BILL BUPPERT : Chasing Ghosts

But so what do you you run over its Libertarian Institute? You run this back to basically the whole post-World War Two era.

Have you found any common themes within U.S. military failure, adventurism, or is it just a series of just like random ass mistakes that we keep making?

Wow.

You know, of course you're going to have random ass mistakes.

I think that's a great qualifier.

Of course you are, because as Clausewitz taught us in Conflict and War, fog, friction, those things that you did not plan on, they are inevitably going to occur.

I know this is a family show, so I won't cuss, but you'll get where I say this otherwise.

But Newton's third law is a stone cold mother fracker.

I mean it.

And and it will visit you every time.

You know, you and I are familiar where they say, oh, artillery is the king of battle.

No, it's not.

Murphy is.

Because things are inevitably going to get screwed up and all those great constructs and planning and you must plan.

There's no doubt in my mind, all those great constructs and planning, if they don't have liquidity, intellectual honesty, and adaptive capability to change on a dime when they have to.

This was embraced by German mission command theory.

I'm going to butcher the German, Auftragstaktik.

And please, apologies for many German speakers if I pronounce that wrong.

But what it says is, Young officers in the field, like Bill and Jim, we're there at the platoon company level, the bloody edge of the spear, and we know the intent of the commander in the German Army four levels up, in the American Army three levels up.

So in the American Army, as a platoon leader, I have to know the battalion commander's intent and what he was told by his brigade or regimental commander to get done.

If I know that, and everybody's decimated, but I've also informed my troops so that when they're on the bloody edge, as they are, and every company commander to my left and right is decimated, to include my battalion commander, I can still carry on the fight if I'm the senior officer in charge because I know what we're trying to accomplish.

Now, the biggest illustration of this is that in the...

Spring of 1940, when the Germans were to launch their French campaign, you had Guderian and Manstein and all the rest of them.

They were on the eastern border of France, where Germany and France meet, and they were saying, look, here's the plan.

I need you guys in 60 days to be on the Atlantic.