The Plan Didn't Fail at the Beach — It Failed Before Anyone Boarded a Ship

I've covered this ground before. In August's piece on the Maginot Line, I argued that the fortifications themselves performed as designed — the problem was the strategic theory bui…

The standard account of the Battle of Britain credits radar, the Spitfire, and Fighter Command's nerve. What it underweights is octane. As War on the Rocks details, high-octane avi…

The tides at Inchon rose and fell more than thirty feet. Twice a day, the Yellow Sea retreated entirely, leaving miles of thick mud between any landing force and the shore. The har…

The popular image of Kursk is a steel avalanche — thousands of tanks grinding against each other across the steppe in history's largest armored engagement. That framing flatters th…

I covered the command-and-control architecture of the Battle of Britain in a July post that argued the Luftwaffe lost to an idea, not a fighter. What I want to revisit here is a mo…

The standard account of Operation Barbarossa's failure runs something like this: the Germans were winning until the Russian winter arrived, froze their engines, and stopped them ou…

The pattern is almost boring by now. Precise strikes, impressive kill chains, technological adaptation that would have seemed like science fiction to a Vietnam-era planner — and th…

The Viet Cong attacked more than 100 towns and cities simultaneously in the early hours of January 31, 1968. An elite squad fought its way into the grounds of the U.S. Embassy in S…

The German retreat from the Marne on September 9, 1914, is usually treated as the moment the war changed — the point where a swift German victory became impossible and the Western…

The same lesson keeps getting rediscovered. Armies plan for the battle; they forget to plan for the supply chain that makes the battle possible. A new doctoral thesis on Red Army r…

The firestorm that consumed Dresden on the nights of February 13–14, 1945 produced one of the most contested casualty figures in modern military history. Not because the evidence i…

The French army that faced Germany in May 1940 was not, by most measurable standards, an inferior force. Nader Elhefnawy's reassessment of the campaign makes the point plainly: the…

The conventional postmortem on the recent U.S.-Iran conflict focuses on American airpower, Israeli precision strikes, and Iranian missile salvos. That's the wrong frame. The more i…

Looking at the source pool honestly: Source [1] is a wargaming blog summarizing a post-war battle summary — it's a low-authority source by this publication's editorial standards, a…

In late September 1950, Douglas MacArthur stood at the apex of his career. The Inchon landing had worked — spectacularly, against the odds, against the advice of nearly every naval…

The standard military history narrative treats logistics as the unglamorous backstory to the "real" campaign. The sources that have crossed my desk recently suggest the opposite: i…

Five U-boats. That's what Admiral Karl Dönitz sent to American coastal waters in January 1942 — just five submarines to test what lay off the Eastern Seaboard. The results were cat…

The standard account of Operation Barbarossa runs something like this: Germany came astonishingly close to winning, was undone by Hitler's strategic meddling, the Russian winter, a…

The 150th anniversary of the Little Bighorn fell last month, and the commemorations did what they always do — centered on Custer, on the ridge, on the last stand. That framing is a…