 It's important to learn stuff. Hello everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense. We are gonna start a new series here and I'm gonna title this thing the mouthful of a tutelage in blood, lessons from the past. And so we are gonna review past battles, past campaigns, past armies, maybe, just stuff like that in order to learn lessons. In general, I think there are kind of three major aspects to fully harness your martial American heritage, right? The first one is you need to be physically fit. You have to have some base level of physical fitness, right? And I'm not gonna tell you what that is. This isn't a workout channel, but you should have some base level of physical fitness. If you don't have that, it makes it a lot harder to, you know, embrace that martial American heritage. If you don't have that base level of physical fitness, it makes it a lot harder to, you know, fight. Fit warriors are usually good warriors. You know, if you look at any professional fighters, they are always going to be physically fit with some exceptions like big country or whatever. But in general, that's a thing, right? The best fighters are always physically fit. So you should have some degree of physical fitness and how far down that road you wanna go depends on you, but have that and make the rest of your life better, easier to get starting strength, read it, there's a review of that book on this channel. Just, okay. The second thing you have to have are skills. You have to have the right skills. And I'm not talking just about shooting skills, right? Like being able to get the gun out and align those sights and press the trigger and being able to do a reload and being able to clear a double feet on your rifle. I'm not talking about just those skills. Although those are of course important, right? We're talking about all the skills and kind of war fighting stuff. And some of those skills may differ based on your job, right? But you need to know stuff, how to like dig a hole in the ground and how to work the radio and how to collect water and pack your pack so it's even. I mean, all those kinds of things you have to know in order to be an effective fighter, right? The internet and YouTube are replete with videos on physical fitness and skills. If you don't believe me, just go ahead and try search, right? Most of the channels you probably subscribe to in the gun world are gear related and then beyond that are skill related, right? So gear is definitely the big winner on YouTube. You know, this gun, that gun, this pack, whatever. And I get that, I like gear. And then of course there's skills. How to do this straw, how to make this shot, how to do long range shooting, how to whatever, right? Those are the predominant things that we talk about when it comes to the gun world. However, there is a third thing that I think is important, if not arguably more important than the other ones, and that is having an understanding of tactics and strategy. Tactics and strategy. There's not that many videos about this and there are very, very few and I don't really subscribe to any. Maybe you have some hidden gem. If so, please let me know in the comments because I'll subscribe to that. I am interested more and more in having a good mental understanding of tactics and strategy. Now, what is that? First of all, tactics and strategy are different things, okay? There's tactics and the strategy. Strategy is usually the larger level campaign kind of level idea of what we're trying to do. What's our overall strategy? Well, overall we're trying to use the strategy of cutting them off from their food source so that they have to surrender and quit. That's the strategy. The tactics are the on the ground in the Pew Pew time. What am I gonna do? Where am I gonna go? How am I gonna act in order to accomplish that overall strategy? That's a rough and quick. When I first started getting into tactics and trying to learn more about it, I was really confused and I thought tactics was just battle drills, right? Tell me what the tactics are. I was very interested in the science aspect of tactics and there's a science and an art side. We'll talk about that. But I was very interested in just the science aspect, like just what are the, I thought tactics was like, hey, we take contact, you know, and then we're gonna fire maneuver, right? I'm gonna shoot your team's gonna move, then your team's gonna shoot, then we're gonna move, right? Like, I thought that was the tactics or we take contact and we're just gonna peel out of here, you know, and do a running peel. And I'm like, oh, those are tactics, the battle drills. But that's not what tactics are. The best way I ever heard tactics explained, and I can't remember who said this, so I apologize for missing the credit, is tactics are a common sense solution to a battlefield problem. A common sense solution to a battlefield problem. I thought that was really, really helpful. When we talk about tactics, we're trying to talk about how are good ways to solve battlefield problems. And the principles by which we do that, things like speed, things like surprise, these are universal throughout all human history, which is why studying past battles and past campaigns and past armies is still relevant and still helpful today. Because the principles that guided those victories or defeats are still the same principles at play in all conflict and will be the same principles that are played in all conflict until Jesus comes back. We have been fighting battles as humans for a very long time. We've been doing it since we left the garden. So what that means is that at this point in human history, we have an absolute wealth of knowledge with which to draw from. We can look at thousands of years of past battles and conflicts, and there's a lot of them. And we can still learn those lessons. We can still look at the same principles that drove those victories or defeats in the past. And we can apply those same principles today to either gain victory ourselves or avoid defeat. So with that as the introduction and that as the backdrop, I want you to understand where this series is going and why we're doing what we're doing. We're trying to harness more of this third, like if there's three legs to this stool of embracing your martial American heritage, I want to embrace that one more and we need to lean into that more and we need to have a good understanding of that. So I'm a huge fan of history. And often when I watch history channels and they review past battles, they just tell me what happened, right? Well, this battle happened and this guy moved here to this and so as a result of that battle, this historical event occurred and blah, blah, blah. And that's all interesting and I enjoy that. But rarely, if ever, I don't think ever, I have seen people look at that past battle through the lens of modern war fighting. And that's what I want to do. This is not a history channel as much as I enjoy history. This is a channel where we are going to embrace our martial American heritage. And so what we're going to do is we're going to review these past battles but then in light of that battle, we are going to look at the principles that drove that victory and how they still apply today. So I don't want to get confused. I'm not going to give huge, long explanations of battles on this channel. I will try to link to other videos of history channels that do give those explanations because again, if you're into that, I'm into that. I totally get it, that's super interesting. But what I want to do here is review the battle and then talk about the principles. Last thing I'm going to say, if you don't consider yourself a person who does a lot of reading or is super interested in history or super interested in this kind of stuff, that's who this series is for. I'm going to go out and read this stuff because I like doing it, right? And I hope you do too and I hope this sparks your interest to dive deeper down that rabbit hole. But my goal here is to give you just enough explanation of the battle and enough explanation of some of the lessons we can learn from that so that you can be better equipped to embrace your martial American heritage. On that note, I would highly suggest you read tactics by the Marine Corps, MCDP one dash three tactics. I have a review of this book on this channel. It's an easy, easy read. The pages are not long, as you can see. So again, written for crayon eaters, right? Like this book is super accessible and it will really help you get the most out of this video series because you'll be able to see and understand those continuing recurring themes. So I hope that's helpful. I'm trying not to make this introduction too long. I'm looking forward to seeing you on the next video when we start to study the battles themselves. Do brave deeds and endure.