It taught him the importance of morale, logistics and leadership more powerfully than any number of academic lectures

Sunday, March 3rd, 2024

The month after Louis XVI’s execution, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon obtained his first significant command:

He was put in charge of the artillery section of an expedition to ‘liberate’ three small Sardinian islands from the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia under Paoli’s nephew, Pier di Cesari Rocca, whom he privately derided as a ‘clothes-horse’.

[…]

They mutinied, and so the entire expedition was aborted by Rocca. A furious Napoleon was forced to spike his own cannon and throw his mortars into the sea.

[…]

It was an inauspicious start for the career of the new Caesar, but it taught him the importance of morale, logistics and leadership more powerfully than any number of academic lectures.

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Jim: No one buys books because no one reads books. There are books of great importance that practically no one has had access to for dozens or hundreds of years now available for free on the Internet Archive, and they have been “viewed” only a handful of times, let alone read. It would be comical were it not so tragic.
David Foster: Does this include books sold for Kindle and other e-readers? Sounds like it doesn’t. Also, I wonder how much more effectively books could be marketed by people outside the publishing establishment.
Phileas Frogg: And yet they continue to furiously, and quietly, ban or hide titles that they consider dangerous as rapidly as ever. Just ask Aleksandr Dugin, Harold Saltzman, or Jean Raspail. Odd.
Bob Sykes: One has to wonder what the aerodynamics of the huge WW II bomber formations were. Often hundreds of large aircraft flew in tight formations. PS. “Twelve O’Clock High” is still one of the best war films ever made.
Bruce: Begun, the drone wars have. Small drones are cheap and effective. Big drones, airplanes, and any static target you can Google is vulnerable. In ‘General Kenney Reports’, Kenney’s memoir of the Pacific War, he mentions Lindberg showing up quasi-illegally. Kenney put the man who babied a single-engine plane across the Atlantic in charge of training P-38 pilots to baby their fuel use, and P-38 ranges doubled.
Bob Sykes: Which is why Russia, China, Iran and North Korea have hypersonic missiles, and we don’t. Not even one successful test. Kunstler is pessimistic: https://kunstler.com/clu sterfuck-nation/pep-talk -on-a-dark-day/#more-216 11′
Gaikokumaniakku: “It’s unusual.” One might say it’s “unwonted.”
Dan Kurt: Re: “Selcouth” is not a word you see every day. It’s unusual. Ok. Strike selcouth and substitute eldritch.
Isegoria: “Selcouth” is not a word you see every day. It’s unusual.
Dan Kurt: To me this post is disconcerting. On reading it I experienced a strong sense that I had read it once before. What a selcouth déjà vu moment.
Gaikokumaniakku: Isaiah 5:20 Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who turn darkness to light and light to darkness, who replace bitter with sweet and sweet with bitter. 21Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight.
Phileas Frogg: Again the eternal conflict between the Real and the Nominal, and once more the Nominal lies. Never forget, lying is an act of aggression, and should always be treated as such. The more egregious the lie, the more aggressive the act. Respond accordingly.
Gaikokumaniakku: Tangentially related: 3M22 Zircon: Debunking Misconceptions. At the link, a military expert criticizes Russian hypersonic weapons.
Phileas Frogg: History is a gift and its study a blessing; even the people whose effects I have come to despise are so obviously superior to our present milieu that one can’t help but feel a sort of scruffy abashedness in the presence of their biographies. And, of course, it gets worse the further back you go. One wonders at the impression a fully fledged Adam in the Garden, before the Fall, would have had on us scampering apes. Darwin got it backwards, we didn’t evolve from an ape-like...
Bob Sykes: LBJ also kept a cooler of beer in that Caddy, and he usually was drinking a beer while he drove around.
Jim: Design really is everything.
Jim: Superb excerption.
Jim: I predicted thith.
Phileas Frogg: “Interestingly, working-class Americans are more likely to read local news, while the wealthy and highly educated favor national and global news.” I wonder how much of this is social norms vs self-perception. Do the wealthy and educated feel in touch with (or that they should be in touch with) national and global events, or is it mere mimicry? How about the working-class? The two are necessarily mutually exclusive of course, but I wonder if there’s a different primary...
Phileas Frogg: As advances in weapon’s have improved the range and effectiveness of the individual soldier’s impact on the battlefield, the number of soldiers has increased in importance relative to the quality of any individual soldier. It’s the Thermopylae Principle in reverse because of weapons advancements. Reminds me of RTS balancing, where to effectively implement melee units developers need to give them either unrealistic speed or durability relative to the ranged capabilities of...

Isegoria

It taught him the importance of morale, logistics and leadership more powerfully than any number of academic lectures

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