More on the theme, "Civil War readers are much harder on historical figures than contemporary figures." As you can tell, this irks me.Consider that if you thought that this nation and its military were at war in 2010, you might glean insight from a recent tidbit from theArmy Chief of Staff from Defense News:
Is there anyway to shoehorn Winfield Scott into an equivalent response? What would that look like?Q: What are your priorities in the next year?
Gen. George Casey: The first priority is embedding the enterprise approach in the institutions and the structure of the Army, and the undersecretary of the Army has really taken the bit in the teeth here. And again, we've been working on this enterprise approach since 2008, and I think we're going to, by the first part of next year, redo the documents governing the structure of the headquarters and the major commands to align them up with this approach and to basically institutionalize that.
The second most important thing that I'm working on with Gen. Martin Dempsey is the revision of our Capstone Doctrine and our Training Doctrine. We published them in 2008.
We are not the same people, by a long stretch.Q: What are your priorities in 1861-62?
Winfield Scott: First, we've been working really hard on a condensed version of the Delafield Commission report and hope to have that distributed down to unit level in the coming months. We also have some excellent translations of Jomini in the pipeline and these should find their way to field units before the year's end.
The second most important thing is a revision of Hardee's Tactics, which were previously published but need to be updated.
One joy of Civil War reading is communing with the people we are not.
