How did 🇺🇸 eventually win the Revolution? Supply lines & knowledge of the terrain. The former quartermaster Nathanael Greene, Edward Carrington & William Richardson Davie made it happen. Two lawyers & one obsessed with terrain detail. That’s how Greene won the Race to the Dan.

The American Revolution did not begin with a gunshot. It began, in a real sense, with a boycott, signed on this day in 1774, that quietly turned thirteen separate colonies into something that could act as one nation, long before anyone dared say the word independence out loud. The crisis had been building. After the Boston Tea Party, Britain had come down hard on Massachusetts with a series of punishing laws the colonists called the Intolerable Acts, meant to crush resistance and make an example of Boston. Instead it backfired. Colonies that had spent a century bickering with each other suddenly saw a common threat: if Parliament could do this to Massachusetts, it could do it to any of them. So they sent delegates to Philadelphia, to the First Continental Congress, to figure out what to do together. What they produced, on October 20, 1774, was the Continental Association. On its surface it was an economic weapon: a sweeping, coordinated agreement to stop importing, consuming, and eventually exporting British goods until Britain backed down. Hit the mother country in its pocketbook, in its merchants and its trade, and force Parliament to repeal the hated laws. The colonies had tried boycotts before, but piecemeal, colony by colony, easy to break. This time they bound themselves to it together, as a union. But here is the part that made it revolutionary, literally. The Association did not just ask people to stop buying British tea and cloth. It called for committees to be elected in every county, town, and city to enforce it, to inspect, to watch, to publish the names of anyone who violated the boycott and mark them as enemies of American liberty. And those committees, thousands of ordinary men chosen by their neighbors, sprang up everywhere. Think about what that actually meant. All across the colonies, local bodies of Americans were now openly enforcing American rules, policing their own communities, and sidelining the royal officials and courts who were supposed to be in charge. Power was quietly shifting, town by town, out of the hands of the Crown and into the hands of elected American committees. The colonists were not just protesting anymore. They were beginning to govern themselves, building a shadow structure of self-rule right under the nose of British authority. The Association was, in effect, the machinery of revolution switching on at the grassroots. And it worked as a unifier in a way nothing had before. For the first time, the colonies had committed themselves to a common cause, with a common enforcement, binding their fates together. It was a dress rehearsal for acting as one country. When the shooting finally started at Lexington and Concord just six months later, the colonies were not thirteen strangers scrambling to cooperate. They had already learned, through the Association, how to stand together and how to run their own affairs. Remember October 20, 1774. No one fired a shot. No army marched. But the Continental Association was one of the true beginnings of the United States, the moment the colonies stopped acting as separate British possessions and started acting as a single people with a will of their own. The Revolution was being built, committee by committee, boycott by boycott, before the first musket ever cracked.

“Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics.” — attributed to Gen. Robert H. Barrow #AnyEnvironment #Values #Leadership

Christopher Hitchens: ”In 1786, when the United States was barely a country, it was having its sailors taken as slaves by the Barbary states, the states of the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. Tripoli, shores of Tripoli. Ships stopped, its crews carried off into slavery. We estimate 1.5 million European and American slaves taken between 1750 and 1815. Jefferson and Adams went to their ambassador in London and said, why do you do this to us? The United States has never had a quarrel with the Muslim world of any kind. We weren't in the crusades. We weren't at war with Spain. Why do you do this to our people and our ships? Why do you plunder and enslave our people? The ambassador said very plainly, Mr. Abdul Rahman said, because the Quran gives us permission to do so, because you are infidels, and that's our answer. Jefferson said, well, in that case, I will send a navy which will crush your state, which he did. Islamic fundamentalism is not created by American democracy. It's a lie to say so. It's a masochistic lie, and it excuses those who are the real criminals, and blames us for the attacks made upon us.”

Oct 19 in 1781, the world turned upside down when Cornwallis surrendered to General Washington at Yorktown. The surrender of the British forces at Yorktown, John Trumbull, c 1832. Yale University Art Gallery, Trumbull Collection

Redoubt 10 on the Yorktown Battlefield Tour

My dear American friends, in my last post I gave you a snapshot of where France stands today. Now let me show you how we got here. I want you to see the whole movie before you buy the ticket. After the war, France was a machine. We called it the Trente Glorieuses, thirty glorious years. We built Concorde, the most beautiful aircraft ever made. We built a fleet of nuclear reactors in about fifteen years and gave ourselves some of the cleanest, cheapest electricity in the world. We built Ariane and put Europe in space. We built the TGV, the fastest train on earth. We invented the Minitel, an online network in millions of homes before most of you had heard of the internet. We were not a museum. We were builders. Then came 1981. François Mitterrand. Think of him as our Bernie Sanders, except he actually won. At his side, in the office next to his at the Élysée, sat a 37-year-old prodigy named Jacques Attali, his special adviser for the next ten years. The brightest minds of the left, convinced they could run an economy from a ministry. Here's what they did. They governed with Communist ministers. In 1982 they nationalized dozens of banks and the biggest industrial groups in the country: Paribas, Suez, Saint-Gobain, Thomson, Pechiney, Rhône-Poulenc. They lowered the retirement age to 60. They cut the work week to 39 hours and added a fifth week of paid vacation. They created a wealth tax. They hired massively into the public sector. Reality hit in less than two years. Capital fled, inflation ran wild, and the franc was devalued three times. In March 1983 Mitterrand had to slam on the brakes and impose austerity just to stay in the European monetary system. But here's the trick: the brakes never reversed anything. They just slowed the ratchet. The so-called right came back with Jacques Chirac, and nothing was undone. Under Chirac's presidency, France passed the 35-hour work week. Left or right, every government added one more program, one more rule, one more tax, and nobody ever took one away. At the same time, the political class did something even more destructive than bad economics. It turned the youth into a political instrument. Instead of teaching young people, including millions of children of immigrants, to love the country they lived in, it taught them a story of guilt and grievance: France as the oppressor, France as the thing to resent. You cannot integrate people into a country you've taught them to despise. We are living with the consequences of that narrative today, in our schools, our suburbs, our streets. Then forty years of slow decline, all the way to Macron. And the story has a perfect ending. In 2007, Jacques Attali chaired a commission on how to unleash French growth. Its deputy rapporteur was a young civil servant named Emmanuel Macron. The commission proposed more than 300 reforms to free the economy. Almost none were ever implemented. Even the men who built the system knew it wasn't working, and even they couldn't undo it. No balanced budget since 1974. Public spending around 57% of GDP. Debt above 3,300 billion euros. Growth stuck under 1%. Now the number that should keep you up at night. In 1995, GDP per person in France was about $27,000. In America, about $29,000. We were neck and neck. Today France is around $49,000. America is around $90,000. You are now nearly twice as rich per person as we are. What changed? Not our talent. Not our engineers. Not our schools of mathematics. The only thing that changed is that we went all in on socialism. The 35 hours, the endless regulation, the taxes that chase out anyone who builds, the belief that the state should do everything and the individual should ask permission for everything. There's a line people love to attribute to Einstein: insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. We tried. For forty years, we tried. Every government promised that one more program, one more tax, one more regulation would finally fix things. You just saw where it got us. So if you choose the Democratic Party, which is literally turning socialist in front of your eyes, you will deserve what comes next. Let me tell you exactly what will happen if you go down that road. Nobody will vote for decline. Every single measure will sound generous, compassionate, reasonable. Your builders will slowly leave or stop building. Your state will grow every year and never shrink. Your debt will compound. And in thirty years, your kids will look at a chart like the one I just described and wonder when it all went wrong. You still have something we lost. You have Elon Musk sending rockets to orbit and landing them on their tail. You have Palmer Luckey building the defense industry of the future. You have Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, and thousands of founders nobody has heard of yet, building in garages right now. Trust your entrepreneurs. Don't trust your politicians. I come from your future. Don't make it yours.

In a scene reminiscent of the 300 Spartans at Thermopile, the Maryland 400's heroic actions in New York saved the American Revolution. Vastly outnumbered and severely outgunned, those dauntless boys charged the heavily fortified Old Stone House again and again. They kept the British guns occupied long enough for the bulk of the American army to escape the trap and flee to safety. The precious hour they bought with their lives, saved the Continental Army. That army survived to fight for 7 more years, won the Revolutionary War and earned the colonists their freedom.

On the night of October 14, 1781, during the climactic Siege of Yorktown, Allied commanders under George Washington resolved to seize two advanced British redoubts that blocked the completion of their second parallel. These fortifications, designated Redoubt 9 and Redoubt 10, stood close enough to the British lines that their capture would allow the Franco-American artillery to be advanced and intensify the bombardment of Lord Cornwallis's trapped army. With the moonless darkness offering concealment, the Allies planned simultaneous assaults: American light infantry drawn from the Marquis de Lafayette's division would strike Redoubt 10, while French regulars of the Gatinais and Deux-Ponts regiments would attack Redoubt 9. Diversionary movements elsewhere along the lines were intended to confuse the defenders and prevent reinforcement of the threatened works. The American column, roughly four hundred strong and led by Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton, advanced in silence with muskets unloaded so that an accidental discharge would not betray their approach. Upon reaching the obstacles of abatis and palisades, the troops surged forward with bayonets fixed, climbing over one another and through gaps in the defenses rather than pausing to clear every obstruction. Hand-to-hand fighting erupted inside the redoubt, yet the position fell within minutes, most of its garrison of about seventy men becoming prisoners. At the same moment the French columns, ordered not to fire until they had mounted the parapet, likewise overran Redoubt 9 after a brief but costly struggle against a larger defending force. The coordinated attacks demonstrated the discipline and élan of both Allied contingents and were completed before the British could organize an effective counterstroke. Possession of the two redoubts transformed the geometry of the siege. The Allies immediately incorporated the captured works into their second parallel, bringing heavy guns within close range of Yorktown's remaining defenses. The intensified cannonade that followed, combined with the impossibility of relief or escape across the York River, convinced Cornwallis that further resistance was futile. Within five days he requested terms, and on October 19 the British army marched out to surrender. The storming of the redoubts on the fourteenth thus marked the decisive tactical stroke that sealed the strategic victory at Yorktown and effectively ended major combat operations of the Revolutionary War.