Schubert,
I listened to General Butler's commentary in full yesterday and my question on if he was a jazz aficionado was an attempt at putting some joy on an otherwise very real and apocalyptic subject. The subject has been talked about ad nauseum from 1946 onwards by thousands of important men and women in military and political spheres. Butlers short commentary regarding his thoughts on the subject was short and correct on all points and his last say was certainly sobering to say the least.
I am sure you are aware that after the destruction of Nazi Germany we invited many of their top generals to the U.S.A. to hear their perspectives on the war they just lost and on future world conflicts. We greatly admired their doctrine of combined arms war of maneuver using an armored fist supported by airpower at the "Schwerpunkt" and a term called "Auftragstaktiks"(giving more authority to lower ranking officers to exploit advantageous situations in real time as they presented themselves on the battlefield without going through a long chain of command) which the German command structure was way ahead of anyone at the time. They lost because they were arrogant and bit off more then they could chew.
The reason we were so interested in debriefing them was because the military here, even though victorious, knew that it took 3 world powers and a lopsided amount of endless war resources to defeat them and so were interested in their conventional warfare tactical and operational doctrines. So even in the period 1946 - 1955, as we were developing and testing nuclear weapons, we were already thinking that nuclear weapons were not the solution and were interested in advancing our conventional war doctrines. The only one who thought otherwise at the time was General Douglas MacArthur.
General Norman Schwarzkopf read many German Panzer Commanders books (memoirs) before the Kuwait war and followed their doctrines.
I listened to General Butler's commentary in full yesterday and my question on if he was a jazz aficionado was an attempt at putting some joy on an otherwise very real and apocalyptic subject. The subject has been talked about ad nauseum from 1946 onwards by thousands of important men and women in military and political spheres. Butlers short commentary regarding his thoughts on the subject was short and correct on all points and his last say was certainly sobering to say the least.
I am sure you are aware that after the destruction of Nazi Germany we invited many of their top generals to the U.S.A. to hear their perspectives on the war they just lost and on future world conflicts. We greatly admired their doctrine of combined arms war of maneuver using an armored fist supported by airpower at the "Schwerpunkt" and a term called "Auftragstaktiks"(giving more authority to lower ranking officers to exploit advantageous situations in real time as they presented themselves on the battlefield without going through a long chain of command) which the German command structure was way ahead of anyone at the time. They lost because they were arrogant and bit off more then they could chew.
The reason we were so interested in debriefing them was because the military here, even though victorious, knew that it took 3 world powers and a lopsided amount of endless war resources to defeat them and so were interested in their conventional warfare tactical and operational doctrines. So even in the period 1946 - 1955, as we were developing and testing nuclear weapons, we were already thinking that nuclear weapons were not the solution and were interested in advancing our conventional war doctrines. The only one who thought otherwise at the time was General Douglas MacArthur.
General Norman Schwarzkopf read many German Panzer Commanders books (memoirs) before the Kuwait war and followed their doctrines.