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Bevin Alexander is the author of five books on military history, & his battle studies of the Korean War, written during his decorated service as a combat historian, are stored in the National Archives. He lives in Bremo Bluff, Virginia. (Bowker Author Biography)

Inkluderar namnen: Alexander Bevan, Bevin Alexander

Foto taget av: Caston Studio

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This is a book whose argument would be more effective had the author not apparently refocused his manuscript after September 11. Alexander, a journalist and writer of general audience works on military subjects, challenges the relevance and effectiveness of the "Western way of war" as articulated by, among others, Victor Davis Hanson and John Keegan. That model emphasizes intense, direct conflict focused on decisive battles whose outcomes are determined by relative loss rates. Alexander's "13 rules," in contrast, emphasize indirection: striking at weak spots, employing deception, paralyzing systems as opposed to killing men. Though the research bases of Alexander's case studies are uniformly thin, he does not seriously abuse his evidence. Most of the battles he cites in demonstration of a particular "rule" more or less support the argument. Cannae, for example, is an appropriate example of a battle of encirclement. Yet Alexander (How Hitler Could Have Won World War II) also seeks to connect his "rules of war" directly to the contemporary "war on terror." In this case, the drastic asymmetries between the adversaries make the relationships to historic battles fought by more similar forces difficult to establish. Alexander usually winds up postulating a connection rather than demonstrating it. The link, for example, between operational-level "cauldron battles" like those fought in Russia in 1941, and the tactics employed by the U.S. in Afghanistan against the Taliban, is at best tenuous, if not entirely inferential. Alexander's case should not be dismissed, but is best approached with intellectual caution. As the U.S. prepares for war, look for interest in this title to be high. (Review 2002 - https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780609610398)
EXAMPLES: Feign retreat: Pretend defeat, fake a retreat, then ambush the enemy while being pursued. Used to devastating effect by the North Vietnamese against U.S. forces during the Vietnam War.
• Strike at enemy weakness: Avoid the enemy’s strength entirely by refusing to fight pitched battles, a method that has run alongside conventional war from the earliest days of human conflict. Brilliantly applied by Mao Zedong to defeat the Chinese Nationalists.
• Defend, then attack: Gain possession of a superior weapon or tactical system, induce the enemy to launch a fruitless attack, then go on the offensive. Employed repeatedly against the Goths by the Eastern Roman general Belisarius to reclaim vast stretches of the Roman Empire.
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MasseyLibrary | 1 annan recension | Feb 21, 2024 |
1CSun Tzu at Gettysburg 1D by Bevin Alexander

If you hate and/or fear war, 1CSun Tzu at Gettysburg 1D by Bevin Alexander will not assuage your misgivings. Alexander argues that while it is possible for a general to engage in battle in such a way that he preserves his army and his soldiers 19 lives as much as possible (while however, destroying his enemy 19s soldiers unless his counterpart is wise enough to see that he must withdraw or surrender when the outcome of the battle becomes a foregone conclusion), the overwhelming majority of generals have not understood this and most likely still do not understand; they have often developed fixed ideas about warfare that are not true and that lead to the entirely unnecessary slaughter of their own troops. This is a fact that does not yield confidence in generals.

Generals with the greatest prestige and even those who have won the love and respect of their troops have nevertheless too often been men who did not see, for example, that a frontal attack on their enemy 19s strongest position, to paraphrase Alexander, calls upon the valor of his troops to compensate for the general 19s lack of imagination. George Washington, Robert E. Lee, and Omar Bradley, were generals who meant no harm to their men but often made them pay for tremendous errors in judgment. (Washington, in my view, was half a good general because at least he knew when to withdraw from a losing battle, and he also knew how to deceive the enemy 14a trait every good general should have in Alexander 19s view.)

This book recounts the histories of several military campaigns from the American War of Independence, to the Napoleonic wars of early nineteenth century Europe, to the American Civil War, and on down to the twentieth century. As he describes each campaign or battle, Alexander keeps a translation of an ancient Chinese book, The Art of War, at his elbow ands tells us what he thinks the legendary author, Sun Tzu, might have said about the historic campaigns and battles under examination. (In a footnote, Alexander admits that Sun Tzu cannot be proven to have existed, and his book might actually be a collection of anonymous military aphorisms.) Alexander says that there is no other book on military strategy quite like The Art of War. Alexander compares it to Western texts on war and finds them inadequate. Most Western writers on war have written longer books than The Art of War without saying so much.

Sun Tzu 19s basic ideas are that the general should see quickly where the enemy 19s strengths and weaknesses are and evaluate what the enemy is trying to do: what is his plan or strategy? Then act to attack the weaknesses, not the strengths, and always attack the enemy 19s strategy rather than attack the enemy himself. This kind of common sense is often avoided by generals, even great ones. Gen. Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate forces in Virginia during the American Civil War, was a brave man and was respected by his men and even his enemies, but he had a bad habit of attacking any army he saw; the bigger the enemy forces, the more he wanted to attack them. And he wanted to attack them in their middle where they were strongest.

At the Battle of Gettysburg, in early July of 1863, Lee 19s subordinate, Gen. James Longstreet, advised Lee to go around the Union Army and put the Confederates between the Union troops and Washington, DC. The idea was to panic the Union generals into thinking that the Confederates were going to attack Washington, something they were frightened the Confederates might do. (Sun Tzu advises the wise general to find out what the enemy holds dear and use it.) The Confederates could find defensive positions along the way so that when the Union Army inevitably attacked them, the Confederates would win. (Six out of seven times, during the Civil War, when one side attacked the other while the defenders were in any kind of fortified position, the defenders won.) Instead, Lee declared that he could see the enemy, and he would attack them directly. In other words, Lee became the attacker against the Union 19s defensive positions, and the odds were that the defenders would win, which they did. The Confederates suffered heavy losses that they could ill afford. The Civil War dragged on for two more years, but it really ended on July 3, 1863 at Gettysburg.

One of Sun Tzu 19s basic tactical formulae is the zheng/qi combination. It is a kind of one-two punch. The zheng movement is a conventional attack or provocation toward the enemy 19s strong point, but the idea is not to make a real attack. The goal is to get the enemy to bring all of his resources to bear at the point where he thinks your main move is going to be. He is wrong, however, because the zheng is followed by a qi move, often an end-run around the enemy 19s weakest flank or some similar attack on a 1Cvoid 1D in the enemy 19s defense. This can be summed up by the advice to 1Chit 19em where they ain 19t. 1D

At the outbreak of World War I, the German 19s reached into a cubbyhole in their war department and pulled out a two-decades-old plan for defeating France. The idea of the von Schlieffen Plan was to feint an invasion into France with a few divisions to draw the French army to the German border, then send most of the German Army around through Belgium, into France behind the French Army, go around behind Paris and then hit the French Army from behind, catching them between the two parts of the German Army.

Alexander thinks it was a very good plan and that Sun Tzu would have agreed. Many historians and military experts concluded that it was a bad plan, however, because it collapsed and was followed by a terrible stalemate that went on for years, soldiers on each side facing each other from rows of permanent parallel trenches, dying from disease as often as weaponry. But, points out Alexander, it wasn 19t the plan that failed; it was General Helmuth von Moltke. Not to be confused with his uncle who was of the same name but a superior strategist, the Moltke of World War I looked at the Schlieffen Plan and failed to understand it. Instead of feinting a direct attack while making a strategic end-run, Moltke modified the plan drastically by making the direct invasion his real strategy. He put most of his troops into the zheng move while sending only a token force to do the qi or end-run move.

Not understanding why the Schlieffen Plan actually failed, most of the military thinkers of the early twentieth century concluded that trench warfare must be inevitable and would be the shape of warfare far into the future. So it was at the outset of World War II. However, a lowly major general in the German Army was not fooled by the collapse of the Schlieffen Plan and realized that something like it could work; he recommended a variation on the Schlieffen Plan only with fast-moving tanks in the qi movement. This is what came to be called the German Bliztkrieg or 1Clightning war 1D that defeated the French within weeks in 1940. The French and their British allies never saw it coming because they had convinced themselves that it had failed before because there was something wrong with the plan, not something wrong with the general who had botched it the first time. Later, during World War II, Gen. George Patton recommended a similar end-run around the German Army in France. Alexander believes that if Gen. Dwight Eisenhower had given the go-ahead, Patton 19s strategy would have ended the war a year or two earlier.

Gen. Omar Bradley was the chief general in the field during the Allied invasion of German-held France. He does not come off well in Alexander 19s book. Certainly a man who loved his troops, Bradley was nevertheless too unimaginative to recognize that Patton 19s bold plan to encircle the German army and press into Germany itself could have brought a swift end to the war. Likewise, when General Douglas MacArthur proposed what in Alexander 19s view was a brilliant plan to invade Korea at Inchon and cut off the North Korean army, Bradley was against it. When MacArthur was given his head anyway, Bradley was mystified that the plan worked and attributed MacArthur 19s victory to luck. Alexander attributes it to a sound plan that would have received the approval of Sun Tzu. Unfortunately, MacArthur himself followed up with a plan to invade North Korea. This time the genius was absent, and the plan failed for reasons that Sun Tzu would have predicted.

It is striking that only the rare general (Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, Thomas 1CStonewall 1D Jackson, Patton), on his own, has come up with similar insights to those of Sun Tzu. In the Far East, however, it is no accident that generals have these insights because they have read Sun Tzu 19s book. During the American involvement in Vietnam, the U.S. military came up against the North Vietnamese Gen. Nguyen Giap whose military success has been attributed to his knowledge of the Chinese strategy game called go, and his familiarity with the teachings of Sun Tzu. At one point, American Gen. William Westmoreland thought he could lure Giap into a pitched battle, but Giap easily foresaw that it was a trap. Westmoreland wanted the enemy to do what he expected them to do; when they did not, he had no plan B. If he had read Sun Tzu, he would have known better. The Art of War advises the wise general to know what his enemy is actually doing and not engage in wishful thinking.

Sun Tzu 19s strategies could be applied not only to war but to any competitive endeavor including business, politics, sports and other games. During the debate over the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, most of the opponents of the proposed national charter complained about the implications of its structure for domestic policy. The Federalist Papers, written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, straightaway advanced arguments for the Constitution based on its foreign policy implications, arguing that the fledgling United States needed the document 19s strengthening of the national government in dealing with foreign political and economic as well as military threats. The Federalists were hitting the Anti-federalists where they weren 19t; it was an end-run around their arguments. There is no evidence that Hamilton, Madison or Jay had ever read Sun Tzu, but neither had Napoleon Bonaparte, Stonewall Jackson or George Patton; they hit upon similar insights by using common sense, which is what most of The Art of War is. Unfortunately, as 1CSun Tzu at Gettysburg 1D demonstrates, common sense is not always common.

In his final chapter, Alexander summarizes the lessons of each battle he has examined and remedies the books tendency to present Sun Tzu on the fly rather than systematically. The author breaks down Sun Tzu's art into the basic maxims: Don't go to war if there is an honorable way to avoid it, figuring out the enemy's strategy not your own is key because you will win by defeating his strategy, don't attack the enemy at his strongest point but attack at the weakest, an all purpose tactic is to present the enemy with an apparent frontal attack but then go around the enemy and surprise-attack his rear or flank, make sure all commanders understand these principles and are intelligent. Good examples of the last point are Napoleon and Hitler. Napoleon was a good commander but he was so insecure about rivals that he promoted generals who were obedient but stupid. Hitler thought he could micromanaged a world war from his bunker and incompetently drove his army to defeat, ignoring the judgment of his more competent generals.
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MilesFowler | 5 andra recensioner | Jul 16, 2023 |
I remember that this was probably one of the better books I read that year. However, it was a busy time back then, so barely made a note in my journal.
 
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bloodravenlib | Aug 17, 2020 |
Very informative book. I was really intrigued by how different Jackson, Lee and Davis truely were. They all had a particular way that they wished to fight the war and all of them were polar oppisites. I wish more people had showed interest earlier in Jackson's way of thinking because it could have saved a number of losses I believe.
 
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BelindaS7 | Apr 14, 2020 |

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