By Mark Stout Carl von Clausewitz offered his “paradoxical trinity” as a tool for thinking about wars and their various manifestations. His trinity was: Composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free…
Category: World War II History
Military History: The Hürtgen Forest: America’s Longest, Most Costly Battle During World War II
At the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest, over 4,500 American troops were killed and wounded — and for the cost, very little ground was gained. Many have never heard of the Hürtgen Forest, much less the bloody battle that took place there 71 years ago. Located in western Germany between the Ruhr River and the…
Military History: A Lot of What We Think We Know about World War II is Wrong
New Book Challenges Conventional Wisdom By James Holland The Second World War remains an enduringly fascinating subject, but despite the large number of films, documentaries, books and even comics on the subject, our understanding of this catastrophic conflict, even seven decades on, remains heavily dependent on conventional wisdom, propaganda and an interpretation skewed by the…
The Ignorance of Intelligence Agencies
This is a very short article, but worthy of your time nonetheless. It points out one of the glaring inadequacies of the current state of our Foreign Intelligence apparatus in this country. All of the sentences in italics are of my doing for emphasis on these points. -SF By Williamson Murray At the start of…
Urban Warfare, Back in the Day
URBAN WARFARE, BACK IN THE DAY Current headlines are replete with stories of urban warfare. Be it Aleppo, Ramadi, Tripoli or some Ukrainian city you only learned of last year, there appears to be no shortage of combatants that want to fight in/over/for some piece of urban terrain. Perhaps a brief step back in to…