The Minnesota Rokkr edged the Los Angeles Thieves 3-2 on Friday in the Call of Duty League Stage 4, Week 3, clinching a spot in the winners bracket for the Stag
How Military Quagmires Have Caught Mighty Powers by Surprise
Portrait of Sir Henry Clinton (1732-95).Credit.DeAgostini/Getty Images
By Thomas E. Ricks
May 21, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
We probably have too many books about the Civil War and World War II, but certainly could use closer examinations of our less understood conflicts. So it is good to see several new works explore more obscure corners of American military history.
In
WINNING INDEPENDENCE: The Decisive Years of the Revolutionary War, 1778-1781 (Bloomsbury, $40), the veteran historian John Ferling sets out to redeem the reputation of Sir Henry Clinton, the British general who lost that war. As Ferling notes, the conventional view is that Clinton was “capricious, indecisive, overly cautious, muddled and confused, persistently inactive, lacking a strategic vision or a master plan and fatally inhibited by his subliminal sense of inadequacy.” The enjoyment of reading this huge volume is watching Ferling make his case that