The point of writing crap is not that you should barf out anything.

It's that you should be aware as you are writing it what the flaws are, and you need to get through it the first time, because the act of doing so informs you what is wrong.

(Also whether I could save a lot of money by equipping half my ranks with Potemkin weapons and armor, if they’re never expected to use them anyway… but I’ll stop, before I start sounding like the guy who shows up to Physical Anthropology 1 and asks about aquatic ape theory)

OK, but *then* I start wondering (sorry! & not like I think I’m owed an answer) how it gets decided who’s in front and who’s in back (or, more likely, all the different ways it gets decided, some more effective and some more dysfunctional, in different cultures / periods / tactical systems)

Same underlying principle as the Roman triplex acies

(2/2) …that in the legion the second and later ranks only expected to engage when the ranks ahead of them were dead/disabled, I’ll believe you. But I got the impression we don’t have that detail (or we wouldn’t be arguing maniple-clouds)… which makes me wonder how providing cohesion really worked.

OK, but—setting aside the sarissa-phalanx for a minute (which we know is a different animal and where even the guys in the back rank are sort of engaged, pikes lowered etc), for me this raises the same kinds of questions about the mechanism. I mean, if you‘re telling me the sources tell us (1/2)

(Morale breaking, presumably, when one side realizes more of their guys *are* being put out of action—which will also mean they’re rotating back in faster, with less rest)

I‘ve never praciticed HEMA, but extrapolating from kendo and judo drills, it seems like if most of your guys can fight hard for even 5 minutes at a time, then disengage and move back to rest (without being seriously wounded), as long as morale holds up, the unit as a whole could easily go 1-2 hours.

finally, we are returning to pre-dreadnought designs, no more woke all big gun designs

A not negligible number of people, when they think of Lithuania, think of pogroms. No one thinks that of France. Why?

Again, the illegality of firing on shipwrecked mariners is so absurdly well established that it is used in the manual training material as the example of an order *so obviously illegal* that no further information would be required for a servicemember to be obligated to refuse it.

Franklin's Canadian publisher seems none too pleased:
bsky.app/profile/kids...