So I set about to reading about it. Over 1,000 pages of it. Fortunately, I finally got my 30 days of block leave, during which I will slay this beast.
Col. Gian Gentile is probably giggling his head off now that an avowed COINdinista is reading about conventional war.
4 comments:
Is Napoleon considered first generation warfare? I thought he was that weird blurry area because while the era still had masses of men lining up in rows to blast each other with disciplined precision, he revolutionized warfare through mobilization on a scale previously unimaginable.
And what were the Egyptians, Persians, Greeks and Romans? Zeroth (0th) Generation?
As to mobilization, remember that the Persians marched into Greece in 480 BC with, allegedly, over a million men. Napoleon didn’t come anywhere close to that.
Anyway, enjoy your reading.
Would recommend paying particular attention to the Spanish campaign, which spawned the term guerrilla, provides an insurgency template that is still valid today, and is one of the best historical examples of "compound warfare," a concept that I find a lot more useful than "asymmetric warfare."
If you're going to be reading about Napoleonic campaigns and want to intersperse your reading of dense 1000-page tomes with some some light reading, I strongly recommend picking up Bernard Cornwell Sharpe's Rifles series. That dovetails nicely with Boss Mongo's comments, since a large number of them (Sharpe's Rifles through Sharpe's Honour) take place in Spain or Portugal.
If you can handle stepping away from the land battles, then picking up Patrick O'Brian's novels of British Seafaring (starting with Master and Commander and extending almost 20 novels) is also a pretty rewarding series.
Post a Comment