The Bazaar of War Profile picture
Warfare, past and present. Read 'Saladin the Strategist': https://t.co/KT9cGzHRIj More writing: https://t.co/47yApgaler
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Jan 18 19 tweets 9 min read
Louis XIV & Louis XV were very different in character, but both fought 3 major wars that followed a remarkably similar arc:

1. Small war over points of honor that rapidly expanded
2. Large war that saw many victories but no real gains
3. Large war that saw defeats and losses
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1. The Franco-Dutch War (1672-78) & War of the Polish Succession (1733-35)

These were the smallest large wars of their reigns. Both started out limited conflicts over points of honor, then spread to other parts of Europe as natural rivalries with the Habsburgs took over.Image
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Jan 16 15 tweets 6 min read
The wars of Louis XIV are criminally neglected in popular anglophone historiography. They were enormous in scope and consequence, shaping the map of modern Europe arguably even more than the Napoleonic wars.

But something else makes them worthy of study. Image In the American market, the two most popular topics by far are WWII and the Civil War. The reasons are obvious: the scale, personal connection, US involvement, etc. But there's another reason they continue to draw more scholarly and professional military attention...
Jan 13 12 tweets 4 min read
The gap between operations and strategy is tough to bridge because it usually overlaps with the civil-military divide. This was even harder when armies were composed of mercenaries.

The Venetians did it by employing officers resembling communist political commissars.🧵 Image Every Venetian army was accompanied by two officers called provveditori. This is sometimes translated as “commissioner” or “commissary”, as they oversaw army administration of the army. But they also had a political and strategic role.
Jan 8 13 tweets 5 min read
The internationalization of wars in the 16th c. made strategy dependent on events far away. This meant that states needed not just accurate information, but effective analysis. But how good was their intelligence?

A 1532 report to the Venetian College gives some indication. Image Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino and an experienced condottiere, had just been contracted as captain-general of the Republic’s armies. While he was in Venice that spring to celebrate his confirmation, he was asked about the military situation in Europe. Image
Dec 12, 2024 20 tweets 7 min read
The takedown of a 2017 London Bridge terrorist could serve as a lesson in combined arms:
-Artillery (fire extinguisher) suppresses
-Cavalry (narwhal tusk) turns his flank
-Infantry closes

Done on the fly by three total strangers using improvised weapons.🧵 Tactics are almost always simple in their essence, an obvious response with the means available—even animals show tactical instinct: ambushes, flanking attacks, swarms, feigned retreats, etc.

The real difficulty lies in executing these maneuvers with large bodies of men. Image
Oct 16, 2024 22 tweets 7 min read
In honor of the first day of the Battle of Leipzig—OTD in 1813—I’m sharing an excellent article by Michael Leggiere (next post) on the strategic miscalculations that led Napoleon to be trapped by three converging armies that outnumbered him nearly 2-to-1. Image Leggiere’s argument is that Napoleon became fixated on an initial “master plan” for the campaign, and continued to pursue it long after the situation changed, detracting from his usual strategy of directly targeting the main enemy army.
muse.jhu.edu/article/40473
Sep 15, 2024 48 tweets 16 min read
It’s time for the myth of Inchon to die. The landings, which occurred 74 years ago today, are credited with turning the tide of the Korean War. In truth, they distracted from the real fighting at the cost of thousands of lives, and lay the groundwork for future disaster.
🧵 Image On 25 June 1950, ten infantry divisions and an armored division of the Korean People’s Army crossed the 38th Parallel. They quickly overwhelmed the unprepared South Koreans and drove south. The US 21st Division, sent over from Japan, was overrun in the first weeks of July. Image
Jun 2, 2024 17 tweets 7 min read
Since there has been so much recent focus on slowly-moving fronts characterized by attrition and positional fighting, my latest Dispatch is on the opposite: a fixed line that encouraged mobility and practically demanded decisive battle.

The Rappahannock Line in the US Civil War.
Image The Rappahannock runs 300 km through northern Virginia, flowing past Fredericksburg midway between Washington and Richmond. Although not especially wide, it has a few features that made it a natural military frontier between North and South.
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Apr 27, 2024 15 tweets 6 min read
Venice is a great case-study for the practice of grand strategy. A tight-knit oligarchy ruled a commercial empire for nearly six centuries, able to chart a course years and decades in advance.🧵
Image If grand strategy is the use of a country’s resources to protect & further its interests, who defines its interests? Even *formulating* grand strategy involves political wrangling—much easier in a small state where everyone’s livelihood depends on the sea.
dispatch.bazaarofwar.com/p/grand-strate…
Apr 20, 2024 9 tweets 3 min read
Among the most promising military applications of AI is staff work. Tons of routine products—intel summaries, orders, etc.—can be generated much faster by machine. Does this mean staffs will reverse the historic trend and begin to shrink?

No: they’re about to explode in size.🧵 Image In the Napoleonic era, a divisional or corps staff was never more than a dozen soldiers, whereas today it’s pushing toward a thousand for formations of about the same size. Part of a general trend in tooth-to-tail ratios. Image
Apr 15, 2024 16 tweets 7 min read
Africa saw a lot of fighting in both World Wars, but nowhere near the scale or importance of the main theaters.

Secondary theaters are usually a drain on the weaker side, so it’s interesting to compare Germany’s performance in both. 🧵
Image The North Africa campaign of WWII is the much more famous of these. It saw the exploits of three of the most famous commanders of the war—Rommel, Montgomery, and Patton—as well as some of the most dramatic back-and-forths. But what were Axis objectives there?

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Mar 22, 2024 10 tweets 4 min read
The Crusades are fascinating in the way they pitted two very different military systems against each other: Western heavy cavalry v. Turkish horse archers—each probably the best in the world at the time. This drove a lot of innovation at the tactical and also operational level.🧵
Image The Crusaders’ great strength was the mounted charge: a line of heavily-armored knights lowering their lances and advancing as one. This was extremely effective especially against the more lightly-armored soldiers they encountered in the East. Image
Jan 6, 2024 14 tweets 5 min read
The focus of my latest was on what it will take to keep forces mobile in the face of long-range precision fires, ubiquitous drones, and persistent ISR.

Although the particular focus was on armor, the question is just as apt for logistics and support vehicles.
Image This was partly in response to an interesting RUSI paper on the future of armor in the British Army, looking at the survivability of individual platforms. Equally important is to look at how armor fits in with the entire combined-arms scheme.
static.rusi.org/heavy-armoured…
Oct 16, 2023 15 tweets 6 min read
OTD in 1813 the armies of the Sixth Coalition converged on Napoleon at Leipzig, the decisive showdown of the Napoleonic Wars.

With a nearly 2-to-1 overall advantage, Allied victory was almost assured—the real challenge had been cornering him there. Thread. Image The Sixth Coalition was formed in March 1813 when Prussia and Sweden declared war on France, encouraged by Russia’s successes the previous year. This forced Napoleon, who was rebuilding his shattered army, to scramble to defend eastern Germany. Image
Sep 13, 2023 45 tweets 15 min read
The most decisive battle of the past 500 years was fought OTD in 1759, on a windswept Canadian plain by fewer than ten thousand men. It decided the fate of the Americas and shaped world events for centuries to come.

Thread on the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. Image What became known as the Seven Years' War was formally declared by France and Britain in 1756, although fighting had broken out in the North American colonies two years earlier. British colonials began by pushing over the Appalachians to seize French forts, but were repulsed. Image
Apr 27, 2023 12 tweets 4 min read
A few stories from the past week have shown just how much drones are transforming warfare. It’s not their increased lethality or even their improved targeting for ground-based systems, but one of the biggest command-and-control revolutions of the past century. Thread. Image The first is an article on Ukraine’s use of drones for indirect fire control. This alone is nothing new—it’s been apparent since last March that guided artillery, far more than ATGMs, has been the most effective weapon of the war.
19fortyfive.com/2023/04/artill…
Apr 27, 2023 8 tweets 2 min read
Military strategy is supposed to be guided by war aims determined by political figures—this has largely been true for Western nations in the past 200 years. But far more often, the demands of strategy determine the war aims themselves. Thread.
bazaarofwar.substack.com/p/theories-of-… Consider the case of the Japanese in World War II. In 1942, their aims were to complete the conquest of China and Southeast Asia. But in response to this, the US imposed an oil embargo which crippled their ability to keep fighting. Image
Mar 28, 2023 9 tweets 3 min read
What is operational art? Most people today would say something about connecting tactics to strategy.

WRONG!

This is an innovation introduced in 1982, which clouded an otherwise clear concept and led to 4 decades of pointless doctrinal bickering. Thread.
bazaarofwar.substack.com/p/the-levels-o… The 1982 version of FM 100-5 Operations introduced the operational level of war, which it defined as using "available military resources to attain strategic goals within a theater of war."

Most criticisms focus on the use of the word 'level'. But that's not the real problem.
Mar 12, 2023 6 tweets 3 min read
The concept of strategy has undergone three distinct evolutions from its original meaning of 'generalship'. Each was associated with a different level of war.

The first occurred in Late Antiquity, when strategy became associated with the overall battle.
bazaarofwar.substack.com/p/the-levels-o… It also carried some sense of the campaign, but this did not really extend so far as an entire campaign plan - it was more the maneuvers outside of battle that gave an army the jump on the enemy.
Feb 28, 2023 7 tweets 3 min read
Tactics, strategy, logistics, lines of operation/communication all entered common usage during in the second half of the 18th century. Together with the mid-17th c., this period basically invented modern strategic language. This ferment originated in France in reaction to her defeat in the Seven Years' War.

The Count of Guibert, who elaborated the concept of grand tactics, laid the intellectual groundwork for fast, decisive warfare - he was a major influence on the armies of the French Revolution.
Feb 28, 2023 8 tweets 3 min read
I just published "The Levels of Warfare, Part 2: The Birth of Tactics and Strategy"
bazaarofwar.substack.com/p/the-levels-o… It's striking how *late* the concepts of tactics & strategy were applied to warfare. It was not until the outbreak of the Seven Years' War in the 1750s that tactics caught on.