2003-01-30 - 4:08 p.m.

War

Gronk. I left my cell phone on all night, and now it's about to die before I even leave the office. Whups. I hate it when that happens.

After having posted an entry or two about it, I feel like I should explain my obsession with military history. One might reasonably wonder why a boy such as I who loved guns and war never actually joined the service, for example. Hell, I wonder that myself sometimes. Then I remember that I hate being outside and/or uncomfortable and it all comes back to me.

Anyway, Clauswitz wrote that "In war, everything is very simple, but the simplest thing becomes very difficult." Let's take something pretty dang simple, such as pissing in the woods. An idiot can get that right. But what if there's someone else in those same woods who's looking to shoot you? All the sudden it becomes more complicated.

In war you have large bodies of troops, and if they can do any little thing to screw up the enemy, they will. Only the commander's prudence limits the stratagems that can be employed. Soldiers will sink each other's ships, ruin each other's food, despoil their camps, etc. The accumulated history of warfare becomes, in part, a manual on how to keep people from messing with you, while messing with them.

One of my Patton biographies points out that in WWII, his 3rd Army had more total manpower than General Motors does. In the space of three to four years an organization of over two hundred thousand people was created, trained, equipped, shipped overseas, and used to push the Nazis back into Germany. The USA actually created several more just like it, and the Germans and the Russians mobilized far larger portions of their manpower. There just have to be valuable lessons in learning how they did that.

You'd also think that if they could do that, we could make some money on this Internet thing.

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