More insomniac reading -- with a sharper point about 4GW.

William Howe. Was the British cause in North America lost between his ears?

“(D)irect military operations” are precisely what the 4GW insurgent seeks to avoid. His target is the mind and the will of the political leadership of his enemy -- to be specific, the few inches between their ears which are filled with brains to be influenced or, if not, popped like a grape with an unanswerable rifle shot from distance as an example to the others. -- Tyrants beware. 4th Generation Warfare: How the next civil war will be fought.

I may be headed to Massachusetts in June to speak at a Flag Day rally, and because that date is so close to the anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, when I was recently in Columbus, OH, I picked up a discounted copy of James L. Nelson's With Fire and Sword: The Battle of Bunker Hill and the Beginning of the American Revolution at the Village Bookshop in Linworth.

Nelson's excellent retelling of that bloody day, where the British took the hill but suffered appalling casualties, ends with this conclusion about the effects of the butcher's bill upon one man, British General William Howe:

The lesson of Bunker Hill and the subsequent entrenchment bought the American army nine months of peace in the Massachusetts theater. . . One would not expect William Howe to admit to having been unnerved by his experience at the rail fence, and of course he never did. Still, historians have long suspected that he was so shaken by the fighting on Breed's Hill that it prevented him from taking advantage of several extraordinary opportunities, the foremost being the rout of the Americans on Long Island. . . We do not know what motivated William Howe, but it is quite possible, indeed likely, that his ability to fling his troops at entrenched Americans, to prosecute the war to the full extent needed, might have died with all those men around him on the slopes of Breed's Hill. By an odd twist, the American Revolution may have been won even as it began, at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Won, I would emphasize, in the mind of the principal war maker and decision taker of the British forces in America. Food for thought for 4GW warriors of the next American civil war that the Mandarin class like Harry Reid seems to wish for so fervently.