational.
Update, 17 June: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
Why Argentina Lost the Falklands War
Real Time History
Published 6 Feb 2026On March 28, 1982 almost the entire Argentinian navy, carrying 900 troops, invaded the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas). The ruling junta was confident Britain wouldn’t oppose the Argentinian fait accompli. But Britain’s political will and military ability to carry out a successful campaign at the end of an 12,500 km supply line surprise many.
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QotD: Nitpicking the field fortifications in Gladiator (2000)
What we are shown is pretty clearly a prepared defense on a hillside, with a series of raised terraces, with a mix of abatis (sharpened wood obstacles, often crudely cut wood stakes set in an X pattern) and mantlets, with gaps in those defenses to allow units to move and a whole bunch of catapults positioned up on the hill. The terraces make for a layered, multi-stage fighting position at each level. On the one hand, the Romans were hardly averse to field fortifications and one wonders again if this set was a product of someone with an active imagination looking at the Column of Trajan [Wiki], which features a lot of scenes of Roman soldiers cutting trees and building bridges, roads and forts.
The problem isn’t that there are field fortifications, it is everything else about them: the style of field fortification, their position, layout and use. As we’ve noted before, Roman armies on campaign built fortified marching camps nightly, so we would expect Maximus’ army to have such a camp, but as we’ve discussed even more so, one of the classic, famous features of Roman armies is that they build the same layout of camp wherever they go, the famous Roman “playing card” forts, generally built on flat, open ground (rather than hillsides). That defense would not look like this, instead consisting of a ditch (the fossa) behind which would have been a earthwork rampart (the agger) topped with a wooden palisade (the vallum); thus rather than successive layers, you’d have a single clear fighting position (the vallum) on a mount with the ditch directly in front of it. And that would be a continuous line, with just four gates (at the center of each side), rather than this kind of checkerboard pattern of fortifications, because of course the purpose of this defense was to prohibit entry. Moreover, the line of field fortifications we see are not part of, nor connected to, a marching camp: it is simply a line of fortifications on the side of the hill with nothing on the flanks, rather than the distinctive “playing card shape”. We don’t see the camp sitting behind it either.
But the really immediate problem is that Maximus’ army has formed up within his troops strung through the field fortifications, with legionary soldiers mostly in front of them (but some are behind them) and the archers in between the stakes and mantlets. This may seem like a sensible way to form up a defense, but it is not the Roman way. Maximus is very intentionally “offering battle”, – inviting his opponent into an open field engagement. The way a Roman army did this was invariably forming up on the flat, open, unfortified ground in front of the camp, toward the enemy, signalling that they would fight in the open, outside of their walls (as Maximus does indeed intend to do).
So what we ought to see is Maximus’ army formed up outside in the open field, with the camp likely visible some distance behind them. That camp would be protected by very different fortifications: you’d be able to make out its “playing-card” shape, with watch-towers on the corners and the raised vallum running the exterior and the relatively neat grid of tents in the interior.
Finally, before we get to the battle plan, I want to note one more oddity here, which is the battlefield itself. The battlefield is a muddy field, which it looks to have been recently clear-cut, otherwise surrounded by dense forest. Of course part of the reason is that this is Bourne Wood, a coniferous tree plantation (and frequent filming location) in Surrey, England (which is why the trees are all the same species, so neatly spaced out) rather than the edge of an old-growth forest somewhere in southern Germany.
But the thing is, the Marcomanni, Quadi and other Germanic-language speaking peoples were an agrarian society, same as the Romans: their villages were surrounded by farm and pastureland. Of course a lot of the forest – old-growth forest, rather than tree-farms as here – remained, but if a Roman army wanted a flat, open space to offer battle in, they needn’t have cleared it themselves (and indeed probably couldn’t, at least not in the time frame they’d have to prepare for a pitched battle), but could simply march to the nearest village with its patches of farmland. Getting a Roman army to fight in dense, old-growth forest, after all, famously required clever ambushes, as a Teutoberg Forest (modern Kalkriese) in 9 AD. And if the enemy didn’t want to fight in the open, Roman armies were perfectly happy to burn villages and pillage crops as the standard way of attempting to force an enemy to accept an offer to battle or else vacate the area.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Nitpicking Gladiator’s Iconic Opening Battle, Part I”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-06-06.
