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The one fundamental thing we didn't account for is the willingness of a massive industrialized nation in the modern age to burn off young men like cordwood by t

The one fundamental thing we didn't account for is the willingness of a massive industrialized nation in the modern age to burn off young men like cordwood by the hundreds of thousands to achieve their war aims. Just about every last bit of military thought in the past 70 years needs to be thrown out and rewritten with that in mind, as it invalidates everything we hold as common sense and viable strategy. Successfully waging an asymmetric war relies on the assumption that in a conflict of choice, the agressor can be inflicted enough pain to quit. The Soviet failures in Afghanistan, and the Americans in Vietnam, convinced the world of this fact. But that breaks down entirely when your agressor treats their own people as cattle for the slaughter, and has the viable means to maintain power regardless. We are entering a dark new age where the answer to "what would WWI look like with modern technology" is now being answered.

Animats 3y ago
> The one fundamental thing we didn't account for is the willingness of a massive industrialized nation in the modern age to burn off young men like cordwood by the hundreds of thousands to achieve their war aims. Classic Russian strategy. The USSR lost 20 million people in WWII.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  People being an important word here. Russian woman fought well.
  - huytersd 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - quickthrower2 3y ago
      Not really: it is noteworthy in the historical context.
    - aebtebeten 3y ago
      I'm probably just being obtuse, but I fail to see how one justifies either "false" or lack of "equivalency"? Hath not a gal eyes? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as their brother is? If you prick them, do they not bleed? If you expend them, do they not die? (eg Lyudmila Pavlichenko's ~1'500 sister snipers who died fighting Nazis)
      - huytersd 3y ago
        20 million vs a couple of thousand is not worth mentioning. At that point you should start mentioning the hundreds of sub Saharan Africans that fought with the Soviets.
        082349872349872 3y ago
        The difference is that soviet women served in combat units, including as decorated air aces. Yes, in small numbers* compared to their brothers, but according to https://americansoldierww2.org/topics/women-and-gender https://americansoldierww2.org/topics/women-and-gender the ~500 female US war deaths were not in action on front lines. * I'm having trouble finding OOB for the combat units, but they would face a division by 0 were one to compare to US female combat units.
        huytersd 3y ago
        The sub Saharans from Comintern also fought in combat roles, what’s your point?
- ramesh31 3y ago
  >Classic Russian strategy. The USSR lost 20 million people in WWII. Sure. But there was a sense that that was a relic of a bygone age. The role of Russian mothers helping to shame the CCCP into capitulation during Afghanistan is well known. We thought that people would never stand for that kind of bloodshed again. You even see it still in the western response. "They can't keep this up", or "The people will overthrow Putin!". It's a total failure to comprehend that we are in fact facing an evil that the world has not seen in many generations.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    Russia has held some amount of indirect control over those lands for hundreds of years. It cannot stomach the thought of losing dominance over them, and the presence of Russian speakers in those territories means that backing down would be seen as a complete betrayal. They'd rather burn it down and ruin it completely than lose control.
    - ordu 3y ago
      It is just a Russian propaganda. Russians mostly didn't give a shit what happens in Ukraine before 2014. There were internet armchair battles, but I never knew a single person who really thought that Russia had any claims on Ukrainian territory. All this talk about history is no more than a central pillar of a Russian propaganda. It needs to justify what state is doing, it needs to find some moral grounds, and it uses history for that. And it is Russian history, which was rewritten for ~1k years each time when tsar changed. It never stopped. So to speak even in 1990s history was in a process of rewriting to show how bad USSR was. And now it is being rewritten to show that Russia didn't failed once, and all its fails are responsibility of "collective West". Just don't listen when Russians talk about history, and you'll be fine. > They'd rather burn it down and ruin it completely than lose control. Yeah-yeah... Putin has no other choices left if he wants to die peacefully. There is a risk for him to end as Muammar Gaddafi did, if he loses this war. No one is happy elites included, give them one chance and they will play a spectacle of brutalizing Putin, freeing Russia from under a heel of a merciless dictator.
    - EB-Barrington 3y ago
- inscriptor 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - aebtebeten 3y ago
    Of note: Soviet losses during one battle* exceeded US losses for the entire war in both theatres. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stalingrad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stalingrad Forget D-Day, Hitler knew he'd lost at this point. No oil, no Blitz. As far as I can tell he kept hanging on because he believed (correctly) that the US and USSR would soon be enemies, and believed (incorrectly) that he could cut a side deal to join one side against the other.
    - Manuel_D 3y ago
      Granted that one battle lasted half of a year. Also, I'm not aware that Nazi Germany every seriously tried to ally with the Allies. They definitely did not have any interest with allying with the USSR, at least outside of divying up Poland between them.
      - aebtebeten 3y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sunrise_(World_War_II) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sunrise_(World_War_I... came close to a separate peace; I have a book I haven't finished about one of the negotiators, and it seems as if some sort of side deal might've been in progress but was blown up when soviet intelligence found out. I don't have any strong evidence for this hypothesis; it's just the only one I've yet run across that (a) assumes Hitler to be rational*, but would still (b) explain how Hitler wound up in the bunker‡, when he'd already noted in his diary that Stalingrad meant his war plans (which had required not only Caucasian but also Iranian oil) were FUBAR. It's certainly true that at the war's end, Nazi commanders were doing whatever they could to manage to surrender on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip side of things and not on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Osoaviakhim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Osoaviakhim side. If Hitler had been thinking the US and USSR were both interested in using the resources of the 3rd Reich against the other, he would have been correct: where he would've been wrong is in thinking he could cut a wholesale deal when they both wound up picking up most of what they wanted at retail. * although after seeing Musk/TWTR play out, I'm a lot more open to the normally ludicrous idea that the top Nazis were a group of occult-addled meth-heads than I would've been 5 years ago... cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sportpalast_speech#Details https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sportpalast_speech#Details ‡ I had assumed Downfall (2004) had been based on an autobiography I'd read because the events depicted meshed so closely (despite my initial scepticism as to the reliability of my source), but oddly I find no mention of that book on either en. or de.wikipedia...
- ProjectArcturis 3y ago
  >Classic Russian strategy. The USSR lost 20 million people in WWII. They didn't have a choice. It was a war for their civilizational survival. If they surrendered to Germany, the Western part of the country would have been killed/enslaved, with the rump Eastern part carved up at Germany's leisure. If they walk out of Ukraine, nothing happens except the killing stops.
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
The conflict in Ukraine looks like WWI trench warfare because conflict in the air has been made impossible. By Ukraine having western anti-aircraft systems but also lacking a serious air force of its own. So all that's left is just to hammer each other over the head with artillery and poke at each other with drones. I am not convinced that other conflicts will look like this.
inscriptor 3y ago
[flagged]
ProjectArcturis 3y ago
These things take time. The Soviets held all the major cities in Afghanistan for 10 years. The Americans had a major presence in Vietnam for 9. World powers can certainly take a punch and keep going. Ukraine does not disprove the idea that at some point they'll throw in the towel.
hackandthink 3y ago
>Americans in Vietnam >But that breaks down entirely when your agressor treats their own people as cattle for the slaughter That sounds like victim blaming. We had to massacre the Vietnamese, they didn't have to fight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties

Animats 3y ago

> The one fundamental thing we didn't account for is the willingness of a massive industrialized nation in the modern age to burn off young men like cordwood by the hundreds of thousands to achieve their war aims. Classic Russian strategy. The USSR lost 20 million people in WWII.

quickthrower2 3y ago
People being an important word here. Russian woman fought well.
- huytersd 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    Not really: it is noteworthy in the historical context.
  - aebtebeten 3y ago
    I'm probably just being obtuse, but I fail to see how one justifies either "false" or lack of "equivalency"? Hath not a gal eyes? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as their brother is? If you prick them, do they not bleed? If you expend them, do they not die? (eg Lyudmila Pavlichenko's ~1'500 sister snipers who died fighting Nazis)
    - huytersd 3y ago
      20 million vs a couple of thousand is not worth mentioning. At that point you should start mentioning the hundreds of sub Saharan Africans that fought with the Soviets.
      - 082349872349872 3y ago
        The difference is that soviet women served in combat units, including as decorated air aces. Yes, in small numbers* compared to their brothers, but according to https://americansoldierww2.org/topics/women-and-gender https://americansoldierww2.org/topics/women-and-gender the ~500 female US war deaths were not in action on front lines. * I'm having trouble finding OOB for the combat units, but they would face a division by 0 were one to compare to US female combat units.
        huytersd 3y ago
        The sub Saharans from Comintern also fought in combat roles, what’s your point?
ramesh31 3y ago
>Classic Russian strategy. The USSR lost 20 million people in WWII. Sure. But there was a sense that that was a relic of a bygone age. The role of Russian mothers helping to shame the CCCP into capitulation during Afghanistan is well known. We thought that people would never stand for that kind of bloodshed again. You even see it still in the western response. "They can't keep this up", or "The people will overthrow Putin!". It's a total failure to comprehend that we are in fact facing an evil that the world has not seen in many generations.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Russia has held some amount of indirect control over those lands for hundreds of years. It cannot stomach the thought of losing dominance over them, and the presence of Russian speakers in those territories means that backing down would be seen as a complete betrayal. They'd rather burn it down and ruin it completely than lose control.
  - ordu 3y ago
    It is just a Russian propaganda. Russians mostly didn't give a shit what happens in Ukraine before 2014. There were internet armchair battles, but I never knew a single person who really thought that Russia had any claims on Ukrainian territory. All this talk about history is no more than a central pillar of a Russian propaganda. It needs to justify what state is doing, it needs to find some moral grounds, and it uses history for that. And it is Russian history, which was rewritten for ~1k years each time when tsar changed. It never stopped. So to speak even in 1990s history was in a process of rewriting to show how bad USSR was. And now it is being rewritten to show that Russia didn't failed once, and all its fails are responsibility of "collective West". Just don't listen when Russians talk about history, and you'll be fine. > They'd rather burn it down and ruin it completely than lose control. Yeah-yeah... Putin has no other choices left if he wants to die peacefully. There is a risk for him to end as Muammar Gaddafi did, if he loses this war. No one is happy elites included, give them one chance and they will play a spectacle of brutalizing Putin, freeing Russia from under a heel of a merciless dictator.
  - EB-Barrington 3y ago
inscriptor 3y ago
[flagged]
- aebtebeten 3y ago
  Of note: Soviet losses during one battle* exceeded US losses for the entire war in both theatres. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stalingrad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stalingrad Forget D-Day, Hitler knew he'd lost at this point. No oil, no Blitz. As far as I can tell he kept hanging on because he believed (correctly) that the US and USSR would soon be enemies, and believed (incorrectly) that he could cut a side deal to join one side against the other.
  - Manuel_D 3y ago
    Granted that one battle lasted half of a year. Also, I'm not aware that Nazi Germany every seriously tried to ally with the Allies. They definitely did not have any interest with allying with the USSR, at least outside of divying up Poland between them.
    - aebtebeten 3y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sunrise_(World_War_II) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sunrise_(World_War_I... came close to a separate peace; I have a book I haven't finished about one of the negotiators, and it seems as if some sort of side deal might've been in progress but was blown up when soviet intelligence found out. I don't have any strong evidence for this hypothesis; it's just the only one I've yet run across that (a) assumes Hitler to be rational*, but would still (b) explain how Hitler wound up in the bunker‡, when he'd already noted in his diary that Stalingrad meant his war plans (which had required not only Caucasian but also Iranian oil) were FUBAR. It's certainly true that at the war's end, Nazi commanders were doing whatever they could to manage to surrender on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip side of things and not on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Osoaviakhim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Osoaviakhim side. If Hitler had been thinking the US and USSR were both interested in using the resources of the 3rd Reich against the other, he would have been correct: where he would've been wrong is in thinking he could cut a wholesale deal when they both wound up picking up most of what they wanted at retail. * although after seeing Musk/TWTR play out, I'm a lot more open to the normally ludicrous idea that the top Nazis were a group of occult-addled meth-heads than I would've been 5 years ago... cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sportpalast_speech#Details https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sportpalast_speech#Details ‡ I had assumed Downfall (2004) had been based on an autobiography I'd read because the events depicted meshed so closely (despite my initial scepticism as to the reliability of my source), but oddly I find no mention of that book on either en. or de.wikipedia...
ProjectArcturis 3y ago
>Classic Russian strategy. The USSR lost 20 million people in WWII. They didn't have a choice. It was a war for their civilizational survival. If they surrendered to Germany, the Western part of the country would have been killed/enslaved, with the rump Eastern part carved up at Germany's leisure. If they walk out of Ukraine, nothing happens except the killing stops.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

The conflict in Ukraine looks like WWI trench warfare because conflict in the air has been made impossible. By Ukraine having western anti-aircraft systems but also lacking a serious air force of its own. So all that's left is just to hammer each other over the head with artillery and poke at each other with drones. I am not convinced that other conflicts will look like this.

inscriptor 3y ago

[flagged]

ProjectArcturis 3y ago

These things take time. The Soviets held all the major cities in Afghanistan for 10 years. The Americans had a major presence in Vietnam for 9. World powers can certainly take a punch and keep going. Ukraine does not disprove the idea that at some point they'll throw in the towel.

hackandthink 3y ago

>Americans in Vietnam >But that breaks down entirely when your agressor treats their own people as cattle for the slaughter That sounds like victim blaming. We had to massacre the Vietnamese, they didn't have to fight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties