The Battle of Borodino occurred on this date in 1812.  It was a bit of a Pyrrhic victory for Napoleon, but if he had followed up on it more vigorously, the course of European history would have been radically different.  Destruction of the Russian army would have meant that even if Napoleon had still been forced to retreat from Moscow, his columns wouldn’t have been as harshly pursued and gutted.   A strong or even victorious Napoleon after the Russian campaigns might have been in a better position to stand up against the British and Austrians, and wouldn’t have been as weakened in the politics of Paris.

Lessons from the Napoleonic wars were learned a bit too well.  Rigid compliance with their tactics in the face of improved technology turned our own Civil War into a meat grinder, a mistake that was repeated  years later on the fields of Sevastopol, Flanders, and Verdun.  There’s a cliché that armies train for the last war, but European and American armies prepared for the War of 1812 for over a century, and only gave it up when the success of the machine gun, tank, and airplane made even the densest of marshalls see that following Napoleon led only to bleeding entire nations white.

I guess the question is whether we’ve learned that lesson.   We spent the second half of the 20th century waiting to refight World War II, while the reality was that we had to be prepared to not only do that, but also to fight brush fire wars in the third world.  Training for conventional war while fighting an unconventional war hollowed out our military, and it took a decade and billions of dollars to bring it back. 10 years of stagnation and preparation to refight Desert Storm gave us a force supremely capable of winning the opening phases of Afghanistan and the Iraq wars, but then the leaders of our forces struggled to switch gears into occupation and counter-insurgency.  It is only through the dedication of our troops and the technology they have been fed that they have done as well as they have, and if they had been better led at the general officer and civilian leadership levels, I believe they might have done better.