School of War - Ep 196: Thomas Bruscino and Mitchell G. Klingenberg on Mapping Warfare

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

Thomas Bruscino, professor at the U.S. Army War College, and Mitchell G. Klingenberg, assistant professor at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, join the show to discuss their article "Making War Upon the Map" The U.S. Army’s Forgotten Map Problem, Meade’s Gettysburg Campaign, and Depicting Operational Art.  ▪️ Times      •      02:05 Introduction     •      03:12 What’s missing?      •      06:17 A modern problem     •      09:27 Meade takes command       •      11:29 Seeing both sides        •      15:41 South Mountain        •      22:54 Lee’s mistakes           •      30:11 Meade’s good choices      •      36:32 Mapping in 2025     •      41:51 Visualization          •      47:37 Developing doctrine Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

I expect a lot of you are like me and are really into maps. Maybe since childhood. Maybe long after you grew up and it stopped being cute. Maybe. Well, today's conversation is for you. I wanted to do more on mapping and the visualization of space in military affairs and geopolitics since we started the show. But for obvious reasons, that's been a challenge on a podcast

that's been largely audio only since its inception. By the way, there's some news coming on that front, so stay tuned. But today I get to talk maps with two really smart professors in the Army's professional military education system and their work on how to improve how we visualize battles and campaigns of the past and of the future. Let's get into it. It is for safety for war. The Rocking and a day of 21, a date which will live in infinity. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state.

We continue to face. situation is around. It will fight on the beaches. It will 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, Tom Braschino, who is a historian and professor in the Department of Military, strategy planning and operations at the U.S. Army War College, and Mitchell Klingenberg, a historian and assistant professor in the Department of Military History at the U.S. Army Command and General

Staff College, both military historians, both serious scholars and authors of many things, and most recently a really fascinating article making war on the map about mapping and operational art and operational decision making as seen through the lens of the Gettysburg campaign. And guys, I really enjoyed it. And thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for having us. Good to be here, Aaron. Thanks for having us.

So I'll toss this first question out in either one of you who wants to take it on or both, feel free. I have at home the West Point two volume Atlas. It's an old version. I think I had already been in the Marines for a while, and it wasn't part of our curriculum in any way at Quantico. And I'm pretty sure I was in a used bookstore at some point when I was an officer. And I saw this. I don't know when it was printed. I'm on the road right now, so I can't take it down off the shelf, but probably sometime in the 80s, judging by sort of glance at my visual memory of it.

And it's just this magnificent document that has taught me a lot over the years. And it's a great quick reference. You know, if you want to learn what was going on, you know, in 1943 on the eastern front or something like that. There's just a few pages right there. You turn to him really quickly and it gives you an overview, a quick narrative, and a great visualization. The upshot of your article, though, is that these maps and others like them leave a lot to be desired. So I'll start us there. In these traditional maps that have been used in officer education for a very long time, what's missing? So, yeah, this is Tom. We should start by saying, you know, we don't speak for the Army, Department of Defense or the United States government. We're here. We work there,

we work there, but we don't speak for them. So this is all, you know, our personal views on these, matters. When it comes to the West Point maps, we should start with him. We're fans. Mitchell taught in the West Point District Department, and they've used them for a long time. They're online. We highly recommend people use them. Like you said, they're a great reference. But they provide a broad overview. One of the stories we tell in this article is about how they came to be.

And they were derived out of a teaching material that an instructor at Leavenworth used in the early 1900s named Matthew Steele for a course, and he developed maps to talk about American campaigns in a course called Conduct of War. And at the time, the map-making capabilities were pretty limited at the schoolhouse and even in the war department. So they kind of borrowed from a lot of popular, more popular accounts. So he did it for a bunch of them. When it came to the Civil War, he pulled a lot of them from the campaigns and leaders, civil war stuff. So, you know, they kind of came out of these popular maps and they could only do so much with them. And even Steele said these are kind of limited.

And then eventually Steele's book was adopted and the atlaces that accompanied it was adopted at the West Point History Department for their courses. and then they made their own. The ones you saw or this later ones, kind of Vincent Esposito, sort of put them together, but didn't really improve on the sort of campaigning portion of it, you know, really looking at it from the perspective of the Field Army commanders and how they looked at their fights. They're great for battles.

They tend to be a little bit weaker on campaigns. They're not showing everything. Mitchell will continue if you like about that. Yeah, no, I think that's a great overview, Tom. And I think we should note, too, that at one point, the operational-level narrative of the campaigns that accompanied the atlases was dropped. And this happened sometime around the turn of the millennium,

I think in 2002, when course offerings at Usma and in the Department of History kind of expanded beyond the traditional operational level of warfare and the tactical level of warfare to include wider political, maybe grand strategic, these kinds of considerations. So I echo Tom's point wholesale. The maps are great for what they show. And we were really trying to take the, you know, what those show one step farther. So one of the things I really liked about your piece was how it lingers on just the role that visualization plays for commanders. And in a way, it's like a basic observation.

And another way to understand it is to kind of understand the whole thing. Everyone in any kind of spatial competition that I was about to say that goes beyond like the size of a tennis court, but even there you have to envision the future. So everyone is always picturing scenarios in a very literal. way, like they are imagining what things look like in order to make decisions and shape the future. What specifically is it that these sort of traditional or that the traditional American way of military mapping leaves out and makes it therefore harder to visualize for commanders? Yes, we should be specific about this.

When we talk about it, that, you know, and it's really a problem across the board, there's really no maps that do this particularly well. And I would say it's a problem of modern industrialized warfare in particular. You know, so the previous maps, and this is both on a historical side, and then for the use of commanders, as warfare change, as its scale grew, as it became more complicated, more technologies involved, all of these things, we didn't like catch up with how a commander visualizes it at echelon or at scale. Right.

So, you know, we're, you know, the entire Defense Department is in this kind of effort to try to figure out how to do war fighting better and, you know, what does it mean? And one of the things we're sort of emphasizing here is that this is war fighting at a particular level. And, you know, we haven't really sort of thought about, I think we've done a pretty good job with battles about, you know, a way a commander would visualize a battle in maps. You sort of see that. And those have held up pretty well.

You know, a lot of those are just, you know, sketches and can be done pretty quickly. But we haven't done it so well for campaigning itself, for a larger scale campaigning. What a, what a field army commander is actually thinking about. You know, that's the particular level we're working on in this. It could be a Joint Task Force commander. It could be a fleet commander. How do they visualize their battle space, what used to be called maybe a theater of operations. Now it's often called a joint operational area or something like that.

So that understanding is what we're talking about. And so, you know, the phrase we use is that what we've tended to do is have like pumped up battle maps. You know, so they look like, it looks like a battle just on a bigger scale. And then what ends up happening is as you kind of scale out to try to capture all the things. they're looking at, the roads drop off of it, the bases of supply drop off of it, the lines of operation, the scale of the units on the road and their movements, all that stuff is missing from it. And all of these other sort of auxiliary headquarters that really matter to the field army commander, but don't seem to be on the maps that depict what that, you know, in this

case, George Gordon Mead was visualizing. But it could be U.S. Zed Grant, it could be Dwight Eisenhower, it could be John Pershing, you name it. And, you know, across the world, any campaign, it's not really what they're thinking about. It's what, you know, we've kind of, so it tends to be these kind of base units, cores kind of floating around, you know, there's no road, right? So they're just kind of in this general space.

You know, sometimes there's rivers, not really railroads, you want to show ports. You know, there's like, a lot of this stuff ends up missing from this. And, you know, we use Gettysburg because it was pretty straightforward, pretty familiar for a lot of people,

but then you could really see how much stuff went into how Mead thought about it. And you could do this for all. And we meant this just as a kind of a cue to hopefully get people thinking this way. Let's leap into Mead. in the days leading up to Gettysburg. We've never talked about Gettysburg on the show here.

We're not really going to talk about the battle itself today. Maybe we should devote an episode to that some other time. But the days leading up to it, which should have illustrate your point of what's on the mind of a field army commander, but not actually depicted on virtually any of the maps that show the action of these days. Tell us how, you know, George Mead saw the world on, was it 28 June that he takes over, 1863? What is the situation? What is he dealing with?

Yeah, so I'll field this one, I suppose. Mead takes command on the 28th, right? He's woken in the night by the bear of the dispatch, the order basically appointing him to command of the Army of the Potomac. He is fearful, thinks he's going to be basically arrested, but is informed that he's replacing General Hooker as commander of the Army of the Potomac. And really, his first order of business is to figure out where his core headquarters are to get a better sight picture of where the enemy are, and basically to understand all available

intelligence to him, to understand the strategic guidance he receives, which is that he has to cover Washington and Baltimore, be prepared to defend those, what Klausvitz or Jominee might have called decisive points or objectives, and also be prepared to either defend against the Army of Northern Virginia or to pursue it and try to destroy it in detail. And this is all confronting him on the 28th of June, as many listeners probably know, the first day of the battle is one July. So flash to bang for General Mead is a very short time horizon. It's a very short timeline. But I would say those are the broad generalities, Aaron, right? Like first he has to understand and comprehend the strategic guidance that he's received. He has to understand what pieces he has at his

disposal, which are a handful of infantry corps, a cavalry corps. The artillery of the artillery of the Army of the Potomac has been kind of distributed at core, but also there's a reserve element as well. And so he has to figure out all of this and the best location for his base of operations and plan a campaign on really short notice. And then I guess, you know, critically, he also has to figure out what the heck the bad guys are up to and Lee's decisions. And that becomes this interplay between his assumptions about Confederate objectives, but then also his knowledge of terrain, which is going to dictate the options of the Confederates, right? How does the understanding of the enemy situation start to play out?

So this is one thing we did, you know, military historians argue about this. And certainly in the military schoolhouse, we kind of argue about whether we should tell the story of a campaign from both sides simultaneously. But that's a, you know, it's very hard to evaluate a commander that way. That's, it's kind of unfair. You know, Mead doesn't know what Lee's actually doing. he knows what his intelligence is telling him. Lead is doing, and his ability to sort of put himself in Lee's shoes and visualize and guess what he would do against the terrain based on the intel he has about where he is

at any time. So we do tell this pretty exclusively from Mead's side. And we do that deliberately. And I think that that is a good way. I think it's the only way you can sort of fairly evaluate a commander. You can't judge him for not knowing things that he couldn't possibly know. He did the best he could with what he had. And, you know, so somebody could flip this around and do it from Lee's side.

And not me. I don't like it and put myself in Lee's shoes. But if you stick it around it from Mead side, you're one person side, you get an idea of the way you have to, you're trying to do that sort of command capability of anticipation of what the enemy might do. And it's a really important kind of factor in this. So, yeah, the one side of this. I see the other thing I would add to it is, you know, one of the things that Mead brings to it. And this goes at that point about Eschalon really matter. Since he was a Corps commander, he understood how Corps operated.

And so, you know, as the Field Army commander, and, you know, previously he didn't have much of a feel as a Corps commander about what was going on in the other Corps. You know, that wasn't like Hooker's Command style. Mead does a little, does a better job of that of letting his cores know where the other cores are. That's a really important thing. And, you know, he has an expectation of how far a Corps could march, you know, what they need to be able to do to get ready for battle, all of those things. And so he brings that perspective. And then Mitchell mentioned it too. You know, one of the things that's like, you know, we've kind of fascinating on this,

the artillery reserve and the headquarters, you know, represent a significant marching formation for him. They have to move too. He has to count them and think about them, right? And on the flip side, he also knows that Lee has, you know, and that's never, the artillery reserves never depicted on maps. That is a separate thing. The headquarters has never depicted on maps as a separate thing that takes up, you know,

five miles of road or whatever it might take up. And, you know, specifically, it's something like that. that, right? Five, six, seven miles a road, maybe a little bit more in certain cases. He's also looking at the enemy and knowing what his formations will take up on a, you know, on a road. He's aware of that, right? So that's part of his, his, you know, it doesn't matter what, you know, exactly what Lee does, those, those Lee's formations are going to take up a certain amount of space on the road. And so he's thinking that way as he goes. So that's part of his, that's part of his perspective, too. And if I can just hop on to this, too, I think one thing that bears mentioning,

And Tom hit on it briefly and his kind of aside about, well, how do you tell both sides of a campaign? We've chosen to fixate on Mead's perspective very deliberately. But part of the project, too, grew from the orientation that was baked into a lot of staff-ride programming, even at the War College, given its geography and its location. And, of course, so much of the campaign centered around Carlisle in its early stages, but of course, that's only because Confederate forces were there. and then march south to the battlefield, the ultimate battlefield at Gettysburg from the north. And so one of the drivers of this project was, you know, and Tom and I drove all the roads and got down into Maryland and really tried to get a feel for all the terrain and the passes and the gaps. And we thought this will require deliberate rethink to try to put ourselves

in Mead's headspace, to see the campaign with his eyes and not really to jump into any kind of conversation or experiential learning staff ride modality at Gettysburg automatically from the perspective of Confederate forces, which given Carlisle's geography, that's quite natural. Well, pick a moment or like an important dilemma or decision, say, that Mead faced in the days leading up to the battle. And just give me an example of what you're talking about. How did standing on the spot inform your understanding of a particular important moment? Yeah. So I think you see a lot of this with a terrain set that is South Mountain, which to kind of the uninformed or to a casual reader might suggest it's a single hill or a single mountain feature, but it's actually an extension,

a range, so to speak. And of course, in that are numerous passes or gaps, right? And both Mead and kind of his top lieutenants in the lead up to the battle understood that Lee faced a very unique kind of operational problem, which was that he had a vast preponderance of his forces, namely the first core under Longstreet, that was still in the valley and had to get out of the valley somehow, right? It would have to cross that range. And there were only so many places to do this, right? And so in the lead up to the fight, Mead and Reynolds in particular are wondering, okay, where are Confederate forces going to exit South Mountain? Where are they going to pop out? Because that's the only way they'll be useful. And one pass in particular, the Monterey Pass was of

keen importance to Reynolds in particular and to meet, and it's something they talk about and would talk about. It's probably not the right word. But if you read their dispatches and their orders and their correspondence, you can quickly perceive that they were fearful in some sense, really up to about the 30th of June, that Confederate forces would exit the valley to their south, kind of and left. and threaten the Army of the Potomac from that position. Of course, in the hours kind of leading up to the fight, it becomes apparent that Lee, for reasons that Mead found inexplicable, and Reynolds, too, did not want to use that pass.

And he could have used that basically to access Fairfield and Emmetsburg, and that would have given him more options. But until you actually drive that and see that, oh, that was a viable option for Lee's forces, and Mead was keenly aware of that, which is why he was prepared to kind of concentrate and mass there or to the south. You know, Mead had built in options into his campaign design. But that's one example where like unless you actually drive the roads and see the ground and understand kind of the dilemmas and the implications of those for concentration of forces and time and space, that's a detail that you might just gloss over in reading, say, Sears or Coddington or class.

classic campaign histories of the sort. And I would add to this, too, that to give people maybe a visualization of what we're talking about, the Appalachian Trail runs along this South Mountain. And it points it, at points, it crosses it. And, you know, so if anybody's ever, you can, you can imagine a mountain trail. And, you know, you're in single file line kind of, you know, having to cross this thing. If you're going over the mountain and not through a pass, and now imagine putting, you know, a large, you know, formation of, of troops and this tens of thousands of troops, trying, you know, wagons.

Like you're not using the Appalachian Trail to go through this, right? So you absolutely have to use these passes. And the point about the passes is even those are kind of suboptimal. If you're going through a single one, because you end up with having a column that's 30 miles long. And if you kind of like as a planning factor, if you're visualizing this like an army commander does, you think, you know, you know, something that's, troops can march 12 miles a day normally. if you accelerate that, it gets something like 20. Sometimes you can do a little bit better than that.

And so if you're strung out on this thing, by the time, you know, the guys in the rear of that column, you know, get to the fight, it's, the fight's already over, you know, kind of thing. And this is what Mead's looking at. This is why when Mitchell was talking about the South Mountain with the South Mountain Range, which, you know, which is on the east side of the Shenandoah

and then Cumberland Valley, where Lee's Army is, you know, that's the route. they take north to invade Pennsylvania. We kind of understand that this mountain range has just a few passes in it that are vitally important. And this is what meat is really looking at. And again, it's like sort of fun to say this to you. Like we can't emphasize this point enough about, you know, switching the perspective.

There is a tendency for us to go to the Gettysburg battle. And you see it in the movie, right, in the Gettysburg movie. You know, the first stand is up on this Chambersburg road, which goes towards the cashdown gap, one of the passes we're talking about. And, you know, it's John Buford and, you know, played by Sam Elliott. And he's talking about the high ground and everybody's all excited about him. And you kind of forget, and you get in the Gettysburg movie, which is a reflection of like how the staff rides are, me doesn't, like, barely appears, you know, either in the book, Killer Angels.

And there are very few studies have actually looked at it really close from the perspective of me. You know, it's all like Lee's decisions, you know, and for the lost cause types, it tends to be, you know, how Lee's generals let him down. Jeff Stewart wasn't there. you know, he's off on his ride around Mead's army. Yule doesn't attack fast enough. You know, so it's always these other somebody else. You know, AP Hill is one of his corps commanders is sick and kind of seems to be out of the fight. Longstreet's parried back at Chambersburg.

So one of the things we ended up kind of when you looked at it from Mead's perspective, and Mitchell mentioned this, the stuff that's kind of inexplicable to him about how Lee's operating is actually like a pretty good indication of Lee not being very good in this campaign. and, you know, the major mistakes that they make are his, that the Confederates make, rebels are his, not stewards, not Yules, not Long Streets, not Hills. They're all things that he, in fact, you know, one of the things that comes out of this, if there's a, we're not looking for heroes on the rebel side on this,

you know, we want the good guys to win. But, you know, if you're looking at this, the, you know, one of the heroes for the Confederate side, the only reason they're even in the fight is because Yule does really, really well in concentrating his troops back, way faster than me. expects. And if Longstreet had done a march as fast as Yule does, you know, and Lee had sent him down to the, to Emmitsburg, in the Amitzburg direction, either through the Monterey Pass or on the roads on the east side of the mountain, he had done either of those things. They could, and it marched

as fast as Yule, the Army of the Potomac would have had to get out of there. They would have never been able to fight the battle of Gettysburg. It probably would have been somewhere else. So just, I don't want to spend the whole episode on Gettysburg, but this is interesting. So the whole logic, right, of the Eastern theory. The theater of the war is, you know, you have this big valley to the west of the mountains that the Confederates can go up and down. The union can go up and down too. But the Confederates typically uses an invasion route.

And then that's on a sort of north-south but sort of curving axis up the coast. And then you have rivers going roughly east-west that are barriers to movement as you go north-south. And those two features in combination are the natural features that sort of define the campaigns. And I guess each pass that you come through on this campaign, the Gettysburg campaign, would be an indicator of Lee's intentions, right? So what does what does me think Lee's most likely intentions are? And you characterize it as a mistake coming through the past as he comes through. What is the nature of the mistake or mistakes? Well, you have to think in terms of the, you know, this is a really important thing about the Civil War that I'm not sure a lot of that is, that it's like gotten into the popular imagination as much.

I think historians somewhat know it. A lot of military observers understand this, but it's really important to understand that Robert Lee is, you know, thinks of fighting in very Napoleonic terms. You know, he's looking for a decisive battle, right? And so how do you get to a decisive battle? One of the ways to do this is to threaten, you know, threaten key strategic points, something like capitals, important cities.

Obviously, Washington, D.C. is one of them. Baltimore could be one, Harrisburg, maybe even Philadelphia. But by threatening them, this forces the enemy out into the open. open, you find a place to fight. And this is the interesting thing with Lee is that he seems to be more about, he doesn't really care that much about getting to the battlefield in a position of advantage as much as just getting to a battlefield, finding a place where they'll settle down and he can fight him and he'll find a place to fight. He's not so great on the offensive about these ways. Now, he's also trying to gather resources along the way, and that's important to this, to this campaign, because

it is the breadbasket. He wants to come up into Pennsylvania because the Virginia side of it's getting a little depleted. So that's part of what he's what he's doing on this. But he's still looking for a decisive battle. And one of the interesting things about the Civil War and, you know, I think Mead is starting to understand this. Grant gets it the best. General Grant gets the best is that there's such thing as a decisive battle anymore. The armies that are organized into cores that are made up of combined arms cores are extremely difficult to destroy in a single day. This is why Grant's Overland campaign is so important the next year where he grinds them and you know, the very definition of campaign changes from a maneuver to a decisive battle or an important battle to a series of battles

the way we kind of think about it now. But in this case, you know, this is, you know, I think Mead is also thinking in terms of like, I can win a big battle. I'm not sure if it'll be decisive, but I can win a big battle. But I'm, but Mead is very much focused, unlike Lee on how he maneuvers his army on the campaign, will, we'll give him a position of advantage when the battle comes. Like I said, Lee just sort of like, hey, wherever they're at, you know, we'll find a, wherever they're at, we'll fix them, we'll find a flank, we'll roll them up on each other, and we'll win. You know, plus my guys are, you know, my guys are, you know, their morale is high, they're undefeated. They can do, they can do great things. And, and the other end, and the Army

of the Potomac's morale is low. And that's not actually true in this case, but that's kind of the way it goes. And so his final decisions there right before the, the, the meeting engagement on the first indicate, indicate what exactly. I suppose that's, that's, that's what I'm trying to ask. Yeah, so it's, it's, it's, it's kind of unclear, right? This is the, this is the, this is the, in his case that's the kind of strange thing he doesn't seem to be you know he's when he gets the word that that the army of the potomac is moving north faster than he then he anticipated he gives an order for his guys to concentrate back and and to yule's yule's core is split they've headed out towards the southwesternet river and he's he calls them back and yule does follow these

orders but he's kind of unclear we're going to concentrate around gettysburg maybe cash town and this sort of would back them up against the mountain, maybe give them a route in or out through the cash town gap, but he's, it's not exactly clear. And I think it's, you know, and this is why they kind of, the Confederates and the, and the, and the apologists tend to bang on about Stewart not being there, his cavalry. He didn't have his eyes. He doesn't know where they're at. He's confused about this stuff. But given the information he had, you know, he still could have made some different decisions about what he's trying to do. It's not really clear if he wants to concentrate in the outside of the valley, and then fight a battle there or retreat back into the valley and fight a battle, you know,

maybe you'll go back, bring the resources back and get the, get the Federals to attack him. It's kind of strange, you know, and this is that dispute he has with Longstreet, with his first Corps commander who says, I thought the idea was for us to go, go north invade, find good defensive ground where we've been successful in the past, get them to engage with us, and then we counterattack on favorable ground. And at least kind of all over the place with this. And like we said, he's kind of saved by Yule coming back as fast as he does because as it turns out, he kind of feeds AP Hills Corps and piecemeal. And I think this ambiguity, if I can interject here, has its roots really all the way in kind of the strategical concept, you know, for the campaign.

Like in May, there's really not a clear, you know, Lee and Davis and said in the Confederate Secretary of War. They meet a couple times in May. And of course, they're talking about the basic strategic dilemma, which is do we try. try to relieve Vicksburg or is that even feasible or not? And of course, the die is cast for a second northern campaign. But there really aren't clear minutes of the decision making that went into that. And there also is not a very clear documentary record of what Longstreet and Lee actually discussed on the eve of the campaign itself. So I think that ambiguity of Lee's design, you know, it's rooted in a much kind of bigger ambiguity that has its roots all the way back in May

before the campaign even kicks off. So in other words, we're going to go north. We're going to threaten things they care about, specifics TBD, and at some point we're going to force a battle. And it seems like a lot of things were still TBD at the moment the battle was actually met. Is that fair? I think that's right. Yeah, so much so that from Mead's perspective, he can't really, really, really,

really understand what me what lee's doing because it doesn't actually make much sense because it is all TBD that's the good that's a good way of putting it you know so you know and in and in the article you know we come up with two maps sort of to to to show the visualization of like the different options that meat thinks that Lee's going to do basic two basic options that he has at the point and he's and and and and Lee kind of does neither or both kind of poorly and it's you know it ends up kind of confusing meat about like what's actually happening and then his eyes and ears you know reynolds is actually killed on the first day which which confuses things more so it takes a you know takes a minute for them to kind of catch up but but in the meantime though mead has unlikely mead has

a very clear idea about what he wants what he's supposed to do hey protect protect protect Baltimore protect Washington DC go you know go engage them in battle and and and you know defeat them in battle kick them out of you know Pennsylvania if you can defeat them all together that would be great you know, kind of idea on this. Assume the tactical offense or defense, right? Like those options are built into his approach. Reynolds is by far the best character to play in any Gettysburg staff ride. You show up.

Shorter prep. And you get to enjoy the rest of the day. You get to enjoy everybody else's presentations. So one last question about this. And then we'll step back to the broader project you guys are working on. So, okay, finally, Lee is kind of operating with so much ambiguity. It seems ambiguous even to Lee. this leads to failure to concentrate effectively in a place where he'll actually have an advantage in

the battle to come. But none of that necessarily leads to, I mean, everything we've just said doesn't necessarily lead to Mead being in an advantageous position. What does Mead do well or how does me get lucky or both such that he does end up in an advantageous position? So first things first, you know, he moves his base of supply to Westminster early on, which kind of shifts his options to the east gives him more protection. He's arrayed his infantry corps in positions to approach a point of concentration like Gettysburg on as many as four or five different avenues of approach. Tom's point at the beginning of moving forces, large, large echelon forces like a core, some nine to 13,000 men. These take up 10 miles of road space apiece, a piece.

And then you think of all their enablers, their guns. So that space is really critical. And the Army of the Potomac, you know, all told with all of its pieces, right, it's its fires, its enablers, its infantry, its cav. I mean, it requires more than 100 miles of road space. So the fact that Mead is able to kind of create physical, spatial dimensions for his design is really critical. So I would start there. Tom, I don't know what you would want to add to that.

Yeah, so there's an anticipation thing. So part of this, too, is unlike, you know, I don't think Lee ever does this in the campaign, meat anticipates that the fight is coming. And so, you know, those big kind of ponderous cores and the Army of atomic cores are smaller, but there's more of them. So that's a, you know, so it's a similar type problem. So the big ponderous cores that take up a lot of road space, he has them all drop. You know, he gives them the order to drop all of their, you know, extra accoutrements,

you know, basically their camp gear. And he has a sent back to that base, back towards the base of supply. so they can march faster because they anticipate a fight coming. And so they're all marching on parallel roads. They're all within a day's march of each other. And this is very important. So at whatever point, this kind of large square formation that they're in, it's like a large, like a diamond is the best way to look at it.

Whatever, you know, whatever point of the diamond encounters the enemy, the other ones are able to support, come in to support rapidly. And he does this like very, very clearly. And, you know, one of the things, things that's that's you know we talk about this a lot you know so everybody gets you know you jump into the battle you know everybody like to start jumping into the battle and start talking about a lot of the tactics of the fighting you know and that's like less interesting to us these days you know

because there's just not that many equivalent ideas for what we do these days you know so that you know that that is that is less important but you know the ability to disperse and concentrate you know on your show you've probably talked about this with the Pacific and things like this isn't this constant dilemma you have mass formations how do you disperse and concentrate and you for a battle. And this is what Mead does very, very well. And Lee doesn't do particularly well in this fight. And this gives him an advantage in this fight. So like we could talk about all the tab, you know, there's a million different tactical actions obviously in the Gettysburg fight in the battle itself. And, you know, in many cases, the Army of the Potomac comes up the worst in those, you know,

little tactical actions. You know, you can talk about sickles. You could talk about all the stuff, right? There's a million up in there. But yeah, and we talk all the time about how, you know, the best tactics in the world can't overcome, you know, bad operational. a bad strategy. But in this case, you sort of see the opposite. We get to probably show something where good operational art, good strategy, what they called at the time, overcomes like all of those sort of tactical shortfalls that they have in the Army of the Potomac. In fact, this actually could be an argument about like one of the things that the United States Army, that the American way of war is really built around is ability to be overwhelmingly, overwhelming and overwhelmingly and with

your operational art, you know, getting those guys concentrated in the right place at the right time, you know, with durable formations that are able to keep fighting and sustain in a fight, you know, this is what we're very good at, even when we have untrained troops or guys with low morale or, you know, some poor tactical leaders because they're inexperienced and, you know, they haven't earned it yet or they're wounded, whatever it might be. You know, so, you know, this is like, this is one of the major points of this is this ability to do strategy operational art better, you know, gives you an advantage that you really should be seeking, you know, as you're trying to improve your tactical capabilities over time.

You see it again and again, over one, world war two happens over and over again. That's really interesting. So here's the sort of $100 question. I think you guys are asking yourselves in the context of this project, which is, okay, so we have the maps, maps just don't really help. The maps that exist don't really help us that much to understand the operational level decision making. They do an okayish job of tactics and showing the tactical situation. of the day. But at least two grounds they fail for understanding operational level decision making. One, they're not very good at communicating optionality in the range of potential futures out of any given moment. And two, we just record a really interesting conversation

with Alexander Burns about his book about 18th century warfare, which he calls infantry in battle and a nod to the great post-World War I American manual of infantry combat, the main theme of which, of course, is reality is a little bit different from theory. And so problem two is, is the reality of moving, in this case, these massive cores with all of their accoutrements down the road. Like, that's a big deal. Like, that's a major factor in the maps do nothing to help you understand the logistical challenges, the physical, literally physical challenges of moving this stuff, even though it's

really not that complicated of a thing to understand on one level. Anybody's been in a traffic jam could kind of get what the issues are. So those two things kind of hold back, even an understanding of as comprehensive. Comparatively simple a situation as the lead-up to the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, which I say comparatively simple. There's no air dimension. There's no, there's no, there's certainly no cyber dimension. There's, there's none of it.

It's, it's really just troops and horses and their equipment and their artillery on the ground, moving around. Today, in 2025, the situation is substantially more complicated. And if our visualizations, such as they are, are coming up short and helping us understand things that happened in 1863, how on earth are we going to use visuals to understand the battlefield or the operational theater or however you want to characterize it in 2025? Is that one, is that your question? And two, what are your first stabs at answering it?

Yeah, I think that that is, it's vitally important. You know, if listeners, you know, know, know, we're kind of on the record for being saying that we need to be focused more on warfighting issues, you know, especially in the military, we tend to get, you know, we tend to drift into policy a lot, policy making for some good reason where, you know, security policy, it's defense policy. So we kind of drift into that stuff. And there's like a kind of image that this, you know, that, you know, that fighting is just sort of big tactics.

And so, you know, I already know enough about this stuff. But it's a different way of looking at things, right? And one of the sort of, you know, we chose a relatively straightforward, like you said, it's basically in one domain. But there's like little things in this that are sort of showing some other domains. you know, when we talk about that move from, from the base of supply to Westminster, like, the idea of that is that, you know, the Westminster's on a, on a rail line that's connected to Baltimore, which is a port, right?

Yeah, which they can, which, and is also connected to rail lines to, to the main supply depot for the United States, the Army of the Potomac, which is around Washington, D.C. Right. So, like, and their ability to, you know, ships carry way more stuff than trains, you know, but, like, yeah, so if you can load up lots stuff off ships and trains carry more stuff than wagons, you know, so you can, you start thinking this. way. And American, you know, American military leaders, when they, like, were really focused on these issues of large-scale command after the Civil War, for them, they take these lessons, you know,

and they use them. It's like one of their great, like, sort of heartbreaks in World War I is they can't use the Navy more, right? Like, because where they're at in the theater, there's, like, no way to get ships there, you know, even, you know, for resupply purposes and all of that, you know, but that is that sort of consistent dilemma. It's, you know, sort of joint expeditionary operations. And how do we visualize those things. And you start to see a start of, we're just showing a start of this here. You could do a similar type of maps for the Overland campaign where you do have more, you know, in 1864, 65, where you do have more where they're using the Navy and maritime support a lot more clearly. It wouldn't be that hard to sort of start depicting, you know, where you put your air base is, how close they have to be.

There's a mix of that stuff. You know, then you start depicting the protection of them, you know, and what you're using them for, both resupply and then for fires, you know, the deeper fight, how you would depict that stuff. But this kind of main problem, you know, of moving forces on multiple, you know, large formations on multiple roads is a persistent one, you know, even in that domain, you know, because a lot of the other domains, you know, hey, look, we work for the Army, so we tend to be, you know, the ground fight matters, right? The ground fight is, you know, a lot of, I won't say that all of them are, everybody else

is in support, but in their complimentary way, at some point you're going to have to flight on the ground and you're going to have to do certain things on the ground. And it's going to be human beings going through terrain, moving in large formations. And we saw this, you know, we see this in Ukraine, right? We see this with the Russians in the Ukraine. Like one of the things you could make about, one of the points you can make is that, you know, the Russians ended up in, you know, if this sounds familiar, they ended up in very long, ponderous columns on not very good roads, you know, and trying to move large formations in their initial invasion. And that got them in a lot of trouble, right? They kind of made the same sort of similar kind of lee mistakes.

And so if we're going to learn from these things, there's ways to depict this differently, to visualize it differently. You know, you can add in those other domains. I'm not sure exactly how the cyber would go into that, but you can add in some of these other domains, you know, along the way and start figuring it out. So like we really wanted this as a start, not as a finish, but to sort of indicate there are ways to talk about warfighting. That's, you know, the business of senior military officers and almost exclusively their business, right? not in a discussion, the SivMil relations discussion, but exclusive their business of moving and fighting large formations,

joint combined in war. And this is like, we see this as kind of a start of showing this, using a campaign a lot of people are familiar with. And in doing this, we were able to, you know, create insights,

you know, about this campaign that, you know, some people have maybe intuited, but haven't really, you know, explored it fully. Yeah.

And then some of those things kind of come out in this, in this article, we hope. Yeah. No, it seems like a really worthy project. My last question, I'm sort of struggling how to how to formulate it, but, you know, just thinking about the present day and thinking about an effort to visualize, say, a conflict in the

Taiwan Strait or, you know, the Swaki Gap or whatever, whatever battle, it's probably going to be someplace that we don't predict, but some, some, some likely spot of a clash and thinking about how to create the visualization in such a way as to help a commander in, in their own mind, then have a correct or the best possible estimate of his options, the bad guys' options, the likely futures, you know, what are the elements that need to go into those visuals that you think are missing? One is kind of a practical question. And then two, a much harder question to answer, I mean, it seems to me a much harder

question to answer is, I mean, the visuals are only ever going to get you so far. At the end of the day, the maps are never going to be reality. they can't be. So what do you need to do in terms of educating and preparing the commander so that he can achieve or she can achieve that that visualization of the battlefield that, you know, Klaus Fitz, you know, that seeing at a stroke that is the commander's art that the map will never do for you. A good map will help you, but it will never do for you.

So there's kind of, there's two answers to this. So, you know, in terms of your first question, right, so the visualization of stuff. So we, like, you know, we see this as a start, right? We were able to sort of put things on there, things like bases of supply, which we call it here. Could be supply depos, could be other names, putting those on there, understanding how you visualize basis of operations, visualizing, you know, depicting formations as they actually are, as the amount of space they take up on roads and off roads and sort of depicting it that way, all of those things, you know, and then also doing your sort of best estimate of what the enemy's things might look like that way, too, right? That was like a key aspect of it is you've given the information that we have, that the commander has, you know, both when you're studying a historical thing instead of like guessing what the other, you know, knowing what the other side has and depicting it that way, saying like, well, how did Mead, how did Mead in this case understand that? How did Eisenhower understand it? How did Pat and understand it in their fight and all those, those things? To your other question about how do we help people in the future get to this, you know, develop that, you know, cootie, right? That, you know, that this sort of this visualization. of it. I can never pronounce it. Right. So that's why that's why I kind of translated it.

Yeah, I'm guessing, I'm guessing too. It's French. So I'm sure I did it wrong. That's how I've heard it. Yeah, I think there's two things that really matter here. So, you know, one is that warfare, even in this era, and you can kind of see this with Mead and Reynolds' relationship and some of the other guys that are in his, that are, that are, that work with him is that, you know, this is a, this is in the modern era become much more of a collective effort. Right. So, you know, instead of waiting around for a genius to show. up, you know, who can do those things. You know, we make staffs who can sort of approximate genius collectively, right?

And so how they work together and how they put together an estimate to help a commander's decision making is really, really important. And that's why we have these big staffs. And we should never lose sight of that. You know, we have a tendency to have people like, oh, that guy's the intelligence officer. That's not really what his role is. You know, we say a G2 or a J2, they're the intelligence officer. That's not what his role is.

His role is assistant chief of staff or deputy chief of staff. for intelligence. You know, if you think about what a chief of staff does, we tend to say they, oh, they run a staff. No, chief of staff thinks like the commander, you know, anticipates a commander and runs a staff to support the commander. So an assistant chief of staff is also thinking like a commander, but would say an emphasis on intelligence or an emphasis on operation or an emphasis on logistics.

So they're all thinking that way, right? And then sort of so how do we develop, you know, both commanders and staff, senior staffs who can do those things. Well, you know, I'm a historian, so I'd say this way, is like, look at a bunch of examples, put yourself in their shoes. you're never going to see the exact same problem, but when you see a lot of like type problems, you develop the ability to anticipate what's happening better.

You use those examples over and over again. Whether it's through historical examples that you study, you put yourself in the shoes of those people, honestly. That's why we're supposed to do staff rides. That's why we study historical ones, why we write about them. It's what the war colleges and the commanderial staff colleges did historically, and we do a little bit less of now, and hopefully we get back to doing more of it.

You put yourself in those shoes, and then you do, you know, you do novel work, games, you know, exercises, field exercises, map exercises, you know, computerized war games these days, put yourself in those situations over and over again until it becomes a little bit more second nature. And then maybe, you know, some geniuses pop out of that. And they're very good at that at a glance, seeing the thing and making the decision and understanding what's going on very quickly. But really that at a glance thing, there's, you know, there's really no such thing is a gut instinct.

It's, you know, that's a whole bunch of, you know, what one guy calls Gary Klein, maybe you've had them around. It calls recognition prime decision making. You know, it's, the recognition is seeing it a bunch of times, and then it primes your decision making, and it feels like a gut feeling,

but it's really a whole bunch of examples kind of playing out, and you sort of see a similar situation and are able to anticipate what's happening and make smarter decisions on it. You know, because, you know, we have a tendency to believe that, like, perfect intelligence leads to perfect decision making. But you could have an absolutely clear picture of where everything is and still make the wrong call.

Right. Yeah. This is, this is, it's really fascinating kind of merits, we're almost out of time, but it's sort of merits a whole separate or continuing discussion. Because I'm based on my own very limited experience. And I was, I never ascended to the ranks of the field grade before departing back to civilian life. But, you know, in what experience I did have, the challenge with all these processes, right, is, is that. I take your point. You're creating the sort of staff processes to kind of approximate in a group what a genius might,

in theory, be able to do on their own. But the problem is, as you get into the process of the processes, you sort of check the boxes of the process. And if you get to the last box and you've checked it, you feel like you've done your job. But the process itself is never going to encapsulate or really be able to account for the full crazy fluidity of reality. and so the danger to the individuals is that they're going to lose that instinct or spark or creativity that actually allows you to understand the battlefield as it is or it might actually be.

That is to say, there has to be this human creative element working its way through the process that's not smushed by the process to get the good results that you want. And maybe you never even know that you have a problem because in the American military our experience for some time now has been against enemies who are generally tactically quite inferior, at least in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. So your process may not, the weaknesses of your process may never become apparent to you, but the day you actually face an enemy that's on par with you or near par with you, I feel like the problems are going to come quickly to the fore.

Yeah, I think you've hit on something really important. We were talking offline a little bit about the idea of, you know, the role that the, you know, the institutions have in developing doctrine. And so I'll give you an example that relates to exactly what you're talking about. Doctrine, so we follow this path, path that you're talking about that we're talking about here. The doctrine right now generally tends to, you know, it talks about command and it talks about, you know, planning process, military decision-making process, the joint planning process, and they're kind of separate. And I think that's a mistake.

And it's something we can correct in doctrine and start having people thinking about. So pretty much every service has something like a commander's way of looking at the problem, which is understand, visualize, describe, direct, lead, assess, something like that, right? Understand it, visualize it, describe it, direct, make the decision, lead assess. And that process tends to be too separated from the, you know, the various steps that you're talking about, box checking that goes on in like a military decision making or joint planning process. and we really need to like, you know, I always say this, like instead of saying, you know, mission analysis, we should talk about mission synthesis, right? So it's like these times where they come together and,

and you get more and more of the staff putting themselves in the shoes of the decision the commander has to make. And there is never going to be a time where that is a purely math problem. Sometimes we talk about these decision matrices that these guys make. And it's like, if they all add up, then the decision is made. Now it just doesn't work that way. And you can't think that way. We would try to, to over, we try to over science, over reason that the, you know, the military decision making that's not really, doesn't really work that way. Like you said, you know, there is going to be some kind of gut instinct on this. And like I said, I think the only way kind of around that is to, you know, there's a tendency for people who are not in a command track, you know, or, or say they're in a

support or supply thing to say, like, it's not my job to think that way. I'm not doing patent stuff, so I don't need to think like Pat. I think that's bad wrong. I think like everybody needs to think about how the fight works. Right. Like you said, we can talk about by this forever. I have lots of examples and it's at all different levels and at all different sort of echelons where that's really, really important, where the supply guys need to understand how the fight works and the fighting guys need to know how the supply works, right? You know, how the mobilization stuff works. You have to know all of these, at least have some familiarity with all of these and you're going to be supported by guys who know it in more detail, but everybody

needs to know what they're all talking about. Right. And so I really, I think you're on to something about this point and you know and it's like hey we're working on it i mean like i go say the good thing is that the american military has been dealing with sort of joint expeditionary warfare at a scale degree that like nobody else has and we're still struggling with it so where do we think like the new guys how they're going to do with it you know and you know who haven't been doing you know amphibious attacks since the mexican war tom briskino Mitchell klingenberg really interesting conversation i really appreciate you guys making the time thank you for having us and thanks for having us This is a nebulous media production.

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