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The Defence of Duffer's Drift: Difference between revisions
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{{work}}
''[[The Defence of Duffer's Drift]]'' -- written in 1904 by British Major-General [[wikipedia:Ernest Dunlop Swinton|Ernest Dunlop Swinton]] under the pseudonym [[Meaningful Name|Lt. Backsight Forethought]] -- is a short book on military tactics set during the [[Second Boer War]]. Over the [[Framing Device]] of [[All Just a Dream|a sequence of six dreams]], Lieutenant Backsight Forethought, or BF, must defend a river crossing, the eponymous "Duffer's Drift", against a numerically superior force of Boers. The scenario [[Groundhog Day Loop|starts out the same way over each dream]], and BF doesn't remember the terrain or the events each new time the scenario is replayed. What he does remember are a series of tactical lessons learned, which he applies to good effect in each new iteration. Eventually, his force does better and better until, on the sixth run-through, he manages to successfully defend the crossing.
The tactics that BF uses are [[Technology Marches On|a little dated]] for today, but many of his observations on entrenching and [[Geo Effects|terrain tactics]] are still valid. It is all-but-required reading in military academies today and spawned a series of [[Follow the Leader]] works of varying quality, using the same dream format to examine logistics, procurement, and Second Iraq War counterinsurgencies.
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{{tropelist}}
* [[Big Book of War]]: not that big at less than 200 pages, but otherwise fits the bill.
* [[Combat Pragmatist]]: the Boers are this, all the way; they start by infiltrating the British camp with civilians, and when BF learns not to trust civilians and to entrench, they pepper his freshly-built trenches with Nordenfeldt guns. BF himself develops from a fresh-faced new lieutenant into a combat pragmatist as things go along.
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:Literature]]
[[Category:The Defence of Duffer's Drift]]
[[Category:Military and Warfare Literature]]
{{DEFAULTSORT:Defence of Duffer's Drift, The}}
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