It is a strange truth that crushing battlefield victories do not per se deliver strategic outcomes.
12.03.2026 22:08
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It is a strange truth that crushing battlefield victories do not per se deliver strategic outcomes.
Ludendorff’s scheme for victory was smash a hole & hope something happened. Hitler’s genius plan for invading the USSR was kick the door in & watch it collapse.
Napoleon thought his iron children would batter enough holes in an enemy line for him to push Guardsmen through and humiliate his enemy
Others have fallen into this trap. When you know you can pulverise enemy formations, that can feel like strategy in itself.
Never has a nation been as dominant on the battlefield as the USA.
But this war is yet more evidence that tactical mastery has stopped them thinking about strategy.
In late August the battle for Stalingrad was in its first few days. It would continue, with ever increasing savagery until February 1943. It ended with one of the most consequential German defeats in history.
‘Practically nothing less to target’
Trump, 2026
Stalingrad has been 'destroyed and [was] without any further worthwhile targets.’
von Richthofen, (senior Luftwaffe commander), August 1942
“We do not intend to part from the Americans and we do not intend to be satellites. I am sure they do not want us to be so. The stronger we are, the better partners we shall be”
Harold MacMillan, Conservative Prime Minister.
Has air power alone ever achieved a strategic result?
A new podcast:
🎧: podfollow.com/dan-snows-history-hit
I think we need to get real about the possibility that, for millennia, twisted assumptions about leadership have put us at the mercy of psychopaths.
Absolutely insupportable. Labour have a massive majority. It’s a hugely popular issue. To fail to act would be a dereliction of historic proportions, and utterly inexplicable.
The siege of Quebec was grinding on, 250 yrs ago, through the winter of 1776. Smallpox ravaged the American army outside the city & it was said that sex workers known to have smallpox were sent out by the British garrison to spread disease.
If true it makes it an early example of biological warfare
Any country with “a strong control by police and military authorities [would sufficiently] preserve the national fighting power unimpaired.”
In fact, air attacks would likely see “the combative spirit of the people roused, and not quelled.”
Well, we’re not dealing with Churchill either:
It is “not reasonable to speak of an air offensive as if it were going to finish the war by itself.” It was “improbable that any terrorization of the civil population which could be achieved by an air attack would compel the Government …. to surrender”
Meanwhile.
Today in 1948 the last British troops left India. They marched onto their ship through the Gateway of India in Bombay, built in the 1920s as a magnificent monument to an empire that had just 20 years left.
The army seized power in England in the 1640s. The Mamlukes. The Praetorian. The Janissaries. The list in endless.
It’s not science fiction that makes us nervous about of autonomous weapons platforms breaking free of human command- it’s history.
Control of warriors has been an unending struggle.
The founding myth of the English is of mercenaries who topple a kingdom.
Why would Lady Jane Grey’s kid have made a bad ruler?
Because they would have been a dud
Just imagine who’s in there.
Dawn in The Forest
Aristocrats going down like they’re in Guards at Waterloo.
Here’s the podcast, about William and many of his justice-involved relatives.
🎧: podfollow.com/dan-snows-hi...
The last time a British Royal Prince was taken into custody:
The future William IV, Jan 1780.
(Pocock, Sailor King)
My expert analysis is that if Canada beats the USA in the hockey it will be a major geostrategic moment but if we lose then it will be an irrelevant footnote.
Really appreciate it. Thank you.
After 24hrs frantic reading I can say with confidence that the last British royal to be arrested was….
William IV
As a young man he got in a drunken brawl in Gibraltar, he was locked up, revealed his identity & was released.
This & other parallels on the pod now:
podfollow.com/dan-snows-hi...
Princes in the tower
😅
In terms of the brother of a living king, I think (despite the heroically dysfunctional Georgians who came close) it was George, Duke of Clarence, sent to the Tower by Edward IV in the 1470s.
I reckon the last time the son of a sovereign was taken into custody in Britain was the Duke of Monmouth in 1685.
