I know, it's an old book nobody reads anymore. They should. I'm not at all dialed in to what is going on day-to-day in Ukraine. Not my fight, not my dogs. I do think it is important though to step back just one step from everything you see in the news and keep in the front of your mind, Russia is not like Alabama or New York. It never was like them. It never will be like them. It's also not at all like France or England. It never was and it never will be. To quote the good scene in the movie, THIS IS SPARTA!
The pundits seem scarce this time. I'm not sure what happened to all our loser generals from Afghanistan who used to come on drone on and on about Trump had hydrophobia and there was simply no way that the Taliban could win since they didn't control ANY OF THE MAJOR cities.....You know those losers. I don't see them so much anymore. Don't miss 'em either.
Clausewitz introduced the scwhwerpunkt to interested persons but all the greater generals/leaders in history knew about it except every single Athenian ever born.
The show war in Ukraine is a phony war. Pundits are awed, amazed, dismayed, frightened by the lack of Russian aggression and killing frenzy. That, however, is not what this is about. This is one of the most civil wars in history. No, the Red Army is not using artillery, no the Red Army is not waging total war, no the Red Army is not using its overwhelming advantages in every single aspect of war as it battles in the Ukraine. It was never about defeating the Ukrainians or the popular will of the Ukrainians. The War is something else.
I know what it is about and so do other strategists and people who snapped up history degrees. This is a GIANT finger to the West from Putin the Tsar of Russia and it's telling them to all back off. I think that he will unleash the other dogs of war on the West who now think, 'oh my, how easy it is to crush the dreams of the Russians.' The banks and surprisingly Switzerland have engaged in economic warfare with Russia. I'll admit, they got their ass handed to them by the Japanese in 1905 but Russia has some staying power that goes far far beyond what democracies have.
Some of the kit that hasn't been seen since the Cold War and which all the European pussies never feared has been put back into play. It was the western reporters that trumpeted Putin putting nuclear forces on alert. In the end, Russia is what it was in 1945. It has been there done that, rode the Tiger and like China, 'oops, how did that get loose?' With the one it's bio warfare and with the other, you haven't seen it yet.
Are you ready for the zombie apocalypse?
8 comments:
Not using enormous amounts of artillery is not the Russian way of doing things. Something is not kosher here.
Show war or not it's still driving tensions up and with the idjits holding Pedo Joe's puppet strings running the show it could easily bungle us into a REAL shootin war....resulting in canned sunshine for everybody.
you know, up until Biden I never thought we'd just blunder into nuclear war.
Wonder how much ob the magnificent and his noble hoard has to do with this latest of monkey acts of treason?
Most people -- including "experts" -- have misread and misinterpreted Clausewitz for years.
Keegan, in "The Face of War" did an excellent job of telling us what we should have known to begin with:
Clausewitz was not telling us how to fight; he was suggesting a new form of society and using it's war making potential to bolster his case.
The holes in Clausewitz's theories are huge, and many of them should have been obvious to him, but he was apparently very selective in the examples he chose to make his point.
Then you get the other idiots who worship Sun Tzu, forgetting that Sun Tzu is as much a cultural document as a military treatise.
Then there's the third option: the complete moron who thinks you can combine the two into a coherent strategy for everything.
Add to this the professional bureaucrat/politician and you get doctrines of "limited war" and "proportional response" which end up getting people killed.
Probably because the Russkies intended -- all along -- to occupy. No need to flatten everything only to have to expend resources to rebuild it.
I think they also believed they had popular support among not just ethnic Russians, but even Ukrainians, for some form of reunification.
In the meantime, read somewhere the reason why the Russians seem to have so many issues is that their mechanized forces are using Chinese tires that are crap, and their maintenance regimes are even crappier.
I'm wondering why the Ukrainians aren't hitting these stationary convoys that are miles long, unless they haven't got the arty or air to do it, or fear escalation?
Sorry, not "Face of War", but rather "A History of Warfare".
Yep.
Then you get 'optimal manning' when what you mean is you slashed manpower through the bone to cut costs and didn't care about readiness at all.
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