Quote Originally Posted by Fuchs View Post
You should look at that differently. People from Northern Germany are blunt and direct and don't hide their opinion as much as most people. You may be unused to it, but honesty has its advantages - especially in communication.
The problem is that this medium of communication doesn't allow the easy back and forth of verbal communicarion so a mildly disparaging comment accompanied by a smile and a shrug comes across in print as an attack if one isn't careful...
So he merely wrote down in a pleasantly readable format what many agreed to be necessary and his book became more of a rallying point and reference than it was a an innovation?

That's sad, because this was one of the relatively few published works on conventional war theory that got much attention post-90.
Published for broad public sale, true. A lot of good material rarely makes it to that level -- but it does get digested and discussed and the public never sees it. MacGregor's book just hit at the right time.

The fall of the Wall, followed by the 1991 Gulf War caught the US and the Army in a "Okay... Now what do we do?" moment. No one had a clue what to do or how to structure but the bureaucracy went to work on it. Bureaucracy is slow, so no movement was apparent to most. Then along came Macgregor with some solid and practical ideas -- not innovative in the grand sense but innovative from the perspective of a very conservative US Army. No real mystery that it got wide acclaim. I imagine Saxe's 'Reveries' was not realized as anything special when it was first published because a lot of people shared his experience. Only later did the simple prescriptions become recognized as classical.

He has some really good ideas and his later efforts have also been practical and bear study and implementation. He makes more sense than do most of the Think Tanks...

But then, my five year old Granddaughter makes more sense than do most Think tanks...