But his corps took the wrong road and was several hours late getting into position. On the second day at Gettysburg, Confederate Lieutenant General James Longstreet was to attack the Union left wing in conjunction with other unit attacks on the Union’s right and center wings. In 2 hours, the battle was already decided his timing was off, and the Russian army survived to fight again. It will begin in two hours.” 8 But the Emperor had miscalculated. Nothing is clear yet.” He then asked an aide what time it was, and when told, Napoleon remarked, “The time for my battle hasn’t come yet. One general who was on the scene reported that Napoleon stated, “I want to see more clearly. Yet the Emperor was reluctant to use all his troops in the battle, especially his Old Guard. He thought it could be the decisive battle of the war-a victory would destroy the enemy army, open the door to the capital city, and force the tsar to surrender. At Borodino in September 1812, Napoleon met the Russian army outside Moscow. There have been countless examples of when time played a key role on the battlefield. It was the conquest of time, not of matter, that so stunned the world-both then and since.

7 The difference between the two events was that the destruction of Hiroshima was effected virtually instantaneously by one weapon, and not over a period of years by several legions. The horrible blast and radiation effects of the bomb on the structures, people, and land of the Japanese city were not all that dissimilar from the effects of the Romans’ actions at Carthage two millennia earlier. On August 6, 1945, a single B-29 bomber took off from the Mariana Islands, and at 0815 it arrived over Hiroshima and dropped a single atomic bomb. When defeating the African power in 146 BCE, the Romans wanted to ensure there would be no Fourth Punic War, so they razed Carthage killed its inhabitants or sold them into slavery and then, as tradition has it, sowed the ground with salt so nothing would grow. The Third Punic War ended with the defeat of Carthage at the hands of Rome. 5Īn example I have often used to illustrate this psychological effect concerns the fates of Carthage and Hiroshima. 4 Military forces also use terms like tempo and synchronization to explain the importance of conquering and best utilizing time in their operations. Boyd posited that the side whose OODA Loop was quicker-who acted most appropriately in the fastest time-would have an advantage. John Boyd, an Airman and theorist of war, devised his famous OODA Loop-Observe, Orient, Decide, Act-to illustrate the cycle through which the human mind makes decisions. Yet the psychological aspect of time, especially its apparent suddenness, is also of great importance, especially in military operations. On other occasions, time appears to accelerate-as when we are enjoying ourselves and want to prolong the moment.įor the military, it is the notion of time as an arrow-the orderly sequencing of events-that matters most. On some days, the clock appears to move very slowly-when we are waiting in anticipation for something to occur.

Although the clock ticks on rhythmically, we often feel it differently. 3īesides its physical and theological aspects, time also has a psychological component, which we all experience. Moreover, God’s time is not an arrow but a circle: He sees all-past, present, and future-whichever way He chooses to look. For theologians, God is both timeless and endless He always was and always will be. Physicists have adapted this bendable concept of time when discussing cosmology. One can remember or read about the past, but we cannot go back time marches inexorably forward, and the future remains unknown.Īlbert Einstein introduced a new concept: time was flexible and relative. Things begin, they develop, and they end. There are several ways to describe the concept, but most consider time to be a straight line. Largest amphibious landing since end of World War II, September 15, 1950, at Inchon Harbor, Republic of Korea (U.S.

War thunder bombing chart