There’s nothing like the whiff of distant grapeshot to energise Australia’s plethora of armchair military strategists. Military professionals, on the other hand, spend an inordinate time pondering where strategy ends and tactics begin.
Australia, in its short history, has had few strategists who were also good tacticians.
Of all the generals since Monash, Major General turned Senator Jim Molan has stood apart as a strategist and tactician. His innate understanding of the capabilities of weapons has made him a master of battlefield manoeuvring both in the lecture room and the field. When the Australian Army repeated their mantra that ‘combat power is a combination of firepower, manoeuvre, and morale’, Molan argued that this was a ruinous simplification.