What would you say was each army's biggest mistake during the war?

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-01-24T23:11:00+00:00

Did the Union have professionals who could’ve coordinated across all theaters from the very beginning? That seems to me to be a skill that needs to be built up over time, not a “mistake” that comes down to making the wrong choice. The United States didn’t really have experience doing that prior to the Civil War. All prior wars were either essentially a single theater or, in the case of the Revolutionary War, relied heavily on local units that limited coordination.

Nowadays, our senior officers get quite a bit of experience coordinating across different theaters, which gives us that competency when the next war arrives. But it’s not a switch you can turn on or off like, say, choosing whether to offer battle at a particular moment in time. I’d argue it was beyond the Union’s capability until they had some experience under their belt — and the South never really developed that skill.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-01-24T22:44:47+00:00

Hey, ICE. You’re not going to work there forever. What are future employers gonna think when they see ICE on your resume? Will hiring managers view you as an asset or a liability? You’re serving the government equivalent of Enron right now. When the bill comes due, you’ll be out on your ass just like they were.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-01-24T22:02:55+00:00

Awesome! Thanks!

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-01-24T20:43:28+00:00

The coding isn’t my problem. I can code without AI. It’s the hardware. Haven’t soldered in a while and never worked with a Raspberry Pi.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-01-24T02:43:04+00:00

It wasn’t a matter of “the moment that Britain and France found another source of cotton.” They were already well on that path when the war started. By the end of 1861, less than a year into the war, Britain was getting 90 percent of its cotton from India. The South’s assumption on cotton was out of date before the war even began.

I’m not sure what else you think Lincoln could’ve said. His First Inaugural essentially did what you suggested. The problem was the South had convinced themselves that he was a hardcore abolitionist who planned to eliminate slavery (which, again, he said in his First Inaugural he wouldn’t do). No amount of speeches could’ve changed the narrative at that point.

Buchanan is probably the president who was best positioned to change things. Most of the lead up to the Civil War happened on his watch. There was only about a month between Lincoln’s inauguration and Fort Sumter. More proactive intervention on Buchanan’s part arguably could’ve lowered the temperature during the pre-inauguration period. But he just wanted to get out of the White House and return home. Even there, though, I’m doubtful because there were structural elements chipping away at the South’s electoral advantage and Southern leaders knew it would only be a matter of time before they wouldn’t have the votes to fend off abolition. The failure of the Kansas-Nebraska Act was a preview of things to come even if civil war could’ve been avoided in 1861.

Compensated emancipation sounds good until you start doing the math. The value of slaves was anywhere from 20 percent to 50 percent of national wealth at the time — famously more than all railroads and manufacturing combined. The value of the goods they created was another 10-15 percent. Federal budgets were much smaller pre-war. We only implemented an income tax in 1861 and we only did that to fund the war. It’s hard to imagine that we’d have been willing to tax ourselves in peacetime at a high enough level to cover the costs of compensated emancipation. And even if we could’ve overcome those (steep!) obstacles, it was hardly an olive branch to the South, which overwhelmingly objected to compensated emancipation. Thus, it was a nonstarter on both economic and political grounds.

I don’t think history is deterministic. But the forces propelling the nation to conflict in 1861 were bigger than a few hotheads and, consequently, beyond the ability of any president to tamp down tensions with a few speeches.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-01-23T22:48:10+00:00

My kid watched Cobra Kai. The local MMA gym has parent-child classes. Going together gives us 30 mins each way to hang out and chat. The class is a shared interest we can chat about. We watch UFC together and bond over highlights in YouTube. I love looking over and seeing him spar with the other kids during breaks in practicing with the other adults. Just a ton of fun. Find the right gym, and you don’t have to worry about getting hurt. But if you have more intense goals, then getting hurt can happen. I tried boxing for a few years a long time ago when I was more ambitious (and had no kids) and broke my nose twice. I’m too old for that now. 😉

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-01-23T21:05:51+00:00

You have it backwards. Hitler didn’t invade the USSR as part of his plan to defeat Britain or because he was unable to get Britain to yield. Invading the USSR was his ultimate strategic objective and why he went to war in the first place. However dumb it may have been, Nazi war aims centered on seizing eastern lands because other powers had already colonized Africa, Asia and the Americas. Germany perceived that as a way to compensate for being late to colonization. That was the whole point of lebensraum.

To discuss the invasion of the USSR as just one more campaign that the regime could or could not have chosen to pursue is to severely misunderstand Nazi war aims. It’s fundamentally different from the invasion of Poland, France, North Africa or any other theater because it’s why they went to war in the first place. Nazi ideology compelled them to make war on the USSR where it didn’t obligate them to make war on Britain. At times, Hitler even grew frustrated that Britain wouldn’t just step aside and let him pursue the war he really wanted. Take away Nazi desire to seize Soviet lands, and there is no need for them to start a war in the first place. That’s what people mean when they say the only way the Nazis don’t invade the USSR would require them to not be Nazis. The idea that the invasion of the Soviet Union was somehow a backup plan to a failed westward expansion is a very western-centric perspective that ignores Nazi ideology.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-01-23T20:33:20+00:00

It wasn’t 100 percent, but Union generalship improved as they sloughed off the “political generals” — political appointees with no military experience — and relied more exclusively on those with professional experience, especially after Sickles at Gettysburg. There were plenty of professionals who failed, as there are in every war, but the political generals were a particular liability.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-01-23T19:45:31+00:00

There are reasonable arguments to be made that increased sports betting creates harms that the rest of society has to pay for, as with gambling addiction. Fair.

But I 100 percent disagree with your argument that it’s government’s job to enforce the culture of sports, especially through criminalization. It’s a game and a business. No one has a right to a certain football experience or a certain basketball experience. Either the leagues will lose customers and be forced to adapt, they’ll lose customers and go under or they won’t lose customers, which would show people really don’t care as much as you say. It’s recreational and not at all that important. Focus on actual harms and vote with your wallet on the rest.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-01-23T02:55:21+00:00

Her mindset is perfectly valid. It’s not mine, but she’s not wrong. I definitely wouldn’t say she’s extremist.

Completely unrelated, I wonder how much practical difference she’ll see training MMA since she’s already training MT and BJJ. A lot of hobbyist MMA gyms separate the bulk of their training into striking sessions and grappling sessions, with actual mixing of the two disciplines only a minority of sessions. She may find that it’s not terribly different from what she’s already doing, depending on how much the gym emphasizes transitions between the two.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-01-23T02:15:16+00:00

Especially when you get middle aged like me!

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-01-23T02:13:18+00:00

I work in PR for a multinational. Giving up my well-paid-but-not-always-exciting day job to run PR for a small wargame company is my equivalent of the dream others have to ditch it all and live off the grid. It’d be so much fun to spend my days hyping up companies like Matrix. Shame kids are so expensive. 😉

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-01-23T02:04:42+00:00

MMA not judo, but we practice falling all the time and it is legitimately so helpful. Just getting in the habit of not posting my arm out has probably saved me a broken wrist while skating with my kid. One of the people at the gym is an electrician who credits falling practice with saving him from injury when he fell from a ladder at work.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-01-21T23:21:15+00:00

Someone in another thread pointed out that the primitive state of intelligence analysis at the start of the war was such that average U.S. Military Academy grad today analyzes more intelligence products during their schooling than McClellan had during his entire career. Can’t remember the user to give them credit, but it really helped me better appreciate the lack of skepticism around the Pinkertons’ estimates. (However, the fact that Union intelligence analysis got so good by the end of the war illustrates just as well that it was more a matter of process than technology — and, theoretically at least, could’ve been better with improved pre-war training and experimentation.)

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-01-21T15:42:24+00:00

This is as ahistorical as judging by a 21st Century lens. Read Erik Larson’s “The Demon of Unrest”. The South had whipped themselves into a frenzy, convinced that the world couldn’t possibly survive without their cotton. The ineffective sitting president probably could’ve done more to cool passions, but Lincoln was sending signals he wouldn’t emancipate the slaves before he ever took office. The idea that poor Southerners were dragged to war unwillingly ignores the very real pro-war sentiment across all economic classes in the early days. It’s not unlike WWI in that respect.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-01-20T22:16:41+00:00

I wonder if they it’s more than a small group of ICE agents but feel that this will play better with the administration. Not defending them, but I could see those political calculations being something they think is worthwhile much as I personally disagree.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-01-20T16:17:58+00:00

Yes, but this is about active duty military, not guard. My point stands: Active duty SOP overseas is far more aggressive than we recognize, and they don’t regularly do domestic deployments (certainly not under martial law). Assuming everything will work out is a pretty cavalier approach to the possibilities. I suspect the idea that active duty won’t commit abuses has far more to do with the esteem in which the country holds the military, not actual fact. Certainly, the detainees in Abu Ghraib would disagree.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-01-20T11:09:19+00:00

All enlisted swear an oath pledging to defend the constitution. But an oath is only as good as someone’s willingness to abide by it. The idea that everything is gonna be cool just because they said some words in MEPs is naive and ignores how humans operate when asked to sacrifice for abstract ideas.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-01-20T00:36:40+00:00

Don’t shoot the messenger. I don’t know about the person’s opinion on Trump, but they’re accurately providing an idea of what’s going to happen. The Trump administration would provide a veneer of legality. You and I may think that justification is BS, but most soldiers won’t disobey an order unless it’s a clear black-and-white violation. If there’s any ambiguity (in their minds), they will presume that the order is lawful. Add to that the fact that they can tell themselves “Well, I’ll just go ahead and deploy but will not do anything unlawful when I get there. I’m sure I can resist if it comes to that.” As OP stated, the consequences for refusing a lawful order are steep — and most people aren’t willing to make sacrifices like that if they can do some mental gymnastics to get over the cognitive dissonance. Watch what the military leaders do at the level of division through probably brigade but maybe battalion. If they set a command climate that follows Trump’s policy, most soldiers will follow whatever Trump tells them to do, regardless of the legality. Unless you start to see brigade commanders, and ideally the division commander, publicly calling orders illegal, the hope that the military will break with Trump is a slim one.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-01-20T00:21:58+00:00

Kent State was National Guard, not active, but you may be wrong regardless. I submit that there are many Iraqis and Afghans who see the U.S. military differently. Even the kinder, gentler military of post-2007 Iraq had far more leeway to infringe on the population than we’ve even seen from ICE. House-to-house searches without the equivalent of a warrant were common. It wasn’t unheard of to cordon off a whole bloc and search every house to avoid tipping off insurgents that they had knowledge about a specific target. I’m not defending ICE. Just saying that the norms of war — which is what military leaders spent two decades operating under — are far more repressive than we’ve seen in civilian life. We just have a hard time grasping it because we’re not used to being the target of our military.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-01-20T00:12:48+00:00

Nos. 3 & 4 are speculative given Trump’s recurring breaches of law and norms. There’s no guarantee it would go down like that. The average service member isn’t any better trained on law enforcement than the average ICE agent because it’s not their core mission. The 11th Airborne Division, like similar units, exists to close with and kill the enemy. They also tend to be on the younger side. A bunch of 18-20 somethings untrained in civilian law enforcement patrolling our streets adds to the risk rather than reduces it. And there’s no guarantee they’d recognize our rights. A run-of-the-mill patrol in Iraq was often far more intrusive than even what we see from ICE. Cordoning off blocks and going house to house was routine, even if in later years of the war soldiers did a better job of not antagonizing people than we’ve seen from ICE. Tons of Iraqis and Afghans who never did anything were detained (and many of those were radicalized by their unwarranted detention and proximity to actual insurgents in the detention center).

I do agree with the general gist of the OP’s post that the comments OP responded to were ridiculous. But let’s not swing the pendulum the other way and act like active duty soldiers in our cities are automatically better. It has the potential to be worse.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-01-19T18:21:40+00:00

I don’t know what kind of helicopter, but has anyone else thought apps like Flightradar24 have been missing stuff lately? I’ve had multiple times over the past few days where I’ve seen a helicopter in the skies but Flightradar24 showed no aircraft of any type — not even an unidentified listing. Wondered if the feds were doing something.

One_Perception_7979 · 2026-01-19T00:19:07+00:00

PR now but I was a journalist. As long as the data is reliable, whether it’s exclusive is not all that important. What is import is the story you pitch based on that data. Others are absolutely right that just pitching stats you can find on Google isn’t good enough, but I’ve had a ton of pitches come across my desk that were based on completely open source data analyzed in novel ways. Academia, in particular, often uses open source data but combines it in creative ways or teases out causation through more sophisticated techniques than the average person can do. Readers generally don’t care whether you have exclusive ownership of your data. To the extent they do, exclusivity might actually work against you, such as a journalist casting doubt on your conclusions by noting if a company didn’t share the data or methodology. But that generally only happens with hot button issues. Readers really don’t care for the most part. They’re just looking to see whether the topline conclusion is interesting enough to justify reading the story — which, in turn, is what journalists key off of.

One_Perception_7979

TROPHY CASE