Curated playlist
Military strategy
- Phase (combat)Not every military phase involves a battle. Some are spent gathering intelligence or moving supplies.
- EncirclementFinnish soldiers in the Winter War trapped much larger Soviet columns in the forest. They called the tactic motti.
- Military strategyWho owns war, the soldier or the politician? Clemenceau said war is too important to be left to soldiers.
- Attrition warfareNapoleon's army marched into Russia in 1812 and was ground away almost entirely.
- FortificationCannons made forts safer by forcing builders to lower their walls. Engineers sank them into ditches.
- MilitarismPrussia once spent 73 percent of its yearly budget on its army. A writer said it was an army with a country.
- Strategic goal (military)A military strategic goal can be about keeping a war from spreading, not winning it.
- Trench warfareTrench warfare made a ditch deadlier than many weapons. A defender could kill several attackers before they reached him.
- Deterrence theoryThe people who ran nuclear deterrence said luck, not skill, kept the Cold War from ending in nuclear war.
- Grand strategyConstantine pulled Rome's legions off the frontiers and put them in cities. Historians still debate the result.
- BlitzkriegHitler privately called the word blitzkrieg a completely idiotic word. He later denied ever using it at all.