#Strategy and Tactics

[almackey]

From Jomini to Dennis Hart Mahan: The Evolution of Trench Warfare and the American Civil War

This article by Edward Hagerman is from Civil War History, Vol. XIII, No. 3, September 1967, pp. 197-220. “The transition from fluid strategic and tactical movement in the early campaigns of Napoleon to the trench warfare of the American Civil War began in the period of the Empire and the Restoration. During the period of transition and theory, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the wars of…

[brainrotcharacters]

Wade's undiagnosed adhd (switching between dual wielding swords, guns, and daggers) is only ever matched by Logan's undiagnosed autism (noticing weak spots in his opponents and going 100% momentum + force on his attacks)

@wadesknife this for u bb

[jonasgoonface]

maybe consider violence.

[linderosse]

@knowledgebear Thank you!!! And I’m so glad to see more TriStrat fans in here!!!

Triangle Strategy is an amazing game, folks. If you’re into tactical RPGs at all, I’d highly recommend it.

Anyways, here’s a lil’ crossover art for all of you Zelda/tactical RPG folks: Flora (BotW/TotK Zelda) and Frederica Aesfrost had a swell time discussing various worlds, histories, and timelines. Turns out the Zelda series in particular has a lot of time shenanigans going on (wow, who would have guessed 😆)

I’m actually also playing a random-army, deathless, NG++ challenge run of TriStrat right now! If you’re interested, stop by and join me! It’s been a blast so far!!

Info Post

[apas-95]

I do think it's funny when anarchists try to intimate that the communism Marxists ultimately intend to build is actually the same as the smallholder economy anarchists desire, because they just hear the word 'stateless' and assume (as libertarians are wont to do) that due to Human Nature, society without a state would naturally result in 'everyone's a small business owner' communalism

[n64retro]

Ike from Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance (Intelligent Systems, Nintendo, 2005) for Nintendo Gamecube.

[serpentface]

Interview Question for Etsushir:

What was the vibe like as a foot soldier during the suppression of the North Finn Rebellion? Did it feel doomed from the start or did it only fall apart once the Odomache was assaulted and killed?

[the-daily-dreamer]

I swear at this point team black just looks for reasons to hate team green because tell me why every take I see from the previous episode about aemond is that he’s pathetic and a loser for turning around when he sees a bunch of huge dragons ready to jump him? That he only attacks when it’s an “unfair” fight (sneak attacks).

Like how is that a bad thing?? That’s smart. That’s called not going into an unwinnable fight (a la Rhaenys). That’s called fighting to your advantage. That’s called being good in battle.

At this point team green characters could sit in a room breathing and team black would find a way to complain about them or make fun of them.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

In the same bed, but not on the same page

[First] Prev <–->Next

[dimonds456]

Headcanon: Papyrus believes that everyone has the capacity for good and change because Sans also believes that. He's the one who taught him that, and Papyrus ran with it to its extreme.

[brainrotcharacters]

just giggled kicked my feet twirled my hair again

[quotesfrommyreading]

Much of the public discussion of Ukraine reveals a tendency to patronize that country and others that escaped Russian rule. As Toomas Ilves, a former president of Estonia, acidly observed, “When I was at university in the mid-1970s, no one referred to Germany as ‘the former Third Reich.’ And yet today, more than 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we keep on being referred to as ‘former Soviet bloc countries.’” Tropes about Ukrainian corruption abound, not without reason—but one may also legitimately ask why so many members of Congress enter the House or Senate with modest means and leave as multimillionaires, or why the children of U.S. presidents make fortunes off foreign countries, or, for that matter, why building in New York City is so infernally expensive.

The latest, richest example of Western condescension came in a report by German military intelligence that complains that although the Ukrainians are good students in their training courses, they are not following Western doctrine and, worse, are promoting officers on the basis of combat experience rather than theoretical knowledge. Similar, if less cutting, views have leaked out of the Pentagon.

Criticism by the German military of any country’s combat performance may be taken with a grain of salt. After all, the Bundeswehr has not seen serious combat in nearly eight decades. In Afghanistan, Germany was notorious for having considerably fewer than 10 percent of its thousands of in-country troops outside the wire of its forward operating bases at any time. One might further observe that when, long ago, the German army did fight wars, it, too, tended to promote experienced and successful combat leaders, as wartime armies usually do.

American complaints about the pace of Ukraine’s counteroffensive and its failure to achieve rapid breakthroughs are similarly misplaced. The Ukrainians indeed received a diverse array of tanks and armored vehicles, but they have far less mine-clearing equipment than they need. They tried doing it our way—attempting to pierce dense Russian defenses and break out into open territory—and paid a price. After 10 days they decided to take a different approach, more careful and incremental, and better suited to their own capabilities (particularly their precision long-range weapons) and the challenge they faced. That is, by historical standards, fast adaptation. By contrast, the United States Army took a good four years to develop an operational approach to counterinsurgency in Iraq that yielded success in defeating the remnants of the Baathist regime and al-Qaeda-oriented terrorists.

A besetting sin of big militaries, particularly America’s, is to think that their way is either the best way or the only way. As a result of this assumption, the United States builds inferior, mirror-image militaries in smaller allies facing insurgency or external threat. These forces tend to fail because they are unsuited to their environment or simply lack the resources that the U.S. military possesses in plenty. The Vietnamese and, later, the Afghan armies are good examples of this tendency—and Washington’s postwar bad-mouthing of its slaughtered clients, rather than critical self-examination of what it set them up for, is reprehensible.

The Ukrainians are now fighting a slow, patient war in which they are dismantling Russian artillery, ammunition depots, and command posts without weapons such as American ATACMS and German Taurus missiles that would make this sensible approach faster and more effective. They know far more about fighting Russians than anyone in any Western military knows, and they are experiencing a combat environment that no Western military has encountered since World War II. Modesty, never an American strong suit, is in order.

  —  Western Diplomats Need to Stop Whining About Ukraine

[sprintingowl]

Radish Knights - Launches In October!

Radish Knights, my feature length tabletop roleplaying tactics game about tiny vegetable knights defending their kingdoms, is launching on October 2nd 2024!

You pick a vegetable, choose a knightly order, and engage in tiny chess-board-sized combats against bandits, kudzu dragons, fallen orders, and an empire of corn.

The game is entirely human made, with design and writing by me and art by Jonas Wittmann (who did the excellent illustrations in my chicken-thieving fantasy game Mendicant.)

I'm an extremely small indie designer, so I rely a lot on word of mouth in order to crowdfund my games. I would love it if you spread the word about this one, and if you personally want to be notified when it launches, hit the Notify Me button on the other side of the link.

There's no specific goodies for being first, but you do get first pick of the limited backer levels where you can force me to add new vegetables, knightly orders, weapons, or monsters to the game.

[trans-axolotl]

and this is also why i think that any meaningful community building/advocacy/support around madness/neurodivergence/mental illness needs to be founded on principles of liberation and abolition, and that we need to be able to distinguish between people who are allies based on our shared values + goals, and between people who use some of the same language as us, but are fundamentally advocating for separate things.

One example I see a lot of is the idea of "lived experience" professionals, people who have a career in the mental health system and who also have some personal experience with mental illness. These professionals oftentimes will talk about their own negative experiences in the mental health system, and come into their careers with a genuine desire to improve the experience of patients. But their impact is incredibly limited by the system they have chosen to work in: the coercive elements of psychiatry incentivize professionals to buy into the existing power structures instead of disrupting them. And as a whole, many lived experience professionals end up getting exploited and tokenized by their employers and used as an attempt to make carceral psychiatry seem more palatable. Professionals in this dynamic are not working to effectively challenge the structural violence of their profession: they become complicit, even if they do also have good intentions and provide individual support.

(I do know some radical providers who have found innovative ways to fuck up the system and destabilize and shift power in their workplaces, but this is a very small number of providers and is not most of the lived experience providers I've talked with.)

Another example I see a lot in our spaces has to do with the evolution of the neurodiversity paradigm. I feel a very deep connection to the original conceptualization of neurodiversity and neurodivergent as coined by Kassiane Asasumasu, but in recent years I've seen a lot of people using neurodivergent language in a way that feels pretty dramatically different than the foundational principles. This isn't saying that people should stop using ND terminology or that all neurodivergent spaces are like this--rather, I just want to point out some trends I see in certain communities, both online and in my in personal life. Although people will often use neurodivergent language and on the surface, seem allied with concepts of deinstitutionalization, acceptance, etc, the values and structure in these community spaces often rely heavily on ideas of classification based in DSM, and build very prescriptive and rigid models for categorizing different types of neurodivergence in a way that ends up excluding some M/MI/ND people. Certain types of knowledge are valued over other types of knowledge, and certain diagnoses are prioritized as worthy of support over others. There's a lot of value placed on identifying and classifying many types of behaviors, beliefs, thoughts, actions, into specific categories, and a lack of solidarity between different diagnoses or the wider disability community.

Again, this isn't to say that ND terminology is bad or useless--I think it is an incredibly helpful explanatory model/shorthand for finding community and will call myself neurodivergent, and find a lot of value in community identification and sharing of wisdom. I just feel like it's important to realize that not every ND person, organization, or initiative, is actually invested in the project of fighting for our liberation.

when thinking about our activism, as abolitionists, it's important to be very specific about what our goals, values, and tactics are. For example, understanding the concept of non-reformist reforms helps us distinguish what immediate goals are useful, versus what reforms work to increase the carceral power of the psychiatric system. And when building our own value systems and trying to build alternative ways of caring for ourselves and our communities, we need to be able to evaluate what brings us closer to autonomy, freedom, and interdependence. I need people to understand that just because someone is also against psych hospitalization does not mean that they are also allies in the project of letting mad people live free, authentic, meaningful, and supported lives, and that oftentimes people's allyship is conditional on our willingness to conform to their ideas of a "good" mentally ill person.

[radioclashh]

lmao pogi and nils doing the sprint against eachother 🫶