Ummagumma

The start of the Longstreet Attacks scenario. The Confederates are to the right (east), the Federals to the left (west). Both sides have already constructed breastworks which was common by this stage of the war. Wood's division is in column ready to move to the north just as Johnson's division of Hood's Corps attacks Brotherton Field. Longstreet and Rosecrans can be seen in the lower right and left corners, respectively. The game prints the various Rebel corps in a different shade of butternut or gray. The Yankee corps are in differing shades of blue. The battle extends beyond the area captured on this map.  This is a BIG game at a regiment scale. The biggest weakness in the “realism” of board style wargames is that you can see where everybody is on the board. Certain games hide it somewhat but you kind of always know what’s near any given unit of your side. That is an enormous advantage that did not occur historically. Particularly at the time of the Napoleonic Wars or the...

Almost all of western Yemen is now controlled by the Houthi rebels supported by the IRGC. [ Read all my Iran stuff. ] Note: I reference a lot of people in this post that are important to this situation. Few have ever heard of any of them. You'll have to look them up yourself if you want more details. My focus is obviously on one previously obscure man in particular. His name is Yusuf al-Madani. Almost no one outside Yemen had heard of him a week ago. Then his forces broke through the front, captured the Red Sea port of Mocha , drove down the coast and reached Bab el-Mandeb at the base of the Red Sea. A Houthi-linked estimate put their gains at more than 6,000 square kilometres. More than 2,300 square miles. Nearly the size of Delaware, taken in a few days. It was a classic blitzkrieg in the middle of a missile war. Al-Madani is the most successful ground commander of anything stimulated by Epic Fury so far. The Houthis have never publicly named the commander of the operation. ...

[ Read all my Iran stuff. ] (9AM Eastern Time...) I thought a lull would settle in on this war weeks ago. Then the IRGC demonstrated that they would continue attacking so the US had to massively retaliate, of course. The United States and Israel had inflicted extraordinary military damage on Iran. Iran's nuclear capability had been severely degraded. The Iranian economy was about to hemorrhage inflation. Yet the IRGC had managed to turn the Strait of Hormuz into the central strategic fact of the war. Whoever controls Hormuz is winning the war. For most of the summer, that was the IRGC. They possessed the missiles, drones, mines and small boats to choke-off traffic. Some ships were allowed through. Others were warned away. Chinese-related traffic received preferential treatment. Several more tankers were struck near the Strait, including vessels operating around Omani waters. Unlike earlier attacks, the IRGC stopped taking credit for them. The attacks remain officially ...

[ Read all my Iran stuff. ] Since late last year, I’ve been enjoying David Stahel’s outstanding series of books on the German operations against Soviet Russia in 1941. I hope to review his body of work in the future. Back in May I quoted Stahel and it bears repeating: “It is important to remember that battlefield victories are not ends in themselves. Their worth is calculated from the strategic possibilities, military or political, that these stimulate.” Although the quote is universally applicable, Stahel was writing about Barbarossa, one of the most extraordinary military campaigns ever. The Germans captured millions Soviet troops, destroyed multiple armies while advancing hundreds of miles into the Soviet Union. They were winning everywhere. Yet, Stahel argues that somewhere in the middle of all that success Germany was already losing the war strategically. The victories stimulated things Germany could not control. Soviet mobilization. Longer supply lines. Constant German losses. Br...

[ Read all my Iran Stuff ] As long-time readers know, I have spent the last five months trying to figure out what Operation Epic Fury stimulated inside Iran. Some of that necessarily involved speculation. Still, the trajectory has turned out to be fairly clear. I wrote in April that Epic Fury had shattered the governing structure and that "the IRGC arose out of the smoldering remains, probably with more weight than it had before." Later I wrote that "the hardliners assaulted the vacuum." By May my conclusion was simpler. "The IRGC has been bombed into greater importance." Epic Fury stimulated that. Today I don't have to speculate as much. Things are clearer now and not in a good way. Iran has announced a sweeping reorganization of its senior military and security leadership. Six major military appointments were issued together. They followed immediately after the appointment of Mohsen Rezaei, one of the most important figures in the history of t...