There are two key takeaways from this documentary that struck me as something that could possible happen here in America. The first one is that before any bullets were shot, the prospects of war were romanticized. It was an adventure to them. They joined with their buddies with the idea of fun and that they would be home in short time. They were joining to protect their countries. This all came crashing down when the antiquated tactics met deadly new technology. We cannot underestimate the reality of a long drawn out war with our near peer adversaries as a nation we have to have the stomach to endure. We have to be adaptable to the extremely deadly environment that modern warfare presents to us.
The second take away was the shear number of lives lost in a relatively short time period that would be the norm during modern warfare. I believe that it mentioned that in the first month of fighting the Serbs had lost 20,000 Soldiers and by month 16 there had been 5 million Soldiers killed. Yet the world leaders would not back down. They just kept pushing and pushing not willing to submit to their enemies. As what was mentioned above the shear loss of live is to be expected with the weapon systems we have in our arsenal. We as leaders have to respect our adversaries capabilities. If we don't do that as leaders we can expect the same results of WW1.
Next month, a hundred years ago, September 1918 my grandfather stood for his picture dressed as an Army private. In Plattsburgh, NY he trained as a machine gunner likely on a Browning machine gun. Soon to ship out to Europe. He was 20 years old.
The Civil War or the War Between the States had ended only 53 years earlier. No doubt he would know people from that generation, as I many years later, knew my grandfather from WWI. Now, a hundred years later I see his picture on tin plate in front of me while I watch a video, on youtube, on a computer, in air conditioning. Technology that hadn’t been invented in his time. He would have been 16 years old when WWI broke out in Europe. With the exception of a few short-lived skirmishes on land (Cuba, Philippines, Tripoli) and mostly naval battles at sea, America had never gone to war outside of the U.S. But my grandfather’s draft card came and he went off to be trained.
What are your key takeaways about the summer of 1914 and why are they relevant to the modern day? Key takeaways… Despite the brilliance of great minds, Intelligence will never divine the butterfly effect. "A butterfly can flutter its wings over a flower in China and cause a hurricane in the Caribbean.” -1914: The murder of a Serbian leader would affect a country boy in Pa. -2001: The actions of a man in a cave in Afghanistan would impact a civilian in Utah. .....War will always be a bloody affair, directed by Generals, but paid in blood by Privates. .....War is never brief. .....War can be an instrument of greed and a Defense for the Just. .....Tactics taught in the last war will be ineffective due to improvements in technology. .....The enemy is not 10’ tall. .....The enemy is as cold, hungry, tired and short of ammo as you are. (Their internet is bad too.)
Why are they relevant to the modern day? .....With the training given our modern Soldiers and advances in technology we will not be prepared for the next battle from a tactics perspective. However, Officers and Enlisted can prepare future Soldiers with examples of integrity, commitment, bravery, courage, kindness, “In God We Trust”, enduring together and never giving up. .....Politics will eventually fail. It becomes you and I who become instruments of foreign policy. .....It is important we remember their sacrifices. No one dies in vain, ever.
Two months after my grandfather’s picture was taken, the war ended and he never shipped to France.
“The more you know about the past, the better prepared you are for the future.” Theodore Roosevelt
Although it is accredited by Mark Twain that “history doesn’t repeat itself, it only rhymes”, this video clearly shows that history does repeat itself and has on many occasions. One of the takeaways which struck out to me was the planned assassination of key individuals which would thwart an invasion. Prior to the 9/11 attacks, the Al Qaeda assassinated Ahmad Shah Massoud whom would’ve been a problem to the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
The French never disappoint with lessons learned! The fact that on one single day 27,000 French were killed due mostly to their lack of proper equipment or uniform, speaks volumes to their leaderships poor planning and preparation. The German forces were adequately armed and equipped for a fierce war they were going to engage in. In “This Kind of War”, it clearly points out the US leader’s lack of planning and preparation for a war, both in equipment and training. And about the French, they fled the capitol!
As the video points out over time military soldiers when engaged in brutal and fierce battle become jaded and aggression is built up and spilt upon civilians with atrocities becoming the norm. In the book, “Black Hearts”, it showed how fierce continuous fighting wears down on soldiers and atrocities could be committed. My take away from both the WWI and the Iraq conflict atrocities is that leadership failed both. Leadership should have never let the situation get to the point it did.
The biggest and most impacting take away was the amount of young lives which were taken away unnecessarily. And for those who survived the war would return back to their lives completely changed. PTSD would not be a “thing” until roughly 100 years later. All of these soldiers would most likely have some form of PTSD. Our soldiers continue to come back with minimum to major levels of PTSD. If we get into a near peer war, this will impact far more people than just those who are nearest to the fight as current insurgency is.
One of the biggest lessons resulted from the training strategies leading up to the conflict. Both sides were preparing for conflict and increasing their weapons, equipment, and personnel: however, neither side consider the new weapon system capabilities or trained to counter those capabilities. The militaries prepared themselves and trained for past conflicts.
This training strategy left them ill prepared for the next generation of warfare. We continue to see the same mindset as we train and prepare our Soldiers. If we do not consider current and future military technologies in our training, we will find ourselves in the same situation as these militaries.
One of the biggest lessons resulted from the training strategies leading up to the conflict. Both sides were preparing for conflict and increasing their weapons, equipment, and personnel: however, neither side consider the new weapon system capabilities or trained to counter those capabilities. The militaries prepared themselves and trained for past conflicts.
This training strategy left them ill prepared for the next generation of warfare. We continue to see the same mindset as we train and prepare our Soldiers. If we do not consider current and future military technologies in our training, we will find ourselves in the same situation as these militaries.
The key takeaways that I feel are relevant to the modern day are how technological improvements change our expectations of war and the nations involved misinterpreted or misunderstood the actions of other nations.
The invention of mass production, industrialized and urbanized societies, and the railroad made it possible, for the first time, to support and mobilize numbers that were not imaginable in the past. At the height of the Napoleonic Wars the largest army had a total strength of one million and in the video we saw that there were multiple millions of Soldiers committed by many of the nations in WWI (Roberts, ). The unprecedented strengths of the armies and the rapid, for the time, nature in which each respective country could commit and supply its own forces led many to believe that the war would be short. The technological improvements of modern artillery and the machine gun rendered previous tactics and strategies, such as fixing a force with artillery and infantry and then finishing it with horse cavalry, ineffective. Today we have many new technological improvements which can impact and affect ours, and our adversaries, abilities to conduct warfare. Just as in 1914 we may think that a particular technology or advantage is available does not mean that the war will be short or have few casualties.
Today we have the United Nations and political and economic unions like the European Union. These organizations are designed to improve communication and to solve disputes amongst the members to prevent war or conflict. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is also relevant as a collective security organization. There were many instances where a given nation could have stopped further escalation from a regional conflict to total and general warfare. Russia began to mobilize its troops which, according to the Germans, was an indicator that the Triple Entente was taking initial preparations to remove the German Empire from existence. In order to prevent the war, which was inevitable, the Germans attacked France through neutral Belgium. Watching or reading the news of foreign governments we can see similar messages and though processes as the German Empire in 1914. We feel as though we are at a moment of relative peace and that no civilized or democratic nation would willingly engage in warfare but those are the same thoughts that all of Europe had in June 1914. It would not take much, in my opinion, to again plunge the world into a state of total warfare.
1LT Matt McPhee D Co 142nd MI BN
Reference
Robert, A. 2014. Napoleon: a Life. New York, NY. Penguin Random House.
This was a hard one for me. I see there are a lot of things that can be easily speculated as a correlation between then and now, but I also see there's way more things that differentiate then and now. The main differentiator that we have much better technology on all fronts that exists in today's world. I think the 2 most important technological advances are communication (internet/cell/satellite-GPS/sensor technologies) and technological advancements with war machines, i.e. Iron Man... oh wait different universe. But really if you took someone from back then and put them into Iraq or Afghanistan or even Vietnam, they would think about us just like we think about Iron Man, "This can't be real!" Our communications networks are so good that in some cases we are able to prevent assassinations and bombings before they even happen. Additionally, we are able to make strategic air strikes to nations destroy their capabilities without having to traditionally invade with ground forces. The one thing I find extremely eery in comparing then and now is the elitism and audacity in leadership. I mean, right now even with as much technology as we have, there are men and women at the highest levels of leadership in our own government doing some extremely shady stuff... And they're getting away with it all. Just think about Hillary Clinton and her secret home data/email servers. Guilty as sin, caught red-handed, and she almost became President. Trump himself is no saint and I'm sure things will come to light at some point in the future, but many people don't even care about things like his character, and yes I'm referring to all the sexual allegations he's had especially the most recent Stormy Daniels scandal. These types of things are indicators of character and a persons true character doesn't necessarily change just because they're in a higher leadership position. Similarly, the leadership of the turn of the century was equally as immoral, just maybe in different ways. Wilhelm II had very deep held belief's about the inferiority of others believing his blood, being half British and half German, is contaminated because of his British side. There is a lot that could be inferred that these deeply held beliefs about inferior bloodlines was the driving force behind setting the stage for WWI. Now imagine instead, modern politicians feeling the same amount of passion about their beliefs about hipsters or rednecks. Isn't our tinderbox just as potentially volatile as the tinderbox that Wilhelm II reigned over? This is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night and the things that we as a nation need to be concerned with. Both sides in todays world I think could be considered equally as divisive as the world leaders in Europe before WWI.
This video touched home to me because in 2002-2003 I was a young SPC in the Army deployed to Bosnia. I spent most of my time in Tuzla, but visited Sarajevo several times. I remember standing and looking over the rolling hills and seeing thousands and possibly millions of grave sites from the war. I stood where the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand took place which was the immediate cause of the war, but also triggered several series of events that started the war.
This video made me think about being ready for war. How we need proper training. That we need to think outside the box and prepare for the unknown. We need to be ready to deploy quickly and possibly for longer durations. Flexible to make changes and fight in the field and not the brick and mortar buildings we are used to.
What are your key takeaways about the summer of 1914 and why are they relevant to the modern day?
Great points everyone!
My key takeaway from the summer of 1914 is how quickly everything went from a relative calm to full scale war. It took the respective militaries of every country off guard even though some were more prepared for it than others. This is a point that is very relevant for the modern day. No one saw 9/11 coming, and yet when it did, it only put us into a limited war with limited objectives. WWI became an existential, unlimited war within a month. That kind of conflict is something none of us have seen in our lifetimes, but is certainly the type of thing for which we need to be prepared.
After half a century of peace it was a generation that didn't know war and romanticized it. There were underestimates on the time it would take and capabilities. After years of repeating history it is still difficult to be prepared for armed conflict. Tactics evolve and may do so without nations being conscious of changes and impact. I really liked the insight to what led up to the war. Now I have to watch the other episodes.
There are two key takeaways from this documentary that struck me as something that could possible happen here in America. The first one is that before any bullets were shot, the prospects of war were romanticized. It was an adventure to them. They joined with their buddies with the idea of fun and that they would be home in short time. They were joining to protect their countries. This all came crashing down when the antiquated tactics met deadly new technology. We cannot underestimate the reality of a long drawn out war with our near peer adversaries as a nation we have to have the stomach to endure. We have to be adaptable to the extremely deadly environment that modern warfare presents to us.
ReplyDeleteThe second take away was the shear number of lives lost in a relatively short time period that would be the norm during modern warfare. I believe that it mentioned that in the first month of fighting the Serbs had lost 20,000 Soldiers and by month 16 there had been 5 million Soldiers killed. Yet the world leaders would not back down. They just kept pushing and pushing not willing to submit to their enemies. As what was mentioned above the shear loss of live is to be expected with the weapon systems we have in our arsenal. We as leaders have to respect our adversaries capabilities. If we don't do that as leaders we can expect the same results of WW1.
Next month, a hundred years ago, September 1918 my grandfather stood for his picture dressed as an Army private. In Plattsburgh, NY he trained as a machine gunner likely on a Browning machine gun. Soon to ship out to Europe. He was 20 years old.
ReplyDeleteThe Civil War or the War Between the States had ended only 53 years earlier. No doubt he would know people from that generation, as I many years later, knew my grandfather from WWI. Now, a hundred years later I see his picture on tin plate in front of me while I watch a video, on youtube, on a computer, in air conditioning. Technology that hadn’t been invented in his time. He would have been 16 years old when WWI broke out in Europe. With the exception of a few short-lived skirmishes on land (Cuba, Philippines, Tripoli) and mostly naval battles at sea, America had never gone to war outside of the U.S. But my grandfather’s draft card came and he went off to be trained.
What are your key takeaways about the summer of 1914 and why are they relevant to the modern day?
Key takeaways…
Despite the brilliance of great minds, Intelligence will never divine the butterfly effect. "A butterfly can flutter its wings over a flower in China and cause a hurricane in the Caribbean.”
-1914: The murder of a Serbian leader would affect a country boy in Pa.
-2001: The actions of a man in a cave in Afghanistan would impact a civilian in Utah.
.....War will always be a bloody affair, directed by Generals, but paid in blood by Privates.
.....War is never brief.
.....War can be an instrument of greed and a Defense for the Just.
.....Tactics taught in the last war will be ineffective due to improvements in technology.
.....The enemy is not 10’ tall.
.....The enemy is as cold, hungry, tired and short of ammo as you are. (Their internet is bad too.)
Why are they relevant to the modern day?
.....With the training given our modern Soldiers and advances in technology we will not be prepared for the next battle from a tactics perspective. However, Officers and Enlisted can prepare future Soldiers with examples of integrity, commitment, bravery, courage, kindness, “In God We Trust”, enduring together and never giving up.
.....Politics will eventually fail. It becomes you and I who become instruments of foreign policy.
.....It is important we remember their sacrifices. No one dies in vain, ever.
Two months after my grandfather’s picture was taken, the war ended and he never shipped to France.
CW2 Gist M. Wylie
IC Det 142
“The more you know about the past, the better prepared you are for the future.” Theodore Roosevelt
ReplyDeleteAlthough it is accredited by Mark Twain that “history doesn’t repeat itself, it only rhymes”, this video clearly shows that history does repeat itself and has on many occasions. One of the takeaways which struck out to me was the planned assassination of key individuals which would thwart an invasion. Prior to the 9/11 attacks, the Al Qaeda assassinated Ahmad Shah Massoud whom would’ve been a problem to the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
The French never disappoint with lessons learned! The fact that on one single day 27,000 French were killed due mostly to their lack of proper equipment or uniform, speaks volumes to their leaderships poor planning and preparation. The German forces were adequately armed and equipped for a fierce war they were going to engage in. In “This Kind of War”, it clearly points out the US leader’s lack of planning and preparation for a war, both in equipment and training. And about the French, they fled the capitol!
As the video points out over time military soldiers when engaged in brutal and fierce battle become jaded and aggression is built up and spilt upon civilians with atrocities becoming the norm. In the book, “Black Hearts”, it showed how fierce continuous fighting wears down on soldiers and atrocities could be committed. My take away from both the WWI and the Iraq conflict atrocities is that leadership failed both. Leadership should have never let the situation get to the point it did.
The biggest and most impacting take away was the amount of young lives which were taken away unnecessarily. And for those who survived the war would return back to their lives completely changed. PTSD would not be a “thing” until roughly 100 years later. All of these soldiers would most likely have some form of PTSD. Our soldiers continue to come back with minimum to major levels of PTSD. If we get into a near peer war, this will impact far more people than just those who are nearest to the fight as current insurgency is.
CPT Greg Holman
HHD 142
One of the biggest lessons resulted from the training strategies leading up to the conflict. Both sides were preparing for conflict and increasing their weapons, equipment, and personnel: however, neither side consider the new weapon system capabilities or trained to counter those capabilities. The militaries prepared themselves and trained for past conflicts.
ReplyDeleteThis training strategy left them ill prepared for the next generation of warfare. We continue to see the same mindset as we train and prepare our Soldiers. If we do not consider current and future military technologies in our training, we will find ourselves in the same situation as these militaries.
One of the biggest lessons resulted from the training strategies leading up to the conflict. Both sides were preparing for conflict and increasing their weapons, equipment, and personnel: however, neither side consider the new weapon system capabilities or trained to counter those capabilities. The militaries prepared themselves and trained for past conflicts.
ReplyDeleteThis training strategy left them ill prepared for the next generation of warfare. We continue to see the same mindset as we train and prepare our Soldiers. If we do not consider current and future military technologies in our training, we will find ourselves in the same situation as these militaries.
WO1 Brent Williams
A CO 142 MI BN
The key takeaways that I feel are relevant to the modern day are how technological improvements change our expectations of war and the nations involved misinterpreted or misunderstood the actions of other nations.
ReplyDeleteThe invention of mass production, industrialized and urbanized societies, and the railroad made it possible, for the first time, to support and mobilize numbers that were not imaginable in the past. At the height of the Napoleonic Wars the largest army had a total strength of one million and in the video we saw that there were multiple millions of Soldiers committed by many of the nations in WWI (Roberts, ). The unprecedented strengths of the armies and the rapid, for the time, nature in which each respective country could commit and supply its own forces led many to believe that the war would be short. The technological improvements of modern artillery and the machine gun rendered previous tactics and strategies, such as fixing a force with artillery and infantry and then finishing it with horse cavalry, ineffective. Today we have many new technological improvements which can impact and affect ours, and our adversaries, abilities to conduct warfare. Just as in 1914 we may think that a particular technology or advantage is available does not mean that the war will be short or have few casualties.
Today we have the United Nations and political and economic unions like the European Union. These organizations are designed to improve communication and to solve disputes amongst the members to prevent war or conflict. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is also relevant as a collective security organization. There were many instances where a given nation could have stopped further escalation from a regional conflict to total and general warfare. Russia began to mobilize its troops which, according to the Germans, was an indicator that the Triple Entente was taking initial preparations to remove the German Empire from existence. In order to prevent the war, which was inevitable, the Germans attacked France through neutral Belgium. Watching or reading the news of foreign governments we can see similar messages and though processes as the German Empire in 1914. We feel as though we are at a moment of relative peace and that no civilized or democratic nation would willingly engage in warfare but those are the same thoughts that all of Europe had in June 1914. It would not take much, in my opinion, to again plunge the world into a state of total warfare.
1LT Matt McPhee
D Co 142nd MI BN
Reference
Robert, A. 2014. Napoleon: a Life. New York, NY. Penguin Random House.
This was a hard one for me. I see there are a lot of things that can be easily speculated as a correlation between then and now, but I also see there's way more things that differentiate then and now. The main differentiator that we have much better technology on all fronts that exists in today's world. I think the 2 most important technological advances are communication (internet/cell/satellite-GPS/sensor technologies) and technological advancements with war machines, i.e. Iron Man... oh wait different universe. But really if you took someone from back then and put them into Iraq or Afghanistan or even Vietnam, they would think about us just like we think about Iron Man, "This can't be real!"
ReplyDeleteOur communications networks are so good that in some cases we are able to prevent assassinations and bombings before they even happen. Additionally, we are able to make strategic air strikes to nations destroy their capabilities without having to traditionally invade with ground forces.
The one thing I find extremely eery in comparing then and now is the elitism and audacity in leadership. I mean, right now even with as much technology as we have, there are men and women at the highest levels of leadership in our own government doing some extremely shady stuff... And they're getting away with it all. Just think about Hillary Clinton and her secret home data/email servers. Guilty as sin, caught red-handed, and she almost became President. Trump himself is no saint and I'm sure things will come to light at some point in the future, but many people don't even care about things like his character, and yes I'm referring to all the sexual allegations he's had especially the most recent Stormy Daniels scandal. These types of things are indicators of character and a persons true character doesn't necessarily change just because they're in a higher leadership position. Similarly, the leadership of the turn of the century was equally as immoral, just maybe in different ways. Wilhelm II had very deep held belief's about the inferiority of others believing his blood, being half British and half German, is contaminated because of his British side. There is a lot that could be inferred that these deeply held beliefs about inferior bloodlines was the driving force behind setting the stage for WWI.
Now imagine instead, modern politicians feeling the same amount of passion about their beliefs about hipsters or rednecks. Isn't our tinderbox just as potentially volatile as the tinderbox that Wilhelm II reigned over? This is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night and the things that we as a nation need to be concerned with. Both sides in todays world I think could be considered equally as divisive as the world leaders in Europe before WWI.
This video touched home to me because in 2002-2003 I was a young SPC in the Army deployed to Bosnia. I spent most of my time in Tuzla, but visited Sarajevo several times. I remember standing and looking over the rolling hills and seeing thousands and possibly millions of grave sites from the war. I stood where the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand took place which was the immediate cause of the war, but also triggered several series of events that started the war.
ReplyDeleteThis video made me think about being ready for war. How we need proper training. That we need to think outside the box and prepare for the unknown. We need to be ready to deploy quickly and possibly for longer durations. Flexible to make changes and fight in the field and not the brick and mortar buildings we are used to.
What are your key takeaways about the summer of 1914 and why are they relevant to the modern day?
ReplyDeleteGreat points everyone!
My key takeaway from the summer of 1914 is how quickly everything went from a relative calm to full scale war. It took the respective militaries of every country off guard even though some were more prepared for it than others. This is a point that is very relevant for the modern day. No one saw 9/11 coming, and yet when it did, it only put us into a limited war with limited objectives. WWI became an existential, unlimited war within a month. That kind of conflict is something none of us have seen in our lifetimes, but is certainly the type of thing for which we need to be prepared.
After half a century of peace it was a generation that didn't know war and romanticized it. There were underestimates on the time it would take and capabilities. After years of repeating history it is still difficult to be prepared for armed conflict. Tactics evolve and may do so without nations being conscious of changes and impact. I really liked the insight to what led up to the war. Now I have to watch the other episodes.
ReplyDelete