A wave of 1000 soldiers won't break a trench line, but a squad of infiltrators can sneak in and make entry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormtroopers_(Imperial_German...
A wave of 1000 soldiers won't break a trench line, but a squad of infiltrators can sneak in and make entry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormtroopers_(Imperial_German...
There's a brutal little book, "The Defense of Duffer's Drift".[1] It's about classic small-unit mistakes, written from the point of view of someone who has to dream about the same battle over and over. Each time, his plan seems reasonable. But he loses and gets killed. He finally gets it right, after quite a few tries. It's to hammer home the message that there are many ways to screw up an operation. If you don't know the classic mistakes, you're going to make them.
A more modern critic is The Angry Staff Officer. This is a currently serving US Army officer who writes, with a biting wit, about tactics, both real and fictional.[2] He's a good read.
The classics for revolutionaries/terrorists are, of course, Mao and Marighella. Mao is philosophical. Marighella is nuts and bolts.
"Rethinking Power: E. H. Carr’s Enduring Lessons for Modern Strategists" [1] (344 downloads) is worth a read. Carr wrote about the period between WWI and WWII, and this article compares it to the current situation.
This sort of material is worth reading to understand what happened the last few times there was a big political and military mess, what the players thought going in, and how it played out in reality. The same mistakes do repeat.
Few people read this, and most of the ones who do wear a uniform.
Current big mistakes are mostly covered by the classic line "The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions."
[1] https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol56/iss2/7/