DZ Season 063 Part 11. 300 Spartans and All That – Manoeuvring and Strategy.
Description
What were Xerxes plans for invading Greece. What were the Greek plans for resisting them? We’re now in the period of calm just before the storm.
As John Gaddis says about plans in his book On Grand Strategy they involve drawing:
upon principles extending across time and space, so that you'll have a sense of what's worked before and what hasn't. You then apply these to the situation at hand: that's the role of scale. The result is a plan, informed by the past, linked to the present, for achieving some future goal.
The engagement, however, won't in all respects follow the plan. Not only will its outcome depend on what the other side does — the "known unknowns," of which former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld famously spoke — but it will also reflect "unknown unknowns," which are all the things that can go wrong before you've even encountered an adversary. Together, these constitute what Clausewitz called "friction," the collision of theory with reality
Over the rest of this series we’ll see how this understanding plays out.
Tag words: Xerxes; Ancient Greece; John Gaddis; On Grand Strategy; Donald Rumsfeld; Persian invasion; Greco-Persian War; Decisive Battles of the Western World; JFC Fuller; Herodotus; The Histories; John Marincola;
United States
