Quote Originally Posted by Norfolk View Post
I have long considered Nathan Bedford Forest to be perhaps the finest battlefield general this Continent has ever produced (sorry about Galusha, Ken). And I put him right up there with Sherman (but not side-by-side.
Norfolk: Grant is still my number one; I cant get the image of him standing under the tree at night in the rain after the first day of shiloh where he is really figuring things out about the true nature of the war he is fighting. And to cross over to another thread a bit, I think a neglected American general at least at the operational level in ww2 is old Curt LeMay.

In the Commonwealth, we've always kind of looked at Colonial Wars/COIN/Small Wars as the place to start off, honing one's individual and sub-unit skills before moving on up the spectrum ladder; for us, HIC Combined Arms operations is Graduate level!
I humbly accept this statement; and sadly many Coin aficionados continue to wrongly portray conventional war as binary and simple. Oh Please, although i never fought in one but of course am a student of them through history i can only imagine them being anything but binary and simple. But my point here is to throw some realism on the Coin fetish and suggest to its oracles to bring themselves down a notch or two and show a bit of humility toward things.
Coin as I experienced was certainly not easy, but neither i imagine is conventional war.