10/02/2010

"Concentration in time" and the ACW (cont.)

It might appear that I am picking on Archer Jones because of my focus on his leading example of "concentration in time" - Lincoln's idiotic order directing simultaneous advances on all fronts on 2/22/61. Consider, however, Jones' pairings that serve as follow-up examples:
Banks moved in late March [1862] just as Buell moved to reinforce Grant at Pittsburg Landing, McClellan's siege of Yorktown began two days before Shiloh, the fall of Corinth occurred two days before the Battle of Fair Oaks, and Buell's advance and Bragg and Kirby Smith's Kentucky campaigns took place simultaneously with the summer operations in Virginia.
Oddly - and honestly enough - Jones recites the pairings and then disavows them as unplanned - they "occurred fortuitously and not as a result of any plan," a phrase McPherson missed when he blindly cribbed Jones' Civil War Command and Strategy to write a couple of bad books in which he assigned Lincoln (and himself) the credit for the Jonesian construct of "concentration in time."

Nevertheless, after the disavowal, in his own book, Jones continues to explore this principle at some length theoretically and he uses it - as theory - in the rest of Command and Strategy as a conceptual yardstick for operational effectiveness.

On this basis we can hold him accountable for the error of prizing simultaneity over coordination.