Quote Originally Posted by jcustis View Post
I've never quite understood the Poole style of researching. That's at least what I took away from the first two books I tried to stomach. I've seen a lot of information compiled there, but not (at least by my perception) much in the way of actual original writing and thought.

Take the Rhodesian tactic of the "drake shoot". It's been posted about here, and would make for good tactical commonsense, but if I slapped it in with about 300 other solid principles, it wouldn't make me a theorist.

I'm not trying to be too much of a naysayer, as I have to admit that I haven't read all of the books. I've heard Poole speak though, and he tends to give me some weird case of the creeps like Grossman does.
Poole has always struck me as a major "cutter and paster." He hauls things out of other sources, doesn't always leave them in context, and seems quite smitten with the idea that everyone (especially, as Fuchs points out, 'Eastern' armies) do everything better than we do. I wouldn't consider him a theorist in any major sense. A compiler, certainly, but not a theorist.