Quote:

We don't need to forget the atrocities of the Civil War. We need to remember them so we don't repeat them!



WWI marked the lsat of that type of warfare where men would face off in straight lines and fire at each other. People finally realizewd just how futile that situation was, but as always, only after the fact.

Army generals are said to always be fighting the "last war" in engineering circles, meaning that technologie that are brought about generally languish while old curmudgeons keep on trying to do that which they know well while exhibiting untoward prejudice about new inventions, techniques and such.

The Polish Army in WWII was still putting all of their faith in the horse cavalry when Hitler's planes and tanks hit them. Just one example, there are many more from just about every nation.

The US "Civil War" history is replete with an outstanding example of this kind of buffoonery in the then new technology of the repeating rifle. Union generals, after extensive so-called "testing" refused to go with the early manual action repeating rifle designs, stating that their reason was that it "wasn't a musket" and "couldn't be fired from the prone position" simply because the early exampes of that new technology were lever-action. Apparently the concept of simply turning the rifle 90 degrees to ***** the lever eluded them.

But it did not elude the Confederacy, which purchased and used repeating rifles to great advantage. The Stevens lever action rifle became a symbol of the victorious Confederate armies for a while. (The Confederacy literally dominated the Union army for quite some time at the start through middle of this war.)

In our times, today's technologies have literally reshaped everything about the subject. Semi-Autonomous, Autonomous and Tele-Operated Drones, Missiles that can deliver payloads with literal pinpoint accuracy repeatedly, 3rd and 4th generation Night Vision capabilities, Air Power that, when implemented properly without idiotic ROE's, can attain complete Air Superiority over an enemy in a matter of hours, "Eye in the Sky" sattelites coupled with aircraft battle management, and, of course, the fact that we no longer employ drafted civilians for the task.

BTW -- the .50 and .60 caliber, slow-moving lead "Minie Ball" fired by the outdated muskets used during the Civil War was the thing most directly responsible for all the amputations, because the system resulted in crushed and broken bones that even today might represent a surgical repair challenge with low success in the result. The Geneva Convention addressed that problem directly and that is why we all can banter the term, "Full Metal Jacket" about ammo, though I doubt most really know what that really means or entails, or why it is even there at all.

War is not a "nice" thing.

But sometimes we have to do things that are not nice in order to survive what someone else intends for us.


--Mac

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