The Bazaar of War

Decisive Battle and Exploitation: The Irreducible Whole of Decision

Overemphasizing the decisiveness of individual battles makes it easy to overlook a key ingredient to any decision: the subsequent exploitation.

Sep 20

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Asymmetric Decisiveness: The Unequal Payoff of Decisive Battle

The decisiveness of a battle is best measured by how it affects a war's range of potential outcomes. Yet the prospects of victory are not equal for both…

Sep 12

36

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August 2026

A Field Tour of Sekigahara: Japan’s Greatest Battle

I was recently at Sekigahara, site of the climactic 1600 battle that led to Japan’s reunification under Tokugawa Ieyasu.

Aug 22

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Minimum Viable Force: Operational Considerations for Future Force Design

What is the smallest-sized ground force that can operate in a single theater against a first-rate peer competitor?

Aug 17

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Maneuver in the Mountains: Opening Moves of the Chickamauga Campaign

The Campaigns for Chattanooga, Part 2

Aug 7

15

July 2026

Rebalancing Combined Arms: A Look at Future Force Structure

The modern system of combined arms discussed in last Dispatch shows no sign of going away in the 21st century.

Jul 24

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Parallel Readings and Combined Arms: Two Essential Books on 20th-Century Warfare

To truly understand any complex topic requires studying it from a variety of angles.

Jul 17

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June 2026

Can the Small Drone Problem Be Solved?

Will counter-drone defense ever become effective enough that it becomes uneconomical to employ FPVs in mass quantities without any complementary effort?

Jun 30

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Virtual Fronts, Mobile Firepower

The growth of armies between the 18th and 20th centuries profoundly changed the nature of operational art.

Jun 25

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Strategic Maneuver

The purely military aspects of strategy often get short shrift. They lack the complexity—or at least dynamism—of tactics and operational art, and are…

Jun 14

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Maneuver in the Mud: The Tullahoma Campaign

The Campaigns for Chattanooga, Part 1

Jun 2

17

May 2026

Amateur Tactics, Professional Logistics: The Operational Level and the Study of War

A famous, but apocryphal, quote attributed to Moltke dismissed the American Civil War as “two armed mobs chasing each other around the country, from…

May 15

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