YMMV / The Defence of Duffer's Drift

• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • One of the first lessons the protagonist learns is to take all the local Dutch civilians prisoner so they can't aid the Boer army. This tactic became widespread during the war, resulting in the creation of concentration camps. The Nazis explicitly took inspiration from this tactic for The Holocaust.
  • The recurring theme, started with the original and kept in all of the follow-up books through the decades is the same style of opening - a freshly-faced, just-got-his-commission Ensign Newbie following what he considers to be "modern" warfare, which from an outside perspective is usually Hollywood Tactics (especially when read some years later) at best, blatant stupidity at worst. Except those people are trained to act like that, time and again, with militaries apparently learning nothing and teaching new generations of COs all sorts of obvious, basic mistakes or not training them at all toward their tasks.
  • The Defense of Jisr Al Doreaa is a 2009 Follow the Leader book about counter-insurgency, stressing the importance of not only proper army operation during the occupation phase, but also using it to prop up a functional, trusted, and staffed by locals police and military force that can maintain peace after the occupation force is withdrawn. Not only the conclusion, but Dream No. 5 in particular is a very, very stark description of the events painfully similar to the eventual collapse of Afghanistan's central government mere months after the US withdrew from the country - except it was written as a cautionary tale 12 years earlier to prevent events like that from happening.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Imprisoning civilians and shooting their livestock are generally not considered to be valid counterinsurgency tactics since at the very least post-WW2 colonial wars, mainly because it only further antagonise the locals. Ironically, many of the Follow the Leader books that had to deal with counter-insurgency explicitly show this sort of tactics as a rookie mistake, rather than a lesson to be learned, and call for being as friendly as only feasible to the locals - the "mistake" BF makes during his first dream.
  • One of the "lessons" BF recites to himself is to force the "lazy black men" of the surrounding area to dig trenches for his unit. This forced labor is presented as absolutely essential for a successful campaign, but the white farmers he captures are apparently not given the same treatment.
  • Soldiers of both sides are treated as Faceless Goons and resource to be used to achieve objectives, with Dream No. 6 openly encouraging sacrificing a third of the unit to prevent a small enemy detachment from crossing an insignificant river in the complete outback. Since this sort of mentality is one of the main factors that turned World War I into a senseless meat-grinder, it went out of fashion not soon after Swinton retired from the military and is now considered one of the biggest mistakes to be made by a CO, particularly in small unit tactics.

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