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Looking forward to you sharing more thoughts in the future; good stuff so far. I am here thanks to Bruce Gudmundsson giving you a shout out in TACTICAL NOTEBOOK. I actually own a full set of the original paper version of it from the mid 90s.

Two comments:

1) Are you familiar with Paul Fussell's use of the term "chickenshit" from his time as a rifle platoon leader in WW2? Tracks well with your previous post on "...Bullshit."

From Wikipedia: "According to Paul Fussell in his book Wartime, chickenshit in this sense has military roots: "Chickenshit refers to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant 'paying off of old scores'; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of the ordinances ... Chickenshit is so called—instead of horse—or bull—or elephant shit—because it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously."

2) I am much less enamored by Jim Storr's work of late and find some of his conclusions disconnected from reality and shows a lack of experience at echelon. His first book, THE HUMAN FACE OF WAR, was quite good, but I found his most recent work, SOMETHING ROTTEN to be chock full of errors and woefully dated observations about the U.S. Army and the Bundeswehr (das Heer) in particular. I had intended to write a critique and send to him, but the errors and or poorly formed conclusions just kept accumulating.

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Tremendous, Maples! Like Coglianese, I followed Bruce Gudmundson's link to you and was exulatant reading your post! So I ask you, why are we like this? Why do our organizations lean toward more process and more paper? I used to think it was a simple "peace-time armies" versus "war-time armies" problem, but after twenty years of actual operations, we (the USMC in my case) seem worse than ever at constructing useful plans and orders. Storr may be old and bitter (my assumption), but his thesis is correct: We over-plan, we over-predict, and we take too much time doing it!

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