Battle of the Little Bighorn

Custer got his rear kicked at Little Big Horn because he was a glory seeking idiot.  He was under orders to more or less escort the natives out of the country but he was trying to recapture the glory that he had deservedly won in the Civil War for his daring cavalry actions.  He also had experienced the joy of murdering natives in their bed at the Washita River not too long before so this was his big chance to relive the fun and recapture the glory.  He obviosly didn't know what he was getting into since he split his command into two or three sections, which means he didn't reconnoiter. Big mistake!!  Instead of a small village of 200-300 mostly women and children he ran into a village of some 1000 units consisting of close to a thousand warriors, if I remember the one native account I read years ago.  It also seems that once they found out that the infamous “Yellow Hair” was trapped they went into a frenzy because each warrior wanted to be the one the kill him and take his scalp as the ultimate trophy.  Unfortunately, again if I remember correctly, he had cropped his hair because of a scalp infection.  Any, Custer died of one of the major examples of military hubris in American history.  Simply put, the guy was a moron and paid the price.  Unfortunately he took some 276 victims with him.

Unfortunately they would have had to arrest most of the military high command.  Too bad they didn't have a Rusty Calley to pin it all on as they did at My Lai.  I think that that may have been the perfect example of the old adage that “S–t runs downhill.”

Yeah, ain't “plausible deniability” a wonderful thing!

That's the problem with military action – the results are often not what was intended but they are usually fatal to somebody.  Usually the victims of these unintended consequences are innocent bystanders but sometimes, as at Little Big Horn, its the poor schmucks who were just doing their jobs that get the short end of the stick.  The only thing that distinguishes that particular FUBAR from so many of the others throughout history is that the moron responsible actually joined his victims in suffering the consequences of his particular act of stupidity.  That is why military action should usually be the solution of last resort.  “Woops, sorry, my bad.”  may work when you overcharged for that hamburger but doesn't cut it when you gave the order that resulted in dropping a bomb on the wrong house.  I'm not a pacifist, far from it, but after 50+ years of studying history, much of it military history, I have learned that military solutions too often create more problems than they solve because too often there is no clear-cut right-wrong situation, no discernable moral distinction between the two sides.  World War II, our Civil War,  the intervention in Kosovo are examples of right v. wrong where the “right” side won.  Most other military actions fall more-or-less into the “I'm going to do this because I want to and I can” category with each side convinced that they were on the side of right.  But the winner gets to write the history books and the loser gets the short end and people like us end up having exchanges like this but hey, that's life.