Paul Schwennesen
Tennyson’s haunting lines, indelibly printed into Western military consciousness, portray a disastrous British light cavalry attack against Russian artillery positions in the midst of the Crimean War. While generally read as a paean to disciplined combat courage, it in fact presents a not-so-veiled warning—a reference to muddled orders (“some one had blunder’d”) and obsolete tactics in the face of technical superiority. Horses and sabers, after all, were no match for canister and grapeshot from well-entrenched artillery.
Psychologist Norman Dixon, a specialist in the psychology of military incompetence, says that the implied heroism in The Charge of the Light Brigade rather gets things backward—the event should have opened discerning eyes to the changing nature of warfare. Instead, it “did much to strengthen those very forms of tradition which put such an incapacitating stranglehold on military endeavor for the next eighty or so years.”
Today, after another frontline trip to Ukraine, I think it can honestly be said that the United States military faces a similar “incapacitating stranglehold” in its collective understanding of the changing nature of warfare. If we do not adjust (quickly) to the threat of drone warfare, we may well end up writing nostalgically of noble but futile charges of legacy weapons against better-adapted adversaries.
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