Curated playlist
Military strategy
- Phase (combat)Phase (combat) is the term military planners use to describe a distinct period within a longer operation, one link in a serial chain of logically connected activities aimed at a defined objective or goal. Not every phase ends in a…
- EncirclementEncirclement is the military term for one of the most desperate situations a fighting force can face: isolated, surrounded, and cut off from any help. The word conjures images spanning thousands of years, from Alexander the Great to modern…
- Military strategyMilitary strategy sits at a peculiar intersection: it is the art of violence in service of politics. Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian theorist who lived from 1780 to 1831, captured this in one of the most-quoted lines in the history of…
- Attrition warfareAttrition warfare is built on a single, brutal idea: you do not defeat your enemy in one blow. You grind them down, loss by loss, until they have nothing left to fight with. The Latin root of the word "attrition" is atterere, meaning "to…
- FortificationA fortification is a military construction built to defend territory in war, and to hold rule over a region in peacetime. The word comes from the Latin fortis, meaning strong, and facere, meaning to make. Long before any of that vocabulary…
- MilitarismMilitarism is the belief that a state should maintain a strong military capability and use it aggressively to expand national interests and values. At its most extreme, it tips into something more: the glorification of soldiers, the…
- Strategic goal (military)A strategic military goal is the highest level of organisational achievement in any military organisation. It sits at the very top of the planning hierarchy, defining what a war or campaign is ultimately meant to accomplish. Before a…
- Trench warfareTrench warfare turned the ground itself into a weapon. A defender crouched in a ditch, shielded from small arms and substantially sheltered from artillery, could kill several approaching men before they ever reached him. That single fact…
- Deterrence theoryDeterrence theory begins with an uncomfortable admission. Robert McNamara, who managed the Cuban Missile Crisis as US Secretary of Defense, later said that "it was luck that prevented nuclear war." Dean Acheson called the same crisis's…
- Grand strategyGrand strategy is the art of directing every instrument a nation possesses, military and nonmilitary alike, toward a single political end. Not just armies, not just diplomacy, but finance, industry, public morale, and the very structure of…
- BlitzkriegBlitzkrieg lit up the front pages of Western newspapers in September 1939, when journalists scrambling to describe the German assault on Poland landed on a single electrifying word: lightning war. Time magazine called it "a war of quick…