WAR 101, PART I

Tecumseh Court introduces “Warfighting,” the how-to manual for the US Marines, and its practical application in Ukraine. Part I of III

Tecumseh Court

There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune 

‘The Death of Paulus Aemilius at the Battle of Cannae,” by John Trumbull. Led by Hannibal, the Carthaginians surrounded and annihilated a Roman army twice their size.

I suspect many Cosmopolitan Globalist readers, who not unreasonably thought the kind of war we’re now witnessing had faded into history, have given little thought over the course of their careers to the day-to-day business of war. I know some of you personally, am a paying subscriber, and sense many readers and writers in this group have been more professionally focused, perhaps, on the interplay of diplomacy and military threats to achieve strategic objectives.

I’ve been a combat leader in the US Marine Corps. I was in Kyiv and Odessa in 2014, although not as a Marine, about two weeks after the Russians occupied Crimea. I’ve been reading the same dispatches as you have since this war began, but I’ve been looking for clues from a different perspective.

For those with a military background, please forgive the simplifications and doctrinal liberties to come. My purpose is to orient Cosmopolitan Globalists to the environmental factors, simple and complex, that will determine the war’s outcome, and help them better understand the news reports, personal dispatches, and partisan claims now emerging from Ukraine, from a military perspective.

My intent is to get novices up to speed as quickly as possible. As I write, Kyiv, Odessa, and Kharkiv are under siege, and the outcome is far from certain. You don’t have time to attend a military staff college or plow through a reading list to fully understand the burden that every able-bodied Ukrainian now carries. What follows is at best an imperfect education in warfighting. (But a good plan executed swiftly is better than a perfect plan delivered too late, as brave Ukrainians are showing us.)