7 Comments
Sep 24Liked by LTC Drew Dornstadter

Thank you for the great analysis. It is always helpful to compare our systems with other militaries. It did make me wonder if there were any attempts to collect a “best of” writing from foreign journals potentially by the Foreign Military Studies Office. I was thinking about this after reading about interwar German military thought and how closely they paid attention to writings in other countries and translated them into their own journals.

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I'd love to see FMSO's OE Watch publish in branch verticals at our forthcoming journal platform. It would help spread knowledge about what our adversaries are up to.

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That's a great idea, Zach. TRADOC G2 also does a nice job of consolidating key points in executive summaries from conferences, seminars, and publications by think tanks. I regularly pass their products to foreign counterparts.

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Robert, thank you, and I wonder the same thing. At the moment, I think scouting "best of" writing is in line with the duties of a liaison officer, but it's tough to devote sufficient reading time in light of competing requirements. While other armies do give special recognition to some articles with prizes and awards, I'm not aware of a parallel to how CSA highlights three or four articles each month. That might be something we can ask his counterparts or someone else with significant cultural influence in the community to do. Thanks again for the comment.

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Great information, well done! I might note that historically, West Point initially included only French language instruction, logical for an army that still looked to Napoleon for inspiration and example. Spanish was added after the Mexican-American War, and German was added after the Franco-Prussian War. I was delighted to discover at a Museum of the Confederacy years ago that Robert E. Lee carried with him a copy of the French Army’s manual for cavalry at his last posting in Texas before the American Civil War when he was with the US Second Cavalry regiment.

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Robert, thank you. Fascinating note about how West Point's language curriculum changed with the conflicts of the era. I'm interested in the history of our cadet and officer exchanges, too.

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The embedded downloadable file is more thorough and offers links and descriptions for all the Spanish publications mentioned above. All of the external audience publications are downloadable for free via the Spanish Ministry of Defense’s public website: https://publicaciones.defensa.gob.es/revistas.html.

The downloadable article also expands on the Spanish publication process, describes options for submitting an article, and offers a deeper comparison between Spain and the United States. You can download by clicking the button above or following this link: https://substack-post-media.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/post-files/149304618/e1cd8d1e-0b9b-479a-bd9c-65367ed29b12.pdf

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