 Hey everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense. Let's talk about the philosophy of tactics. When I first started reading about tactics, and I first started trying to figure this stuff out, one of the things that I was really interested in is like, you know, what do you do? Like what's the secret history? What's the secret knowledge? What's all the secrets that I need to know in order to do tactics correctly? And then I started reading a lot and mostly, if not entirely, American books on tactics. And over time now, I've come to realize something. You need to understand what it is you're reading in the context in which it was written. Now, that might sound painfully obvious and like, well, duh, Dylan, don't be an idiot. However, I think a lot of us can easily forget that. And we tend to treat what we read on tactics as the Bible of tactics. Again, you gotta remember, all this stuff is made up. Okay, it doesn't mean it doesn't have good reasons, it doesn't mean it's not effective. You just have to remember it's made up. There's no gospel truth on tactics, right? Human beings have been fighting wars since the fall of man. And we're gonna continue to do that until Jesus comes back. However, we still haven't, ironically enough, perfected that yet. And there are still rooms for thoughts and as weapons and technology changes, so then of course do your tactics. And as your foe and their tactics change, well then so do yours in response and then theirs and yours and you understand how this goes, right? So it's this constantly changing, ever-evolving thing and the tactics that you read were written in a certain context for certain people to fight a certain battle and may or may not apply to the situation that you think they might. One of the very first things you need to understand about American military tactics is they were written primarily for kids who are 18, 19, maybe on the old end, 20 years old, who are going out in the field with a lot of firepower to do some dangerous goon stuff. So that's important to understand because some of it might be oversimplified for your context. Now I know, I'm sure there's gonna be a lot of people who would just say I'm an idiot and I don't understand what I'm talking about and things like that. So you gotta understand that because those things were written for brand new, fresh off the boat, 18, 19 year olds, who don't know the way around life in general, let alone around a field with a bunch of loaded weapons, those things might not apply to you. If you're rolling with a crew of older, more experienced guys who have a solid grasp on weapons handling and have been shooting seriously for several years, well then your tactics, techniques and procedures don't need to be a carbon copy of what they do in the military just because that's what they do in the military. One of the best examples of this that I can think applies to what I'm talking about here is that when you set up a machine gun, you're supposed to have the machine gunner lay down and then the patrol leader is supposed to literally lay on top of the machine gunner in kind of a homoerotic fashion and he's supposed to point out with his arms directly, look, your fire, your field of fire is here to here, right? And he's supposed to very clearly lay it out so that machine gun doesn't sweep into the entire line and you get a bunch of friendly fire incident, right? Now, when you read that, if you understand that was written in the context of that machine gunner who's holding that fully automatic 7.62 machine gun is some 19 year old kid from New Jersey who's never held the gun in his life prior to eight months ago, well, suddenly that makes a little bit more sense, right? Because again, you don't want them sweeping that machine gun to everybody. But if your machine gunner is 37 years old and has been seriously shooting for the past two decades, well, that's a little bit different now, isn't it? The other thing you need to understand is that because we almost exclusively read American tactics, we tend to think that's the only way to do things and things that Americans would consider complete and anathema are standard operating procedure in other countries. For example, in America, we prefer the 90 degree flank. So, typically you'll have some kind of bad pig-eye position here, right? And you'll have friendlies here. You'll try to gain suppressing fire to keep the enemy's head down and then what you're gonna wanna do is send this element all the way over here and get them at a 90 degree flank so that they have to fight in two different directions at once, right? Which makes sense, is effective, not a bad idea. We've been fighting that way for a while, since about World War II-ish, give or take. So that's typically one of our go-to maneuvers for tactics in small units and how we fight. One of the things we do not do is we don't go to 180 degrees because in that case, then you would have crossfire and you might hit your own guys. So that's something in America we consider absolute anathema to how we're going to shoot. Now, you might see that and say, well, that makes complete sense. I wouldn't wanna get shot by my own guys and I wouldn't wanna shoot my own guys. However, other countries in history have not done it that way. For example, the Germans during World War II who widely respected as one of the better militaries in history would engage things a little bit different. So if they had a mechanized infantry unit and they were to encounter some kind of problem, usually, let's say the bad guys over here and they're in their little mechanized car down here, usually what they would try to do, say the road is right here. They would pull off the road, they would try to get an MG rushed up and begin to suppress the bad guy. Then they would take the rest of their crew and they would try to get a complete 180 degrees in order to engage the bad guy from both sides. Now, you could say, oh my God, that's insane, but that was their standard operating procedure where they were trying to get the enemy involved in a complete encirclement with 180 degrees and having to fight in front of you and behind you at the same time. And of course, that's almost impossible to do. Now, you could say, Dylan, what about crossfire? Like there's an MG spitting bullets into all your guys. Isn't that a problem? And I would say, yeah, I think it's a problem, but that's just how they viewed tactics and how they viewed things differently. Again, this revolves around the context and how you think about tactics. In America, we tend to fight wars by throwing as much lead and firepower downrange as we possibly humanly can. We're not exactly concerned with maneuver as much as we're concerned with just smothering the enemy with lead, which, hey, it's kind of worked out for us, so there's that going on for it. However, you have to understand again that there are other things at play here. And if you don't have the smothering firepower where you have six aircraft carriers just offshore and you can drop tens of thousands of tons of bombs in the next four minutes, well, then your tactics are gonna be a little bit different, aren't they? And just because we as Americans consider other people's tactics anathema doesn't necessarily mean they're a bad idea. It just means that they don't fit in our context. And your context, most likely if you're watching this, is not in the American military. You're probably an everyday American who's interested in tactics and interested in learning how to embrace their martial American heritage, which is great. But you should not wholesale adopt American military tactics because you don't have all the stuff and your context isn't the same as their context. Again, when understanding tactics and having this deeper delve into what works and what doesn't and what we should read and learn from and what doesn't, you have to understand the context. And yours, just as an everyday American guy or girl is gonna be different than someone who belongs to the ginormous corporation that is the United States military. I hope that was helpful and I hope that helps you think a couple levels deeper about what you're learning here and what is actually gonna work and fit for you in your context versus just the information that's out there that we should just read and then do. Do brave deeds and endure.