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Introduction THE DYNAMICS OF MILITARY DISASTERS What are military disasters? What are their dynamics? Are ­there common threads that link them? ­ These are the sorts of questions that we hope to address in this book. Military disasters are not related only to ­ battles, but in some cases campaigns, or even entire, disastrous wars. Their commonality is that they occur in ­human con- flict, mostly among larger entities such as empires, states, and nations, or any per- mutation therein. In categorizing them as military, we have de­cided not to limit ourselves to military disasters on land, but also to include sea and air disasters, as well as what one might call multidomain environments—­ those that encompass con- flict in its broadest sense, such as the campaign of Gallipoli in 1915.1 We also strove to prevent this being a work that stresses warfare in Western Eu­ rope, but rather encompasses the entire globe. However, ­ because we are writing this in En­ glish, the authors’ common language, we could not avoid a bias ­ toward picking Western military disasters, especially ­ those of the last 300 years. We do go back millennia, but choosing a majority of recent disasters is more the result of actually knowing so much more about the circumstances of ­ these conflicts and engagements, rather than deliberate bias. ­There are undoubtedly major military disasters from ­human history that could be covered but are ­either poorly chroni- cled, lost to history, or have yet to be more fully discovered and articulated. One of our criteria for picking the disasters that we did, other than our effort not to limit ourselves to land ­ battles, comes from the work of Carl von Clausewitz—­ namely, that the disaster has some sort of po­liti­cal result. One could argue, seman- tically and tendentiously we suppose, that when ­ people are killed, maimed, or captured, as well as held hostage for ransom (which used to be a common practice in most wars), a po­ liti ­ cal consequence of some mea­ sure results. True, but we are talking about major po­ liti ­ cal or operational results—­ destruction of an army, lead- ing to a diplomatic outreach or outright capitulation ceding of a province or trad- ing privilege and other ­things of this nature. This does not mean that the obverse is true. Not all po­ liti ­ cal circumstances flowing from war come from military disas- ter they often are the result of steady or artful application of force and diplomacy over time. Another feature of military disasters in this work is that they are dramatic: they have the shape and form of what evolutionary biologists call “punctuated equilibrium”—­ large amounts of violent change in a relatively short period of time.