 Good day. I'm Colonel Jerry Morlock, the Director of the Combat Studies Institute. You're about to use a video series which our instructors have prepared for the sole purpose of improving your presentation of M610, the Evolution of Modern Warfare. We've taken care to make the course that you teach as similar to the one taught at Fort Leavenworth as possible and choose to add these tapes to your libraries in order to give you every advantage as you prepare to teach this new course. These tapes are similar to the weekly train-up sessions which we utilize to prepare our instructors here at Fort Leavenworth. My intent for the tape sessions was to provide you insights and tips on ways to approach the lessons of M610 that were not available in the instructor notes. I've drawn various instructors, military and civilian into the sessions based upon their specific expertise and historical background. They were asked to just talk to the lesson structure and content, giving you some additional information on the historical context and differing views on how to approach the lessons. These tapes will provide you a wealth of knowledge and direction that will significantly improve your readiness to teach our new history course. One word of caution regarding how to use these training tapes. They are not designed to be substituted for your instruction during the individual lessons of the course. As instructor preparation tapes train the training material, if you will, they are inappropriate for direct instruction to students and are not intended for that purpose. Our intent with these tapes is to improve your ability to lead the students' seminars by sharing tips and advice from some highly qualified experts. The Combat Studies Institute stands ready to provide whatever additional expertise or assistance that you may require, and we've included the Institute's phone, mail, and email contact information on the tape if you should need it. Good luck with the evolution of modern warfare course. Have a good time. Good morning or good afternoon from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. This is the Combat Studies Institute. I'm Lieutenant Colonel Sylvia Pierce. To my right is Lieutenant Colonel Dr. James Martin, and to my left is Dr. Larry Yates. Dr. Yates is the author of the introduction to this lesson and to one of the lesson articles. This lesson is lesson seven, the Men Against Fire, and the Colonial Warfare from 1864 to 1914. This particular lesson is a bridge lesson between the American Civil War and World War I. Lots of things happened during this particular time frame, and we're going to look at this in two different venues. One, the Colonial Warfare venue, and the one leading into the Men Against Fire into World War I. Larry. Okay. Just in context, and that started out by putting this lesson in context for the students, although they'll get most, if not all of that in the introductions they read, but points to emphasize would be that, as Sylvia said, the 19th century is a period of change, and it sets the stage following the Napoleonic Wars or modern warfare, which we'll see in World War I or a new kind of war, a more lethal battlefield. What's happening, first of all, nationalism, which you saw as a result of the French Revolution, becomes much more widespread and much more pronounced during the 19th century. Much of Europe, if not all of Europe in the West, become very nationalistic. You have industrialization. Some would call it the Industrial Revolution, although others would argue something that takes 200 years isn't a revolution, but the term sticks. There's a more rapid industrialization in the 19th century than there had been before that, especially in Western Europe, but throughout Europe, and it will extend to the United States. A point to remember in the context, mainly of colonial warfare, and then what follows is that by the end of the 19th century, the United States has become the foremost industrialized power in the world. We've overtaken both the British and the Germans who had a head start on us. Another aspect or another phenomenon to come out of the 19th century would be the number of ideologies trying to cope with this new world, social Darwinism. That may be more of a philosophy than an ideology, but the idea that Darwin's theory of the origins of the species and survival of the fittest can be transposed from the biological realm to the social realm and the international realm. And in the latter, the strong countries will survive over the week, they will prevail over the week, they will dominate the week. This will be a rationale for imperialism, for example. And imperialism itself will be a product of the 19th century, at least a new form of imperialism. By and large, economically motivated, although there are other justifications for it as well, which I discuss in the introduction. But the economics, you want markets, you want markets for your surplus goods. Goods produce at home, but you can't sell at home. You need to sell them abroad. If you can't do that, you're going to have a depression. Capital, you can only invest so much at home or reinvest so much to keep the shoe factories growing until they can't produce enough that can produce too much to be sold at home. Why invest more money in that factory? Invest it somewhere else. Well, overseas is one place to invest. So markets for surplus goods, surplus capital, also the need to control sources of raw materials. This will lead to an imperialistic venture throughout the 19th century. The big wave comes in the 1880s, 1890s. But you see it throughout the 19th century in the case, for example, of the French. Technology, the Industrial Revolution, brings about new technology. And for the first time now, in this particular course, we're going to see technology making a difference. Today when we talk about revolutions in military affairs, we always talk about the technology. This is what triggers the revolution. We've seen radical changes in military affairs up to the 19th century that had nothing to do with technology. That had more to do with philosophy, with leadership, Napoleon being an example. Napoleon didn't have any technology that was radically different from those who went before him, his predecessors. But he had certain, his conception of the battlefield, his leadership ability, his strategy, his formations, et cetera, many for which he was responsible, some of which he just liked the core. He modified and used for his own ends. But the point is, it had little, or very little to do with technology. Now technology is going to play a big part in the shaping of modern warfare. So the 19th century, a very critical period in terms of not only the world as a whole, in terms of the westernization of the world, but also in terms of the military. New ideologies, new technology that will have an effect on military affairs. Now, in one sense where it does, as we've already said, is colonial warfare. Imperialism, the outward expansion, mainly of the European powers, although by the end of the century you're getting Japanese expansion as well, Japanese imperialism. But imperialism, colonial warfare, is primarily a product of the western world, Western Europe and then the United States. And what I would suggest for this lesson, given the readings that you have, is that one, you provide the context. As I've just done here very briefly, the introduction gets into it a bit more. But the background for the 19th century in which colonial warfare takes place, I would talk about the problem. What is colonial warfare all about? Well, it's to establish colonies and then to maintain them. And to keep others out, and to keep the indigenous population subdued or happy, one of the two or both. What policies can you pursue in colonial war? What tactics do you use? And what is the impact of colonial warfare on the military? This is the way I would divide it. Again, context, the issue or problem at hand, the policies pursued, the tactics pursued in pursuit of the policies, and the impact of all of this on the military. And just going down some of these points, discussing them in general, and then we'll look specifically at the French in the U.S. The context, again, is industrialization, nationalism, 19th century movements, colonial expansion. The main wave, as I said, started in the 1880s, but the French are at work and others are at work even before that. It's the ascendancy of the West. This is where the West really takes over most of the world, not all of it, but most of it. And what hasn't been colonized up to this point will be. We're talking mainly about Africa and Asia, parts of Asia. The Western Hemisphere of Latin America is off limits. The Monroe Doctrine establishes the precedent, at least, or the policy that the United States doesn't want to see Europeans colonize or re-colonize Latin America. What will happen to Latin America, that's for another day. So the colonial expansion, mainly Africa and Asia, but again, most of the world that hasn't been divided up will be. For the military and for the government that runs the military, the problem is to establish a colony when ordered to do so, often over the resistance of the old indigenous population, and then to maintain that colony by keeping the locals down and the foreigners out. Your basic problem or your basic issue. The policies for doing this, you can talk about, you can divide them into the harsh policies, the benevolent policies. This is the way the United States described them at the turn of the century. We used plain English back then, and not jargon. The harsh policies simply meant subjugating the population, making the locals accept colonial rule, even if they didn't want to, and in many cases they didn't. It's a policy of raids, of burning villages, of punishing those who resist, but using force to establish your colony. The benevolent approach was to try to convince the local population that they wanted to be a colony, and that being colonized would work to their benefit as well as the benefit of the mother country, meaning the colonizer. You would build an infrastructure, you'd set up a marketplace, and you would convince the locals that they would be better off under French or US or English or German or Italian rule than they would be on their own or under their current situation. Today the programs we would refer to is nation building, civic actions, and environmental affairs. This is the benevolent approach. In most cases you get a combination of the harsh and the benevolent. It's a question of which is going to have the emphasis and at what time. Generally early on, if it's a combined approach, the emphasis will be on the harsh policy because you're setting up the colony over resistance, and then over time you try to convince more and more people to go along with it. And the benevolent approach depends over the harsh approach, but it just depends on where you are and when you're there. In some cases the French will use a harsh approach throughout. In the case of the Philippines it'll be a mixed approach with initial emphasis on the benevolent and it goes to the harsh and then back to the benevolent. So the main thing is there are two different approaches and you will see generally a combination of the two, one form or another. Warfare, this we can go on forever on this, but we'll try not to. They tend to be unconventional and the problem here is that initially at least the armies going in to colonize an area tend to be traditional armies, conventional armies. European armies that are used to fighting on a linear battlefield against a well-defined opponent and you simply exchange volleys etc. until and then charge or defend until one side prevails but they're used to traditional warfare, large units, big formations, volley fire etc. In the local situations that they find themselves in colonial warfare these tactics are often very inappropriate. Often there is no enemy out there. In some cases there are. There is. But at any rate in many cases the enemy, the indigenous population will break down into small groups that will engage in raids will attack supply lines, ambush this sort of thing. Very unconventional tactics they will not engage you in a pitched battle European style and if you're to prevail you have to adapt your tactics. If you try to approach these small guerilla type groups in a conventional way with large columns on a conventional battlefield it isn't going to happen. You're going to be ineffective and so the European powers where they confront this sort of enemy will adapt their tactics to it. Smaller units, flying columns they will also employ raids and ambushes against a guerilla type opponent. They will adapt in other words to the local situation and also keep in mind throughout this the military while it's fighting the colonial wars the military is part of the larger effort which includes the political economic instruments as well to colonize a given area. So the tactics generally tend to be unconventional. Occasionally you'll get that pitched battle but more often than not you're going to have to adapt by adapting or adapt by adopting unconventional tactics. The impact of all this well first of all what happens to traditional armies who fight colonial wars they're not prepared to fight them they do have to adapt what does this mean it can be a painful process then once they've learned to do that can they re-adapt when they have to fight a conventional war and this is the problem you'll look at when you get to World War I many of the European armies are oriented toward a colonial warfare to the big war anymore and this is a problem how do you take an army that has been a constabulary force a police force a colonializing force and turn it back into a conventional army you want to parallel the United States going into Vietnam as a conventional army the army in Vietnam to some extent becomes an unconventional army not entirely and then you have to after Vietnam is over re-oriented to Europe and that took some doing in the areas of doctrine, training force, structure, etc secondly the problem of colonial armies can they retain the support of the nation they represent especially in a democracy the French and the British both but mainly the French because of the tactics they use the emphasis on the harsh over the benevolent tactics and the French experience the French army lost the support of many politicians in France and much of the French of French society stories of atrocities would come back to France and they would be played up in the anti-imperial newspapers and the army would caught a black eye that would have to live with the Dreyfus Affair which is another issue and explained in your instructor notes also enters into it but can a colonial army which fighting an unconventional war which by its very nature tends to be very nasty the use of torture atrocities, you burn down a village many see just the act of burning it down as an atrocity if you happen to kill some people in the process women, children, old men that doesn't go over well either back at home and yet that's oftentimes almost inherent in the nature of unconventional warfare it's not to excuse it to say it's likely to happen and it's not likely to play well at home so the French army finds itself alienated from its own society and again the parallel here is so obvious, the American army during Vietnam if you were in the military during the Vietnam years best not show up on a university campus certainly not in uniform there was an anti-militarism it did not affect the majority of the population but a vocal minority certainly made it being in the military fairly rough on the French side while you're talking about it isn't it true that at that time the French actually had two armies one that was the metropolitan army of Paris if you will and then the other one that was the unconventional or colonial army and the two were exactly meet in the middle I gave a misimpression if you go to colonial warfare the entire army of the country does not become a colonial army any more than when we were colonizing the Philippines the US army does not become a colonial army as a whole parts of it do or parts of it many officers gain their experience in the colonial wars but that does not mean the army itself has reoriented to become an exclusively colonial army so you know quite right the French have a colonial army and they have the metropolitan army and there's a gap between the two in terms of their ability to fight a traditional war and then there's a gap between the colonial army and French society because of the nature of colonial warfare especially when it goes into its harsh phase so it's a little more complicated than I was laying it out it's again not an entire army does not become a colonial army and in fact once you've set up a colony often times you'll find friendly groups within that society to become a colonial force you'll use native troops to maintain order in the colony and then with World War I you'll bring them over to fight in Europe which is an interesting experience for them for many for example in Africa they find in World War I their bullets will kill these people there's nothing magic about these people they can be killed this lesson will be reapplied again in World War II one final point here in this overview and that is there's an assumption made on the ideological side of imperialism and that is that Western ways one are universally applicable and are acceptable that people want to look like us the United States will certainly carry that ideological baggage into the colonial wars that we're doing these folks a favor the white man's burden we're bringing them the benefits of Western civilization primarily the economic benefits but also the social and political as well at some point when they're ready for them so there's a good deal of ethnocentrism here there's a good deal of cultural arrogance I suppose ours is better and because of that we have the right to impose it and they will be grateful to us either right away or in the long term for doing it so that's the overview then you get into specific experiences which the article by porch on the French lays out and then the material we have on the Indian wars and the Philippines so any comments on the general approach before we get into the city I guess the first thing that I'd comment I'd make is that just about now the British are handing over Hong Kong to the Chinese one of the last bastions of the period that Larry talked about where the European western nations dominated the world this summer comes to an end kind of closes an ear actually if there was anything left of the empire but I think you can use that to highlight what Larry is talking about here and taking a Chinese population and making them British a piece I saw in the news this morning that talks about how high dollar land prices in Britain I mean things are just being snapped up from Chinese who grew up in Hong Kong but think of themselves as British because of the colonial empire and are now moving to England because they don't want to stay there they want to stay on the British side not on the Chinese side so that just occurred to me that kind of articulates what you're talking about with an example I'm sorry Glenn I was just going to go on and say to take off in something Larry said when I teach this block of instruction I also happen to be a student of guerrilla warfare just from a little different period you can do more than just examine Guayani, Bujo, Latte you can use how they deal with it and they have different techniques of dealing with it to show how there's no one way to deal with irregular warfare it's very situational dependent but understanding the culture of the folks that you're fighting against or the people who inhabit the area you're fighting is a big help and you can use this as a bridge to talk about like you said, Vietnam because we certainly don't understand the culture as we go in we make some mistakes early on in how we're going to deal with these folks and much of it has to do I think with your discussion of how we look at America or the western world is how things should be we don't understand why other people aren't like us we want to make them like us like we tried in the Philippines and it's it's what Robert Asprey calls in his book he calls it an ignorance of arrogance where we think everybody ought to be like us and we don't understand why they are whether or not and understanding that I think gives you a big leg up as a military commander in trying to deal with irregular warfare because it brings you from at least the correct base where you have to what do you have to do? and what their strengths and weaknesses are and they have a tendency not to do that we see that with the French we see it with the Americans as we deal in the Spanish-American war we see it in the Indian wars there's certainly an arrogance there with this whole colonial empire peace that plays into it I think you can use that to deal with your students it gives you a lot of different directions to go whether it's Vietnam it could be Bosnia you could bring that in how do you deal with the Serbs versus the Croats versus the Bosnians I think all of that while that's not exactly in the period we're talking about it's the idea we're talking about so I use this lesson to do a lot of that to pull things together and look at irregular warfare let me make two comments on what you said one has to do with the context in the 19th century to the West imperialism is taken as something that's completely acceptable today it is not the big watershed is World War II and that will come later in your studies but it's World War II that really begins to break up the colonial empires decolonization takes place rapidly after World War II and today the United States could not embark on an openly imperialistic venture without great critical debate within the country and in fact it simply won't float the context has changed our views toward other races other peoples have changed from what were today would be racist views of the 19th century white people are superior innately if I were a university professor at Harvard in the 19th century I would be telling you that as a scientifically proved fact we don't believe that today at least people do not and thus our policies are different but back then that was a prevailing belief thus the white man's burden again was something you picked up you accepted the second thing dealing with the nature of the military beast a couple of things first of all intelligence those writing on the small wars or colonial wars the first thing you need is well and you can argue this the first thing you need is really good intelligence but intelligence for these kind of wars is often different in the questions you'll ask for traditional warfare and these wars as Jim says the culture is tremendously important knowing the people and how they're divided how they interact with their perceptions are Marine General coming out of Somalia indicated that when he went in there he took his intellectual baggage his cultural baggage individual responsibility and all of a sudden he's negotiating face to face with Klan leaders who don't share that view their culture is based upon or part of is based upon the idea of communal responsibility as he put it if you steal a cow an individual steals a cow his Klan has to answer for it to the Klan from which he stole the cow and the elders of the Klan but it's not an individualistic society and yet that was the baggage this Marine General took in and he said it was an eye opener to find out that the culture was different he said we're not good at cultural intelligence for these kind of wars you have to be and this applies to the 19th century colonial war as much as it does to Bosnia Somalia, Haiti today we need the intelligence side we not only need to know where the weapons are and who has them as you need to know the culture and the people also what Jim said about the nature colonial warfare and unconventional war the context differs from country to country and within a country from location to location and this is perhaps a lesson of the Philippines an article which you don't read so I'll just mention it there's a book and several articles by a fellow named Brian Lin and his argument is that in the Philippines counter insurgency by the United States begins to work when it's applied at the local level meaning the town and village that a captain in charge of a company or a lieutenant in charge of what would have been a platoon back then he has responsibility for a town or a village and he will adapt the policies coming out of Manila the military government in Manila run by the US he will adapt those policies as he needs to in the local situation because in his area it may be the conservative Filipinos that oppose you it may be the liberal Filipinos that oppose you it may be the conflict may be religiously oriented or it may not it what the upper class may support you in one area and oppose you in another you have to look at each area and adapt your policies accordingly so it gets to be very localized and there's a great deal of responsibility on the small unit leader to adapt one overall policy whether it's benevolent or harsh may not provide enough of a guideline to make it work at the local level an additive to that this year I had a Filipino officer in my class Lieutenant Colonel Mack McClung he read the LUNE article and said that he said you may find this hard to believe but we originally started fighting against the communist insurrection the insurgency in the Philippines which they're still fighting today he said we tried to do it the way you first tried to do the Filipino-American war until we realized that we above all should understand the culture of the people we're going against and when we started to take it down to much smaller levels say well look at this province not the entire island was much more successful he said what Lynn says is exactly what we found that if we would follow the second American model not the first one that we would be successful in dealing with our own insurgency and I think that's important because today our small unit leaders are the ones that are going out there and they're the first interaction with the Bosnian Serbs or the Muslims or the folks in Samaya and so we have a second lieutenant first lieutenant captain on a very small scale that are the ones that are influencing we did the same thing in Vietnam later on where we went at the small level and it did make a difference if you could affect one village and take care of one village so we have a track record if you will of this the problem is that this goes against the whole trend of the west again this gets back to the 19th century and in this case the 20th as well what's the trend the trend is toward centralization whether it's political bigger government economic from small businesses to corporations it's toward centralization and the term rationalization streamlining making more efficient and you do that by getting bigger by combining and we're saying in this kind of war that doesn't work a centralized military policy isn't going to work because unless it's so general that the small unit leaders can take out of it what they need to if you try to be too specific at the higher level more than likely you're not going to succeed because the general policy will not apply to so much to which you're trying to apply it so this idea of approaching colonial warfare or unconventional warfare from a localized perspective again runs counter to the historical trend in the west which is to centralization, business, growth and coordination from the top it runs counter to the other things that we'll get to in minnegan's fire larger armies, an offensive doctrine those things are what is being taught in the schools like the equivalents of the command and general staff college even though they're at during this period the schools are just being born in all the western armies but you're right how to fight unconventional warfare is on the small scale whereas everything that's being taught is on the large scale and you have this dichotomy okay which do we use at what point in time and that's very hard to do and that's true if you look at andrew krepenevich's book the army in vietnam it's trying to get unconventional warfare through the army or even today what we call operations other than war a term that's about to change to something else just as vague in general again there's a resistance to that if you want the big army to fight the big war the problem is throughout most of our history it's this sort of issue whether it's colonial warfare or small wars or interventions that's what the military does most you've got to be ready to fight the big war but this sort of thing is more than likely what you'll end up doing in your career and it takes a different mindset and a different approach the indian wars now this is just stuck into the lesson we don't colonize the west or do we so when you look at the indian wars one question you might raise with the students and use as a basis for discussion is in what way do the indian wars look very similar to the colonial wars are they in fact colonial wars and then how are they fought and again as in the colonial experience you'll find both conventional and unconventional warfare in some cases conventional warfare three converging columns works in other cases it's a recipe for disaster down south especially against the apache where a critical adopt unconventional tactics to go after them it's a mixed bag it's not simple in any of these cases but there are trends that emerge and one is that very rarely do you fight a traditional conventional battle on a traditional conventional battlefield so again a comparison of the US indian wars to colonial warfare even though we generally don't think of them as colonial wars good point any other comments we'll move on let's talk men against fire up until this point we've really looked at the colonial warfare piece in the US in western europe in western europe is really colonizing africa in the United States you can argue that it was colonizing the western part of the United States and then the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico during this piece as we move to the men against fire piece we start looking at different things we start looking at industry which is just grown dramatically especially in the second half of the 19th century we look at as you said different ideologies social Darwinism that we look at we look at armies that are very very big fighting at least in Europe they do fight that pitched standing battle that we all want to do we look at an offensive doctrine and we look at a lot of the different wars that happened during this period the Franco-Prussian war the Astro-Prussian war you have the Russia-Japanese war you can look at the Boer war and contrast all those what comments did it can you lend either one of you for those are we there? the idea again looking at these trends of the 19th century and focusing on one particular industrialization and a product of that the new military technology as said earlier technological change will now begin to have a very pronounced impact on military affairs more so than it has previously in the 18th century that we have looked at up to now and with the technology from railroads which allow you to have larger armies and transport them to down to the tactics rifles which make the battlefield rifles and artillery which make the battlefield much more lethal and this men against fire implies that's what we're going to be focusing upon is the battlefield here and how does that change and the critical word I think is lethality to become a much more deadly place on which to conduct your affairs much more deadly or deadlier than the Napoleonic battlefield where because of the inaccuracy of muskets you can volley fire but hitting the target is problematical with a rifle you can hit the target if you take the time to aim you can hit your target fairly easily maybe overstating that given the confusion of the battlefield in theory at least the rifle is much more accurate and of longer range than the musket that's a fact the theory is whether or not it's actually more lethal but you've got this problem of lethality and the question then is how will soldiers or troops survive on a more lethal battlefield what do you have to do what tactics do you have to adopt what position do you have to take is the offense better than the defense given the new technology and if the offense is better what should you do how should the troops be how should the units be organized how should the tactics be set up for a more lethal battlefield and we saw in the American Civil War adjustments being made looser formations skirmishers much greater numbers than you had in the Napoleonic Wars you look for cover you just don't march shoulder to shoulder across a field you take off and when you need to you go to ground and find cover and you can stay down thanks to the fact now you've got a cartridge you can load while lying down you don't have to stand up to take out your powder horn and all of those mechanics of loading a smooth bore musket but now you've got a rifle with a cartridge you can do that from the ground and so many people go to cover the thing is you've got to adapt and the question is but how do you do what's best is the offense better than the defense well when you start seeing the results of the more lethal battlefield for example in the Russo-Japanese War you attend to the conclusion that to be on the defense is to be in the winning position you can slaughter anybody coming at you with rifles and later machine guns by the time the Russo-Japanese war machine guns and a more accurate artillery you can kill anybody trying to come to your position and vice versa if you try to get to the other side they will kill you so best to be on the defensive that would seem to be the lesson but that's not the lesson taken out of it going into the 20th century and into World War I Western countries are still looking at the offense as critical and if the battle feels more lethal which they all recognize they weren't ignorant of that we can find ways to overcome it and how do you do it mainly technology will simply have more bullets to shoot at them than they had us and to morale for a spree if you're a Frenchman you can win because you are a Frenchman and the other person isn't so the issue of morale this raises the whole issue of people under fire can they maintain that a spree can they maintain the morale the willingness to sacrifice that will get them across a lethal battlefield and into the enemies position and that's a question what Dupique addresses looking at the psychological factors he calls them the moral factors read psychological when he says moral I guess you're not going to read Dupique anyway if there's a reference to it if there's a reference to it you'll find a reference to moral factors but read psychological and not morale into moral but that raises the whole issue of troops under fire how will they perform and how can you get the best out of them small units where they can see their leader do you lead from the front, from the rear how do you communicate with them in a battlefield it's going to be very noisy and how do you keep them moving forward instead of backward or downward which would be the natural inclination coming under fire either to turn and run or to dig in and how do you do that the weapon systems that Larry talks about sometimes it's hard for people of our day and age to understand the changes here I mean the European wars that preceded World War I the Franco-Prussian War particularly it's where you start to see this new or better artillery artillery which has recoil systems so that they don't roll out of place every time they're fired which allows many more rounds to go down range and all of them being breach loading instead of being muzzle loading so when you look from Larry's perspective at the Franco-Prussian War it's the first time ever that the ability to fire ammunition outruns the ability to provide it Infantry ammunition is not a problem I mean the average soldier in the German Army when he cranks out into the Franco-Prussian War has enough ammunition on him to finish the war I mean most of them fire more than 80 or 90 rounds and they're carrying a basic load of 126 in the German Army but it's the artillery ammunition that makes such a gross difference with these huge weapons systems that fire on Paris as the war comes towards an end and you just von Moltke's trains cannot get enough ammunition that's kind of the precursor that should have told them something about war because as Larry says you'll look at the Schlieffen plan the next time out on the planet everything's swinging right and there were a grand total of four roads and two rails behind these two Army groups up there and there was no way they could get everything shoved into those little holes those little bottlenecks they've got but they just don't come to understand it the French call it a land but everybody it's the it's that offensive mindedness and they can't get away from it they can do fighting horse cavalry as the war begins and you've got, you know, the the lances and the sabers and all of this will soon be that spirit will be taken up by the guys in Falker triplanes with their scarves flying in the breeze but the attitude is still the same it's the offensive minded it's not manly to sit back and wait and shoot someone the way you fight this is by offensive spirits hitting each other you know it's telling that as you start the first battles of the war you have the Germans attacking with the Schlieffen plan and you have the French planning to attack also I mean that side which is being attacked it's pre done plans call for it to attack also and that's I think edifying in what Larry talks about even though you're being attacked you're the French you're being attacked you're outnumbered and your answer to this is still well I'll attack them and that goes along with the ideas and the attitudes that go into this now one weapon that we haven't talked about much and it's you know you really most of you will not even have seen one because they haven't been in our army for a very long time and that's a water cooled machine gun and when we think about machine guns today we think about M60s we think about 50 cals and systems you've got to change barrels on fairly regularly you've got to understand what a water cooled machine gun could do I mean a 30 caliber water cooled machine gun could fire 400 rounds a minute cyclic and as long as you put a belt into it and you kept water in the jacket and there was a guy in the crew whose mission was to keep water in the jacket you could fire at that well all day long you could fire at that rate so as you start this charge across open ground it happened in the Russia-Japanese war and there's a number of interlocking water cooled machine guns just imagine they can put out 400 rounds a minute off a tripod with a T&E mechanism so they're exceedingly active I have a tape of one taking out a 4x4 in about a 2 second burst and just ripping it to shreds and think when that could do to an infantry assault starting across and but that just wasn't picked up it's like in the Boer War that was just kind of an aberration raising this idea of the frontal assault becomes almost suicidal even though again nobody's willing to admit it until World War I and even then as you'll see when you get to it every time you attack and get repulsed the ideas will just throw more at them the next time and it'll work well what do you do if you can't attack them friendly and you have to attack well obviously you hit them on the flank the problem is they can adjust the rifles and the artillery to the flank and be just as deadly so the solution to the forward attack which is to simply go around and envelope and hit them on the flank you can't do it any more easily than you can get at them from the front it can be just as deadly another thing Jim said about logistics there were those like help me out on the French bloke who are arguing that war has become too costly one in terms of just natural resources in terms of logistics involved it's going to take so much even natural resources to fight a war it becomes counterproductive to fight secondly it will disrupt trade all the mechanisms that make life what it is will be casualties of war it's become too complex bloke is arguing that war has become anachronistic that has become so lethal and so financially costly so costly in resources and in manpower that a war if it's not short will become well it will be short because you'll have to end it you can't afford to continue it financially or in terms of your manpower and much of what he said about the battlefield came true in World War I what didn't come true was it wasn't a short war all sides showed that they were willing to make the sacrifices in manpower and in resources to continue the war even though there was no end in sight but in every other respect or in many other respects bloke was very prescient the problem is much of what he had to say about the lethality of the battlefield was that he was a terrorist because he was a civilian and the military experts were not willing to listen to that one point on the minute against fire I want to get in here in terms of the teaching method and that is a question I found that can generate discussion although the lesson itself just what does it take to fight should generate a lot of discussion is that make a comparison with today's battlefield with the Russians in the full to gap we have doctrine fort air land battle we had doctrine air land battle we're going to maneuver, we're going to get into the rear areas, we're going to disrupt their command and control their communications this sort of thing well all that sounds great highly mobile maneuvering force what happens when you're in your Abrams or you're Bradley the first mushroom cloud from a tactical nuke you're going to keep going forward or you're going to head to the rear or start digging down and many who were looking at the possibility of World War 3 before ICBMs at least got involved before you would have a nuclear exchange but looking at it on the battlefield many were arguing World War 3 would look much more like World War 1 than World War 2 because as soon as the tactical nuke started going off which was more or less built into the doctrine it would have been almost impossible to avoid the use of tactical nuke once you start seeing those you're going to dig in and get the safety, just self-preservation you're not going to be out there maneuvering around because when one of those goes off you're dead, it's not like a bullet maybe it'll get you, maybe it won't it'll get you, the fireball's going to take you and everybody around you and so the natural reaction would have been to dig in or to run but better perhaps to dig in and you may end up with not a continuous trench but a series of dug-in positions and a static war didn't happen so we don't know but there were those who argued what would it have taken to motivate people to go out into a nuclear battlefield where you're looking at something of the same question back then when you're having to face rifles more accurate artillery which you haven't seen before Larry brought up Yvonne Block in the discussion of how war had become so costly it would not go on and you might question why why the leaders of Germany and France had not learned anything from the American Civil War a war which everyone thought would be short the stories of the picnics on the hills over First Manassas and I mean those stories are true it wasn't believed going to be the damaging war that it turned out to be well that war is basically in Europe is basically put aside as just running around the wilderness and these weren't European armies much the way Larry talked about how we look at the Filipinos or the Cubans as somewhat less than us the Europeans look at the American army in the same way as an unorganized rabble so while there may have been some lessons on lethality on that battlefield which could have been learned and could have helped the Europeans and you know take a look at what defense did towards the end of the war they didn't learn the lesson because they chose to dismiss those people who were not them alright and that's a theme underestimating people a theme throughout military history and it shows up here again because they dismiss that war they don't use it at all and what they end up doing is a much bigger version of Petersburg by the time they're done because of newer weapons larger amounts of manpower but you still get basically what you have around Petersburg in 1865 an incredible trench system that you just you know eventually Grant finds his way around and Grant in Europe come come in the middle of the trench period because it goes from the from the Baltic all the way down to the Alps there's nowhere to go around by the time you get there so once they once this offensive mindedness we talked about proves to run out of steam short of Paris then you're destined to have Petersburg on a huge scale because people just don't learn from people that aren't them it's not the same experience alright concluding remarks I'll kind of wrap this up and get us on the road and get you all out of here we've looked at two very significant areas looked at colonial warfare and we've looked against men against fire the period that we're looking at is a broad period it's a lot of time from the end of the Civil War to right at the beginning of the World War One so you've got a lot of maneuver space out there that you can get through the readings that we have assigned cover everything in a general way there are more readings or there's an extra bibliography in the instructor notes in the instructor packet that you can look if you don't have the time to do it assign some of these extra readings like Ivan Block and depict to students and let them give a three to five, seven minute presentation on what they've learned the things that we're looking at are still subjects that we look at today men against fire we have a very lethal battlefield today how do we get our soldiers to get out there and fight colonial warfare we're still fighting that yes, Hong Kong is one of the last bastions of colonialism to be given up at least for the British how about for the United States the United States still owns Puerto Rico it's not a foreign country it is part of the United States and yet it is not part of the United States how do you look at issues like that Larry made a good point economically do we have colonies that are economically beholding to the US these are all things that we've done before a little more than a hundred years ago but they're still applicable today we don't need to keep reinventing the wheel and with that I think I'll close it thank you very much enjoy the rest of the tapes