My 2026 tour of defence academies

By improbable coincidence, in August I visited four different military educational institutions in three different countries;

- the UK Defence Academy at Shrivenham (as invited participant in a Waterloo wargame);

- the US Army War College, Carlisle PA (to present BBB at a Symposium on Wargaming in Professional Military Education);

- the US Military Academy at West Point (strictly as a tourist);

- and Sweden's Defence University, Stockholm (to participate in an academic workshop).

I also took in a couple of good military museums on the way.

I already reported on the Waterloo game in a previous post here.

The symposium at AWC was a much more substantial and significant event. It was the first conference of its kind, gathering nearly 100 international participants to discuss the use of wargaming in military education, share best practice, etc. It was initiated by Professor Nicholas Murray, who has regular used the Bloody Big Battles! rules to run games for educational purposes at the US Army's Command & General Staff College, Naval War College, and elsewhere. Consequently I attended to present a BBB demonstration game.

I chose to use the Montebello scenario that is my favourite "training game". A couple of bold participants took up the challenge and played it through, while a fair number of others stopped by to view and discuss it. (Since you ask: crushing French win, their all-out aggression from the start paid off, everything went right for them and none of the Austrian potential reinforcements made it onto the table.)

An example of the other games on display at AWC, this one by LTC Tyler Brooks of AWC.

As well as presenting the game, I attended a lot of interesting talks and met some really impressive people. It was an exciting meeting and I understand is likely to become an annual event. Other related activities may follow as well.

These slides are from COL Tim Barrick's presentation, reproduced with his kind permission.

Maybe I will adapt it to create my own Cognitive Wargaming Competency Framework and assess my gaming buddies. The risk is that it might be turned against me.

Professor Murray has published a report on the symposium in Small Wars Journal here. Participant Aaron Danis has also done a write-up in Armchair Dragoons here. (You'll find a pic of my Montebello game captioned as "a Kriegsspiel-type game with effective terrain representation". I used a printed battlemat with Kriegsspiel blocks rather than miniatures.)

AWC has a rather fine museum on-site. Exhibits include this mighty FT-17.

Also of particular interest to us wargamers is this Apparatus, as explained by COL Parrish below. Further information on it can be found here.

As if that wasn't enough, half an hour down the road from AWC is the National Civil War Museum at Harrisburg PA.

Vignette from Pickett's Charge, a display at the NCWM.

We spent a good couple of hours there and could easily have spent a couple more. Its collection of firearms is particularly impressive, including all sorts of firearms by makers I'd never heard of. Well worth a visit.

Sherman on gate guard at West Point.

The West Point visit was just an opportunistic side-trip on the drive between AWC and the airport. Obviously I knew it was an impressive institution but actually going there helped to reinforce that impression.

Illustrious alumni greeted us at the West Point visitor center.

The Defence University in Stockholm.

The workshop in Stockholm was perhaps the most important of the month's excursions (for me, at least). All I'll say for now is that it relates to the Clausewitz translations Professor Murray and I have published. Oh, and that he demonstrated his excellent map game of the 1799 campaign, illuminating the challenges of coalition warfare and of allocating resources between competing theatres of operations. More in due course.

I can't praise our generous hosts' hospitality highly enough. These eminent Swedish generals watched us eat some very fine lunches in the VIP room.

The 1799 campaign game. Map in foreground is the German theatre of operations; the further one, northern Italy and Switzerland. This has helped to educate a lot of officers and strategic thinkers over the years.

Army History journal on Clausewitz 1799 Vol 1: "engaging and interactive"

Professor Murray has just alerted me to another recent review of one of our Clausewitz translations, "Napoleon Absent, Coalition Ascendant: The 1799 Campaign in Italy and Switzerland, Volume 1". The generous reviewer this time is LTC Tom Vance, writing in Army History journal. I thank LTC Vance for his thorough and fair review. The full review can be found in JSTOR. Favourable comments include:

"With 509 footnotes accompanying Clausewitz’s original 39 notes, Murray and Pringle have created an engaging book within this translation."

"Clausewitz’s text and Murray and Pringle’s commentary and analysis are so seamless that it is easy to forget whose voice you are reading"

and a nicely backhanded finish:

"their book requires studying, not just reading. However, the effort is worth it. Their commentary is easy to follow, and the cross-referencing creates an engaging and interactive experience [...]. When you are finished, however, you feel like you have earned several professional military education credits."

Go on - buy the book, enjoy an engaging experience and earn yourself some PME credits!

A couple of previous reviews of the 1799 works are reported here and here.

H-War on Clausewitz 1799 histories: "highly recommended"

I am delighted to report another highly positive review of our Clausewitz translations* from an authoritative source. This time it is Dr Jonathan Abel of the US Army's Command and General Staff College. In his review published last month on H-War, Dr Abel generously notes:

"[Murray & Pringle's] translation is excellent, no small task for the notoriously difficult-to-translate Clausewitz"

"Their notes also illuminate the connections between the work and On War, making the former an invaluable corollary to the latter"

"Murray and Pringle have provided another vital service in their translation by highlighting a largely forgotten series of campaigns. The 1799 campaigns were the opening salvos in the War of the Second Coalition in Europe, but they have no dedicated, academic account in English."

"an invaluable addition to the field of Clausewitz studies"

"highly recommended"

I am very grateful to Dr Abel for his review.

 

*The books in question:

"Napoleon Absent, Coalition Ascendant: The 1799 Campaign in Italy and Switzerland, Volume 1"

"The Coalition Crumbles, Napoleon Returns: The 1799 Campaign in Italy and Switzerland, Volume 2"

 

JMH on Clausewitz 1799: "finely translated, annotated, and edited volumes"

Just over a year ago, Professor Nicholas Murray and I published translations of two more volumes of Clausewitz's histories which helped him develop his theories:

"Napoleon Absent, Coalition Ascendant: The 1799 Campaign in Italy and Switzerland, Volume 1"

"The Coalition Crumbles, Napoleon Returns: The 1799 Campaign in Italy and Switzerland, Volume 2"

These have now been very positively reviewed in the Journal of Military History, Vol.86, No.3, July 2022. JMH's reviewer, Professor Frederick C. Schneid, is kind enough to say Nick and I "continue to produce finely translated, annotated and edited volumes of Carl von Clausewitz's military histories" and "For those scholars who study this era, these volumes will be a wonderful addition to their library". He also mentions our previous volume, "Napoleon's 1796 Italian Campaign", describing it as "clear, well-presented, and valuable".

I am very grateful to Professor Schneid for his review.

"The entire work is a treat for military specialists and lay readers alike" - Clausewitz 1796 reviewed on H-War

Delighted to see our translation of Clausewitz's history of Napoleon's 1796 Italian Campaign receive this excellent review by Doina Georgeta Harsanyi (Central Michigan University) for H-War. Some quotes from her assessment of the work:

"Military historians and army officers will find much to enjoy in this theoretician’s take on a well-known sequence of events."

"The narrative is rich in perceptive insights"

"excellent critical apparatus"

"Richly researched footnotes"

"The entire work is a treat for military specialists and lay readers alike"

I am very grateful to Dr Harsanyi for her thorough review and generous comments.

Clausewitz 1799 Vol.2 is published

Closely following the appearance of Vol.1 in December, last month saw the publication of our latest Clausewitz translation: 'The Coalition Crumbles, Napoleon Returns: The 1799 Campaign in Italy and Switzerland, Volume 2'. It has been slow to arrive on Amazon - logistics perhaps impeded by pandemic? - but it did so yesterday, only to promptly go out of stock (sold out, presumably). Anyway, for a brief glorious moment last night, both the 1799 volumes and the 1796 book were all in Amazon's Top 100 best-selling books on the history of the Napoleonic Wars:

 As for Vol.2 itself, highlights include the Second Battle of Zurich and Suvorov's remarkable march over the Alps. A favourite episode of mine is Archduke Charles's farcical attempt at a river crossing, in which his 30,000 or so men are repelled by just 200 Swiss jaegers. The accounts of these and many other fascinating actions are all accompanied by Clausewitz's incisive analysis, in turn supported by Professor Murray's erudite commentary.

The previous books are here:

'Napoleon Absent, Coalition Ascendant: The 1799 Campaign in Italy and Switzerland, Volume 1'

'Napoleon's 1796 Italian Campaign'

Books being like buses - you wait ages, then two or three all arrive at once - my next one should appear soon. It's a change of scene but similar format, a translated history with extensive commentary added:

'Hungary 1848: The Winter Campaign'

Clausewitz 1799 Vol.1 is published

In a previous post I mentioned the very positive endorsements our latest book had received: 

'Napoleon Absent, Coalition Ascendant: The 1799 Campaign in Italy and Switzerland'.

I am pleased to report it is now published.

It will shortly be followed by Volume 2, 'The Coalition Crumbles, Napoleon Returns', which is due out in February 2021.

With that, I hope you had a Merry Christmas, and I wish you a Happy New Year!

A classic encounter wargame: Verona 1799

No doubt like many readers of this blog, as a young teenage wargamer I didn't refight historical battles. My standard fare was formulaic Napoleonic games in which the two sides would each line up a dozen units and head toward each other to fight over a couple of isolated terrain objectives on an otherwise fairly empty table.

The Verona battlefield

(Map probably circa 1860, hence the anachronistic railway)

The Italian campaign of 1799 provides us with an action that could virtually be the template for this stereotypical symmetrical encounter wargame: Verona. As Clausewitz says, “It is hard to find another action in such equilibrium in terms of its situation, its course of events, and its outcome. Both sides were divided into two divisions, under the orders of a general who was not the commander-in-chief; both were equally strong; both advanced to the attack; neither could drive the other off the position. We can say that here one force completely neutralized the other, while neither of them contributed to general success. The result was virtually zero.” (Murray & Pringle, Napoleon Absent, Coalition Ascendant: The 1799 Campaign in Italy and Switzerland, Volume1.)

I enjoyed this description so much that I was moved to write a scenario for it. I've deliberately kept it simple to try to recapture that teenage novice gamer feel, but at the same time I think it's reasonably historical. The scenario is in the BBB group files on groups.io. Gaming opportunities are limited at present, so it has not been playtested, but its simplicity means it should be pretty sound and robust. I hope some readers will get some amusement from it.

"exceptional, elegant and accessible, masterful, exciting, brilliantly executed, erudite, highly recommended!"

How's that for a string of superlatives? Not my words, but those of Dr Vanya Eftimova Bellinger and Dr Alexander Mikaberidze, extracted from their review comments on the forthcoming book prepared by Professor Nicholas Murray and myself: 

'Napoleon Absent, Coalition Ascendant: The 1799 Campaign in Italy and Switzerland, Volume 1'.

Dr Eftimova is Assistant Professor of Strategy at the USAF's Air University and author of a biography of Clausewitz's wife, Marie von Clausewitz: The woman behind the making of On War.

Dr Mikaberidze is Professor of History at Louisiana State University Shreveport and author of numerous books on the Napoleonic Wars, including most recently, The Napoleonic Wars: A global history.

I am delighted (and a little overwhelmed) that our work has received such generous praise from such authoritative commentators. I am grateful to Dr Eftimova and Dr Mikaberidze for their kind words.

Napoleon's 1796 Italian Campaign: "Bravo!"

Dr Konstantinos Travlos has written a nice 'annotated presentation' about the first Clausewitz volume Professor Murray and I translated and edited, 'Napoleon's 1796 Italian Campaign'.

Konstantinos rightly declares his conflict of interest in that he and I are friends and collaborators, notably on his own excellent wargame campaign book on the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, 'Bloody Big Balkan Battles!'.

Nevertheless, he is a serious scholar of military history and his remarks merit attention. I therefore offer some of them here:

'The editorial job and translation are excellent.'

'The decision to include the notes of an earlier French translator (Colin) is brilliant [...]. It also makes reading the text more interesting as it calls on you to compare what Clausewitz wrote with what Colin and the translators/editors think he wrote.'

'Bravo!'

But I encourage you to read the full presentation, as Konstantinos provides a number of perceptive observations of his own on the lessons Clausewitz teaches.

I am grateful to Konstantinos for his kind words and for his thoughtful discussion of our work. I hope he will enjoy our forthcoming translations of the two volumes on the 1799 campaigns in Italy and Switzerland just as much.

(For other reviews of the 1796 book, see here.)

 

1799 campaign in Italy and Switzerland - new book!

Our translation of Clausewitz's history of Napoleon's 1796 Italian campaign has received very positive reviews (JMH called it 'outstanding').

I am pleased to announce that Professor Murray and I have also translated Clausewitz's two volumes on the 1799 campaigns in Italy and Switzerland. The first, 'Napoleon Absent, Coalition Ascendant', is scheduled for publication in December 2020, with the second, 'The Coalition Crumbles, Napoleon Returns' due out early 2021. (Both of these are in press now, at the proof-checking/indexing stage, so these are firm publication dates.)