You've heard of US military tragedies like Pearl Harbor and Custer's Last Stand, but arguably the worst defeat on a US army force is so unknown that it doesn't even have a name. Most call it St. Clair's defeat, named after the general who lost 1/3 of the US's standing...

Britain's introduction to "modern" warfare came a few years before World War I against an unlikely foe: farmers on horseback. Except these farmers geniusly employed smokeless powder, machine guns, and trenches. The farmers were called Boers, and 3,500 of them fended...

Simon Bolivar is known as The Liberator of South America, but on a hot summer morning in a sleepy Venezuelan village he nearly lost his entire revolution, and possibly the freedom of a continent. Moments from defeat, Bolivar was saved by an unlikely ally: British...

When we think of the great military minds, we think of the standards: Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, etc. But in 621 a second son in frontier China would emerge from the desert to lead one of the most successful military campaigns in history, culminating...

What does victory on the battlefield look like? Can you fail your objective but still change the war? The U.S. Marines at Soissons did just that. Failed by their planners, these Marines drove headfirst into a maelstrom of German firepower. The casualties were...

For being the United State’s first war on foreign soil and featuring a Who’s Who of future Civil War leadership, the Mexican War gets little attention. On several occasions the US was on the brink of disaster, only to pull out a surprise victory. Arguably the most...

On October 7, 1780, a band of American backwoodsmen slowly encircled British loyalists. The loyalists had the numbers, the training, and the high ground, but on this day the traditional rules of war would not work out for them. The entire force would disintegrate and...

On a small hillock in a remote ridge on a forgotten frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan sat a small signal tower in a dusty village. In 1897, the 22 Sikh soldiers employed by the British army operating this signal tower were surrounded by at least 8,000 Pashtun...

The Roman Legions were the height of military professionalism of their day. How, then, was a young Roman officer able to cobble together a loose federation of lightly armed Germanic tribesmen and hand Rome one of her most disastrous defeats? All of this right under...

Besides it getting made into a country folk song, the Battle of New Orleans has largely been forgotten. Which is a shame, because rarely has such a motley crew of fighters—US soldiers, US sailors, American backwoodsmen, American Indians, Frenchmen, free Blacks,...

There is room to argue that The Battle of Monongahela is the most “underrated” battle ever. After all, it sparked the world’s first real world war, it shifted the boundaries of huge swaths of North America, it lit the fire of revolution in Colonial Americans, and it...