Infinite Wisdom

"Wise commanders never attempt to win by force what can be won by guile."

La Triviata

• The “Maginot Line” was named after André Maginot, French Minister of War (1922-1924, 1929-1930, 1931-1932), who had been severely wounded in the trenches at Verdun during the Great War, while earning the Medaille militaire, and came to champion the defensive system intended to keep the Germans from directly invading France again.
• In mid-1864 after a direct appeal from Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles to the Army, "to yield up” sailors serving in the ranks “to their proper trade and calling," President Lincoln intervened to force Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton to release seamen to the “sister service,” thus easing a serious manpower crunch in the fleet.
• In a military career of some 50 years – for 44 of which he was France’s Commissioner of Fortifications – Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633-1707), built or rebuilt over 160 fortified places, and participated in 48 sieges, all of them successfully. 
• At the height of its power, in the Third Century B.C., Carthage had permanent facilities to house 24,000 troops, 4,000 horses, and 300 elephants, as well as some 200 warships.
• Small arms and machine gun ammunition expenditure by the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II are estimated to have totaled 40 billion rounds.
• Arguably, the first communications "Hot Line" in history was established in July of 1913 by the French and Russians in the early twentieth century, to help them coordinate planning and operations in the event of war with Germany, when they initiated a dedicated wireless link between the two general staffs operating about eight hours a day.
• The Duke of Wellington had singularly bad luck investing places, and actually abandoned sieges on a number of occasions (e.g., Badajoz, April-June 1811, and Burgos, September-October 1812), partially due to his relative shortage of artillery, coupled with the Spanish penchant for building fortresses with concrete instead of mortar
• In the summer of 1944, about two years after the U.S. Marines had landed on Guadalcanal in August of 1942, did Japan’s Imperial General Headquarters finally get around to issuing a tactical manual on insular defense. 

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