MILITARY RECONNAISSANCE

◗ Alexander Stilwell ◗ Casemate Publishers (2021) ◗ £20 ◗ 189 pages (hardback) ◗ ISBN:9781612009506 ◗ casematepublishers.co.uk

The author has set himself the ambitious aim of describing the roles and methods of military reconnaissance from around 330 BC to the present day. He does this by providing innumerable snippets of individual battles and skirmishes.

Therein lies the problem. The 190-odd pages have a non-dense text, and probably equate to around 120 pages of standard text, with (at a guess) getting on for 200 examples of the military art. These are often descriptive rather than analytical, and the end result is that you learn that ‘reconnaissance is important’but little else. A more focused approach, with fewer examples in more detail, would have been far better, aided by a chapter or two pulling together the key tenets of the various levels of reconnaissance. In some periods, his enthusiasm seems to exceed his judgement: for example, Grouchy’s 33,000 men at Wavre in June 1815 were not held-down by 17,000 jager-type Prussian light troops...

There are interesting bits in the book, but the canvas is just too broad (and the style too bitty) to cover the subject meaningfully.