A Long and Obstinate Resistance: Staff Ride Handbook for the Charleston Campaign, 1776-80

Harold “Allen” Skinner Jr.

Published: 2023

The Staff Ride Guide to the Charleston Campaign provides a systematic analytical framework to help guide military professionals through a leadership development event. Careful analysis of the Charleston Campaign will reveal valuable insights regarding the operational and strategic levels of war for today’s military professionals. This third staff ride book written by Army historian Allen Skinner studies the pivotal struggle between the British Empire and breakaway American colonies for control of South Carolina. Analysis focuses first on the thwarted 1776 British attack on Charleston then follows with a detailed study of the 1780 siege of Charleston, which ended in the largest British victory of the Revolutionary War.
It is designed for a two-day training event, but can be amended so a unit can conduct a fulfilling one-day staff ride with insights at all levels of war.

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Armies in Retreat: Chaos, Cohesion, and Consequences

Timothy G. Heck and Walker D. Mills

Published: 2023

In Armies in Retreat: Chaos, Cohesion, and Consequences, editors Timothy Heck and Walker Mills have culled together a collection of essays that fills a critical gap in publications and literature covering large-scale combat operations. Every battle has two sides: the victors and the vanquished. This book explores retreating armies—those that maintained cohesion and later succeeded and others that devolved into chaos. Ultimately, this book is about surviving defeat and designed to inform leaders about what to expect when the unexpected happens, to prevent the shock and mitigate some of the terror on every side so they can respond with resilience and cohesion. Retreat, while unpalatable, can ultimately lead to military or national survival, even victory.

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The Cowpens Staff Ride and Battlefield Tour

By Lieutenant Colonel John Moncure

208 Pages

Published: 1996

The Cowpens Staff Ride and Battlefield Tour, by Lieutenant Colonel John Moncure, offers a staff ride guide on a critical Revolutionary War battle. The guidebook examines the war from a strategic perspective, looks at the campaign as an operational event, and provides the backdrop to the tactical battle. The author has gathered operations orders, dispatches, and numerous eyewitness accounts to allow each visitor to reconstruct the events that occurred at the Cowpens.

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The Battle of Kings Mountain, 7 October 1780

By Harold Allen Skinner, Jr.

148 Pages

Published: 2020

The Staff Ride Handbook for the Battle for King’s Mountain, 7 October 1780 offers army leadership an opportunity to place themselves in a one-day battle in the Appalachian Mountains that signaled the beginning of British surrender in the Revolutionary War. Earlier in 1780, Major General Charles Cornwallis felt encouraged to act in the offensive against southern militias and their supporters. He picked Major Patrick Ferguson to lead an army of Loyalists into the mountains, with the ultimate goal of protecting Cornwallis’ left flank at Charlotte, North Carolina. He and his men never made it. The Overmountain Men, armed resisters who lived west of the Blue Ridge Mountains, shot and killed Ferguson which prompted the surrender of Loyalist troops. The well-researched handbook for this pivotal day in the autumn of 1780 offers opportunities to highlight intimate warfighting with an emphasis on intelligence, leadership, and decisive actions under the “fog of war.”

In fourteen stands, taking approximately six hours, this handbook encourages detailed analysis of mountain warfare and military professionalism. Operational and strategic lessons that played out before and after the battle provide context for the Southern Campaign of the American Revolution. Participants will walk away with an enhanced understanding of close combat and see the value of integrating lessons learned in the Battle for King’s Mountain into contemporary wartime situations.

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Neutral Rights and the War in Narrow Seas 1778-82

By David Syrett

44 Pages

Published: 1985

This paper on neutral rights on the high seas and the origins of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War grew out of a much larger and continuing study of the Royal Navy during the American Revolutionary War.

The rights and duties of both neutrals and belligerents on the high seas during war is a complex subject. National policy, strategy, naval tactics, diplomacy, economics, international and metropolitan law, the laws and customs both of the sea and of war, and the threat or the use of brute force by nation-states to attain their goals--all become intertwined and are as difficult to unravel as a splice in a length of wire rope.

Against a background of gunfire and continual diplomatic crises, politicians, diplomats, navy officers, admiralty court judges, lawyers, merchant shipowners, the owners of cargoes, and insurance companies all manipulate and maneuver in an attempt to gain their own ends. Rarely do any of these interests coincide. What may be sound admiralty law might be bad diplomacy. A seemingly legal and profitable trading venture might result in the loss of a ship or the beginning of a war. Or what the military and naval leaders of a state think is an absolutely necessary military measure may be seen by politicians and diplomats as a sure way of bringing about national ruin.

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