Without getting excessively partisan in this space (as is my policy), I just want to point out that the slogan "Defend Our Nation's History" actually means "Ensure that No Change is Ever Made to Our National Narrative, Regardless of Evidence from Historical Research." "Our History" isn't malleable because historians and the public want to deliberately misinterpret the past to suit their political aims (though this does frequently occur and always has). We learn more about the past as we study it. That's what us historians do for a living.

It’s not that we shouldn’t learn from Ukraine or other near-peer fights. It’s not that we shouldn’t be observing, making relevant acquisitions, or evaluating concepts for LSCO.

It’s that it’s not a dichotomy.

We *have* to prepare for the rest too.

Don’t pivot or shift. Expand. We can’t allow Ukraine to be the new Yom Kippur War. We can’t allow it to function as a “get out of jail free card” for Afghanistan the same way we used Yom Kippur to distract from having to confront our failures in Vietnam.

We have to chew gum and walk at the same time.

The correct way for dismounts to react to contact. Dismount. Get away from the vehicles. Seek to orient and coordinate the pursuit of fire supremacy. Contrast this with so many of the RU helmet cam clusters we’ve witnessed in recent months. 🇺🇦

https://twitter.com/znezabarom/status/1577571683963109376

Although, I will say I would have preferred a little more muzzle awareness during that last burst 😳

Nearly 160 years ago this month, my great great great grandfather, Etienne Agnor Larrieu, a free person of color from New Orleans, signed on as a Paymaster’s Clerk aboard the USS Sachem then fitting out for the expedition to put down the secessionist rebellion in Texas. 1/x Upwards of 5,000 loyal men, white and Black, were part of the amphibious US force intended to secure a beachhead at Sabine Pass, Texas to establish a logistical base that could support operations inland to reestablish US authority and free the more than 180k enslaved Texans. 2/x

@AndrewSBledsoe I think it's also important to use this opportunity to highlight the fact that disaffected ex-Rebels did not invent the manipulation of historical narratives and selective interpretation of the past for political ends. It's something people do, even for good and moral causes. @AndrewSBledsoe The past happened. History is the sum of all the (hopefully evidence-based) stories we tell ourselves about it. The past is unchangeable, but we decide what it meant/means, and that project will never be complete.

When asked by a Georgian if he objected to Rebel monuments, Elisha Hunt Rhodes replied, "Oh no...if you people want to perpetuate your shame, I care little about it. You are simply telling the story to your children of how you tried to pull down the Old Flag and how you failed." "Another day I stood by the monument in Winchester, Va., and I read upon it an inscription which told how men had died for liberty, had died for constitution in that country. An old gentleman asked me what I thought of it. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘the day will come when you will put a...

Not to insult anyone's intelligence, but just because I so frequently discover popular confusion on this score, and it's often poorly taught in grade school, here's a (very) brief thread, and lesson/reminder on the difference between "the past" and "history" ... The "Past" constitutes every conceivable aspect of the universe at any given point(s) prior to the present moment. It cannot be altered.

While everyone is ranking generals, it seems an appropriate time to mention the tens if not hundreds of thousands of black men whose names we still don’t know, but whose toil made possible the movements of nearly every army in nearly every campaign on both sides during the war... ...While generals plotted and planned grand strategic movements on the map, and issued their general or special orders, slaves (toiling under duress for Rebs) and freedmen (for the U.S. Army for $10/day) often made those movements possible in many indispensable ways...

@hoyawolf @jkuehn50 Plenty of entrenchments during sieges in the Napoleonic Wars that would have been all but indistinguishable from those at the siege at Petersburg. Badajoz comes to mind. @hoyawolf @jkuehn50 Trenches aren’t what made the Great War special. Non-LOS artillery and major C3 advances were.

@AndrewSBledsoe @KevinMKruse “To send his army in two days of ... charges against an entrenched position, where they were promptly mowed down.”

*cough* May 19 *cough* May 22 *cough* @AndrewSBledsoe @KevinMKruse My point being: if this makes Lee an inept commander, the war essentially produced no competent commanders.

@AndrewSBledsoe I have great trouble seeing Grant as any more than an average general officer in a war that produced a profoundly high number of truly terrible ones. I find that most of what we’ve criticized him for is unfair, and most of what he deserves criticism for, we’ve ignored. @AndrewSBledsoe He tends to be the personality Americans tend to want to imagine their generals to be more than he was particularly visionary as an actual combatant commander. IMHO.

The thousands of after-action reports published within the 128 vol. "Official Records of the War of the Rebellion" represent the scripture of Civil War operational history. Too often, they are read and quoted uncritically without attention to what they contain and don't. While many assume that 150 years of scholarship has ironed out most of the kinks in our understanding of how major battles and even minor skirmishes unfolded, one need only uncover the rough drafts of these reports to see how much conscious curation went into their production.

The vast preponderance of Civil War combat was not between massed battle lines, but rather dispersed open-order 4-man skirmish teams called “comrades in battle” (tragically similar to “battle buddies”) who bounded from cover to cover, covering each other with fire and maneuver. Multiple companies, or occasionally even an entire regiment dispersed into such 4-man teams and led by senior NCOs or junior officers, advanced as a “cloud” in loose coordination hundreds of yards or more ahead of the massed main body of a command.

Maurice, Count de Saxe (1759) on just how, precisely, to convince your colonels to convince their soldiers to tattoo "with the kind of composition made use of by Indians" their legionary [brigade] and regimental designations upon their right hands... ...This custom, however strange, may nevertheless be easily introduced, provided the sovereign will only assemble his colonels, and represent to them, that it will be of great importance to supporting good order, as well as preventing desertion; that it cannot be considered in...

“Those who forget history” are in fact not “bound to repeat it,” because the past never repeats itself. Nor does it “rhyme.” Insofar as the present or future appears similar to the past, it’s because history builds progressively upon itself. Each and every moment in time is built upon an indelible foundation of all preceding moments. We are powerless to alter these past moments. They’re ineffaceable. It is entirely up to us, however, to reflect upon, carefully study,...

“The further nuclear strategy develops and the nearer it gets to establishing a balance, however precarious, of overall deterrence, the more will indirect strategy be used. Peace will become less and less peaceful... ...The relationship between cold war and hot war is analogous to that between medicine and surgery. Instead of the bloody business of hot war, we now have ‘infections,’ which are none the less lethal for being insidious...