Editor: Douglas Drenkow

V A L U E S   &   I S S U E S

Feedback

Legal Notices

Links of Interest

LEARNING: History & Education | December 24, 2002


HOW THE AMERICANS WON

THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR

VS. HOW NAPOLEON

DEFEATED HIS ENEMIES

An E-Mail to a Political Scientist

What all this has reminded me of is how the American patriots won the Revolutionary War (I love what little history I know). Cornwallis was given orders to keep the bulk of the British forces holed up in their stronghold of the deep South. But numerous guerrilla attacks by the outnumbered Americans goaded him, step by step, farther and farther away from his redoubt, finally into Virginia, where his army was then surrounded, by Washington's American and French army on land, and the French navy at sea. And that was that.

The point that I had only partially developed in my previous notes is that smaller forces are usually more effective against more powerful forces not with frontal assaults but with well chosen isolated incidents, which can nickel and dime the opponent and get him to a place he really doesn't want to be...

Then again, I seem to remember that Napoleon made his bones with daring assaults on perhaps larger forces, by carefully finding the weakest point in their lines (although that seems to me like a good way to end up surrounded).

Return to Archive of LEARNING: History & Education

 


Home | Editor | Values & Issues | Feedback | Legal | Links