School of War - Ep 184: Alexander Burns on the Dawn of the Modern Battlefield

Episode Date: March 14, 2025

Alexander Burns, Assistant Professor of History at Franciscan University and author of Infantry in Battle 1733-1783 (From Reason to Revolution), joins the show to talk about how combat evolved in the decades between Marlborough and Napoleon. ▪️ Times      •     01:45 Introduction     •     02:19 1733     •     06:20 Infantry in battle     •     10:54 Achieving results       •     14:19 Tactical effectivness         •     18:40 Prussia       •     24:17 More than fear       •     29:45 Early nationalism        •     33:12 American evolution      •     38:50 Drones and prestige Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

For a lot of people, not the enlightened types who listen to this podcast, of course, but a lot of people. The warfare of the 18th century and before can appear in the mind's eye to be an antiseptic thing. Neat rows of colorfully attired infantry marching smartly, firing in synchrony, on uncaotic battlefields where the violence is limited, as were the wars. It won't surprise you to hear that that's largely nonsense. Our guest today explains how battlefields in the 18th century already, were beginning to evolve into the savage, difficult to survive spaces that they obviously became by the 20th, and how soldiers were already beginning to adapt to these hellish scenes. Let's get into it.

It is a prescription for war. This Iraqi invasion of the way. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infantry. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the great situation in grand. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing ground, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean.

Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today, Alexander Burns, who is assistant professor of history at Franciscan University of Steubenville. an expert on 18th century warfare and the author most recently of the very interesting infantry in battle 1733 to 1783 Alex. Thanks so much for joining the show. Thank you so much, Aaron. It's great to be here. All right. I'm going to start with the really obvious question, but I actually feel like your answer is going to be interesting. But why 1733? That is to say, you know, everyone sort of generally, anyone who has half an interest in the matter is aware

that turn of the 18th to the 19th century is marked some kind of important change. in the nature of war. Why do you start the story, though, one-third of the way into the century? What's so big about, what's the huge difference between, say, the war of the Spanish succession and the war of the Polish succession, two, extremely well-known conflicts that I'm sure listeners are really deep in the details of? Yeah, absolutely. No, it's a great question. So I start the book in 1733 because I'm primarily interested in a period of history that Dr. Andrew Bamford has called the high 18th century, so the war is in the middle of. of the 18th century.

And generally, especially in the English-speaking world, we think about those wars as including the war of Austrian succession or what we call King George's war over here in America. Of course, the French and Indian War, which Europeans call the Seven Years War, and last but not least, our American War of Independence. And so there's a very kind of northern European focus in that story. Often it centers around the story of a Prussian military leader, a man named Frederick the Great or Frederick the second king of Prussia. And so in this book, I'm trying to drag the audience kicking and screaming a little bit earlier. I'm much more interested in beginning the story of what

warfare was like for enlisted infantrymen with the war of Polish succession, because I do think there are themes that run throughout that period up and through our American War of Independence and even in some ways into the Napoleonic period. And not to skip to what I take to be the heart of your argument, but to skip right there, there's something about this moment in time where, I'll put it in my own terms, but like the psychological experience of the battlefield, the primacy or increasing primacy of small arms and firepower and firearms induces a change in the character of combat that you can identify and speak about meaningfully.

And in some ways, four dates, or back dates, I'm actually not sure which expression I want. It pulls back, pulls to the left in time, the observations that are typically made about the 19th or even the 20th century, that the battlefield becomes such a murderous place, the dispersion, et cetera, becomes a noticeable phenomenon. You would make that case about the early 18th century, essentially. Yeah, absolutely. So I think what you see in this period that sort of distinguishes it from the earlier war of Spanish succession or the Great Northern War is exactly what you just out. outlined. I do think probably to some extent, dispersion is happening in those earlier periods as well. In fact, in the book briefly, I point to an example where it happens in the 30 years war. But more to the point, in these wars, you see enlisted men kind of driving that story of dispersion, taking cover,

not wanting to be a sort of open target on the battlefield, and also to some extent wanting to avoid melee combat. That's relatively hard to do in the 17th century when an important part of military experience is still, was in that time called the push of pike or hand-to-hand combat, trying to physically drive the enemy off the battlefield after, say, a volley or discharge of musketry with, you know, 18-foot-long pikes as you're going in the hand-to-hand combat. With the advent of these wars more in the middle of the 18th century, you see the comment again and again, particularly in the War of Polish Succession, it didn't come to the bayonet. We didn't fight in hand-to-hand combat. So the bayonet is still a vital weapon of intimidation, but you're seeing it used perhaps a

little bit less than you did at large battles in the war of Spanish succession like Malpaccaque, where essentially they're fighting over villages, they're fighting in very close quarters, and it does frequently come down to hand-to-hand combat. And so talk a bit about the period that precedes the high 18th century that you talk about, and what you call in the book, this sort of stereotype of what war in the 18th century is like, which I'm sure every listener can picture. It's, and you have an eloquent description of this in the book, but, you know, rows of colorfully dressed soldiers operating in machine-like fashion to trade volleys of fire, followed, followed by a melee, a softening up with fire followed by a melee. Is, is that more accurate? It is a description

of the 17th century and something the Duke of Marlborough would have recognized as true? no, not necessarily. I do think both of these, you see linear formations in both of these wars. But in the period of Marlborough and Prince Eugen of Van Savoy and Prince Eugene of Savoy, you see more focus on fighting over villages on the battlefield, almost like small fortified positions. I mean, the French do create whole battlefield fortifications at periods in the war of Spanish succession.

But with that said, I think both in that period and in this one, there's sort of technological improvements. I mean, in the war of Spanish succession, you're transitioning from the plug bayonets to the socket bayonets in sort of the wars that I'm discussing. I mean, the pikes have almost vanished altogether, regardless of what the officers might desire, as I talk about later in the book. But I don't know that necessarily in either case, this parade-grade. image that is so often present in film where, you know, the soldiers are very,

films like the Patriots, maybe our listeners are familiar with, or for a more European audience films like the Sovereign Servant, which is a Russian film about the Battle of Poltava in 1709. They depict what is often described in the drill manuals as the way to fight, but of course, you know, I would hope our listeners are aware and perhaps they're even familiar with the book that I'm referencing, like an homage in the title, infantry in battle, in World War I, our officers realized, man, our military manuals and what actually happens on the battlefield is rarely exactly the same thing. So how do we adapt from those military manuals to the actual practice of combat? And that's what the original kind of book titled,

Inventry and Battled, looked at military experience in World War I was trying to unpack. And so I'm trying to do something similar in the 18th century, say, well, this is how officers conceive of battle. This is how drill manuals present combat in the 18th century, often very similar to what we have in film. But what actually happens on the battlefield and what is that gulf between what's in the drill manuals and what actual lived experience of combat on the battlefield is. Yeah, I was struck by your title and then chuckled when I saw you acknowledge it explicitly in the book. In the Year of Our Lord 2007, I was issued a copy of infantry in battle in Quantico and was struck by how good it was, you know, a hundred-year-old book practically,

less because of, you know, the direct overlap of platoon or company-level tactics, which obviously at the time is what most interested me, though there was some overlap. And more the, one, the question of sort of fire and maneuver, fire and movement, a level of principle, which clearly overlaps. And two, and more to your direct point, this question of theory versus practice and the need to prepare yourself for the practice of the battlefield. There's a remarkable volume. it really is and and i mean i i don't think perhaps my vault volume will have newly that much staying power i you know certainly in terms of instructing modern officers but i i did kind of notice some similarities in the claims that were made and my publisher helly and over the united cana

they said we really want a short and pithy title and so i decided to go with this as a result yeah that's great well let's let's try to draw this out a bit so you you know your your argument that there's reluctance to engage in the melee, longer exchanges of, you know, often aimed fire at greater ranges. This, you know, if you combine this with something else about the period, I'm not an expert in the period at all. I'm hardly an expert in anything, but I have read Winston Churchill's Marlboro, his life in times. And so I know a little bit about the war of the Spanish succession as a consequence. And one thing I know about that war, which seems to me, if anything, to probably be enhanced or aggravated, depending on your point of view, by your argument, is that decision was hard on the battlefield

in this period. First of all, because it was hard to get anyone to agree to put themselves in a position to give you a decision, right? Seages, siege craft, fortresses, fortification was sort of the name of the game. So you often had these less than decisive campaigns over limited political objectives, and that's kind of the flavor of the day in stereotypical contradistinction to, say, the Napoleonic era, a hundred years later. What you're describing is a form of infantry combat, which adjacent to the knowledge that sieges and fortification are still very much a theme, right, in your period, the decision is getting harder and harder. Is that I upped my intonation at the end because I'm not confident.

I'm just curious to know if this is an implication I should draw. No, I think it is. I think you do see battles stretching out maybe a longer in the early modern period, especially as we're kind of moving towards the end of the 18th century in the Pollyotic Wars, that firepower that these troops can deliver with flitlock weapons, often we over-exaggerate the inaccuracy of these weapons. It's possible, it's not certainly, I think, reproducible with a huge amount of precision, but it's possible to hit a man-sized target from 100 yards away with the smooth more flint-lock weapon.

And although I certainly was never a bet for myself, I do regularly shoot these weapons in a target setting. you can hit a man-sized target fairly, you know, precisely, at about 100 yards. And we know this from descriptions of the Battle of Utah Springs at the end of the book, where the British soldiers are picking off our officers and our artillerymen from about 100 yards away, individual targets, but 100 yards away with these weapons. And so that combined, and the ordinary soldiers kind of have this knowledge, right? they're broadly familiar with how deadly these weapons are. That makes them very hesitant to move,

especially at almost like a methodical drumbeat pace like you would see depicted in the movie The Patriot into very close range while the enemy is opening fire on it. And so frequently at battles, like the battles of Parma and Bostla in the War of Polish Succession in northern Italy, you see the soldiers say, we're 150 yards away from the enemy, that's probably close enough. Let's stop here and open fire. And of course, the officers despise this. The officers are going around and doing things like

hitting the men with the flats of their swords, trying to get them, trying to force that decision that you're asking about, right? But for the men say, yeah, you know, the firepower is pretty dangerous. Let's stay back and shoot from a further distance. I expend maybe more ammunition, but not make ourselves such a presentable target to the enemy at close range. And so this is, I think, something that marks a lot of 18th century battles. What you see in the four case studies I describe in the book, the battles of Parma, Guastela, German town, and Utah Springs, both of those second two in our American War of Independence,

is essentially no decision at all. The attackers arrive on the battlefield, they fight for a number of hours, eventually they run out of ammunition, and then they withdraw. ending the attack. And so it's not so much a clear decision that is reached as one side becomes exhausted or is attritted as a result of their lack of ammunition. And so they sort of withdraw from the battlefield ending the engagement. So there's a couple of things I want to make sure we get to. So I'll just say them aloud now as sort of we can have a table of contents. I want to get to

Prussia and the role that Prussia plays and all this. And I want to get to modern, potential modern relevance because I think there are some really interesting parallels we could potentially draw here. But before either of those, I want to ask. you sort of a, it sounds a bit like a stupid question, but were the officers right? That is to say, if the soldiers would just suck it up and act like the machine they were being asked to act like in any of the wars in this period, would they have actually had a better chance at achieving a decision and fulfilling the strategic and political goals that they were out there to fulfill? That's a really good question. And I try to get at this a little bit in like the last few

pages of the book. Often, armies that we frequently admire, not necessarily. Certainly not from their political outlook, but from their effectiveness in the tactical level of war, armies like the Swedish army in the Great Northern War, the British Army in the American War of Independence, I think probably the most famous example, is the Bergmach to the German army in the Second World War. Frequently, armies that are excelling like this at the tactical level of war are being asked to fulfill very difficult operational and strategic objectives. And so in my period, in the case of the Swedish army, which is a little before my time, but still in the 18th century, and the British army in the American War of Independence, you do see a focus on we're going to get into very close range. Maybe we'll fire once and then we'll try and charge bayonets and very quickly move over that sort of killbox or, you know, dead ground presented by the enemy firepower. And so as a result of this tactic, what the Swedes call, Guapa in the Great Northern War, they are very effective. The officers kind of look at this and say,

wow, if you charge right in, if you're moving at a pretty good clip, maybe you only stop to fire once, you're trying to get in the enemy's grill basically with bayonets in a really short manner, a really short order of time, that does lead to a lot of battles, spectacular battlefield success. And indeed, officers who can't quite get their men to do these same things, like the Austrian officer, who I quote a couple times in the book, Johann Sigismund McGuire, he says, man, if only we had done what the officer said, we would have been a second, Charles, the 12th of Sweet, we would have been able to really quickly force the enemy off the battlefield.

But if you look at the strategic outcomes of these wars, I mean, obviously, we're both speaking not British English, but American English today, right? We're not ruled by, you know, the British monarchy anymore. They had some battlefield success, but eventually, in the face of an enemy that wields firepower an increasingly more effective way, this desire on the part of the officers can lead to intense casualties. And that happens to Charles the 12th of Pultava in 1709. It happens to Frederick II of Frederick the Great of Prussia at the Battle of Prague on May 6,

1757. It happens to the British at places like Cowpins and Guilford Courthouse and Monmouth Courthouse in the later half of the or the latter half of the American War of Independence. And so, yes, I think in the short run, you can operate in this much more, maybe flexible, aggressive, fast-moving manner and achieve very desirable tactical results. But eventually you're going to run out a road. And the enemy is going to figure out how to best use their firepower to annihilate you as you're coming in even when you're using these tactics.

And so as a result, most 18th century battles eventually devolved. into maybe more longer range fire fights between the two opposing sides. Now, that's a really interesting answer and it's, you know, by the time we get to the First World War and I realize I'm just going to traffic and stereotypes here, but to traffic and stereotypes for a second, it seems clear that the answer

to my question is, no, the officers are wrong. If you fix bayonets and charge into the machine guns, you're going to most likely almost certainly lose. And in some ways, this is the theme of infantry in battle is, look, idiots, if you actually want to achieve tactical success, you have to accept reality and here's what reality is going to look like. But in the 18th century, a bit more of an open question where you have from the bottom up, this sort of dawning realization that, man, this

sucks. This battlefield is a very dangerous place. And yes, mass and achievement of attempts to achieve quick decision through proximity and hand-to-hand combat and everything else might have some appeal, but it sure seems pretty dangerous to me, like odds, odds that I'm not certainly personally very thrilled with when there are other alternatives immediately available. But just as that realization seems to become thematic as you as you document in the book, Prussia and the achievements of Frederick the Great come to the fore. And at the same time, sort of seem to seem to make the case for the more traditional way of looking at the battlefield. Speak to that, if you would, in the role of Prussia and all this. Absolutely.

So in 1740, the old king of Prussia, Frederick Wilhelm, the first, or Friedrich Wilhelm I'm the first, who Germans remember as the soldier king, Odessa Dutnik. He dies, and his son, a young 28-year-old man named Frederick the second, or we often, in English, call him now Frederick the Great, takes this rope. And he embarks on a series of very large wars to primarily expand Prussia's power and influence at the expense of his southern Catholic neighbor, the Austrian Empire, the Habsburg Empire. And so he's trying to fight with them

over the control of a certain duchy, the Duchy of Silesia, which is in southern modern Poland or modern southern Poland. And in the course of these fights, even though the Prussian army is usually outnumbered by their opponents, perhaps outnumbered by a factor of two to one

or more than that, they are able to win battlefield victory after battlefield victory, particularly in the first of these three series of wars, the war of Austrian succession, or what Germans would call the first and second Silesian war. This is a, in some ways, I guess, almost like a wake-up call across Europe. And it turns the Prussians into what we might call today the paradigm army of the 18th century. And so all across Europe, officers now want to come and take military tours of Prussia

and do kind of 18th century versions of what we would today call. staff rides on these battlefields that the Prussians fought on in the war of Austrian succession and the seven years war, what they would call the Third Silesian War. And so as a result of this, many officers look at the relatively high standard of peacetime discipline in the Prussian army and the way that on the drill square, Prussian soldiers are kept under a very high standard of parade ground excellence often at the threat of being, you know, sort of hit by their officers, maybe with their fists or canes or something like this, they say, wow, maybe we need to do that. Maybe this is the key to their success. Maybe this

focus on close order drill really makes the Prussian army exceptional. It makes them a force that even if you're outnumbered two to one or three to one, you could still find success against the enemy on the battlefield. And so this focus on trying to turn these other European armies into more rigidly controlled, maybe tightly drilled forces, is what I refer to in the book and what my mentor, Christopher Duffy, calls Prussia mania, which is almost like a, and I won't call it a sickness because I, you say, Ted earlier, essentially, you know, the officers are idiots, the unless I know what's going on, I think it's a little bit more complicated than that. But at times, when you're reading these theoretical treatises from the officers and they're giving out all

of these suggestions, it's hard not to occasionally roll your eyes. I mean, when they're saying things like, we need to re-adopt body armor and bring Pikes back. Like, well, that would be like saying we need to bring back bolt action rifles in the U.S. military today. I mean, you know, maybe they were an excellent piece of technology, but times have kind of moved on. And so in this way, going to the drill fields in Silesia and around Magdeburg in Brandenburg and sort of observing the Prussian military, in some ways, I think that the military Europe, where this conglomerate of officers from all across the European and even by the end of the century, American worlds, there's American colonels who travel to Prussia after our revolutionary war

to see the Prussian army, how they sort of do their peacetime evolutions. In some ways, they're kind of drawing some of the wrong lessons from what makes the Prussian army exceptional. They're copying the outward appearance and not really getting at the heart of what makes the Prussian Army exceptional, which is what I try and unpack in the book, kind of this outward look and also the social cohesive bonds, the loyalty to the state in some ways that motivates Prussian soldiers. It makes them. Maybe pretty hard to defeat on the battlefield. And so the Prussians go on. They win the war of Austrian secession quite handily. They almost lose the seven years of war, but they're safe.

at the last moment by the death of the Russian Empress Elizabeth Petrovna. And so they kind of go down in history, at least in their own time, as being exceptionally good soldiers. And so to really grapple with, you know, what's going on on 18th century battlefields and more than just an American context, you've got to understand the Prussian Army, you've got to place the other parts of the Atlantic military world in relationship to them. So that's what I try to do in the book. No, it's a really fascinating argument on a number of of levels and the one I want to ask you to elaborate a little bit more on now is this this notion if you're if you're a non-prussian officer enjoying or suffering depending on your point of view from prussomania and again sort of sticking with the stereotype of 18th century armies you know well here you have this rabble of soldiers from the gutter as it were in the 18th century that you the landed aristocrat officer have to whip into shape and you look at the prussians and they just seem really good at it they've whipped these guys into shape through through fear and discipline and man if only we could have fearful and disciplined soldiers to send into the meat grinder.

We do well, too, on the battlefield. And your point is, there's an ideological element to it for the Prussians that that account misses. Tell us about the Prussian soldier. Just say more about that. Absolutely. Yeah. So this idea of the sort of peasant recruit who's beaten into submission by his aristocratic

officer, who's probably not a very good professional soldier, is common across all these 18th century armies. And it's something that historians who I look up to, people like Ilya Berkovich and Susha Mubius, have really tried to unpack and challenge over the last 30 years of scholarly research on this topic. But essentially, I think we do have to wrestle with why the Prussian army was successful in the 18th century. The book came out in 2008 by a scholar up in Canada named Franz Sabeau. And I respect Dr. Sable a lot. He's an incredible scholar.

But essentially it came out and said, well, Frederick the Great was actually not very good general. The Prussian army, you know, he views them as kind of the bad guys. He's kind of a partisan for the Austrians in some ways. And so he comes out. He can be the bad guys and still be effective on the battle. Exactly right. Exactly right. And so if it's not all the genius of the king, which is kind of the old hero worship, kind of Thomas Carlyle-esque, you know, the great man theory of history,

explanation for why the Prussians are so effective. and it's not the fact that they were all essentially robots beaten into shape by discipline who could just march through enemy gunfire, you know, and in the phrase that's often repeated from the 18th century, they're more afraid of their officers than they are the enemy. There's not a lot of, I think, good evidence for that. And again, Sasha and Gilea have really done a great job on packing that. What is it that makes them so effective? And so the answer that I keep coming back to, I looked at this in my dissertation, and looked at

a little bit in the book as well, is the kind of high level of social cohesion in the Prussian army. If you look at how these men are recruited, many of them are conscripts, almost like the U.S. Army was recruited, but, you know, say, during the Vietnam War and earlier, but they're conscripted in such a way that men from the same locality go into the same unit. And so you have people who know each other and who are, in some cases related, like uncles and nephews, in the same platoon, in the same. company. And so they're hesitant to run away on the battlefield, not necessarily because they're afraid of the officers. I think there probably is some level of fear. You don't want to run away

in front of the officers and get in trouble, but also because they don't want to leave their buddies behind, because they don't want to leave the men they know from their village. They don't want to leave, you know, Uncle Johann there on the battlefield by himself. I don't want to run away and leave him. And so this, this level of social cohesion, in addition to religious ideologies and monarchical ideologies that are really kind of broiling around in the Prussian army at this time helped turn it into a very highly motivated force, a force that is led a little bit more by a sense of maybe positive inner leadership than just the, you know, the canes of their officers kind of beating them into combat. And so it's in the seven years war, in the war of Austrian

succession, I disagree with Professor Sable a little bit. I think Fred is probably not upward with Napoleon, but he is a good general in some ways. That probably helps some. But this social cohesion, the high level of training and discipline, these men are subjected to and the leadership of the king. And as Adam Storing would say, kind of a laboratory of other very good officers, this is what makes the Prussian army so effective. And it's not a very easy thing to copy. And I've always put in mind in sort of an anecdote from the period of the global war on terror and the Afghan army in that period, which even though, Afghanistan is not necessarily like a temperate forest climate like northern Europe, Afghan soldiers really wanted to adopt the woodland forest camouflage that,

you'd say the United States soldiers were in the 1990s and 1980s. And so you're copying maybe the outward trappings of what is making the paradigm army so good, but if you're not internalizing like the social bonds or the leadership structures and more than just kind of the bare minimum of the outside sort of what frederick the great himself called the mere externals the uniforms of the soldiers you'll probably like to be able to copy that same level of success so i'm going to repeat back to you what what i think i'm learning from the book and from your explanation just now and i'll finish in a provocative way because i want to i want to draw something out of you which is so the battlefield is changing it's changing in ways

that harm individual survivability soldiers are reacting somewhat naturally to this in ways that frustrate their officers. And then who, who, it's a complicated question of, you know, the officers are dealing with the changing battlefield, but maybe the kinds of stereotypical tactics the officers want might still be effective if you could really put your back into it. Then we see the Prussians, as it were, putting their back into it and actually achieving success with the sort of more stereotypical bids for decision. But what's making that possible is less the, the sort of rule by fear, small R realism approach to discipline that theoretically is a to anyone and really more a kind of almost here's where I'm going to get provocative sort of

semi kind of sort of nationalistic spirit that sounds a lot like Napoleon or the close you know the the mass conscript armies of the of the revolutionary period not the same thing obviously but that that'll be my question to you is what you're saying sounds a lot more like a kind of nationalistic asprit of core than than anything else we might point to in the 18th century yeah and I think broadly I mean it's important not to over-dredued draw that, but broadly, I think that's where this literature is going on this topic. I mean, if you look at in 1970 or 1960, if I was a historian writing on this topic, I would have said, ah, these men were the scum of the earth who were going to draw into the military only because they wanted to sort of

fulfill material conditions. They wanted a paycheck. They wanted three meals a day. They didn't really care about the army they were fighting for. There's probably some of that going on still, to be clear. There are still a lot of men who are bounty jumping back and forth between armies, He's kind of taking the pay wherever they can get it. But in the Prussian army, in the British army, perhaps in the Russian army of the 18th century, there is maybe kind of early stirrings of what you have called a nationalistist's free to corps. I think that might be going a little far for me. My mentor, Christopher Duffy, says, you see the early forms of nationalism in Britain and Russia at this time.

Often we describe what's going on in Prussia more in terms of like patriotism, the nationalism. And you see, especially in things like the military rage of 1775 and 7076, a similar experience in our country in the United States. A lot of Americans are motivated to go and fight, not because they want a job and a paycheck and three meals a day, because they care about the ideology that they're sort of fighting for. It doesn't look like, you know, an army of free citizens fighting for a republic as it does in our case. But in the 18th century Prussian army, if you're a, if you grow up Lutheran, if you have a very high view of the sort of role in the monarchy in the state, in ideology that Sasha Mubius and others have called God and King ideology kind of sweeps

through the Prussian army in the middle years of the 18th century. And so these men, it doesn't quite look like the loyalty to the national flag that we might see in the 19th century, but they are motivated by the ideologies at the time. They are motivated by things like religion and loyalty to the state. Lord of the local communities, loyalty to the king. All of this kind of brings together to at least make some elements of that Prussian army in the 18th century. It would be a little bit more like an army of virtue than just a group of almost quasi-mercernaries bound together as a result of their need to have material conditions fulfilled.

So say then how your argument plays out for the American Revolution to take it through to the conclusion of your story. Here we have, as you, as you just put it, a Republican, proto-Republican army fighting for freedom. How does that then, you're also speaking, I love that you're speaking to us from Steubenville. I assume that that is, that is von Steuben. Yes, he is the mascot of my university. And we actually have the only known portrait of his father, also a Prussian officer, in the collections to the university. So it's a wonderful place for me to be. Yeah, well, I, so, you know, as ever my, initial thoughts on most questions dealing with American history reformed by Kevin Kelly, my AP US history teacher in high school was a brilliant teacher. And I remember him sheeriness of our

illusions that the American Revolution was won by soldiers hiding behind trees and learning to, you know, fight like the Indians. But in fact, it was the Prussianization of the American Army that leads to success in the end. And so that became, that became the conventional wisdom of my, you know, 11th grade self. Finish your story for listeners in the American Revolution and how these forces play out in the 1770s and 80s. Yeah, I would say broadly, I think obviously your A. AP, a U.S. teacher was right. But it's a little bit more complicated than that because, you know, as you, as I've kind of already said, you've suggested, my book indicates that all European armies are fighting in this way, more or less to some degree. And indeed, we have descriptions from the Freit-El who's a German soldier fighting on behalf of the British, one of these so-called Hessians.

He's actually from the small state of Brunswick or Grunschweinfluf. And he's talking about British fighting the Americans in Canada in 1776 at the tail end of our invasion of Canada. which began in 1775. And he essentially says in this diary entry, the British are lying down and kind of taking the Americans unawares. They're firing from ambush. They're, you know, sort of,

if you're, you have maybe a patriot influence and the co-here I'm talking about the Mel Gibson film, you know, sort of influence understanding of the revolution. It actually seems like maybe the British are Mel Gibson and were the guys getting picked off in some of these diary entries. And so often,

as Americans, we have kind of two conceits about the Revolutionary War. We have the idea that the British are foppishly incompetent. I mean, they're wearing bright red, and supposedly they're wearing powdered wigs, and they're marching in lines, and how could we take an army seriously like this? But on the other hand, we also have this conceit, and they're the best army in the world, and we beat them, so good on us. And probably one of those things is more true than the other. You mean, the British Army is actually not foppishly incompetent.

It's a fairly effective fighting force in the 18th century. It's maybe not the best army in the world, but it's one of the great powers. It's one of the better armies in the world in the 18th century. And so in order to defeat them, we need not just the military force that comes to be in 1775 and 1776, which is essentially angry American showing up with guns in order to defeat the British, organized into militia companies in the period of 7075 in the Battle of Lexington and Concord. But we need a more professional army. We need an army that is going to incorporate maybe both the European discipline

and this more loose style of fighting that is so effective in North America. And so Storbyn really does this for us. He is able to come over and give us not necessarily what you think of, I mean, he doesn't come over and show the Americans how to load their guns and do the manual arms effectively for the first time. We knew all that. Our army was pretty effective at fighting even before Schoeman came over. But what he brings over is a Prussian expertise in how to rapidly train large numbers of men, how to get the men to do large-scale realistic war games, which was a specialty of the Prussian army in the 18th century. Frederick the Great in many ways

of Frederick the second is the pioneer of realistic opposed war games at an 18th century context. And so, Stoibin trains us how to put it all together. We already have a lot of really good component parts, but we need to be able to kind of use all those synergistically together. And so, Stoibin trains us to do things like launch what we would today call like brigade and divisional level attacks effectively, simultaneously together. He trains the army on a larger scale so that when Washington takes it into battle, you don't have individual battalion commanders thinking, how do I want to fight the enemy? You have an army that essentially has a army-wide playbook of tactics that say, okay, so in this situation, this is what we would want to do.

And so he standardizes already good components as opposed to maybe building the army from the ground up in a new way. This is really the gift that he provides our more professional army, the continental army, that comes to play a such an important role in later years of the war. My last question for you, I'm going to ask you to sort of reflect to the extent that you're comfortable on the present day, because everything that we're discussing, and one of the really interesting upshots of your argument, is that everything we deal with today has its roots not in the First World War or the Civil War, or even the Napoleonic Wars, but actually you can see the nascent phenomena all at work in the 18th century. And all the trends that we've spent the last 45 minutes or so going over is the increasing savagery of the battlefield, the natural response of armies and soldiers to that, the responsive officers to those responses, the constant desire for a decision frustrated by the very nature of the battlefield itself.

That's all alive and well. And it's accelerated and gone through revolution after revolution in its own right such that the latest is drones. It was a great long piece in the New York Times just this morning on. how drones have transformed the battlefield in Ukraine. And all in speaking very broadly, in terms that are like totally understandable, according to the logic of your research in the 18th century. I don't exactly know how to phrase this question. So maybe I'll just ask you to sort of, what is it, if anything, and what you are learning

about 18th century combat in the sort of dawn of a lot of the issues that we're dealing with today at a level of principle that you think practitioners today, because we have a lot of military officers who listen to the show or policymakers for that matter who care about defense policy and may have something to do with the military, what should they be most aware of? What are you learning from this that when you look at the news about Ukraine, you think, aha, well, if you knew this, you would understand better what's going on. Sure, absolutely. I think I could take this a number of different directions. And I actually close out the book with the realization that my book on 50 years of the 18th century really only goes so far. We need to be younger, more linguistically

talented scholar than I to go back further and tell the whole story of how firearms changed the battlefield from, say, the period around 1500 up until until the present day, kind of using this framework of what I look at in the book and call negotiated authority, the enlisted men saying, well, you know, we don't really want to do that. And the officer is saying, well, this would be the way we force a decision. We need you to go do that. I think armies are very traditional institutions in some ways. They're institutions where you have. to sort of marry tradition, prestige, social prestige, with battlefield effectiveness in a way that gives maybe hopefully more weight to efficiency and less weight to prestige. And right now I'm

working on a piece for foreign policy that looks at the drone question that you've raised through the lens, not of the 18th century, but earlier back in the 1490s. in early 1500s with the initial introduction to these firearms, more within called the archbassiers or or you have sort of a very early mashlock firearms. And you have, much like today,

we might look at the problems drones present as especially from a perspective of infantrymen and say how can we protect our men from these drones, how can we sort of adopt drones ourselves, most of effectively in order to entreat the enemy force.

But I think you also, to some extent, have questions today in terms of our own employment of drones that deal with questions of social prestige. Do we want to move to an increasingly unmanned aerial combat force or even naval combat force? And if we do, you know, what kind of social questions will that raise for pilots? today or you know sort of sailors today and so i look at particular german emperor austrian emperor i mean maximilian the first who was the grandfather of charles the fifth that pretty important hapsburg emperor and he faced a similar question in the the late part of the 15th century in the early part of the 16th century which which is in a world where increasingly infantry are

are starting to dominate the battlefield against armored knights who have a ton of social prestige, how do you navigate battlefield efficiency without upsetting a whole bunch of people who have traditionally held a ton of prestige in your military? And this is something he doesn't always do well. There are times when he goes too far in the quest for battlefield efficiency and upset some of his nobles, upset some of his knights, and they kind of go home and abandon the war. but I do think you're facing a similar question today where we might have, because of the traditional nature of armies, people who are concerned, what is my role going forward in a warfighting sort of capacity if drones are going to take all of the role that I currently do?

You know, what will happen to this MOS or this branch in the face of technological developments? And you kind of have to, and this is what Emperor Maximilian did, is having. it's sort of a Janus-faced approach where you try to do as much as you can to spur technological change while maybe not stepping on the toes of those people who have a lot of social prestige and have traditionally enjoyed that in the current version of the military that you're trying to afford. That's a really interesting answer. It just mostly makes me think we should do a whole separate episode on this question because there's much more to be said. But for now we're out of time.

And Alexander Burns, author most recently, of Infantry in Battle, 1733 to, 83. Really interesting book, really interesting conversation. I really appreciate you making the time. Thanks so much, Eric. It was great to be here. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.