seangabb
Published 8 Feb 2026Greece: A Brief History, c.700 BC – 500 AD
This segment goes straight to the ancient evidence. Using Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus (with the passages shown on-screen), I explain how Sparta understood itself: infant inspection and exposure, the collective upbringing of boys in the agōgē, deliberate hunger and deprivation, enforced endurance, and the suppression of private loyalties in favour of loyalty to the state.
This is not presented as scandal. Plutarch often writes admiringly, which is precisely why the text is so revealing. The system is coherent. It is also terrifying. Sparta did not merely train soldiers. It manufactured them, beginning at birth.
June 26, 2026
Sparta vs Athens 2(c): Spartan Childhood – The Agōgē, Infant Inspection, and State Brutality
June 24, 2026
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
QotD: When the US switched to the All-Volunteer Force in 1973
This of course forms the context for the creation of the All-Volunteer Force (AVF), the effective conversion of the United States military into a professional, fully standing military, which I’d argue is the single most dramatic shift in the civil-military relationship in American history, the full impact of which is not yet clear. For almost 200 years, the United States military had been an essentially civilian force which relied on conscription. For the decades prior to the creation of the AVF in 1973, conscription had been a fact of life. While the United States had demobilized substantially after WWII, there had been at least some conscription in every year from 1940 to 1972 except for 1947. In every year between 1950 and 1972, conscription had never been lower than at least 80,000 new conscriptions a year.
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 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
QotD: The artillery
Combat Boot, “So, ‘capbadges’, what’s that all about then?”, combatboot.co.uk, 2020-11-13.
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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.
June 12, 2026
How one German soldier survived WW1
The Great War
Published 12 Dec 2025Order Alexander’s Diary in The Other Trench in English and Der andere Graben in German: https://www.theothertrench.com
More than 13 million men served in the German army during the First World War. Most wrote letters home, some kept diaries, and some wrote memoirs if they survived. But over a century later, it’s rare to have a window into the everyday thoughts and feelings of one man, a time capsule of the experience of one of those 13 million.
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June 11, 2026
“That’s the fun thing about the fall of the West; everybody gets a swing of the sledgehammer”
Devon Eriksen responds to a fairly common boomer-ish post:
I don’t know if @ArbitrageAndy1 is a Boomer, but here he gives us a mashup of two classics from the Boomers’ greatest hits, “Younger Generations Suck”, and “The Television Never Lies to Me”.
It’s a jaunty little tune, and you can sing in it the shower, but the lyrics don’t actually make much sense.
Back in the real world, which younger generations actually have to live in, and where the television seldom tells the truth, WW2 was fought, on both sides, by guys even younger than 26.
And they were terrified.
The stress of combat against a peer adversary is overwhelming. It’s unendurable. But you endure anyway, because there you are, it’s happening to you, and you’re not getting out of it.
So you actually do have those little moments that Boomers would describe as stress meltdowns if they happened at work. You have them, and you do what you need to do anyway. Sometimes at the very same moment while you are melting down.
When you’re in this kind of war, there’s something terrible in front of you. In reality, that terrible thing is just as young and scared and overwhelmed as you are, but it sure doesn’t feel that way to you.
However, you also have something behind you, and something around you.
Behind you, you have a tribe that accepts and appreciates you. They know they sent you to hell, but they did it because hell was necessary, not because hell was fine. No one is gaslighting you pretending that everything is okay and that any problems you have are personal character flaws.
Around you, you have bros. They’re exactly where you are, doing exactly what you are doing, and they know how much it sucks. You’ve entrusted your lives to each other, and carried each other through things you don’t wanna talk about in your letters home.
Under intense stress and fear and exhaustion, your horizons shrink. You might have signed up for duty and patriotism and high ideals, but when you’re fighting, you fight to save the man next to you. And he fights to save you.
This is a very different experience than being isolated in a society that’s turned against young people, especially young men, especially young White men.
I won’t pretend it’s as difficult as fighting the Waffen SS. But young men fought the Waffen SS together.
They have to face the dissolution of the West alone.
That’s why they are anxious. Everything around them is not just going to shit.
It’s being systematically and deliberately turned into shit by powerful people who want them dead and replaced by someone else who will work cheaper and doesn’t expect to have a share of political power and a nice house and a retirement pension.
But I suppose Andy can still go ahead and dunk on them for clicks and a twenty-three dollar check from Twitter. That’s the fun thing about the fall of the West. Everybody gets a swing of the sledgehammer.
The Course of Empire – Destruction by Thomas Cole, 1836.
From the New York Historical Society collection via Wikimedia Commons.
June 10, 2026
World War 2 Mincemeat Pie for the Battle of the Bulge
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 16 Dec 2025Raisin-forward army mincemeat pie made in a quarter sheet pan
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1945During World War II, and really any war, soldiers far from home longed for a taste of home, especially during the holidays. Field kitchens would go to great lengths to break the monotonous menus and bring a little holiday cheer to the troops with things like turkey, stuffing, and pies.
This mincemeat pie is not bad, but it does lack the spices and citrus that really say “Christmas” to me. The corned beef and bouillon cubes add more of a savory note than a real meaty flavor, and raisins are the star of this pie.
No. 822. MINCEMEAT FORMULA NO. 1
Yield: 100 servings, 2 sheet pans, 16 1/2″ x 24″ x 1 1/2″.
Bouillon cubes……36 cubes
Water, boiling……9 quarts (9 No. 56 dippers)
Corned beef, canned……4 pounds
Fat……2 pounds (1 No. 56 dipper)
Apple nuggets, dehydrated……2 1/2 pounds (3 1/4 No. 56 dippers)
Sugar, granulated……3 pounds (1 1/2 No. 56 dippers)
Raisins……7 pounds (5 1/3 No. 56 dippers)
Cinnamon…… 3/4 ounce (3 mess kit spoons)
Pepper……(1/3 mess kit spoon)
Nutmeg……1/4 ounce (1 mess kit spoon)
Salt……(1/3 mess kit spoon)
Dissolve bouillon cubes in boiling water.
Add remaining ingredients. Simmer on a slow fire for approximately 45 minutes or until apples and raisins are tender. The addition of gravy coloring or caramelized sugar will improve the appearance. Remove from fire and cool. Pour into pastry-lined sheet pans.
Cover with a top crust and make in hot oven 40 to 45 minutes or until crust is golden brown.
Note. This mix should be prepared just prior to using.
— TM 10-412 US Army Technical Manual. Army Recipes by the U.S. War Department, 1945
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May 29, 2026
QotD: What is volley fire and what is it for?
Volley fire can cover for the slow reload rate of guns or crossbows in two ways. The first are volley fire drills designed to ensure a continuous curtain of fire; the most famous of these is the “counter-march”, a drill where arquebuses or muskets are deployed several ranks deep (as many as six). The front rank fires a volley (that is, they all fire together) and then rush to the back of their file to begin reloading, allowing the next rank to fire, and so on. By the time the last rank has fired, the whole formation has moved backwards slightly (thus “counter” march) and the first rank has finished reloading and is ready to fire. The problem this is solving is the danger of an enemy, especially cavalry, crossing the entire effective range of the weapon in the long gap between shots. This, by the by, was the volley fire tactic that was being used in China with crossbows before gunpowder; I don’t know that anyone ever did volley-and-charge with crossbows, which lack the lethality of muskets.
The other classic use is volley-and-charge. Because firearms are very lethal but slow to reload, it could be very effective to march in close order right up to an enemy, dump a single volley by the entire unit into them to cause mass casualties and confusion and then immediately charge with pikes or bayonets to try to capitalize on the enemy being demoralized and confused. You can see variations on this tactic in things like the 17th century Highland Charge or the contemporary Swedish Gå–På (“go on”). By charging rather than waiting to reload, the attacker could take advantage of the high lethality of firearms without suffering the drawback of long reload times.
Crucially, note that volley-and-charge works because it compresses a lot of lethality into a very short time, which I suspect is why we don’t see it with bows or crossbows (but do see it with javelins, which may have shorter range and far fewer projectiles, but seem to have had higher lethality per projectile). As we’re going to see in a moment, the lethality of bows or crossbows against armored, shielded infantry – even in close order – was pretty low at any given moment and needed to add up over an extended period of shooting. By contrast, muskets were powerful enough to defeat most armor and thus to disable or kill basically anyone they hit, limited of course by reload time: with a reload time of as much as 30 seconds for earlier matchlocks, a line of musketeers might only be able to fire a few times at an advancing infantry unit (which might take two or three minutes to walk through effective range) and given the limited accuracy of smoothbore muskets, only the last shots would hit at a high level. By contrast, a unit doing volley-and-charge is compressing probably close to 50% of the lethality of sustained shooting, devastating moment and then immediately charging.
Putting that much lethality into a singular instant was valuable from a morale perspective and of course it enabled a unit to quick march through the enemy’s effective range, stopping only briefly to fire and charge, limiting losses from steady enemy fire. But as we’re going to see, the lethality of bows (and, to a significant extent, crossbows) was much lower and so couldn’t be effectively compressed into that single, devastating, confusing moment.2
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Why Archers Didn’t Volley Fire”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2005-05-02.
- On drill and in particular, counter-march volley fire with crossbows, see Andrade, The Gunpowder Age (2016), 149-160.
- It also didn’t generate a smokescreen to help with the final rushing charge, whereas a musket-and-bayonet unit might benefit significantly from firing and then charging through and out of its own obscuring smoke into a terrified and confused enemy.
May 21, 2026
Enoch Powell, from would-be Viceroy to “Little Englander”
Niccolo Soldo discusses the early career of Enoch Powell and an earlier speech than the famous “Rivers of Blood” speech that took his own party to task for failings in the Imperial decline after World War 2:
AI-generated image from Fisted by Foucault
I’ve been on a bit of an Enoch Powell kick lately, and I’m not exactly sure as to why. Best known for his “Rivers of Blood” speech, in which he warned the UK about the dangers of mass migration, Powell was both an iconoclast and an eccentric, something that the British used to produce in spades.
Think about it; as a boy of the age of six, he would finish books and then collect his parents and give them a presentation on what he learned. His teen years were focused on the Classics, and translating(!) them into English. So adept was he at this that by the time he got to Trinity College at Cambridge, he entered into every Classics competition that existed at the time, and won each and every single one during his first year. When the University’s Dean and his wife invited him for a private supper, he had the temerity to politely refuse their offer, insisting that he had work to do (more translations). He became a Professor of Greek at the ripe old age of 25.
A devoted Nietzschean, Powell dreamed of becoming Viceroy of India, and he took the first opportunity to volunteer to serve his country in the war. His rise through the ranks was nothing short of incredible: Lieutenant-Colonel by 1942, and Brigadier (One-Star General) by the end of WW2. The man was the living embodiment of a 19th century German Romantic, albeit an English one at that. So thoroughly English was he that he could barely conceal his anti-Americanism, a trait that would surface from time to time over the course of decades. And yes, English, not British. Although today feted by immigration-restrictionists across the UK, his nationalism was what is known as “Little Englander”. Adding to the eccentricity, the turn away from Empire by the UK shortly after WW2 saw Powell do much the same: from golden dreams of being appointed Viceroy of India, to transforming into a Little Englander, adamant that it protect and retain all of what he felt were its best traits and characteristics, rejecting that which did not conform to this modus operandi.
It’s this overnight transformation that most piques my interest in his character because it is somewhat unique for a person of a very conservative nature to immediately accept such a dramatic shift in conditions and insist that the best must be made of it. “Empire is over. Let’s put it to bed, and let’s get on with it”, are words that are far, far beneath Powell’s level of erudition, but they do accurately describe his course correction.
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May 19, 2026
The War People by Lucian Staiano-Daniels
At Dead Carl and You, Kiran Pfitzner reviews The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War and finds it has value in bringing to life some of the ordinary people involved in that bloody, interconnected series of wars that we group together as the Thirty Years’ War:
“Their word for themselves was People. Early seventeenth-century common soldiers were Die Leute, Das Volk, les gens, or la gente. They were Das Kriegsvolk, Die Kriegsleute, les gens de guerre, the War People.” So begins Lucian Staiano-Daniels’s aptly titled The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War. Using the technique of micro-history, Staiano-Daniels follows the Mansfeld regiment from its raising in 1625 to its unhappy dissolution in 1627. This unexceptional regiment is notable because of the primary source documentation that survives, specifically its original internal legal records — investigations, debts, trials, and last testaments. Through this unusually immediate resource, we gain glimpses of the reality of the 17th century common soldier and so a clearer view of the social conditions he lived within.
One way Staiano-Daniels situates this investigation is in terms of the relationship between military organization and state-building. Describing the existing historiography, he writes: “In this argument, early-modern states increased their control over their civilian populations in part to raise tax money for larger armies that were inhabited by soldiers who were themselves increasingly well-disciplined”. He instead finds, “neither an intensification of military discipline nor unadulterated thuggishness. The military community was made up of systems of relationships that were subtle, intricate, and disorganized.” (7). These findings are well evidenced, and significant, as earlier literature (drawing on more normative sources like manuals and regulations) asserted the intensification of discipline as part of the emergence of the modern state. Instead, we see states forced to engage in the paradoxically complexly and loosely organized world of the mercenary, unable in this time of crisis and state-emergence to fully subordinate the armed forces they employed.
The 17th century and the Thirty Years’ War serve as an important benchmark in understanding the development of war. In witnessing the lives of the kind of men with which wars of the 17th century were fought, we gain a greater understanding of the society that they moved in. In so doing, we can more easily conceptualize the forces that both constrained and enabled war in the 17th century, producing its particular form. This conception provides the opportunity to more easily understand war in other places and times and what conditions reduced or intensified its violence.
Reading this work as a Clausewitz scholar, I could also not help but see a connection between the culture of the war people and Clausewitz’s support for a national militia or Landwehr as a step towards more inclusive governance. There is, of course, a great distance between the unruly mercenaries of the Thirty Years’ War and the “nation in arms” envisioned by Clausewitz and the other Prussian reformers, but at its core we find a common phenomenon: the connection between military service and rights, personal and political.
This book demonstrates well the value of microhistory; in looking closely at the practices and prevalent attitudes of these soldiers of the 17th century, we gain a more concrete view of the prevailing social conditions. This is not just of interest for its own sake (as social history), but because social conditions greatly shape the practice of war, as Clausewitz tells us. This is so because social conditions both reflect and affect the political conditions that create war, as well as the political purpose that exercises a continuous influence upon it.
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May 18, 2026
The American Civil War was “two armed mobs chasing each other around the country, from which nothing could be learned”
Ben Duval looks at the implications of the quote above (attributed to Moltke the Elder) and shows that there were indeed lessons to be learned from that conflict:
Chief of the Prussian General Staff Helmuth von Moltke the Elder (1800-1891).
Photo by Carl Günther via Wikimedia Commons.
A famous, if apocryphal, quote attributed to Moltke dismissed the American Civil War as “two armed mobs chasing each other around the country, from which nothing could be learned”. There were certainly lessons to be learned — it could hardly be otherwise in so long and intense a conflict. The war showcased many new technologies on a large scale, including rail and telegraph, while the growing accuracy of firearms showed the growing importance of field fortifications in pitched battle. It also gave witness to many expedients and innovations, including the first known employment of indirect fire (although that would take much longer to be appreciated).
Nevertheless, the readiness with which Moltke’s spurious quote was accepted is suggestive of fundamental differences between Europe’s large professional armies and the hastily-raised volunteers that fought for both North and South. The Civil War saw a mobilization of unprecedented scale, expanding from a pre-war regular army of 15,000 to a total of nearly 2 million at its peak.
At some critical battles, like Antietam, many regiments had mustered bare weeks before. At best, these soldiers could handle their weapons reasonably well; large-scale maneuvers in the heat of combat were out of the question. Even long-serving formations did not have much of a chance to redress these deficiencies, as demonstrated by the disjointed conduct of Pickett’s Charge. What immediate lessons could the Prussian and French, efficiently maneuvering under fire at Gravelotte or Mars-la-Tour, have learned from Civil War armies?
Prussian attack at Gravelotte on 18 August 1870.
Lessons at the Right Level
Perhaps not much at the tactical level, but there was plenty to be learned at the operational. Never before had railroads been employed at such scale to shift troops within and between theaters; nor the telegraph, which was used to coordinate such movements. Efficient logistical services allowed both sides to undertake bold maneuvers involving massive numbers of troops (it is noteworthy how many generals had previous experience working for railroad companies, and how many more went on to high management or board positions after the war).
Union supply wagons loading up at a railhead.
But the point also holds more broadly, beyond the particular technical specialties of 1860s America. Whenever tactics alone cannot suffice—either because both sides are extremely skilled, as in the First World War, or because organizational breakdowns rule out more complex maneuvers — decisive action can by default only occur at the operational level. This was an essential point in Saladin the Strategist. Muslim and Crusader armies, through long experience fighting each other, had developed unique fighting styles tailored to blunt each other’s edges: barring a fluke, decision could only be won through some higher-level maneuver.
In such cases, the fighting capabilities of an army matter less in any absolute sense than in their ability to effect a particular operational scheme. Tactical proficiency is but one variable among many, and not necessarily the most important. Whether a general is dealing with poorly-trained militia or long-serving professionals, it is above all their relative odds that factor into his calculations.
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Withdrawing the Black Jack Brigade from Europe
Depending on your point of view, President Trump’s sudden decision to withdraw a US Army brigade from Europe is either Trump having a temper tantrum yet again or part of an overall plan to reduce US deployment to allied nations who should be able to pay for their own defence. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, InfantryDort discusses the formation being relocated back to the continental United States:
1st Cavalry Division, 2nd Brigade – “The Black Jack Brigade”
There’s a lot of drama around Black Jack brigade being ordered back to the U.S. from Europe.
I was in that unit on that same mission from 2019-2020.
We deployed, did training there, went to a CTC. I’ll be honest, it was the most fun I’ve probably had in the Army.
But after the initial training and the CTC rotation, we didn’t do much.
Played a lot of softball. BBQs. PT. Some drinking. Mostly just working on keeping people out of trouble.
It was kind of like being back at Fort Hood, but in Germany.
I suppose one could argue that the simple act of us being there made all the difference. I don’t know. That was above my level.
But I couldn’t help but think then, as I do now, that there are better ways to keep one’s adversaries at bay.
To say nothing of the fact that I do believe we have been a crutch to Europe for too long. Everyone seems to forget that Europe as a whole, dwarfs the GDP of Russia. A country who is barely richer than Italy.
You accomplish nothing providing security for people who refuse to do it themselves.
What are we supposed to do? Defend them forever? Permanently?
What has it gotten us? Europe, by all accounts, has taken advantage of our security blanket and prioritized making a socialist hellscape.
A socialist hellscape that has become their chief export. So the very act of remaining there in force is enabling the destruction of the western world.
Our relationship with those people DEMANDS revisiting in my view. Because whatever good will we generated after the end of the Second World War has dried up.
The free flow of money from us to them has also dried up.
It’s very telling how others treat you when you stop doing things for them. This isn’t mutual respect. It’s been little more than bribery.
And I’m all for keeping our Armored brigades right here, building readiness.
And not running them into the ground for little gain.
There is an age old adage that says you must help yourself before you can help others. Prudence demands that for our country right now.
America first. America always.
May 17, 2026
QotD: Battlefield morale and cohesion in movies/games versus real history
Actual armies have far more than two states of morale and behaved in far more dynamic, unpredictable and interesting ways!
The first problem with this “binary model” of morale is that it assumes just a single factor (“leadership” or “morale”) but in practice we ought to be thinking about at least two different ingredients here: morale and cohesion.
Morale is the commitment the combatants have to their leadership and their cause. To simplify a bit, we might say that soldiers with good morale believe three things: that their cause is a worthy one, that they are on the road to success and that their leaders have a good (enough) plan to achieve final victory. Poor morale can result from a breakdown in any of those three elements: troops might for instance believe both in their goal and its eventual possibility but not in their leaders to produce it (this seems to have been the case, for instance, in the French Mutiny of 1917). On the other hand, regardless of the charisma of leaders, few people come to a war intending to die in it; if the cause appears impossible, morale will sink regardless. And armies that do not believe in the cause at all are extremely difficult to motivate by other means.
On the other hand cohesion is the force that holds a specific unit together through the power of the bonds holding the individual combatants to each other and/or to their (generally junior or non-commissioned) officers. There are a lot of ways to build that cohesion: people are generally unwilling to abandon neighbors, close friends and relatives, for one. They are also reluctant to expose themselves to shame at home for having done so; shame is one of the few things people fear as much, if not more than, death. For armies that can’t rely on that sort of organic cohesion, it can be built by reconstructing the soldier’s unit as his primary social group. Drill can do this: it creates an experience of shared suffering and achievement which bonds the soldiers together creating strong “artificial” cohesion.
These two ingredients have different roots, but they also function differently. The formulation that has always stuck with me is one from James McPherson’s For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (1998): morale (McPherson discusses it under the heading of “the Cause”) will get men into uniform, it will sustain them on large marches and cold nights and it will get them to the battle, but it will not get them through the battle. Instead, cohesion (the “comrades” of the title) gets men through the terror of actual combat, when fear has driven “the cause” far from mind. But of course cohesion isn’t enough on its own either, since it provides no reason to advance or attack or really to do anything at all except stick together.
Adding further complication to this, morale and cohesion are not, as they often exist in games, inherent properties of a unit, but rather emergent properties of the interactions of a whole bunch of individuals. In a strategy game, units exist primarily as extension of the player’s will; in film units typically exist as extensions of their commander’s or the main character’s will (note how common it is that right as the hero begins winning his duel with the villain, so too his army begins winning the battle). But of course actual armies are composed of lots of humans, each with their own individual will and agency.
Those humans are continually making calculations about risks, goals and survival. It’s not hard here to see why, by the by, morale won’t carry troops through high risk conditions: if your only goal is to survive to experience the end-state of the war, then it is always in your interest to let someone else do the dying; it doesn’t serve your end to stay in a high risk position. By contrast, if you are held there by the fear of shame if your close comrades see you run, that still applies. Thus these calculations get progressively more “primal” as the sense of danger rises (fear makes a mess of those higher brain functions), but they do not stop.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Total Generalship: Commanding Pre-Modern Armies, Part IIIC: Morale and Cohesion”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-07-01.
