This is indeed good news. For me, his columns at his Private Papers website (over 2 million hits per month) have always been a valuable source of historical and military perspective so often missing in analysis of our wars and our times, but now, with his move to a blog, I hope we can see more spontaneous comments that I see and appreciate in his Q & A's. These I feel are of greater value.
Here, for example, is the final bit--a reoccurring theme for me--from his latest post on "Wars, Then and Now":
The End of WarsIndeed.
Today I finish the last class of a five-week course I taught this late summer at Hillsdale College on World War II. What is striking is the abrupt end of the war, whose last months nevertheless saw the worst American casualties in Europe of the entire struggle. 10,677 of our soldiers died in April 1945 alone, just a few days before the collapse of the Nazi regime— about the same number lost a year earlier during the month of June in the 1944 landings at Normandy and the slogging in the Hedgerows. Okinawa saw our worst casualties on the ground in the Pacific—and was declared secure only 6 weeks before the Japanese surrender. 1945 was far bloodier than 1939, a reminder that in the midst of a war daily losses are not necessarily a barometer of how close or far away is the end of the carnage. Ask the Red Army for whom the final siege of Berlin—361, 367 Russian and Polish soldiers lost—may have been their worst single battle of their entire war, itself characterized by killing on a scale unimaginable in the West.
I don’t know how close or far away we are in Iraq from securing a chance for Iraqi democracy to stabilize, but I do know—despite the recent spate of doom and gloom journalistic accounts—that, as in all wars, it is almost impossible to tell from the 24-hour pulse of the battlefield.
The rest, "War, Then and Now", can be read at Works and Days. --His blog, by the way, is named after one of the great Greek poets', Hesiod, works, Works and Days. But, VDH talks about it better:
Hesiod was an ancient Greek poet who wrote about the world about him from the angle of the farmer. His Works and Days were a sort of a tough take about how hard life could be, and the world view that the no-nonsense farmer should adopt about the world about him if he were to survive. I have never posted blogs before but I will take Hesiod to heart here the beginning.
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