battle fail blog

[juliastinson]

To me, there are a startling number of armies in these readings and previous readings who do not prepare for battle enough. They don’t think everything through to the end. So many attacks are caught off guard by winter, opposing armies, not enough supplies, not enough people, poor tactics, bad routes, or even miscalculating routes like in the last unit. With the amount of energy spent to assemble an army and get it to battle, it is ignorant that important details like that are overlooked. It seems to me that many of these attacks could be improved if they spent more time planning and thinking things through. I liked the psychological warfare Brock used. I really admire his battle tactics and his leadership. He was brave and resourceful. If more people approached battle from that perspective, and didn’t rush to attack I feel like more would be successful. That is not to say that surprise attacks are wrong, I just think that some sieges seem doomed from the start as a result of poor planning. THe americans had so many people, they could have been so much more powerful.

[Mr. Delainey]

I'd tend to agree with you, Julia. Brock was by all accounts an exceptional leader. He was the type of person that men just followed because he had it so together. He understood tactics, he understood what his men could or could not be expected to achieve, he was a realist, and he had an appreciation for the fighting on the frontier.