JFC Fuller's Universe

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JFC Fuller's Universe

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Thu Jan 10, 2013 1:00 am

“This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games. All games are basically hostile. Winners and losers. We see them all around us: the winners and the losers. The losers can oftentimes become winners, and the winners can very easily become losers. ” - WSB

I first got into JFC Fuller when I was still in a heavy RPG / Fantasy phase and curious about troop movements. Being a hick from the sticks, I never got to actually engage in that whole "minatures warfare" scene but I did purchase, paint and cultivate an army of my own (very racially diverse, too, I think there's a place for orcs and elves to not only get along, but kill together).

Man oh man, do Warhammer 40k nerds get into strategy. That was my gateway drug to military strategy, and a big reason I can tolerate the sneering racism and misogynist trolling of John Dolan's Gary Brecher schtick -- I was a war nerd once. Not saying I sympathize because of that, just that I can identify with his heretic, outsider interest in grand strategy and the real mechanics of warfare.

JFC's Fullers "The Foundations of the Science of War" was recommended repeatedly and I devoured it. It's 1926 vintage but very crisp stuff. Never gave it a second thought beyond digesting the information therein, in ways I myself will never understand.

Many moons later, Jeff drops this:

http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2 ... -army.html

I could somewhat identify! Let us now gather data on this remarkable polymath.
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Re: JFC Fuller's Universe

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Thu Jan 10, 2013 1:04 am

Word to Phillip Coppens - The Nine show up in ways I'd long forgotten. Via the wiki summaries:

Fuller is perhaps best known today for his "Nine Principles of War"[7] which have formed the foundation of much of modern military theory since the 1930s, and which were originally derived from a convergence of Fuller's mystical and military interests. The Nine Principles went through several iterations; Fuller stated that "...the system evolved from six principles in 1912, rose to eight in 1915, to, virtually, nineteen in 1923, and then descended to nine in 1925..."


Dig that timeline. I had forgotten how gnomic and downright Urantian the whole extent of Fuller's vision was:

They were also grouped into Cosmic (Spiritual), Mental (Mind / Thought / Reason), Moral (Soul / Sensations / Emotions), and Physical (Body / Musculature / Action) Spheres, in which two Principles (like the double-edged point of an arrowhead) combine to create or manifest a third, which in turn guides the first and second Principles (like the fletches on an arrow's tail). Each Sphere leads to the creation of the next until it returns to the beginning and repeats the circular cycle with reassessments of the Object and Objective to redefine the uses of Force. The Cosmic Sphere is seen as outside the other three Spheres, like the Heavens are outside the Realm of Man. They influence it indirectly in ways that cannot be controlled by the commander, but they are a factor in the use of Force. Force resides in the center of the pattern, as all of these elements revolve around it.
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Re: JFC Fuller's Universe

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Thu Jan 10, 2013 11:21 am

Via: http://www.historynet.com/jfc-boney-ful ... arfare.htm

Major General John Frederick Charles Fuller was, during World War I and through the early 1930s, the British army's tank warfare go-to guy. He was the man who taught the Wehrmacht how to blitzkrieg, George Patton how to rumble and the Israelis how to kill Syrians. Yet he was an absolute un-Pattonlike, don't-mistake-me-for-Bernard Montgomery, I'm-no-Heinz-Guderian staff officer. The quintessential egghead, "Boney" Fuller was a tiny man with a modicum of actual combat experience whose bearing, manner and attitude were fully represented by his nerdy nickname.

Irascible, overbearing, argumentative, condescending,
a fan of woo-woo occultism and, ultimately, a Nazi sympathizer, J.F.C. Fuller was nevertheless a foresighted tactician and imaginative military theorist. He would have been hard-pressed to take a rifle squad into action, yet he did something few other professional officers at the time bothered with: He thought about how battles should be fought. Thought so long and hard, in fact, that he became what the Brits love to call "too clever by half."

Fuller failed to get into Sandhurst on his first try because he was too short (5-foot-4), too wispy (117 pounds at age 18) and had too small a chest (boney, presumably) to meet the British military academy's standards. Second time around he got in, though he later admitted, "I took no interest whatever in things military." Fuller preferred to read classics and write letters to his mother, yet he eventually secured a commission in the Oxfordshire Light Infantry.

About his first action, in the Boer War, Fuller observed: "We knew nothing about war, about South Africa, about our eventual enemy, about anything at all which mattered and upon which our lives might depend. Nine officers out of 10—I might say 99 out of every 100—knew no more of military affairs than the man on the moon and do not intend or want to know more." Fuller was so contemptuous of his fellow officers that, he wrote his mother, he even loathed playing cards with them during the voyage to South Africa. "That biped is a great deal too uninteresting for me," he sniffed, adding, "The army…needs primitive men who enjoy the heirlooms of prehistoric times such as hunting, shooting, etc."

Fuller saw his first real fighting in the Transvaal. He wrote his mother about a friendly fire incident in which a native trooper was wounded in the forehead. Fuller fed the man whiskey while trying to stuff his brains back in with the handle of a mess kit fork. His words reveal his lifelong racism: "Any ordinary civilized individual would have fallen down dead at once, but I suppose these semi-savages use their brain so little that it doesn't matter much if they lose a part of it."

The best months of Fuller's Boer War came when he was put in charge of 70 black scouts and given a 4,000-square-mile area of only partially pacified countryside to patrol. His recon platoon engaged in casual firefights, took and interrogated prisoners, raided, scouted for regular army units and generally operated independently. It was dangerous work, for the Boers particularly hated Brits who led the despised "kaffirs," and captured officers could expect to die in unpleasant ways.

The experience was for Fuller an on-the-job tactical education. It taught him about field operations—particularly frontal and flank attacks and whether to envelop or penetrate an opposing force—in a way Sandhurst never could. His South African foray instilled in Fuller two ideas that would become cornerstones of his tactical thinking: 1) mobility is all-important, and 2) a rapid, deep, penetrating attack is far more effective than the traditional slow-paced, beat-your-head-against-a-wall frontal assault.

When Fuller returned to England after a brief posting to India (where he stoked his fascination with Eastern religion and mysticism), he resolved that the sweatier side of army life—drilling, marching, maneuvering—held no appeal for him and decided to escape into staff work. In 1913 he was accepted into the Staff College at Camberley, again on his second try. Fuller almost immediately got into trouble for trying to amend the army's sacrosanct operating handbook, the Field Service Regulations. The FSR basically stated that war was simple, fighting principles were not particularly numerous or abstruse, and Napoléon pretty much knew everything that needed to be known.

Perhaps due to his reputation as a prima donna and troublemaker, at the 1914 outbreak of war Fuller was assigned as a minor General Staff officer, while his schoolmates were sent to the front (where many were killed). Among Boney's crucial tasks, he reorganized the filing system at his base, developed a sheep-evacuation plan in the event of a German invasion, and determined whether and how to deprive such invaders of alcohol in the area's pubs. In March 1915, he finally managed to get into the action by insulting his commanding officer so thoroughly that the man shipped him out in retribution.

What Fuller found in France was the stalemate that would persist for most of the war. Frontal attacks were useless, as both sides fielded machine guns. Flanking attacks were impossible, as frontline trenches extended across the Continent from the Atlantic to Switzerland.

Fuller advocated a style of warfare based on mobility and penetration—that is, breakthrough on a limited front. (Twenty years later, Adolf Hitler's Wehrmacht would use those principles to develop its blitzkrieg concepts.) Another elementary principle on which Fuller predicated his style of war was mass: If you don't outnumber your enemy, you probably can't outfight him. "Do not let my opponents castigate me with the blather that Waterloo was won on the playfields of Eton," he later wrote, "for the fact remains, geographically, historically and tactically, whether the Great Duke of Wellington uttered such undiluted nonsense or not, that it was won on fields in Belgium by carrying out a fundamental principle of war, the principle of mass; in other words by marching onto those fields three Englishmen, Germans or Belgians for every two Frenchmen."

It was the tank, however, that would establish Fuller's reputation as a tactician. So much so that some think he invented the modern armored vehicle, though in fact he became "an armor guy" well after Sir Ernest Swinton conceived the vehicle, after its first combat test at the September 1916 Battle of the Somme, and after Swinton and others had already developed and written about tank tactics.

Fuller later recalled his own epiphany. He'd gone to Yvranch, France, home of the army's Heavy Section, as Tank Corps was then called, to watch the demonstration of a remarkable new weapon. (In fact, about all the Heavy Section was doing in those days was putting on daily maintenance-intensive dog-and-pony shows for visiting officers, sending its crude tanks to trundle over berms, cross trenches and, of course, crush trees like matchsticks.) "Everyone was talking and chatting," Fuller wrote, "when slowly came into sight the first tank I ever saw. Not a monster but a very graceful machine with beautiful lines.…Here was the missing tool of penetration, the answer to the dominance on the battlefield of small-arms fire." Fuller had found the antidote to the all-powerful machine gun.

Fuller's first actual tank operation was the April 1917 Battle of Arras. As a demonstration of the tank's capability the operation was a failure, at least in part because tankers ignored Fuller's advice to deploy en masse and instead fed the tanks—mostly clapped-out training vehicles shipped from England—into battle a few at a time. Nor did it help that the army insisted on a traditional pre-attack artillery bombardment, a tactic anathema to Fuller, as it both eliminated any element of surprise and so thoroughly chewed up the ground that many of the tanks were immobilized.

The Battle of Cambrai in November and December 1917 was the Tank Corps' greatest wartime success, as it punched a horde of tanks through the Hindenburg Line in a stunning example of Fuller's penetration tactics. Fuller had wanted to lead the central charge, but his commander, Lt. Col. Hugh Elles, turned him down and directed the battle himself from his tank "Hilda," becoming a fleeting national hero as a result.

Still, Cambrai wasn't a clear-cut enough victory to establish Tank Corps as part of the varsity. Field Marshal Douglas Haig instead relegated tanks to a defensive role, much to Fuller's chagrin. The iron monsters were strung out along a 65-mile front, either dug into pits or otherwise fortified—parked pillboxes, in effect—where "this beast would squat and slumber until the enemy advanced," Fuller later mocked, "when it would make warlike noises and pounce upon him."

Fuller's finest wartime moment was the promulgation of his Plan 1919. Believing World War I would continue into 1919, he suggested victory with a single penetrating, surprise, mass tank attack aimed not at killing lots of German soldiers but at reaching and killing the enemy "brain"—the rear-area command-and-communications infrastructure—and thus paralyzing the body. But Fuller's most meaningful tactical concept came to naught, as the war ended in November 1918. Had it continued, Fuller today might be as widely known as Guderian, Montgomery and Patton.

Britain's hidebound high command seemed to learn little from World War I, their American counterparts perhaps only a bit more. The military remained convinced that wars were won by men clad in woolen uniforms hiding behind rocks and shooting bullets at one another and that despite the growing civilian predilection for cross-country travel in gasoline-powered automobiles, mobility of armies was still best provided by horses. Few seemed to realize that armor trumped wool and machinery was stronger than muscle. Part of the problem was that professional officers liked horses and loathed greasy, smelly machinery. Even airplanes met with their disdain.

Through the 1920s, as Fuller grew increasingly disenchanted with the military and his inability to bring about real tactical reforms, the military became equally disenchanted with Fuller. The final straw was the "Tidworth Affair," which began when the British army gave Fuller the plum command of an experimental tank force at Tidworth, on the Salisbury Plain. The posting, which marked the tactician's last chance to champion his armored doctrine, turned sour when he voiced a variety of small-minded ultimatums, such as demanding a full-time secretary and refusing to "waste his time" commanding an infantry unit attached to the tank force. To top things off, he petulantly threatened to resign, which would have been a PR disaster for the army, as Fuller had far stronger support among the popular press than he did among the officer corps. The army managed to talk him out of quitting.

But instead of taking in Tidworth, Fuller was again sent to India on a minor fact-finding mission and was never again offered a command. In 1933, at the age of 55, Fuller retired as a major general. Biographer Anthony John Trythall summed up his turbulent career: "And so ended, a few years before what will almost certainly prove to have been the largest and longest mechanized war of all time, the military career of Britain's most experienced and able tank officer, the victim of his own brilliance and energy, and of his own inability to trim his words and actions to the winds of political reality and human frailty.…He was…too clever, too rigid, too intellectually arrogant and self-reliant to be highly successful in a military career."

Following his army retirement, Fuller became deeply involved with Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists (not a completely unexpected development, given that Fuller was a Germanophile, a racist and an anti-Semite whose preferred boyhood nickname was "Fritz"). He visited Germany frequently and spent time with Hitler, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Rudolf Hess, all of whom he found "charming." Fuller was one of only two British guests at Hitler's 50th birthday party, in April 1939, and it was at that event he apparently spoke some of the most notorious words ever attributed too him.

After a three-hour parade of the thoroughly motorized, armored Wehrmacht, Hitler greeted Fuller on the receiving line and said, "I hope you were pleased with your children." Fuller is said to have replied, "Your Excellency, they have grown up so quickly that I no longer recognize them." The Germans—particularly panzer commander Guderian—would later largely credit Fuller's writings with their development of blitzkrieg tactics, though historians debate whether the defeated Guderian meant this more as postwar politeness than praise.

While Fuller realized that war with Germany would almost certainly erupt again, he deluded himself into thinking that white brothers under the skin would wage chivalrous battles, eventually settle on a winner and shake on it, "for chivalry was born in Europe," he naively wrote.

While the government interned most members of the British Union of Fascists upon the 1939 outbreak of war, Fuller was left alone, probably because Winston Churchill intervened on his behalf. Yet Fuller loathed Churchill, of whom he once wrote to his friend Basil Liddell Hart, "The war as it is being run is just a vast Bedlam with WC as its glamour boy; a kind of mad hatter who one day appears as a cowpuncher and the next as an air commodore—the man is an enormous mountebank."

In the 1930s Fuller had embarked upon a second career as a writer, ultimately penning some 45 authoritative books and hundreds of popular-press articles and scholarly papers. He wrote about everything from war to yoga (the latter extremely avant-garde at the time) and became a precursor of today's retired generals anxious to freelance as media talking heads. Indeed, Fuller was Newsweek's "military analyst" during much of World War II.

For all his foibles and failings, Fuller was a visionary. In the early 1930s he predicted, as Anthony Trythall wrote, "future armies would be surrounded by swarms of motorized guerillas, irregulars or regular troops making use of the multitude of civilian motorcars that would be available." Fuller also mused that one day "a manless flying machine" would change the face of war. Early on he was intrigued by the development of radio, not only for communication but also as a way to control robot weapons. He also thought then-primitive rocket technology would one day lead to the development of superb anti-aircraft weapons.

And as early as the 1920s, Fuller was a proponent of amphibious warfare. He envisioned a naval fleet "which belches forth war on every strand, which vomits forth armies as never did the horse of Troy." Indeed, he foresaw future navies as being entirely submersible. On the negative side of the balance sheet, Fuller also championed the military use of poison gas, particularly when spread by airplanes. Even as late as 1961, with the publication of his book The Conduct of War, he blamed resistance to chemical warfare on "popular emotionalism."

If Fuller had a fatal flaw as a tactician, it was that he derided the importance of putting infantry "boots on the ground." To him, combat was simply a matter of wool uniforms versus steel armor—and that seemed to him a no-brainer. Of course, Fuller had failed to consider the development of portable, shoulder-fired and helicopter-borne antitank weaponry.

Maj. Gen. J.F.C. Fuller, CB, CBE, DSO (Ret.) died on Feb. 10, 1966. Had he lived another 16 months, he'd doubtless have gained considerable satisfaction from Israel's total rout of the Egyptians, Syrians and Jordanians in the June 1967 Six-Day War, using Fuller-doctrine tank tactics in what was later dubbed "the Jewish blitzkrieg."

"Boney" Fuller was indeed a prophet—albeit a cantankerous, irritating and bigoted one—in his own time.

For further reading, Stephan Wilkinson recommends: "Boney" Fuller: Soldier, Strategist and Writer, 1878–1966, by Anthony John Trythall, and Fuller's own The Conduct of War, 1789–1961.
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Re: JFC Fuller's Universe

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Jan 10, 2013 12:48 pm

Thanks! That was very instructive. I didn't know about Fuller and I always love learning history. Though he was clearly a monster, I can totally relate to his frustration about seeing obvious things that tradition and hierarchy cannot and will not comprehend. It's always been incredible to me that the British command refused to understand tank strategy despite having all the facts in front of their noses for more than 20 years, right up until the Germans punched through their lines in France.

But that opening quote? This is a war species, maybe -- though we all start as helpless sucklings seeking warmth at the teat of mother or other adults -- or a war biosphere. But a universe? That's selective anthropomorphic projection on to something infinitely bigger than us.
Last edited by JackRiddler on Thu Jan 10, 2013 12:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: JFC Fuller's Universe

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Thu Jan 10, 2013 12:50 pm

Quote is just there because WSB and JFC were on the same cracker-lizard channel. No truthiness implied.
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Re: JFC Fuller's Universe

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Jan 10, 2013 12:54 pm

That's all right sweetheart, no need. I always give YOU the benefit of the doubt. You had me at "wombat."
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Re: JFC Fuller's Universe

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Thu Jan 10, 2013 2:05 pm

Via: http://cosmodromium.blogspot.com/2009/1 ... enius.html

Fuller was an early disciple of English poet and magician Aleister Crowley and was very familiar with his, and other forms of, magick and mysticism. While serving in the First Oxfordshire Light Infantry he had entered, and won, a contest to write the best review of Crowley's poetic works - his entered review was an unsurprising success as he was apparently the only entrant to the contest. This essay was later published in book form in 1907 as The Star in the West. After this he became an enthusiastic supporter of Crowley, joining his magical Order, the A.A.. within which he became a leading member, editing Order documents and its journal, The Equinox. During this period he wrote The Treasure House of Images, edited early sections of Crowley's magical autobiography The Temple of Solomon the King and produced highly-regarded paintings dealing with A.A. teachings: these paintings have been used in recent years as the covers of the journal's revival, The Equinox, Volume IV.[1] [2]

After the Jones vs The Looking Glass case, in which a great deal was made of Aleister Crowley's homosexuality (although Crowley himself was not a party to the case), Fuller became worried that his association with Crowley might be a hindrance to his career. Crowley writes in chapter 67 of his Confessions:

"...to my breathless amazement he fired pointblank at my head a document in which he agreed to continue his co-operation on condition that I refrain from mentioning his name in public or private under penalty of paying him a hundred pounds for each such offence. I sat down and poured in a broadside at close quarters. "My dear man," I said in effect, "do recover your sense of proportion, to say nothing of your sense of humour. Your contribution, indeed! I can do in two days what takes you six months, and my real reason for ever printing your work at all is my friendship for you. I wanted to give you a leg up the literary ladder. I have taken endless pain to teach you the first principles of writing. When I met you, you were not so much as a fifth-rate journalist, and now you can write quite good prose with no more than my blue pencil through two out of every three adjectives, and five out of every six commas. Another three years with me and I will make you a master, but please don't think that either I or the Work depend on you, any more than J.P. Morgan depends on his favourite clerk."

After this contact between the two men faded rapidly. However Fuller continued to be fascinated with occult subjects, and in later years he contrinued to write about topics such as the Qabalah and to a lesser extent yoga (which was at the time seen as potentially dangerous in Western eyes).
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Re: JFC Fuller's Universe

Postby Hammer of Los » Fri Jan 11, 2013 1:43 am

...

Not the old Crow again.

He always starin' out at me.

He can go take a bloody runnin' jump.

Belief is a most mysterious thing.

The will is a most dangerous master.

Inaction a most subtle creed.

Resolve your karma.

...
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Re: JFC Fuller's Universe

Postby semper occultus » Fri Jan 11, 2013 3:59 pm

....Fuller is a strange character but by no means unprecedented - Maxwell Knight of MI5 was also an extremely eccentric Crowleyite dabbler

I came across an intriguing "anti-Fuller" the other day who was abroad at the same time - Tom Wintringham who....if the blatant thread hi-jack will be forgiven...makes an interesting ideological counter-point to Fuller....as a leading member and intellectual in the Communist Party of Great Britain who fell out with the Stalinists over the Nazi-Soviet Pact...

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jwinteringham.htm
http://tom.wintringham.ch/#man

Image

......according to one critic he was "the leading Marxist expert on military affairs at present writing in English". He wrote a series of pamphlets including War and the Way to Fight Against It (1932) and Air Raid Warning (1934). In 1935 Wintringham published The Coming World War. The following year he became Military Correspondent of the Daily Worker and wrote a series of articles on modern warfare. His next book was Mutiny: A Survey of Mutinies from Spartacus to Invergordon (1936).


Wintringham "believed that war provided the best opportunity for revolution and that a revolution was necessary for fascism to be defeated." George Orwell agreed with him: "We are in a strange period of history, in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary." Both men had been deeply influenced by their experiences of fighting in the Spanish Civil War.

In October 1939, Winston Churchill suggested to Sir John Anderson, the head of Air Raid Precautions (ARP), that a Home Guard of men aged over forty should be formed. Anderson agreed with Churchill's suggestion but it was not until the German Army had launched its Western Offensive that action was taken and on 14th May, 1940, Anthony Eden appealed on radio for men to become Local Defence Volunteers (LDV). In the broadcast Eden asked that volunteers should be aged be aged between 40 and 65 and should be able to fire a rifle or shotgun. By the end of June nearly one and a half a million men had been recruited.

Wintringham wrote several articles where he argued that the Home Guard should be trained in guerrilla warfare. Tom Hopkinson and Edward Hulton came up with the idea private training school for the Home Guard. On 10th July 1940, Wintringham was appointed as director of the Osterley Park Training School at Isleworth, Middlesex. In the first three months he trained 5,000 in the rudiments of guerrilla warfare.


In 1940 Wintringham wrote a 20,000 word pamphlet entitled How to Reform the Army. Over the next few months over 10,000 copies were sold and he was consulted by Sir Ronald Adam, the Deputy Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir John Brown, the Deputy Adjutant-General and Major General Augustus Thorne, the Commander of the Brigade of Guards.



On 20th May 1940 Wintringham became the Military Correspondent of the Daily Mirror. He continued to write for other publications. One article published in the Picture Post on 15th June that gave practical instructions for a people's war to resist invasion was bought by the War Office which printed off 100,000 copies and distributed them to Home Guard units.

The War Office became concerned about the activities of the Osterley Park Training School. The Inspector's Directorate of the Home Guard reported in July 1940: "While approving of the school in principle, the London District Assistant Commander did not think the Instructors were of a suitable type because of communistic tendencies. On 10th September General Pownall informed the Inspector's Directorate that "the school at Osterley was gradually being taken over by the War Office." In the spring of 1941 Wintringham was dismissed from his post as director of the training school.

Wintringham published People's War in 1942. He argued that a modern people's war combines "guerrilla forces behind enemy lines with a blitzkrieg striking force." In another pamphlet, Freedom is Our Weapon, Wintringham wrote: "If we are able to achieve the making of a people's army, we can be sure that the men will come back determined to achieve and capable of achieving for themselves their own homes for heroes, their own society linking liberty, agreement and co-operation."
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Re: JFC Fuller's Universe

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sat Jan 12, 2013 12:03 pm

I dig it. Expanding the dots:

Oswald Mosley was an adorable twerp to me, but his written eloquence has won him a lot of sympathy from other folks I've talked to along the road. I am consistently surprised by the otherwise egalitarian anarchist types who will express no small fondness for his work. All I can see is this:

Image

The second "honored guest" at Hitler's 50th birthday is a reference I am uncertain of, but may involve one of the two men that JFC Fuller traveled to Germany with, Walter Montagu-Douglas-Scott and Arthur Ronald Nall-Cain.

How Novel Was Plan 1919?

The Jimmy Wales Show wrote:Plan 1919 was a military strategy drawn up by J.F.C. Fuller in 1918 during World War I. His plan criticised the practice of physically destroying the enemy, and instead suggested a lightning thrust toward the command center of the German army. His plan called for tanks to rapidly advance into the enemy's rear area, destroying supply bases and lines of communication.

The Allied advance and German retreat across France and Belgium in 1918 had begun to show some of the pace and aspects that would mark later mechanized warfare; British tanks played an increasing role, and German rear-guard defenses focused on stopping their advance. Whilst never implemented, Plan 1919 would have carried these trends forward earlier, and can be said to have formed the basis for later blitzkrieg tactics and the Soviet theories of Deep Battle and Deep Operations


I am wondering how innovative this really was -- smells like "Flat Earth" history by juicy anecdote. Violates the James Burke principle of multiple simultaneous emerging inventors for most human innovations.

Full text of Plan 1919: http://www.alternatewars.com/WW1/Fuller_1919.htm

Heads up: links to .mil server and launches a .pdf file: http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA363919 "JFC Fuller: His Methods, Insights and Vision" is the title of that 1999 vintage strategy paper.

Strategy Research Paper wrote:So what institutional roles does such a distinguished military thinker, critic and prophet play in the current US Army's senior leaders' military education? Unfortunately, his role is very insignificant. Although many of his ideas and maxims have been championed and discussed in past decades at our nations senior leader war colleges, MG Fuller's current attributed contributions have been reduced to the following quotation found in many seminar rooms at Carlisle Barracks:

"We shall teach each other: first, because we have a vast amount of experience behind us, and secondly, in my opinion is only through free criticism of each other's ideas truth can be thrashed about ... during your course here no one is going to compel you to work, for the simple reason that man who requires to be driven is not worth driving ... thus you will become your own students and until you learn how to teach yourselves, you will never be taught by others."
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Re: JFC Fuller's Universe

Postby semper occultus » Wed Jan 16, 2013 7:13 pm

Wombaticus Rex wrote:I dig it. Expanding the dots:

Oswald Mosley was an adorable twerp to me
Image


....Mosley was lampooned by PG Wodehouse as Roderick Spode leader of the Black Shorts...the man on the far left ( in the picture, not politically ) is William Joyce....who croseed paths with Dennis Wheatley who crossed paths with Crowley & Maxwell Knight of MI5....did he with Fuller is the question....

Image
Image
The Devil is a Gentleman Phil Baker

Wheatley made his own war time contributions to warfare & military strategy :

DW wrote a paper on 'Total War' in December 1940, and returned to the theme in December 1941, when he wrote a much longer paper on the subject.

This was in many ways DW's most comprehensive paper - analysing the nature of the conflict, putting it in context, and discussing how resources of all kinds would have to be marshalled if it was to be won.

DW distinguished between 'tribal wars' and 'civil wars'; 'tribal wars' being essentially territorial, wars where there were rules governing behaviour, and 'civil wars' being essentially ideological, where no compromise was possible. He placed World War II firmly in the latter category.

DW considered there were three instruments of Total War - propaganda, intelligence and armed force - and he considered that none of these should operate independently, with the whole being greater than its parts.

The paper then went on to consider how the country could most effectively marshal its resources to win the war.

The paper was wide ranging and included ideas across the whole spectrum from religion to strategy and to economics; in the latter area it contained proposals to release men from conscription until they were actually needed - since otherwise many small businesses would disintegrate, and DW considered that these would be the lifeblood of the future.

It was a hard hitting paper, and many parts were controversial and were excluded from the public edition.

For example, in the unpublished version, DW discussed the pros and cons of sinking a neutral ship if this would bring in the neutral country and speed up the war, and a proposition that both enemy leaders and neutral leaders with enemy sympathies should be eliminated so long as the assassins were not caught (see the two exhibits immediately above).

www.denniswheatley.info


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