Onasander

Fort Bragg? Almost got sent there from RIP, went to the 501st instead. Ft. Rich is my first duty station. Which did you like better, leg or airborne?

Their are significant differances between Revolutionary War generals in the US to the Civil War, and even more so from then to know. We've been under two constitutions and forms of government. But would someone deny George Washington or General Tommy Franks from list? Nations change, and beyond a reasonable doubt, Belasarius was a roman general, even more so in my opinion than some during the civilwars in Rome who broke off and set up thier own territories. Nobody denies them of being Roman Generals. He served with honor to the Roman Emperor and to the pope in Rome and patriarch in Constantanople in the reconquering of lost Imperial lands, what more can be asked of a Roman General? (Don't forget, the Romans lost the city of Rome before and retook it.)

I'm not denying the battles of Ceasar, I'm talking about the big battles where Rome didn't come out on top, lost heavy numbers of troops. Rifles allow more spread out formations, the Romans generally would of been more compact, which at first glance would make it easier to understand what was happening around them, but because of the bewilderment factor, and their focus on the inglorious concept of WTF (a powerful force on the battlefield), I doubt even the commanders once the fight came to them and through them knew what was going on outside of thier adreniline narrowed vision. They most likely had theos simple geometical divisions in thier mind like me on my first mission afterwards trying to compute the enemy's formlessness and thier own Chaos. Did they really do a double envelopement at Cannae in the way the described, or was there significatly more to it than the Romans were later able to Rationalize?

They can build under or over it, or just outright move the wall. On the one hand, it would suck that they would tear it down, but it would also give us a detailed look into it's construction.

Shoot, I'm up in Alaska and I'm in the infantry, I can definately relate.

Kishido- The Art of the Western Warrior Has anyone ever read this book, it's a philosophy comparing the similarities of Western martian tradition, philosophy, logic, and law from greek times to the middleages with it's eastern counterparts. It makes an awsome source book, of equal value to a martial artist as well as a historian.

Belisarius for sure. And don't give me that Byzantine not Roman stuff, the Pope greated him friendly when he re-entered Rome, and he was under the command of a legitimate Roman Emperor reclaiming roman lands in the west. He is undisputibly as much a Roman General as any other.

Ummm, no, I pretty sure the results would quickly accumulate in a small town where people regularly practiced incest. The romans did have deductive reasoning, sure they were a smart bunch and I'm sure that over time in a small town could figure out who was producing the retarded people and why. Besides, many of our sexual practices are decended from Romans, such as heterosexual union in marriage and the adversion to polygamy, which many non-roman christian areas of africa practice. There is a defernce between Roman Christianity and Christianity in and of itself, which is fundamentally Jewish in it conception during it's very first days.

Hey, great news. China has resurrected the time honored tradition of killing people in a stadium and crushing prostest with the military. I'll sign you up for you chinese passport and secret decoder ring, good luck!!

Hhuuhhh, ummm. Dude, it happens all the time, more so today. Boyfriends are goading their girlfriends into situations involving another female; movies of a adult type are made where they for all practical reasons bribe a heterosexual to be performed on by homosexuals(Imagine now Rome, slavery and prositution are legal, and all the plebes are dirt poor) I think if I remember correctly, the first Han emperor was made to crawl between the legs of another man before he rose to power.

I'm not going to discuss the well ordered victory and defeats where everyone is in a nice clean field moving piecemeal with plently of survivors on both sides, I'm focusing more on my own experiance in training with the US Army as an infantryman and my perspective on 'awareness of your surroundings' in battle. People to this day study battles like Cannae and Andrianople, for deriving tactical and strategic kwoledge to be used in future military aplications. One things I know from losing a mock battle is, you usually don't very well know why you lost it. A example from my first experiance, basic training. It was on the last field excersice we had(FTX), hadn't gotten much sleep the night before, and wasn't going to get any for another 24 hours. We started out on our 14 mile road march, but was diverted on a mission which required us to hike 2 miles down a hill on this sand/gravel road road chewed up by erosion, fill up a bunch of water buckets (20-30 of them) and carry them up the hill back to camp before setting off. Well, it was dark, and we made it down with little injury. One of the Drill Sargents started taking out these big sticks that looked like white dynamite, lit it and then made motion to throw it on the grown. I was the only one paying attention, and got a bad feeling about it, and yelled to everyone the drill deargeant was up to something (thereby breaking some unknown training rule I was unaware of, he's not really there doing what he's doing, he's suppost to be invisible, they forgot to tell us this.) The thing exploded, and we all hit the deck, and looked at the drill sergent with a WTF attitude. He yelled at us it was a simulated mortar round and told us to pick up the canisters and run before they sent more rounds in, which we could clearly see since every sergeant out their seemed like he was lighting one up. I grabbed two and started running frantically up the hill with a the tan color 5 gallon canisters on my shoulders, M16 slapping into my side, moving pass groups in a broken chain of five to ten guys here and there, moving at various speeds, sweating fullspeed heart-pounding uphill. Everthing was greyish blue(nihjt), sweat was coming out of me from every pore, and I was acutely aware of the sand and dirt smeared on the side of my face and uniform, the abrasion on my elbow and hands, the huge, monsterous, uncomfortable boots, waterlogger and getting heavier with everystep, and my cheap helmet that always managed to block my vision and blunt my abilitity to hear. I knew traveling up that road bordered on both sides by forest was a bad idea, but since we didn't have permission to do otherwise, we just kept lugging uphill, and kept having training grenades/mortars thrown at us (with a occasional tossback, though we knew enough not to throw back the mortars). We finally got to the top of that poory maintained crumbling road, and waited for everyone to catch up pulling security. We made it back to camp, where the other platoons were waiting, and then dumped the water, moving on to the next mission, which was pretty much the same thing but on a much larger scale, with different platoons (it was company size), four platoons a company) getting shreaded into smaller squads(four squads a platoon, a squad being about nine guys) -seperated a good tenth mile around a bend of the road from the next two groups, in a failed mission for all (it was designed to fail). Needless to say, it was a ugly retreat, with the dumbest guys trying to take the inititive getting everyone more 'shot' up. Now, I've reflected upon this night, and the many others I've had since then, and now have come to an understanding on two things. First, I really hate my job, something everyone with the job title of Infantry holds in common with me. Secondly, I've come to doubt some of the historical accounts of the great military disasters in history. The first mission I described is pretty much straight foreward; a enemy ambush was set on the hill road, allowing us to pass through unmolested till we got to the waterpoint. Then they called in artillery on us knowing that some would be killed, and the rest would be bewildered as well as disorganized and would have to go uphill on a well defined, though irregually eroded road to get to our location, a perfect time to attack us. So, I cou, when we could lest counter. l can pretty much map out in my brain what the basic battlefield deposition theoretically would look like, but in truth how do I know how many men were supposedly attacking, or their exact locations in the woodline? How many were actually involved... on bothsides? Well, easy. It was a small group of guys (one platoon, about 50 guys) and we each knew who was the guy next to him. We all told each other afterwards the stories of what we seen, and figured it out, putting t impreeven impress the First Sergeant (head NCO over the Drill Sergeants). But, when it came to the second mission of the long night, everyone was confused both during and after. 200+ guys running amuk from four different platoons (mabey more, we kept on hearing that another company was using the training range with us in the simulated battle, but I'm not certain) not really knowing each other that well because of animosities forstered through tradition and instict further blurring everything(this is done to make us more competitive). The guys who got the most praise afterwards appeared from what I saw that night to be mearly the most loudmouth and rash ones who just started ordering people to do stuff when they didn't really know what was going on, and more often than not got more people mangled in the traps. I really don't have a clear mental image of what the basic deposition of the 'battlefield' there was, much less the enemy's tactics, or heck, even ours. Now, to my point. When Rome fough barbarians or nations who's historical records have since disappeared, we can in general rely on the Roman record, if it was a victory, or even a minor defeat. But a major defeat, the kind most diligently studied in the war colleges and universities across the globe? I'm not so sure. With the radical increase of of troops involved in these battlesin comparision to my two examples above, any massacre would leave a couple from this file or that, and the complicated maneuvering that defeated these troops may not of been seen or comprehended by the survivors till it was too late, or mabey even not at all (likely one of the reason's they lost in the first place). It's Sun Tzu's formlessness. How do we know this or that actually transpired in the narrated fashion. To me, it's not even a question of the time gap between the occurance of the battle and the time the history was witten down, which in ancient times often was a good hundred years or more. Nor is it the biases of the historian, his root sources (the witnesses) I guarantee had many more (remember my talking qbout the various platoons anamosities to one another, keeping us from developing a cohert picture of what happened, and how I think it was the bigest idiots who were leading us. Now multiply py perspective against everyone elses, the calculate each one's vendettas and grudges, and you'll get a pretty compliced view of the battle.) And furthermore, what I remember most was the stupidstuff. I knew more about the cut on my and and the weight in my boots than I knew about the enemy. My attention to detail reminds me of the old vets watching Saving Private for the first time... they said it looked exactly as it did on the real V-day invasion. They knew all the details cept for one, where everyone in the battlefield was. I'm telling you, they didn't have a overhead view of the battle, and spent the next 50 years buffing up on it by reading the history books to figure out just what the heck happened. Now imagine the poor roman soldier, survivor, without the modern luxery of Barnes and Noble or the history channel, or even a decent book. All he has is his disorganised memoried and that of his compatriots being doused by alchohol over the years. Did the great defeats really happen the way we think they did? Are we studying the wrong tactics and strtegies?

don't look down upon a phalanx, it may be old fashion, but not without it's uses. They can be really helpful in 'tight' situations. It really wouldn't be that bad of an idea to have a mixed greek/roman style army.

Hi. I'm new, I'm 22 and in the US Army, Airborne Infantry up in Fort Richardson, Alaska (outside Anchorage). Anyone else military?