archieclement
Colonel
- Joined
- Sep 17, 2011
- Location
- mo
At times trading space/resources for maneuver can be a valid strategy, however if your the one with limited space/resources you can ill afford to sacrifice what you do have.The West was not considered as important as the war in the east. Therefore the West ended up with officers who had been wounded,as Johnston had been, or he ones considered inferior. Johnston had been a good commander in the East until he was severely wounded. That took a lot of the fight out of him. Pemberton was on his way to combine his forces with Johnston, but ran into the union forces at Champion Hill. And then in the early days of the siege, when he was camped along the East bank of the Big Black River, he had enough men to relieve the siege. But he did nothing. It has been said that if Johnston had been in charge of the Confederate troops, and McClellan had been in charge of the union troops, there never would have been any battles. They would have spent the whole war outflanking each other.
And if the one with less numbers/resources, one of the best ways to offset the disadvantage is by seizing the initiative and forcing them to have to react to you......not passively waiting for the larger side to continually flank you.