2023 NaPM 18 April

[dukealien]

Duke, your poem got me to reading about the seige of Gibraltar, in particular the battle involving the "floating batteries".  The British always found a way to thwart the Spanish.  I could only find one reference to the General's mercy, and it was not very enlightening, but anyway, enjoyed re-reading this with care after that.  

Have the Spanish had a good military idea since the Thirty Years War?

TqB

Not mercy, exactly, more like "fair play."

Taking the question seriously, the Spanish have, perhaps, tended to have good "big ideas" ahead of their time or with inadequate means of executing them.  For example, the floating batteries were meant to be impregnable and unsinkable, but remained flammable: they were wooden, though packed with earth to stop shot kinetically.  Coles' (British) Crimean War ironclad floating batteries protected their wooden structure with metal plates, solving the problem and producing a naval revolution when combined with steam propulsion, 60 years later.  The Tercios (up to the 30 Years' War) were tactical combined-arms forces which would flower, 400 years later, into Panzer divisions and US Combat Commands with operational-level capabilities... it's often forgotten that Panzer divisions contained a lot more than tanks.  A case can be made that 1800s Spain invented (or re-invented) guerilla warfare against Napoleon - they gave it its modern name, after all.  And Franco's mobile campaigns are not to be despised, militarily.

I guess you could say Spain suffered from a "land's end" situation:  fairly safe from invasion after defeating its African invaders, and after the burst of energy resulting from that subsided, with only dynastic interests elsewhere (Napoleon was a dynast).  There might be grounds for a comparison with China, but China's hinterlands are more porous than the Pyrenees... though not as close as France.