Sublime

Beyond the great captains of irregular warfare, a few key supporting characters make recurring guest appearances in the pages that follow. The most frequent is Winston Churchill, who appears on the scene at the outset of the Boer War in 1899, returns to support T. E. Lawrence’s pan-Arab policy goals after World War I, develops a friendship with Tit

Presidential advisers found this frustrating, even frivolous, and some historians since have agreed.35 But follow the metaphor more closely: how do you keep one hand from knowing what the other is doing without having a head instruct both? “I may be entirely inconsistent,” FDR went on to explain, “if it will help win the war.”36 Consistency in gran

General Marshall, who had been installed as chief of staff nine months earlier, was already trimming deadwood root and branch. His first target was the bloated square division of World War I.25 As early as 1920, General Pershing had urged the square division be scrapped in favor of a 15,000-man “triangular” structure of three regiments, which he be

These “principles of the Blitzkrieg” do not give instructions on how to deploy tanks on the battlefield. Rather they aim to attack the ability of the other side to make effective decisions under conditions of danger, fear, and uncertainty and to increase our ability to function well under these same conditions. There was, in other words, little exc

Alfred Paddock explains how and why the Army institutionalized these forces after World War II with his book, U.S. Army Special Warfare: Its Origins (Paddock 2002).

Douglas Waller’s account of U.S. SOF after the Cold War, The Commandos (Waller 1994),

To ensure that we did not repeat the Vietnam War mistake of confusing activity with progress, our staff would institute “framing sessions,” which I believed were necessary to foster understanding, before we developed options for the president. These sessions would result in succinct analyses of a particular challenge to national security; the “so w

Yet when it comes to the great captains of irregular warfare, the same can hardly be said. While there are many accounts of daring commando raids, and more thoughtful works that explore the complex relationships between elite military advisors and friendly indigenous fighters, there is precious little study of the principles that might be distilled

Roger Beaumont’s classic exposition, Military Elites (Beaumont 1976)