Sipsey Street Irregulars: Thinking about Schwerpunkts

Monday, December 22, 2008

Thinking about Schwerpunkts

All you fans of fourth generation warfare need to go here and read through all the links. When you internalize that data, you'll be smarter than me. (Not terribly difficult.) You'll also be better prepared to think through the battles to come.

3 comments:

GunRights4US said...: I read this yesterday, and certainly is has value. But the small unit tactics (heavily interspersed with the concepts taught by Sun Tsu) that you find in the writings of HG Poole I think are much more relevant to what we III's face. The two books The Last Hundred Yards, and The Tiger's Way ought to be read and reread and annotated and dog-eared. They should literally become "our" bible in the coming tempest.; December 23, 2008 at 5:41 AM
Anonymous said...: GunRights4US: AB-so-FRIGGIN-lute-LY!

Poole's works should be (and is in our AO) the school "primer"; all are required to have one or the other or both (depending on prior service factors).

On the other hand, the PDF file download on Clauswitz' "focus of effort" is essential for leadership in any AO to read and apply if for nothing else than perspective and to clarify thinking.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!; December 23, 2008 at 8:25 AM
Concerned American said...: Remember that schwerpunkts and systempunkts can and do occur at the tactical level.

Every small-unit-thinker s/b asking, "What are the decisive points in my area, and how can they best be exploited?"

It ain't about big maps of the Western or Eastern Fronts. It's about what you can do in your area in the most efficient, effective way possible.; December 23, 2008 at 8:56 AM

"Progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress."

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. -- H.L. Mencken

"The Fate of Unborn Millions. . ."

"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army-Our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission; that is all we can expect-We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die." -- George Washington to his troops before the Battle of Long Island.

"We will not go gently . . ."

This is no small thing, to restore a republic after it has fallen into corruption. I have studied history for years and I cannot recall it ever happening. It may be that our task is impossible. Yet, if we do not try then how will we know it can't be done? And if we do not try, it most certainly won't be done. The Founders' Republic, and the larger war for western civilization, will be lost.

But I tell you this: We will not go gently into that bloody collectivist good night. Indeed, we will make with our defiance such a sound as ALL history from that day forward will be forced to note, even if they despise us in the writing of it.

And when we are gone, the scattered, free survivors hiding in the ruins of our once-great republic will sing of our deeds in forbidden songs, tending the flickering flame of individual liberty until it bursts forth again, as it must, generations later. We will live forever, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, in sacred memory.

-- Mike Vanderboegh, The Lessons of Mumbai:Death Cults, the "Socialism of Imbeciles" and Refusing to Submit, 1 December 2008

"A common language of resistance . . ."

"Colonial rebellions throughout the modern world have been acts of shared political imagination. Unless unhappy people develop the capacity to trust other unhappy people, protest remains a local affair easily silenced by traditional authority. Usually, however, a moment arrives when large numbers of men and women realize for the first time that they enjoy the support of strangers, ordinary people much like themselves who happen to live in distant places and whom under normal circumstances they would never meet. It is an intoxicating discovery. A common language of resistance suddenly opens to those who are most vulnerable to painful retribution the possibility of creating a new community. As the conviction of solidarity grows, parochial issues and aspirations merge imperceptibly with a compelling national agenda which only a short time before may have been the dream of only a few. For many Americans colonists this moment occurred late in the spring of 1774." -- T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, Oxford University Press, 2004, p.1.

Sipsey Street Irregulars

Monday, December 22, 2008

Thinking about Schwerpunkts

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