So I don't know this is directed at me, but I also don't know...

"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux@BretDevereaux

44 views Feb 04, 2025 ~5 min read

So I don't know this is directed at me, but I also don't know anyone else whose done this exact thing and when I google "Minas Tirith Logistics" I am results 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

So I think this is directed at me?

So, if it is, let me explain the concept of a 'teaching tool.' 1/
x.com/LivFaustDieJun…

                            2
                        
Most (all?) military historians are, pretty much by definition, educators.  Military practitioners may read military history for purely personal use, but the point at which you are researching and writing this stuff, you are doing so so that *others* might read it. 2/

Now obviously the sort of military history you produce is going to need to be tailored to your audience. I write very differently for a specialist audience. If you're wondering what the 'orc logistics guy' does as scholarship...well you can read that: doi.org/10.25162/histo… 3/

And I write differently too when I am writing for the broader policy conversation, see, e.g.:
nationalinterest.org/feature/roman-…
foreignpolicy.com/2021/10/03/us-…
foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/19/uni…

Look! No orcs! 4/

                            5
                        
But when I'm writing on my blog, I'm writing for the general public. And writing history (military or otherwise) for the general public is *very important* because we live in a democracy where the general public gets to weigh in on national strategy every 2-4 years.  5/

                            6
                        
You can't just 'leave it to the professionals.'

Of course any good military historian will also note that states which *did* 'leave it to the professionals' tended to get bad strategic outcomes - that's a standard criticism of the Deutsches Heer, Wehrmacht and the IJA/IJN. 6/

(Amusingly, this is a standard criticism I note with some bibliography in discussing the strategy of orcs at Helm's Deep: acoup.blog/2020/06/19/col…) 7/

                            8
                        
So public education on history and on military history matters, but then the question is how do you do that and here is where the orcs come in: it is a teaching tool to get the student-reader into my digital classroom.  8/

                            9
                        
And that's the deep, dark secret of ACOUP: the posts aren't about orcs or Game of Thrones or whatever.  The posts are about the historical concepts an ideas I am aiming to illustrate.

The pop-culture framing exists to get you to read the history.  9/

                            10
                        
This is the classic 'a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down' approach or - the ancient historian in me must note - as in the Roman original, a bit of honey around the rim of the cup full of bitter medicine (Lucretius, DRN 1.935-942). 10/

                            11
                        
In doing so, I can teach a section of the public through some fairly complex military history concepts, reaching an audience of people who might not have otherwise reached out to read on this sort of stuff.

This is pretty classic pedagogy. 11/

                            12
                        
I've seen that structure - surprise! you were learning history the whole time - used in some of the most successful courses I've seen (I think particularly to @UNChistory 's Matt Andrews' 'Sports in American History' courses which are actually about American social history) 12/

                            13
                        
So what I am doing in the relevant Siege of Gondor posts?
Part I introduces the conceit and then uses it to define operations and lay out its relationship to strategy and tactics as concepts before using it to illustrate the basic concerns of pre-modern logistics.  13/

                            14
                        
Part II introduces the concept of defense in depth as well as one form of Clausewitz conception of 'friction,' makes a brief detour into Byzantine military history before sweeping back to discuss the rarity of opposed landings before the modern period.  14/

                            15
                        
Part IV is about the mechanics of ancient and medieval siege assaults: what are you trying to do, how are you trying to do it?

Part V introduces a different historical method, the 'physics of the battlefield' approach (most often associated with 'face of battle' studies). 15/

                            16
                        
And then, as if as an antidote for the technology-and-strength oriented Part V (my heavens, it's almost like he plans them), Part VI introduces the concept of cohesion and argues for the supremacy of morale and the importance of leadership.  16/

                            17
                        
And if you'll pardon me for a moment, but food logistics, marching distances, friction, siege warfare, the physics of the battlefield, cohesion, morale and the importance of leadership sure seem to me like fairly important but also often complex and difficult milhist concepts.17/

                            18
                        
Note that the structure here is never 'what LotR can teach us about milhist' but superficially 'what milhist can teach us about LotR' and more accurately using LotR as a springboard to teach these key concepts for their own sake.  18/

                            19
                        
All of which is to say, to loop back around, that the orcs are merely a teaching tool: both an inducement to get people to trick themselves into learning something (hardly a new trick!) and also a thought experiment which is made more useful because we all know it already.  19/

                            20
                        
(I don't want to underrate the value of that second point. That exercise would be little more instructive, but *much* longer, more difficult and drier if I had used a historical campaign to illustrate all of those things, if just because I'd also have to teach the campaign.) 20/

                            21
                        
And if that means that some tiny group of people had these concepts in their back pocket when it came time to try to understand, say, Putin's War in Ukraine - and I know this has happened because readers tell me it has - then it has served its purpose.  21/

And if it gets people on the site for more narrowly military historical content, like primers on, say, Protracted War (acoup.blog/2022/03/03/col…) or Nuclear Deterrence (acoup.blog/2022/03/11/col…) or the mechanics of trench warfare (acoup.blog/2021/09/24/col…), so much the better. 22/

In conclusion: BS gatekeeping is BS, especially BS coming from an account behind a nom de plumme.

And you can't keep this gate anyway, 'cause I have my union card.

Anyway, hit me up at SMH, I'm chairing a panel on governance, war and identity. /end
x.com/MENAConflicted…

So I don't know this is directed at me, but I also don't know...

Actions

What You Can Do

Actions

What You Can Do

More in Science & Research

More from @BretDevereaux