>Tactical brilliance could not guarantee strategic clarity—and each gain came at political and moral cost.
sums up what is wrong with modern conflict --- the abandonment of the moral high ground and a failure to take into account the will of people and their right to self-determination which Jomini (who had displaced Clausewitz after his inculcation at West Point as part of the brutal lessens the U.S. learned in Vietnam) failed to consider, and which Clausewitz took to heart and studied deeply, and thought long on.
It wasn't that long ago that the collapse of the Soviet Union was viewed as "the end of history" and a global acknowledgement that liberal democracy was the means of government most widely accepted --- hopefully articles such as this will be a guidepost to getting back on that track --- every moral failure simply recruits others to fight on the opposite side.
West Point is only one of three service academies, and it needs to teach only enough of the higher level of war to produce a reasonably competent Second Lieutenant. In fact it's arguable the service academies are a waste of resources as currently implemented as opposed to OCS and ROTC.
What matters is what is taught to the Majors, Lieutenant Colonels, Lieutenant Commanders, and Commanders 12-15 years later at the War Colleges. And as a graduate myself (if only by correspondence) I can assure you that Clausewitz and Sun Tzu were very much still on the books in the 2010s.
The war colleges are more intellectual than many people think. The curricula of those schools include most of the seminal works on war and statecraft from Thucydides to Kissinger.
I was disappointed they truncated the remote version of Strategy and War and we didn't get to dig into Thucydides and Corbett.
I will say getting that intellectualism to stick in the officer corps doesn't necessarily always work. There are jokes about "it's only a lot of reading if you do the reading," and oftentimes being able to spend a year in residence gets passed over in favor of sending people to other assignments and expecting them to do the War College syllabus by correspondence.
That said, the War Colleges are also heavily involved in things like designing and evaluating higher-level military exercises, red-teaming things, etc.
If there were ~9 wars that followed purely imperialist logic and 1 where it could plausibly have been done for imperialist or humanitarian reasons, it was probably done for imperialist reasons.
Fragmenting Serbia and creating a puppet state within its borders did serve America's goal to project power in the balkans.
Future historians will judge America harshly for the now documented millions of Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghans, Lybians that died for no reason at the hand of America.
Wonder if it will be depicted as a modern Mongol Invasion equivalent, with all the cruelty associated with it
The Mongols were a mixed bag. Cruel in certain ways but surprisingly enlightened and pragmatic in others. Many of the conquered peoples lived better under the Mongols than under their previous overlords.
If you check out the thread, I think you’ll see it wasn’t me making it into a flamewar, but rather a bunch of folks with apparently no idea what Islam even is (like literally core tenets). And somehow thinking that me stating them is harshing on Islam, which seems really funny actually? Isn’t that the anti-Islamic sentiment in reality?
It’s like if people accused me of being antisemitic because I was just saying that Jews believe they have a special deal with god. Or that I hate Christians because I said they believe Jesus was the son of god. When that’s literally one of the core tenets of Judaism/Christianity.
I’m not hating on any religion here, just pointing out core tenets that are at the root of ideological conflicts!
Personally, I think this is a great example for surfacing the actual underlying problems here.
Which is that trying to apply your own core values to something/someone with wildly different core values from a position of ignorance produces bad outcomes for everyone.
And any sort of ‘high ground’ definition is just internal propaganda - which everyone does need - but has little to no connection to actual reality.
You took the thread way off topic into a generic argument about religion that is more or less guaranteed, in the general case, to end up in a flamewar. Since your account is the one that started it and contributed the most to it, you're responsible for it. Then you kept doing it repeatedly after I asked you to stop. Not cool.
Edit: We've had to ask you not to do such things in the past:
If you keep doing it, we're going to end up banning you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the intended spirit of the site from now on, that would be good.
Dang, this is like the 4th time you’ve done this on something that the reading of the thread later shows did not go in that direction.
Seriously, what do you expect me to do?
If my behavior was actually a problem, those threads would have ended up being actually a problem - but near as I can tell, they aren’t. And this it out of what, 5k+ comments?
The only way I can think of to avoid this situation is to be so bland that there is literally zero signal being added.
I expect you to stop taking HN threads on generic flamewar tangents and stick to the site guidelines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45516877 is an example of the thread going in a flamewar direction, and while that user shouldn't be breaking the site guidelines either, your account is the primary one responsible. If most other users didn't respond by breaking the guidelines, that is commendable, but random. In the general case, they certainly would. This means that the way you were posting was flamebait.
Tell you what dang. If tomorrow you still really believe this is true, please do ban my account.
It would be healthier for me to be spending more time with the real people in my life anyway - like the multiple Palestinian friends and co-workers who are refugees from Gaza. Instead of arguing with people on the internet.
Could you please more fully explain what you mean and how it relates to the parent comment? The parent and TFA offer examples of the conflicts of US vs. Vietnam and Russia vs. Ukraine, which don't clearly involve Islamic beliefs, but otherwise appear to be similar enough to demonstrate the same principles/issues.
Those are valid opinions (though I disagree with several of them), but what yo seem to be missing is that you barged into a general discussion in modern warfare to express your antipathy to Islam.
Islam isn't a big factor in the Ukraine Russia conflict, it's not a big factor in US domestic politics (which are tilting toward military conflict), it's not a big factor in Asian geopolitics. IF you want to make a point about Islam that's one thing, but ignoring the larger context and harping on your pet issue is distracting and rude. You could at the very least acknowledge the existence of the bigger picture and situate your concerns as a specific part of it.
I’m pointing out that a discussion about ‘high ground’ that ignores that it’s a subjective discussion where there are numerous other factions with wildly conflicting views of it is not a useful discussion.
And that the Islamic vs Western world split is a classic example where people seem to insist on projecting their western (often Christian derived if not strictly so) views onto a rather diametrically opposed set of values and then acting surprised when ‘the other side’ goes ‘WTF, no’ or even acts in ways that they consider abhorrent - but are not surprising if you actually know what is going on.
That people even consider this a religious flamewar (apparently) is quite hilarious because if you actually read the Koran and Hadiths, or have spent much time around many Muslim societies these aren’t even (generally) contentious things I’m talking about!
For example - you just don’t draw a picture of Mohammed. Especially not if it’s making fun of him, but even if it’s flattering, just don’t.
If you’re in a culture that has major Muslim influences, this is very very obvious. It’s not a flamewar topic, but it doesn’t come up much - for the same reason most people don’t talk about slapping strangers in the face either.
It’s still a thing. As are the calls to prayer. And not gooning on random Muslim women. And a hundred other things.
And when the ‘good’ thing by our standards is the monstrous behavior to someone else?
WW2 and the Japanese, as someone noted, provide many examples. For example, to the Japanese, the Allies taking prisoners was ritual humiliation - and death with a sword in their hand would have been preferable.
Sometimes, your high ground is another’s sewer (or even your own), and there is nothing anyone can do to change that.
Isn’t systematically humiliating an entire group of enemies being a monster too? It’s literally banned by the Geneva convention!
In the end when conflicts like this happen, realpolitik/pragmatic application of force wins regardless.
The janny smacked you but I thought you raised a valid point. The "moral high ground" is and has always been subjective. Do the ends justify the means? Depends on the ideology. Is a soldier surrendering a dishonorable act, or should he be treated with professional dignity? During WW2 the Japanese thought that surrender was dishonorable and treated POWs very poorly. They also deliberately shot at combat medics, they didn't have any sort of taboo against that. Nor did Europeans, until most of the way through the 19th century, think much about leaving wounded soldiers to lay dying in the field, or even casually murdering the wounded as they lay helpless after the battle was already decided (these sort of behaviors lead to the creation of the Red Cross.) In all of these cases it wasn't because those people were fundamentally evil. They were acting according to the norms and expectations of their culture. When two sides with radically different norms encounter each other in conflict, both can feel as though the other is depraved. But that's not necessarily an accurate reflection of the mental state of the other guys. American soldiers in the Pacific thought that the Japanese were savage animals, but with cooler hindsight we know that the Japanese had and still have a strong sense of honor. The catch is that it is, or at least then was, a very different sort of honor that held people to different expectations than Americans were accustomed to.
Sorry if I was unclear, I was hoping for clarity about your argument and its relevance to urban warfare situations across different conflicts, not more detail about your take on Islam in general.
When two ideologically incompatible parties (as in what is good/bad, high ground or not) are fighting, it gets complicated and ruthless/very destructive. In large part because it’s about incompatible identities and trying to purge ‘the other’, rather than ‘mere’ control of a specific piece of land. It takes a potentially resolvable conflict (an area where there may be a stable compromise), and can turn it into an existential fight.
This becomes especially destructive in very dense environments like urban centers, because the level of hiding that can happen becomes almost fractal.
The fight in Gaza is one recent example, as are the others.
I’m not surprised that Gaza has escalated to the point it has (total war, essentially), because Hamas can’t actually give up without losing their entire identity and reason for being, for example. And the factions in Israel can’t back down without winning or ‘it would have all been for nothing’.
Or are you referring to tactics, because there are actual religions reasons/justifications for the nature of some specific tactics being used in Gaza.
> Islamic teachings actively call for believers to punish those that 1) challenge teachings of Mohammed, 2) stop believing in the teachings of Mohammed, 3) stray from the teachings of Mohammed. Often with literal proscribed death sentences.
Utter non sense.
You misunderstand both what Islam is about, the place it gives to the prophet and how sharia works.
Sharia explicitly protects non believers. Did you fail to notice that Jews lived for ages in the various Islamic empires?
As a non Muslim who has lived in majority Muslim countries multiple times, I’m shocked you can actually live in one and come out with such large misconceptions.
I don't know if Sharia law protects non-Muslims, but it most definitely prescribes the death penalty to apostates of Islam, which is what GP is saying.
An Islamic belief which can be worked with would be the mainstream liberal views which were gaining currency in Iran and Iraq back before the Shah and the Ba'athists.
Regimes which do not accord basic rights to all citizens, including women should simply be ignored until such time as they do, no matter how much oil they have.
Islamic teachings/belief tell you approximately as much as catholics teachings/belief which is to say next to nothing.
The Islamic world in as much as it exists as entity is not homogeneous in its belief and practices. It’s a collection of countries and groups and they don’t all agree.
I never said it was homogenous, I’m pointing out core beliefs that - while modified in a few places - are definitional for the religion, and are fundamentally at odds with other perspectives.
This isn’t hypothetical, this is a lived experience for a billion+ people.
So is the vast majority of secular western society according to hardline christian religion. I think what poster you're replying to is implicitly saying is just that religious institutions have to weakened and "tamed"
Islamic beliefs as some sort of bad monolith vs Western beliefs as some sort of opposing good monolith is a painfully narrow and frankly bigoted view of human existence, warfare, and statecraft. I'll point you at Gaza and rub your nose directly in it.
>Do you consider freedom (speech, movement, self-determination and so on) equal to oppression, restriction and tyranny?
GP is saying that the phrase "moral high ground" presupposes an objective definition of "up" in morality. You can't cite a particular person's subjective moral "up" to disagree with them. Whether any given person values freedom or oppression more highly doesn't say anything about which one is objectively more moral, if any.
Besides that, do you think it unthinkable that a person would approve of some amount of oppression and restriction being placed on them in favor of achieving some goal?
How is adopting the beliefs your society blasted you with since childhood an "inner" moral compass? I completely agree with you, but I recognize it's a product of my environment and "propaganda" more than some kind of intrinsic thing
If you ask a random Chinese middle aged man or woman, do you think they will agree with you or not?
In my experience, they think there are practical reasons why things are the way they are in China, and what you’re describing is a poisonous fantasy spread by idiots. (As one said to me quite clearly once in Singapore!)
Either way, I prefer freedom of movement, self determination, etc. but it’s pretty obvious that many cultures actively think it’s a bad idea and go out of their way to squash it in very real ways, especially against certain portions of the population. And I bet if we did a spreadsheet with various examples, you’d also consider some of them too much.
Like consensual vore. Personal freedom, or mental illness?
Ignoring that you’ll get a fight from any given culture on these and many more topics and we can all just ‘get along’ due to fundamental human awesomeness is just not how it has ever worked - ever - near as I can tell.
This is spoken as if history converges to a point and then it _really_ gets to the end of history. There is no end, there will be endless fights and conflicts and one country taking the upper hand is just a temporary state.
"Win" here doesn't mean military victory over Russia. It means Ukraine's slow destruction of of Russia's oil and gas infrastructure and the West's sanctions make it too expensive for Russia to continue, so they withdraw from Ukraine and Crimea.
What a difference just 4 years the accelerated pace of technological development makes that happens in war makes. 4 years ago, Ukraine would have ended without the influx of Western weapons. Now the West looks at the Ukrainian battle fields, and ponders the relevance of their weapons against a $10k drone, made in Ukraine.
Another more likely scenario in the next few decades is that Russia and/or China will collapse into violent revolution or civil way — as has happened multiple times throughout their long histories. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping aren't immortal. They have effectively concentrated decision making in their own hands and purged all other internal power centers, leaving no clear succession plan. When they die there's no way to predict what might happen.
We lost India to China because we were impulsive. Beijing’s “wolf warriors” had already done generational damage to China’s strength. We could have held the high ground for decades more.
Russia is a one-trick petrostate that has been stuck in a three-year quagmire of a land war against the poorest country in Europe (that is a quarter its size).
Completely agree... though I wouldn't underestimate them: Their main strength, I'd argue, comes from their very successful use of the Firehose Of Falsehood (effectively managing to make the US self-own itself by turbocharging neoliberalism, among other things). They "James-Bond-Villain'd" the US (announced how they'd "take over the world") 28 years ago [0], and... well... look how that's going.
Nothing there seems to be dramatically different from the sort of wankery produced by think tanks like PNAC and their ilk. And it's not like the US or the UK or the USSR have ever shied away from using soft power to destabilize other countries.
The game everyone's playing is not that different, and Ivan isn't making some 400 IQ move in it.
The most corrupt government in American history (Trumps) is the one that is the most eager to give Russia everything they want. They are kind of trying to make America loose.
Morally purer government would do better in the competition between Russia and America.
The problem is, this mafia has a shitload of nuclear weapons. Without those, their vast land holdings east of the Urals would’ve already been taken by China.
Both China and Russia have concentrated vast amounts of power into a single person, it gets bloody and chaotic when the ‘one powerful man’ dies and there’s a power struggle.
> “war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on by other means.”
If _and only if_ War is utilized as a last resort. Otherwise this is self serving nonsense used by the political class which utilizes war to orient the population and to maintain a dark and grotesque part of our economy.
It's 2025. Institutions like the "Modern War Institute" not just existing but also pumping out this outdated amoral claptrap is obscenely depressing.
> If _and only if_ War is utilized as a last resort
Nope, always. War is politics by violent memes. Pretending it is only used in the last case is incredibly dangerous, since it ignores both provocation and deterrence.
Then that's not "political intercourse." I understand that war is not actually used as described in the quote. Which is the point. These military ideas of war are romantic fantasies.
Although I'm sure the victims of all the holocausts in human history will be heartened to know that it was just politics by a different means.
The full phrase is "the political intercourse of Governments and nations" [1].
Clausewitz's point is that if "such intercourse is broken off by war, and that a totally different state of things ensues, subject to no laws but its own," then not only does international law become irrelevant, but diplomatic resolutions to war impossible. Rejecting that war is a continuation of politics underwrites atrocity. (If war only happens as a last resort, and you are at war, it follows that you've exhasuted all non-military avenues to ending the war.)
> These military ideas of war are romantic fantasies
Clausewitz wasn't a military romanticist. To the extent here are romantic ideals at play, it's in pretending war isn't a continuation of politics.
> I'm sure the victims of all the holocausts in human history will be heartened
Why is this relevant to the correctness of the theory? Should we reject the heat-death hypothsis because it's uncomfortable?
I've already argued why rejecting war as a continuation of politics rejects diplomacy as a way to end wars. The Third Reich is a good demonstrator for why rejecting the political component of war is dangerous on the other end. Appeasing Hitler makes sense if parties will only pursue war as a last resort. Acknowledging his political interests, on the other hand, would have shown why--in that case--appeasement was destabilising.
> Victory in this environment requires more than technological superiority. It demands clarity of purpose, coherence between means and ends, disciplined execution, and moral restraint—the very fundamentals Clausewitz insisted upon. These are not optional in the urban century. They are decisive.
If I learned anything from both Gaza and Ukraine, it's that its the complete opposite that's true. You go clearing from house to house, some AQB fighter is gonna pop-out of a tunnel and pop an IED into your Merkava tank. You do that enough times and your army's morale is going to be shot. You wanna win, you have to bomb dual use assets and only fight when its needed. If you can do a hunger siege, flood by bombing a dam or something else, then do that.
You are just giving an example of how lack of "coherence between means and ends" leads to failure.
A military occupation (means) is not an effective way to achieve lasting control over the civilian population (ends) unless much of the population is already on your side, so it is foolish to try to use those means to achieve those ends.
Russia has also been hurt quite badly by lack of moral restraint in the war against Ukraine (which in the context Clausewitz used it I believe means more whether you have rational control of your actions than whether your actions are "good" or "bad"). Attacking civilians is usually extremely ineffective at achieving anything other than making leaders feel good that they are hurting their enemies and usually just hardens the enemy's resolve to continue fighting.
I think Russia has been quite restrained. I'm not defending them in any way, but many Ukrainians still have electric power, running water, and other trappings of modern society. If the present Russian regime chose otherwise I'm not sure that they would. It doesn't take a great deal of precision to mission-kill water works and other civil infrastructure that has survived in rear areas.
It seems to me both sides have been sending signals with their respective attacks on 'homeland' targets, rather than going fully gloves-off. Agreed that it's not working out for the Russians.
Nations have tried what Russia is trying with much, much more explosives and demonstrated that strategic bombing doesn't really work. Ukraine's infrastructure is intact because Russia is unable to destroy it. To the extent that such attacks have a useful military purpose, it is mainly in tying up air defense capabilities that could be protecting military assets.
Russia targets Ukrainian Infra. It goes down and ukraine brings it back online. They also have air defense assets protecting key infra. Russia doesnt leave it up because of moral reasons, they're doing what they can to win and that includes attacking the grid.
I think it's a bit insane to think that Russia couldn't completely and totally obliterate civilian central infrastructure in Ukraine if it wanted to. It's not like these locations are hidden or top-secret, or like Ukraine has the ability to completely and inevitably stop the attacks.
However, whatever wins this achieved would probably instantly be overshadowed by the negatives. Think of mass famine, relocation, refugee-ism, ... Not to mention a destroyed infrastructure that the eventual owner needs to rebuild as a first priority. Not even to mention the increased levels of international condemnation due to such a targeted attack on a civilian population.
> I think it's a bit insane to think that Russia couldn't completely and totally obliterate civilian central infrastructure in Ukraine if it wanted to.
It really can not.
> It's not like these locations are hidden or top-secret, or like Ukraine has the ability to completely and inevitably stop the attacks.
You'd be surprised how much explosives you need to actually destroy the infrastructure. Russia simply doesn't have enough long-range rockets, and drones can't carry large charges.
You can't learn these from either Gaza or Ukraine. Neither is over. Not even close to an end. Both are longer and the technologically superior side suffered more than expected.
It’s essentially just this; in urban warfare with entrenched enemies you can choose who suffers, but not whether there’s suffering. The endeavor is inherently horrific, and that horror in both the cases of Ukraine and Gaza are dictated by the decision by one party to use the urban environment to maximize casualties. Whether it’s the Russians in Bucha or Hamas in tunnels under schools, both are fully aware of what they’re doing.
Unfortunately the mentality of most people has been grossly oversimplified to the point of staging everything as a melodrama.
<snark> Well, according to this, maybe the US cities have nothing to fear from the troops sicked onto them by the current administration. Seeing that a clarity of purpose, coherence between means and ends, disciplined execution, and moral restraint are a sine qua non for success here. </snark>
I found this to be a remarkably uninsightful work. He somehow negates the inherent drama of war with the milquetoast prose and myopia of an academic. Much of what he says is in fact false, presumably because he is far from the action and relies on Clausewitz as a crutch for thought.
The key nodes to control have to do with supply chain, energy and information; ie depots, road and rail, bridges, factories, substations and data centers or satellites.
Ukraine has severely weakened Russia by attacking those points, as Russia has Ukraine.
Beijing could well defeat Taiwan (and the US by proxy) by controlling its sea lanes, cutting its cables, and jamming its radio spectrum.
China might be able to blockade Taiwan for a while but China's own SLOC are far more vulnerable. They are dependent on critical food, energy, and mineral imports — most of which pass through a few choke points where they are still unable to project sustained naval power. The US and its allies could cut those off at any time and China lacks the internal reserves to survive a long blockade.
The author seems to be more interested in the past than in the present or the future. They must've been rereading Clausewitz as Russia was turning Bakhmut, Vovchansk, Toretsk, Chasiv Yar et al. to _literal_ rubble. They speak of some abstract "urban warfare", where "Every strike is a message, every misstep a liability", where the reality is basically a grid-like approach of how to deliver as much kinetic energy per square kilometer as efficiently as possible.
I have a sense that articles like these is why a lot of people think the "academics" are completely disconnected from the reality.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is one of the mini-case studies analyzed in the piece, specifically for its note that Russia's disregard for Clausewitzian principles has failed to bring it meaningful success.
It should also be noted that, objectively, Russia's war has not been a success. It also has not been a failure, except in the grand strategic sense of provoking the realignment and reinvigorating of NATO it was meant to prevent.
That sounds like "the leg amputation operation was a success, other than the fact that the patient died on the operating table". That "except" is doing rather a lot of heavy lifting.
I have absolutely no idea what Russia was expecting from their three day special military operation, currently on 3 years, 7 months, and 2 weeks. But surely whatever they were thinking, if I could go back in time and paint them a picture of how the situation is today, they'd jump out the window (or be 'helped' out of them, as appears to be a popular pastime in Moscow this decade). This has to be on the levels quite near 'worst than our worst case scenario'.
I think Von clausewitz's revenge on the russian plan for Ukraine hasn't even begun yet. If Russia ends up wanting to turn lands they currently occupy in lands they annexed (a land that is productive and well on its way to just being culturally subsumed), the cost of that operation will be even larger than the astronomical cost they are paying to gain them: Their utter disregard for Clausewitzian planning means it'll be one heck of an insurgency.
Unfortunately, Russia is one of the most ruthless countries in this regard and will simply massively replace the population, starve it out, or otherwise eliminate any odds of low morale amongst the populace or active insurgency by simply replacing the entire population.
But that also destroys all inherent economic productivity other than natural resources. Russia already has plenty of land and plenty of resources; what they need is more people in general and productive, creative members of society in particular, neither of which you can make happen by starving a population that hates you for how you fought that war and still holds out hope they can drive you out.
>if I could go back in time and paint them a picture of how the situation is today, they'd jump out the window
Debatable. The war itself is basically a massively failure, but it completely stabilized the regime. Whereas 5 years ago there were clear questions about what would happen after Putin died, ZOV-logic is enough to power the regime for the next 10 years.
20 years of careful building of liberal oppositions by highlighting corruption is now out of the window. FBK, Kats, Volkov, etc are now all abroad with no chance to return; literally no one gives a fuck about corruption that's not military related. The new "liberal" party that replaced Navalniy & Co (Noviye Lyudi) is basically only liberal in economics.
The only thing that will decide if Russia ends up winning or losing in the long term is whether the "Pivot to Asia" strategy that they basically were forced to take will end up working.
This war either ends eventually or we move back to 'there are clear questions about what is going to happen to the stability of the regime' territory.
And when it ends we... also move back to that.
Probably, anyway. I have no crystal ball and you make a good point; the regime has enjoyed nearly 4 years out of stability out of this, that's a win of some sorts.
You are right, but also expect some high noble goals from russian leadership. It was supposed to be an easy land grab, a very valuable land grab full of heavy industry and literal gigatons of natural gas. There was never a rich greedy person who didn't want more. And lets not forget they weren't that far from success in first days - if they won Hostomel airport, Kyiv would probably fall and with it the rest would be a domino effect.
Especially given how russian elites are just several pyramids structured (and behaving) exactly like typical mafia. They only go for themselves, screw the rest. They only think now and maybe tomorrow, long term planning ain't a strong point of decision makers to be polite. Nihilism all around, to the very top. The whole war became purely an ego game, emotional stupidity of little boys who simply refuse to lose face (and thus life and legacy) even when colossal fuckup they created is right in their faces all the time.
But is is actually colossal fuckup to them? No it isn't, they get some international hate but plight of commoners is completely irrelevant to them, and who cares when you still have billions all around the globe. Also don't underestimate the capacity of russian population to just quietly accept brutal oppression and go on, its not something west can fully grok. Life of a human being has no value there, that's still the case as it was.,
> And lets not forget they weren't that far from success in first days - if they won Hostomel airport, Kyiv would probably fall and with it the rest would be a domino effect.
I think the war would have been very short if Zelensky hadn’t rejected the USA offer to evacuate him, asking for ammunition instead.
> But is is actually colossal fuckup to them? No it isn't, they get some international hate but plight of commoners is completely irrelevant to them
Maybe it isn’t a colossal fuckup to them _yet_. The plight of commoners was irrelevant to the tsars, too, until it became very relevant, and then, it was too late for them.
My comment originally contained something along the lines of "When the invasion of hostomel failed, they should have ended their operation on the spot" but that felt too presumptuous.
But perhaps it did inform my sense that this war is such a shambles. Because of what Moscow must be thinking about what could have been and how close they came.
I disagree with the 'plight of commoners' comment, though.
This war is being paid by the oligarchs. The printers are printing rubles nonstop and sending them to the commoners. It's not like the russian economy is creating that value (quite the opposite; it's bleeding value). That means the massive amounts of rubles that the oligarchs hold are worth way, way less now. Also a bunch of them have flown out windows.
The plight of the oligarchy that has supported this regime for decades doesn't seem "irrelevant to the tsars" to nearly the same level. There's the sense that the regime has shown they can screw over the oligarchy without repercussion and that can be considered 'a success', but I'm guessing there will be repercussions. Just, now right now, the populace presumably likes the situation partly because they are now much richer (at the cost of the oligarchy) than before. But once this war ends, or drags on too long and the economy collapses due to it - I think we're going to be back to this being a total failure of an operation for the tsars.
Annexing Ukrainian lands and making them productive was never the primary Russian strategic goal. What they wanted to do was establish defensible strategic depth. There are no natural geographic borders (like mountain ranges or wide rivers) between NATO member states and Moscow so Russian leaders still fear a land invasion from Western Europe (which has happened a couple times before). If they controlled Ukraine then they could make an invasion by NATO much more difficult. I'm not trying to justify Russian aggression but from an amoral geopolitical perspective there was a certain logic to it.
Firstly no one in Ukraine or NATO had any thoughts of invading Russia. Even now after Russia launched its war, no one wants to invade Russia. Why invade some godforsaken place with the world's largest nuclear arsenal? Makes no sense.
Second if they wanted to invade they could have gone from Estonia or Latvia which share a border with Russia and are fairly close to Moscow and St Petersburg.
My take is the Russians regard Ukraine as Russian lands and Ukrainians as their property and felt the west was trying to steal it from them by promoting democracy and independence.
I'm not claiming that it makes sense to a rational outside observer, I'm just pointing out part of the strategic calculus from the perspective of a paranoid Russian leader. They conceptualize the world in a fundamentally different way that's hard for westerners to intuitively comprehend. And obviously that wasn't the only factor, they thought they had multiple reasons for acting.
Except Putin is not, and has absolutely never been paranoid of NATO invading Russia.
He literally believed the west would barely react to this invasion. They didn't even take hundreds of billions of dollars of hard cash out of foreign accounts.
Russia continues to pull defensive weapons like SAM systems from the NATO border to use them in Ukraine
Because "NATO invasion" has always been bullshit.
The strategic calculus was that Putin has spent a decade killing anyone who tells him something he doesn't want to hear, so a couple years ago he heard "We could take over all of Ukraine in 3 days and they would welcome us with open arms" and he believed it.
Vladimir Putin genuinely believed that they could blitz Ukraine and be thanked for it.
A reminder that for Putin to genuinely believe that Ukrainian people who the soviets killed and repressed quite significantly would choose to be Russian willingly, he must have believed that EuroMaidan was not genuine protest.
Putin believes the CIA did it.
Which is yet again another reason why the "Protection from NATO" argument is horse shit, because Putin does not believe that a country has to be in NATO for it to be used against Russia.
Let's assume for a moment that this is true. In 2014, when Russia first invaded Ukraine, European militaries were in the process of unilateral disarmament. Military units were being disbanded, bases were being shut down, equipment like Leopard tanks was being sold to places as far away as Chile. The US removed its last permanent heavy equipment from Europe in 2013. The few countries that still had conscription were debating a move to much smaller professional armies.
If a leader in Moscow had truly feared an invasion from the West, why would they have needed to do anything other than sit and wait for the disarmament trend to continue?
Perhaps it was the other way around: the leader in Moscow saw all that and believed that no one would have the resources to stop him?
Exactly. The West did next to nothing when Russia invaded Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, Crimea, Donbas and Lugansk... no wonder then that Russia kept taking if we kept giving. We should've acted sooner. We would've saved hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives if we did.
Choosing Kyiv as an example of a modern urban warfare is really weird, as there wasn't really much urban fighting at all (with the exception of some Russian saboteur groups in Kyiv), since the main Russian army didn't even make it into the city because their logistics got blown up in the outskirts.
Also, we are talking about the most technologically advanced war that ever took place, where the iteration cycles are measured with weeks. The Russo-Ukrainian war of the beginning of 2022 looked very different from what it currently is. For the actual modern urban warfare see the cities I mentioned.
Thanks for the clarification. Yes, I absolutely agree that this analysis was lacking.
I would then ask you about your mention of:
> turning Bakhmut, Vovchansk, Toretsk, Chasiv Yar et al. to _literal_ rubble
Leaving aside the horrible ethics. Would you say that this was an intentional strategic approach by the Russian leaders, as a mechanism of avoiding the difficulty of urban warfare, or an unintended side-effect of trying to conduct urban warfare?
I think they just lack the sophistication to do it any other way. According to their own doctrine, they should be trying to flank and encircle a city, cut off enemy logistics and reinforcements, and suffocate the defenders. But in most cases they were unable to to do, so they just default to pure destruction. It's just simpler to bomb everything that could shelter Ukrainian defenders. Russian artillery and aviation is not really known for their precision. There is nothing surgical about their approach. They are just throwing tons and tons of explosives at urban centers until they are stopped or there is nothing left to bomb. I think the siege of Mariupol was the only somewhat successful Russian urban operation in this war.
I appreciated the historical context, but was disappointed that it seemed to fizzle to nothing at the end, just circling around "Urban warfare is messy; bummer". I mean, I was hoping that it could offer at least the basics of a strategy for any of Russia, Ukraine, Hamas or Israel to achieve a decisive victory, but couldn't find any. My mind kept yelling "What would Clausewitz do in this situation?" but left at empty-handed as I was at the start.
It actually had the gall to finish with:
> Clausewitz offers no checklist for success in cities, but rather something more valuable. What he offers is a way to think clearly ...
I'm pretty sure that a checklist for success would have been more valuable.
Clausewitz's writing (and especially On War) is very abstract and philosophical, to the point that when he mentions specifics it's almost incongruous.
There's a bit in On War where he descends from a lofty discussion on what victory means and how generals should should figure that out before the battle starts, to state abruptly that chasing a fleeing enemy is a bad idea, particularly through a forest, because it's a good way to get your forces strung out and cut down. This part is so vivid I've often wondered if he or a superior officer succumbed to enthusiasm and Clausewitz learned this lesson the hard way.
One problem with reading Clausewitz is that he was writing in an era of large set-piece battles where you had blocks of infantry that still marched around in square formation, cavalry charges and so on, though centuries-long practices were changing thanks to Napoleon's tactical innovations. Clausewitz writes in generalities rather than specifics because commanders of the time were very familiar with standard dispositions and didn't need them laid out in detail, and likewise strategic ideas like trying to ravage your enemy's supply lines and bypass forts hadn't changed significantly in millenia. Clausewitz was trying to give shape to the questions of whether and why one should go to war in the first place, how to break out of escalatory cycles so you don't end up isolated and so on. I often think he has more to say to the fields of international relations/statecraft than to pure military analysis.
If you prefer something less abstract there's a good small book by Machiavelli on the topic (confusingly also titled On War; easiest to find as a double-volume with The Prince) and of course Sun Tzu. I think the Samuel Griffith translation is the best one because Griffith was a marine officer in addition to being a scholar. Lidell-Hart's book Strategy also stands up to repeat reading and functions as a great roadmap of European military history.
> A checklist approach to strategy is only useful if your adversaries are foolish enough to use a checklist themselves
Checklists aren't immutable. Having clear pre-war plans and procedures doesn't preclude changing them. But going in without them almost assures defeat.
Well, yes, a "checklist" (his word) might be too much of a strawman, but what would be useful would be a strategy in the game theoretical sense - a decision mechanism of actions conditional on different situations (e.g. "If the enemy is hiding in a network of tunnel under civilian population, you should wait until ... and then randomly ..., but if they ... then reverse course and instead ...").
Quoting again from the author's closing remarks:
> Victory in this environment requires more than technological superiority. It demands clarity of purpose, coherence between means and ends, disciplined execution, and moral restraint—the very fundamentals Clausewitz insisted upon. These are not optional in the urban century. They are decisive.
But that's so vague that I can't help but again yell "But what is decisive?!", "What should the commanders/politicians do in practice?". It's almost astrology in how it doesn't say anything objectionable.
In one sense, your checklist is whatever you wrote down before starting:
> Clausewitz also famously wrote, “No one starts a war—or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so—without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.”
You could also make a checklist of stuff like "reduce effectiveness of enemy's forces" and "minimize damage to your own ability to wage war" - but that's basics which any upperclassman at a military academy could recite, in regard to pretty much any war ever.
It's been 2 centuries since Clausewitz was writing about military theory. He's still widely read because his ideas are big-picture abstractions. Bridging the gap between his abstractions and what to do, with whatever current-day/recent-tech forces you happen to have - that's the job of your flag officers and their staffs. Though their "checklists" will keep changing, as the war progresses.
Well said. But I'm still left with the question - have we actually benefitted in any way from these two centuries of military theory? If anything, it seems to me that wars are less decisive, more prolonged and often more deadly than they've been in Clausewitz's time.
If we treat kinetic warfare as a game, I suppose you could argue that as in any other game, the more knowledgeable and more experienced the players are, the higher the likelihood of a draw. But then, seeing the harm that this is doing to the world, should we not see about changing the rules of war to reduce this likelihood and make things more decisive again, with the aim of reducing overall harm to civilians?
> have we actually benefitted in any way from these two centuries of military theory?
"How to win" theories - when correct - favor those with the motivation to take them seriously, and the smarts to apply them correctly. I hope that overlaps nicely (in Venn diagram terms) with your "we".
Plausibly, some wars have been prevented by military theory - because a nation analyzed their situation, and decided that starting a war would be a bad move.
> If anything, it seems to me that wars are less decisive, more prolonged and often more deadly than they've been in Clausewitz's time.
Human "games" are generally balanced, or darn close. Vs. very few modern wars were started by anyone who thought things were nicely balanced.
> ...should we not see about changing the rules...
If you mean military tech or practices aimed at cutting such harm - 'most every modern military is forever working on that.* If you mean treaties banning land mines, or napalm, or nerve gas, or whatever - when well done, those can be quite useful. But in game terms, they are (at most) just changing the costs (in economic, human, and political terms) of making a "break the treaty" move.
*Edit: Unfortunately, they're also working on some conflicting goals - like "require even more firepower for our enemies to defeat" and "apply even more firepower, to defeat our enemies".
Military theory struggles to provide serious benefit above trite things because the actual reality of war changes every single day.
The most successful military theory is still the extreme basics: Your troops will do better when they want to do war. You need to feed troops and give them plenty of ammo. Training matters.
Adapt or die
>But then, seeing the harm that this is doing to the world, should we not see about changing the rules of war to reduce this likelihood and make things more decisive again, with the aim of reducing overall harm to civilians?
Why would I follow your "rules of war" if it causes me to lose? There is no global authority to force anyone to follow rules, that's the whole point.
It seems to me that making wars longer and less decisive helps weaker parties. Would the Vietnamese have preferred a shorter and more decisive war against the US, or Ukraine against Russia?
Shorter and more decisive wars also encourages war. If there's the possibility of winning quickly and thoroughly then you might choose to start a war. If you know it's going to be a bloody and tedious affair no matter what, you probably won't.
The modern world is remarkably peaceful compared to centuries past. We're at the point where having an active war of conquest in Europe is utterly shocking. Imagine going back to 1925 and saying "I can't believe a European country is taking parts of another European country by force, it's nuts, nobody does that!" They used to call that "Tuesday." The same is true in much of the rest of the world. And why? A lot of it is because it just doesn't work very well anymore. Russia has had very little return for 3+ years of invading Ukraine. Israel has spent two years invading Gaza so far and annexing the territory looks unlikely regardless of the military outcome. War used to be something a country might plausibly benefit from starting in some situations. It's really hard to make that case now, and that's how I want it to be.
People really don't have an appreciation for how destructive dragging a "classical" army across the countryside actually is since it hasn't happened much since the advent of the railroad.
There's a reason it was considered newsworthy and bold when Sherman did it and he was incredibly restrained because he was operating in his own country.
"What should the commanders/politicians do in practice?"
It simply depends. No situation is unique.
Israels strategy towards tunnels for example is to blow up and level everything. Ukraine does not deem that acceptable to the russian tunnels inside Ukraine.
What Russian tunnels in Ukraine? The battlefields are of very, very different sizes, and the Ukraine war is mostly not taking place in occupied cities at the moment.
What do you mean it depends? What does it depend on?
I was hoping that being "the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute" [0], the author could offer some actual advice on strategy. Or what is the institute for? Hopefully not just for writing essays.
As for Israel's strategy towards tunnels, I actually have no understanding of what's going on there, but I can just say that whatever they're doing has not been effective in achieving a decisive victory, and is thus ipso facto not a good strategy. So I'm wondering what might a good strategy have been. The author now has two years of hindsight - could he not use that time and information to offer some alternative approach?
"What do you mean it depends? What does it depend on?"
The terrain, your avaiable forces and equipment, the morale of your soldiers, the main goal of the operation, the short, mid and long term plans. Outside reactions.
Strength of enemy. Outside reactions, will the enemy get more support if X happens or less, will it matter if key target is achieved before time Y, ...
There is no magic bullet for something as complex as urban warfare.
If you want to level all, just use a nuke. But there seems to be reasons, why that is not a valid option.
If you go with lots of ground troops, you will have casualties. Here the question how much is acceptable to your own population.
If you go fast, you achieve a different effect then going slow. Etc. Etc etc.
The issue is mainly the hostages, as any tunnel or building may contain one that really slows the pace of advance considerably and ironically increases palestinian suffering
Also probably to note that much of the "ideological" battles in early Europe, whether it was legitimacy for the throne or religious conflicts tended to end in sobering sieges not unlike Gaza. The difference is they actually all did starve to death when they refused to surrender. Siege of La Rochelle as the climatic battle betwen King Louis and the Huguenots, the population declined from 22k to 5k, comparable to Gaza. But the Huguenots really did loose in the end when they were too weak to resist entry.
Russia is following Clausewitzian principles pretty assiduously.
They've got a set of 3 clear objectives and their tactics on the ground, e.g.
* prioritizing attrition over the capture of territory.
* avoiding urban fighting where possible (e.g. a multi-year avoidance of zaporizhia and kharkiv).
* minimizing civilian casualties.
Reflect not only the objectives, but the desire to avoid a lot of the "messiness" the author referred to. The fact that Ukrainian civilians fear busification more than drone strikes is a testament to that.
None of the other parties (Ukraine, Hamas, Israel) appear to follow clausewitzian logic, though.
If this was remotely true, they'd have won the war already. Russian operational and strategic decision-making has been a bonfire of blazing incompetence since the beginning, which is what led to things breaking down into WWI-style attritional warfare.
Leaving the moral dimension aside, this entire war has been basically two JV teams going at it since the beginning. NATO would have wiped the floor with the Russian military based on their performance so far, and it's surprising considering what a juggernaut everyone claimed the Russian military was pre-war.
> NATO would have wiped the floor with the Russian military
Considering my interests and those of my country I would like to believe, but reality do not provide much support for such hopes.
> and it's surprising considering what a juggernaut everyone claimed the Russian military was pre-war.
It is true, but they improved immensely during 3 years of intense conflict (the same for Ukraine). On the other hand NATO has most experience in bombing people in Africa and Middle-East.
War with Russia wouldn't be the same as battle of Timbuktu.
>If this was remotely true, they'd have won the war already.
They're invading the largest country in Europe armed by a military bloc constituting 60% of world military spending. Which part of that screamed quick to you?
>Russian operational and strategic decision-making has been a bonfire of blazing incompetence
They somehow managed to achieve a body bag exchange ratio of 44:1 and an extreme busification crisis in Ukraine with a volunteer force.
It's a more impressive showing than Iraq.
>led to things breaking down into WWI-style attritional warfare.
Putin announced the strategy of attritional warfare in March 2022 after the land bridge was secured, so one could hardly argue that this wasnt the plan.
Ukraine has done a good job of playing into their hands by trying to cling on to land long past the point where it becomes defensible and getting enveloped in cauldron after cauldron.
Hence the issue where Ukrainian civilians are now more afraid of their own government's roving kidnapping gangs than living under Moscow's rule.
That part is probably going to be the real kicker in the end.
The amount of total financial support provided to Ukraine is lower than that which Russia has earned from the same bloc. And military support is the smaller fraction of this total. So, the support has been important but without Ukraine deciding to resist Russia vehemently, the Donbass would have long been conquered.
I do agree with your criticism that in certain places, such as Bakhmut or Avdiivka, Ukraine has lost many men needlessly when in an indefensible position. Saying that, Russia is making at best incremental gains for huge casualties. They certainly aren't going to conquer the rest of Donbass by this year or even by the 4th anniversary.
>The amount of total financial support provided to Ukraine is lower than that which Russia has earned from the same bloc.
The amount of aid sent during the war totaled up to about $300 billion, which is roughly equal to the Russian military budget for the same period.
Thats not counting all of the "soon to be expired" stuff they handed over in 2022/2023, declaring it was worth $0 because it would have been disposed of.
>Saying that, Russia is making at best incremental gains for huge casualties.
For every body bag they get back theyve recently been handing over 44.
Territorial gains are only relevant for them right now insofar as it serves their overriding goal of attrition.
>They certainly aren't going to conquer the rest of Donbass by this year or even by the 4th anniversary.
If it serves the overall goal of attrition im sure theyd be happy to drag it out beyond February. Theyre not on a deadline.
The problem is that the more the Ukrainian army gets hollowed out by attrition now, the faster and more complete the eventual collapse will be.
> Putin and Ukraine are in a stalemate. That takes Russia off the table as a near peer to the U.S.
Ukraine, with currently most capable and experienced military in Europe, supported by western countries, is losing. Slowly and while making Russia pay, but losing nonetheless. And if you consider demographics, it kinda lost already. Most people that escaped west won't get back, and many men that were forced to stay will leave soon after they will be allowed to.
For last few decades US victories were even less clear and made against countries like Iraq and Afghanistan.
>He’s not winning on the timelines his military brass originally predicted.
Untrue. I remember them being asked for a deadline in a press conference in March 2022 and they said (verbatim) "it will take as long as it takes". Theyve not deviated from that position either, because Clausewitz.
That "3 days to kiev" thing was General Mark Milley's prediction to congress, which was later morphed by western propaganda into "Putin's goal" and is now presumed by the terminally naive to have been the overriding goal.
>Putin and Ukraine are in a stalemate
If it were stalemate the body bag exchange ratios would probably be a little lower than 44:1 and the TCC probably wouldnt be kidnapping quite so many men out doing a grocery run.
I think you can explain Russia's poor performance somewhat from Clausewitzian principles:
"primordial violence, hatred, and enmity" - weren't really there - most Russians viewed Ukrainians as their brethren.
"Chance and Probability" - the Russians have proved pretty inflexible. I mean after they failed to take Kyiv in three days they could have gone home and saved a lot of bother, maybe keeping some lands in the south.
"Reason and Policy" - didn't make much sense. Few Russians wanted to go to war so Putin could lord it over the Ukrainians as well as the Russians. This looks more like a political move by Putin to keep power.
If Russia had actually had a clear objective to annex Ukraine they could have mobilised and knocked them out in no time but instead we have a mess and kind of stalemate which to me seems to be moving in Ukraine's favour as they can now hit most targets inside Russia.
Russians target civilian objects - apartment complexes, hospitals, metro entrances, passenger trains. Constantly do a second strike when emergency crews arrive. They use drones to hunt civillians who live near frontline.
Gazan civilian casualties eclipsed Ukrainian within about two weeks.
Militaries routinely use civilian objects for military purposes, so that these objects are targeted isnt meaningful in and of itself - like the time a pizza restaurant was targeted and it later emerged that the restaurant hosted a rather large military gathering.
Obviously because Gaza is virtually defenseless and Israel has roughly one active duty soldier for every seven adults in Gaza. It's less of a war than just a massacre.
Ukraine and Russia on the other hand are relatively evenly matched, so killing civilians is much harder.
The checklist is one's own ethics and morale guideposts --- every interaction with others has to be done with a consideration for the long-term strategic goals rather than short-term gains --- Clausewitz argues that the will of the people of whom the military is an extension of and their ethics and mores have to be taken into account and all actions done in accord with what will make an acceptable news story.
Consider the old adage:
>Never do something which you wouldn't want your grandparents to read about in a newspaper, or to discuss with them over Sunday dinner.
By extension, a military force should:
>Never do anything which when shown on the evening news would result in a Congressional inquiry (or a War Crimes Tribunal).
I'm all for "Be excellent to each other", but in war, the first and foremost consideration is whether the strategy is effective. I'm not a big Clausewitz scholar, but I can't imagine that he or any other general would accept a strategy that prioritises the well-being of the opposing side to the point of their own side admitting defeat.
As I see it, the only way that we can have "Rules of War" is by proving that a war can be won while maintaining them. Otherwise (and unless you have a magic wand to make humans non-aggressive), these rules are worse than useless, because they limit the more ethical side, while making them lose to the less ethical.
Friend, I have respect to where you are coming from, and ask you to please think a little longer term.
You don't prioritize the well-being of the other side, but you do want to avoid radicalizing them. The more reasons they have to surrender, the more likely they are to surrender, thus ending the conflict sooner AND keeping the end conditions one they are comfortable living under.
If instead they feel they are in a fight to the death, then you have a much tougher battle on your hand because they will fight to the death. You'll still win (maybe) but it's going to cost you in personelle and time and money.
Next aspect. Moral of your troops. Everyone wants to be a hero, very few people join the military because they want to kill. And those that are in it to kill tend to be toxic leaders which is really bad for the rest of the team.
"Rules of war"/"rules of engagement" are methods that allow your troops to maintain their humanity and sense of purpose under horrific situations. You give up that and you are now undercutting the fighting power of your own forces.
The military did not come up with these ideas to make themselves weak. They came up with them and enforced them because they are the source of strength.
In WWII the Allies didn't take any steps to avoid radicalizing the other side. We implemented starvation blockades and fire bombed cities, killing millions of enemy civilians. They surrendered unconditionally because they were utterly destroyed and had no more capability it resist.
But that's the question - how do you fight honorably and win? How many examples can you offer (from any time in history), where the winning side conducted the campaign in a "gentlemanly fashion" (or however you want to call it), won, and got the respect of the losing side and lasting peace?
To address your concern-- if two people are fighting and one thinks "I won't hit below the belt" that person is at a tactical disadvantage. Even worse if they think the other side has also agreed to that rule.
So in that sense you are absolutely correct.
But I invite you to think bigger. If one side lays siege to another side's city, and offers terms of surrender, the city needs to believe that the terms will be honored otherwise they don't surrender.
Which is a large part of European history during the period from the middle ages up until Napoleon figured out how to use artillery, i.e. hundreds of years of examples where "fighting honorably" was the winning strategy.
Notice that Germany and Japan are now strong allies.
Also notice that many people think the cause of WWII was that the WWI surrender forced unsustainable terms on Germany thus fueling the resentment that lead to WWII.
> Also notice that many people think the cause of WWII was that the WWI surrender forced unsustainable terms on Germany thus fueling the resentment that lead to WWII.
And many historians dispute it. Partly because those terms were standard for the time and better then what Germans themselves planned to enact after they win.
And partly because the German population never believed they lost the war. They believed they would winning absent "stab in the back". That is why the allies insisted on actually conquering Germany with no in between solution. The victory had to be absolute.
I wouldn't quite say that the former Confederate states fully respected the Union's victory as saying something good about the North [0], and in some ways still don't, but otherwise it is a good example.
if you can't count on your troops to be disciplined enough to follow your rules of engagement, how can you count on their discipline to follow your other orders? If you cannot show them that you are also disciplined, how do you expect them to maintain their respect for you as a leader?
If you don't have honor, what are you fighting for? Troop moral is what wins wars.
what's worse than death? Not having anything worth living for.
very very few people find honor in being the most evil person. And those few who do make very bad leaders; you either avoid having them in your armed forces or you limit their impact.
If one of your squadmates is an "I'll do anything to win" person, how can you trust them not to ditch you if that is their best survival option? Prisoner's dilema situations are common in battle
I encourage you to visit a US military cemetery. You will sometimes see shrines to the military virtues. Courage, honor, pride, family, discipline all rank pretty high.
I think the lesson is that you can never be sure that you will meet your military objectives—failure is always a possibility—and the blowback from that failure will be more limited if you appear to have conducted your war with adequate respect for noncombatants.
Failing to conquer a nation (or depose its government, or secure some land, or defend a border, or whatever your objective is) may be shrugged off by your own nation, and you may even be able to normalize relations after some time. But if you abuse the noncombatant population, you often create bitter enemies, generational hatred, and global pressures on your society from third party observers. In the worst case this eventually escalates to mutual threats of genocide and total war.
Even if a nation wins a conflict through sheer brutality, they may lose the occupation, or the reconstruction, or good relations with important partners, or all of the above. And they may create an enemy who will one day return with a vengeance.
From my reading of history, there's no straightforward correspondence between the ethics of the winning side and its ability to have good relations with the losing side. As a clear anti-example, in later stages of WW2, the allied forces were very willing to engage in attacks on population centers to achieve a decisive victory faster (particularly: Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima and Nagasaki), and the resulting relationships between the allied countries and Germany and Japan could not have been more positive even if the most optimistic poet in 1944 were to written lyric poetry about the best possible future.
To be clear, I'm not advocating for cruelty, but I'm wondering if going back to an approach of "surrender or we'll kill you all" would save more lives than the current situation of "do everything you can to avoid doing too much harm at any one time", which ends up prolonging conflicts indefinitely.
> resulting relationships between the allied countries and Germany and Japan could not have been more positive
I think there may have been a "lesser evil" aspect to that. The Allies had good relationships with West Germany almost immediately after the war because they were saving the defeated Germans from the USSR. Japan reconciled with the USSR but there are still tensions between Japan, Korea, and China over the war.
In both cases the aggressors were the first to engage in atrocities, and their atrocities were much more severe than those inflicted upon them. So both seem like a unique case. Additionally, both were part of a global conflict, which is uncommon. In a global conflict there aren’t many bystanders who can effectively implement sanctions or apply diplomatic pressure.
> I'm wondering if going back to an approach of "surrender or we'll kill you all" would save more lives than the current situation
This is just as likely to provoke a “fight to the death” response from the defender which is often enough to prevent you from achieving your objectives. There are very few large conflicts where the objective is simply “eliminate the defenders”.
The obvious counter example is WWII. The victorious Allied forces conducted widespread strategic bombing campaigns and starvation blockades against Axis civilian targets. This was highly effective and saved the lives of many Allied personnel but judged against some modern criteria could have been considered "war crimes": for example, see the fire bombing of Dresden. None of the Allied leaders were put in front of a tribunal because the strategy worked and Congress was fully on board. The uncomfortable reality is that sometimes the only practical way to win and preserve your own forces is to massacre enemy civilians on an industrial scale.
The strategic bombing campaign absolutely reduced Axis manufacturing capacity and fuel supplies. There is no serious dispute about that point. There is some academic dispute about whether it was the most effective use of Allied resources but by the second half of the war the US had plenty resources to spare so that dispute is kind of moot.
In the case of the active conflicts (Gaza, Ukraine), it seems that there is a strong disconnect between internal-facing media and political will and external facing media on potential allies.
I would have liked some more unpacking of how this disconnect would have been interpreted by Clausewitz.
It also struck me that as an outsider to these conflicts, I assume that the combatants are acting rationally from the perspective of the adage (“No one starts a war—or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so—without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it“) and I judge the morality based on the inferred intent. That would also have been interesting to unpack…
Our "government" ( who ever "our" pertains to within the US) has been lied always lied and will continuing on lying to the people within the American society....
But so long as the people accept
They will continuing on doing
Manufacturing consent for war is important, news at 11. Snark aside, it's getting harder to generate moral high ground to maintain the facade of LIO supremecy. The problem with modern American imperialism (and European colonialism) is it's hard to sell to your (multicultural) people we need to to sacrifice blood and treasure to remove/occupy bad/inferior people on the other side of the world. More after decades of mass media recognizing you're actually sacrificing blood and treasure to collateral damage a bunch of civilians. More so when the spoils of war seems meagre relative to cost, and all the resources prosecuting one could have been focused on domestic serenity. Clausewitz (mostly) lived in a context of fighting for survival/dominance against neighbours, which I guess is apt for RU/UK, ISR/GAZA discussed in this article but the actual belligerants in either war are less sustained by morality / or need moral cover as realist interest. Who needs moral cover is however their sponsors, and really we're talking about US+co who needs to convince constitutents of the moral cause to support proxy wars, instead of just admitting: we get to cripple RU by sacrificing UKR, or keeping MENA influence is worth starving and killing tons of kids.
Are we now seeing belligerents changing military strategies to ones that will make manufacturing consent difficult? As in, traditionally adopting tactics that lead to civilian casualties is a trade-off between increased effectiveness and damage to the populous. However can we say that now both aspects are positive because sympathetic victimhood makes it difficult to support a proxy war? Is this the way both fronts are fought at once in modern war?
There is quite obvious reason that Israel does what it does - commiting an equivalent of mass child sacrifice is quite good at uniting Israelis even if lot of them protest against that.
If you are hated by everyone outside your tribe, you will stick with your tribe, because you have lost other options.
This line:
>Tactical brilliance could not guarantee strategic clarity—and each gain came at political and moral cost.
sums up what is wrong with modern conflict --- the abandonment of the moral high ground and a failure to take into account the will of people and their right to self-determination which Jomini (who had displaced Clausewitz after his inculcation at West Point as part of the brutal lessens the U.S. learned in Vietnam) failed to consider, and which Clausewitz took to heart and studied deeply, and thought long on.
It wasn't that long ago that the collapse of the Soviet Union was viewed as "the end of history" and a global acknowledgement that liberal democracy was the means of government most widely accepted --- hopefully articles such as this will be a guidepost to getting back on that track --- every moral failure simply recruits others to fight on the opposite side.
West Point is only one of three service academies, and it needs to teach only enough of the higher level of war to produce a reasonably competent Second Lieutenant. In fact it's arguable the service academies are a waste of resources as currently implemented as opposed to OCS and ROTC.
What matters is what is taught to the Majors, Lieutenant Colonels, Lieutenant Commanders, and Commanders 12-15 years later at the War Colleges. And as a graduate myself (if only by correspondence) I can assure you that Clausewitz and Sun Tzu were very much still on the books in the 2010s.
The war colleges are more intellectual than many people think. The curricula of those schools include most of the seminal works on war and statecraft from Thucydides to Kissinger.
I was disappointed they truncated the remote version of Strategy and War and we didn't get to dig into Thucydides and Corbett.
I will say getting that intellectualism to stick in the officer corps doesn't necessarily always work. There are jokes about "it's only a lot of reading if you do the reading," and oftentimes being able to spend a year in residence gets passed over in favor of sending people to other assignments and expecting them to do the War College syllabus by correspondence.
That said, the War Colleges are also heavily involved in things like designing and evaluating higher-level military exercises, red-teaming things, etc.
[flagged]
[flagged]
yes there is
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-c...
Instantly discredited by having UN as a source.
Serbia is not like the others. You see the genocide in Gaza, but also see the genocide in Srebrenica.
If there were ~9 wars that followed purely imperialist logic and 1 where it could plausibly have been done for imperialist or humanitarian reasons, it was probably done for imperialist reasons.
Fragmenting Serbia and creating a puppet state within its borders did serve America's goal to project power in the balkans.
Future historians will judge America harshly for the now documented millions of Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghans, Lybians that died for no reason at the hand of America.
Wonder if it will be depicted as a modern Mongol Invasion equivalent, with all the cruelty associated with it
I'm sure America is shaking in fear at the thought of future historians.
The Mongols were a mixed bag. Cruel in certain ways but surprisingly enlightened and pragmatic in others. Many of the conquered peoples lived better under the Mongols than under their previous overlords.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/187628/genghis-khan...
>Cruel in certain ways but surprisingly enlightened and pragmatic in others.
Sounds like western imperialism then?
Imperial Japan improved living conditions in their co-prosperity sphere.
It also murdered ~20 million people in China, but, you know, you give and you take, right?
[flagged]
Please don't take HN threads into religious flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting, we'd appreciate it.
If you check out the thread, I think you’ll see it wasn’t me making it into a flamewar, but rather a bunch of folks with apparently no idea what Islam even is (like literally core tenets). And somehow thinking that me stating them is harshing on Islam, which seems really funny actually? Isn’t that the anti-Islamic sentiment in reality?
It’s like if people accused me of being antisemitic because I was just saying that Jews believe they have a special deal with god. Or that I hate Christians because I said they believe Jesus was the son of god. When that’s literally one of the core tenets of Judaism/Christianity.
I’m not hating on any religion here, just pointing out core tenets that are at the root of ideological conflicts!
Personally, I think this is a great example for surfacing the actual underlying problems here.
Which is that trying to apply your own core values to something/someone with wildly different core values from a position of ignorance produces bad outcomes for everyone.
And any sort of ‘high ground’ definition is just internal propaganda - which everyone does need - but has little to no connection to actual reality.
You took the thread way off topic into a generic argument about religion that is more or less guaranteed, in the general case, to end up in a flamewar. Since your account is the one that started it and contributed the most to it, you're responsible for it. Then you kept doing it repeatedly after I asked you to stop. Not cool.
Edit: We've had to ask you not to do such things in the past:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45031745 (Aug 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41821594 (Oct 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39082862 (Jan 2024)
If you keep doing it, we're going to end up banning you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the intended spirit of the site from now on, that would be good.
Dang, this is like the 4th time you’ve done this on something that the reading of the thread later shows did not go in that direction.
Seriously, what do you expect me to do?
If my behavior was actually a problem, those threads would have ended up being actually a problem - but near as I can tell, they aren’t. And this it out of what, 5k+ comments?
The only way I can think of to avoid this situation is to be so bland that there is literally zero signal being added.
I expect you to stop taking HN threads on generic flamewar tangents and stick to the site guidelines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45516877 is an example of the thread going in a flamewar direction, and while that user shouldn't be breaking the site guidelines either, your account is the primary one responsible. If most other users didn't respond by breaking the guidelines, that is commendable, but random. In the general case, they certainly would. This means that the way you were posting was flamebait.
Tell you what dang. If tomorrow you still really believe this is true, please do ban my account.
It would be healthier for me to be spending more time with the real people in my life anyway - like the multiple Palestinian friends and co-workers who are refugees from Gaza. Instead of arguing with people on the internet.
And no, I’m not joking.
Could you please more fully explain what you mean and how it relates to the parent comment? The parent and TFA offer examples of the conflicts of US vs. Vietnam and Russia vs. Ukraine, which don't clearly involve Islamic beliefs, but otherwise appear to be similar enough to demonstrate the same principles/issues.
[flagged]
Those are valid opinions (though I disagree with several of them), but what yo seem to be missing is that you barged into a general discussion in modern warfare to express your antipathy to Islam.
Islam isn't a big factor in the Ukraine Russia conflict, it's not a big factor in US domestic politics (which are tilting toward military conflict), it's not a big factor in Asian geopolitics. IF you want to make a point about Islam that's one thing, but ignoring the larger context and harping on your pet issue is distracting and rude. You could at the very least acknowledge the existence of the bigger picture and situate your concerns as a specific part of it.
I don’t mind Islam at all actually.
I’m pointing out that a discussion about ‘high ground’ that ignores that it’s a subjective discussion where there are numerous other factions with wildly conflicting views of it is not a useful discussion.
And that the Islamic vs Western world split is a classic example where people seem to insist on projecting their western (often Christian derived if not strictly so) views onto a rather diametrically opposed set of values and then acting surprised when ‘the other side’ goes ‘WTF, no’ or even acts in ways that they consider abhorrent - but are not surprising if you actually know what is going on.
That people even consider this a religious flamewar (apparently) is quite hilarious because if you actually read the Koran and Hadiths, or have spent much time around many Muslim societies these aren’t even (generally) contentious things I’m talking about!
For example - you just don’t draw a picture of Mohammed. Especially not if it’s making fun of him, but even if it’s flattering, just don’t.
If you’re in a culture that has major Muslim influences, this is very very obvious. It’s not a flamewar topic, but it doesn’t come up much - for the same reason most people don’t talk about slapping strangers in the face either.
It’s still a thing. As are the calls to prayer. And not gooning on random Muslim women. And a hundred other things.
To my mind, you're misreading the "high ground" thing.
War pushes us into actions where we abandon the moral high ground, even as defined by us. That's part of the horror of war - we become monsters.
And when the ‘good’ thing by our standards is the monstrous behavior to someone else?
WW2 and the Japanese, as someone noted, provide many examples. For example, to the Japanese, the Allies taking prisoners was ritual humiliation - and death with a sword in their hand would have been preferable.
Sometimes, your high ground is another’s sewer (or even your own), and there is nothing anyone can do to change that.
Isn’t systematically humiliating an entire group of enemies being a monster too? It’s literally banned by the Geneva convention!
In the end when conflicts like this happen, realpolitik/pragmatic application of force wins regardless.
The janny smacked you but I thought you raised a valid point. The "moral high ground" is and has always been subjective. Do the ends justify the means? Depends on the ideology. Is a soldier surrendering a dishonorable act, or should he be treated with professional dignity? During WW2 the Japanese thought that surrender was dishonorable and treated POWs very poorly. They also deliberately shot at combat medics, they didn't have any sort of taboo against that. Nor did Europeans, until most of the way through the 19th century, think much about leaving wounded soldiers to lay dying in the field, or even casually murdering the wounded as they lay helpless after the battle was already decided (these sort of behaviors lead to the creation of the Red Cross.) In all of these cases it wasn't because those people were fundamentally evil. They were acting according to the norms and expectations of their culture. When two sides with radically different norms encounter each other in conflict, both can feel as though the other is depraved. But that's not necessarily an accurate reflection of the mental state of the other guys. American soldiers in the Pacific thought that the Japanese were savage animals, but with cooler hindsight we know that the Japanese had and still have a strong sense of honor. The catch is that it is, or at least then was, a very different sort of honor that held people to different expectations than Americans were accustomed to.
Sorry if I was unclear, I was hoping for clarity about your argument and its relevance to urban warfare situations across different conflicts, not more detail about your take on Islam in general.
When two ideologically incompatible parties (as in what is good/bad, high ground or not) are fighting, it gets complicated and ruthless/very destructive. In large part because it’s about incompatible identities and trying to purge ‘the other’, rather than ‘mere’ control of a specific piece of land. It takes a potentially resolvable conflict (an area where there may be a stable compromise), and can turn it into an existential fight.
This becomes especially destructive in very dense environments like urban centers, because the level of hiding that can happen becomes almost fractal.
The fight in Gaza is one recent example, as are the others.
I’m not surprised that Gaza has escalated to the point it has (total war, essentially), because Hamas can’t actually give up without losing their entire identity and reason for being, for example. And the factions in Israel can’t back down without winning or ‘it would have all been for nothing’.
Or are you referring to tactics, because there are actual religions reasons/justifications for the nature of some specific tactics being used in Gaza.
> Islamic teachings actively call for believers to punish those that 1) challenge teachings of Mohammed, 2) stop believing in the teachings of Mohammed, 3) stray from the teachings of Mohammed. Often with literal proscribed death sentences.
Utter non sense.
You misunderstand both what Islam is about, the place it gives to the prophet and how sharia works.
Sharia explicitly protects non believers. Did you fail to notice that Jews lived for ages in the various Islamic empires?
As a non Muslim who has lived in majority Muslim countries multiple times, I’m shocked you can actually live in one and come out with such large misconceptions.
I don't know if Sharia law protects non-Muslims, but it most definitely prescribes the death penalty to apostates of Islam, which is what GP is saying.
An Islamic belief which can be worked with would be the mainstream liberal views which were gaining currency in Iran and Iraq back before the Shah and the Ba'athists.
Regimes which do not accord basic rights to all citizens, including women should simply be ignored until such time as they do, no matter how much oil they have.
[flagged]
Islamic teachings/belief tell you approximately as much as catholics teachings/belief which is to say next to nothing.
The Islamic world in as much as it exists as entity is not homogeneous in its belief and practices. It’s a collection of countries and groups and they don’t all agree.
Like the Holy Ghost/Spirit to Catholics?
I never said it was homogenous, I’m pointing out core beliefs that - while modified in a few places - are definitional for the religion, and are fundamentally at odds with other perspectives.
This isn’t hypothetical, this is a lived experience for a billion+ people.
So is the vast majority of secular western society according to hardline christian religion. I think what poster you're replying to is implicitly saying is just that religious institutions have to weakened and "tamed"
The difference is, Islam isn’t out of the fight yet.
Even 200 years ago, this would be (and was!) a very different discussion around Christianity, eh?
That’s true for all Abrahamic religions though. People can and have just ignored the parts that don’t fit in with modern society.
Islamic beliefs as some sort of bad monolith vs Western beliefs as some sort of opposing good monolith is a painfully narrow and frankly bigoted view of human existence, warfare, and statecraft. I'll point you at Gaza and rub your nose directly in it.
[flagged]
[flagged]
>Do you consider freedom (speech, movement, self-determination and so on) equal to oppression, restriction and tyranny?
GP is saying that the phrase "moral high ground" presupposes an objective definition of "up" in morality. You can't cite a particular person's subjective moral "up" to disagree with them. Whether any given person values freedom or oppression more highly doesn't say anything about which one is objectively more moral, if any.
Besides that, do you think it unthinkable that a person would approve of some amount of oppression and restriction being placed on them in favor of achieving some goal?
How is adopting the beliefs your society blasted you with since childhood an "inner" moral compass? I completely agree with you, but I recognize it's a product of my environment and "propaganda" more than some kind of intrinsic thing
Every freedom has boundaries that some see as oppression.
That’s where the disagreement arises between people who have no doubt that their view of these boundaries is the right one
If you ask a random Chinese middle aged man or woman, do you think they will agree with you or not?
In my experience, they think there are practical reasons why things are the way they are in China, and what you’re describing is a poisonous fantasy spread by idiots. (As one said to me quite clearly once in Singapore!)
Either way, I prefer freedom of movement, self determination, etc. but it’s pretty obvious that many cultures actively think it’s a bad idea and go out of their way to squash it in very real ways, especially against certain portions of the population. And I bet if we did a spreadsheet with various examples, you’d also consider some of them too much.
Like consensual vore. Personal freedom, or mental illness?
Ignoring that you’ll get a fight from any given culture on these and many more topics and we can all just ‘get along’ due to fundamental human awesomeness is just not how it has ever worked - ever - near as I can tell.
Western beliefs? Do they include colonizing other people and taking their land and freedom?
Hmm, do you think Ghenghis Khan was a westerner in this scenario?
Being a genocidal manic is as old as humans, near as I can tell. One group was the most recent assholes, but change is inevitable.
You're going to loose to Russia and China in time.
This is spoken as if history converges to a point and then it _really_ gets to the end of history. There is no end, there will be endless fights and conflicts and one country taking the upper hand is just a temporary state.
Dosen't mean you specifically will survive till the next conflict.
I would not have believed it, but now looking like Ukraine could win it's war against Russia: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/10/07/drones-target-oil-...
"Win" here doesn't mean military victory over Russia. It means Ukraine's slow destruction of of Russia's oil and gas infrastructure and the West's sanctions make it too expensive for Russia to continue, so they withdraw from Ukraine and Crimea.
What a difference just 4 years the accelerated pace of technological development makes that happens in war makes. 4 years ago, Ukraine would have ended without the influx of Western weapons. Now the West looks at the Ukrainian battle fields, and ponders the relevance of their weapons against a $10k drone, made in Ukraine.
I guess that's always a possibility.
Another more likely scenario in the next few decades is that Russia and/or China will collapse into violent revolution or civil way — as has happened multiple times throughout their long histories. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping aren't immortal. They have effectively concentrated decision making in their own hands and purged all other internal power centers, leaving no clear succession plan. When they die there's no way to predict what might happen.
We lost India to China because we were impulsive. Beijing’s “wolf warriors” had already done generational damage to China’s strength. We could have held the high ground for decades more.
Russia is a one-trick petrostate that has been stuck in a three-year quagmire of a land war against the poorest country in Europe (that is a quarter its size).
Completely agree... though I wouldn't underestimate them: Their main strength, I'd argue, comes from their very successful use of the Firehose Of Falsehood (effectively managing to make the US self-own itself by turbocharging neoliberalism, among other things). They "James-Bond-Villain'd" the US (announced how they'd "take over the world") 28 years ago [0], and... well... look how that's going.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
Nothing there seems to be dramatically different from the sort of wankery produced by think tanks like PNAC and their ilk. And it's not like the US or the UK or the USSR have ever shied away from using soft power to destabilize other countries.
The game everyone's playing is not that different, and Ivan isn't making some 400 IQ move in it.
China already lost to China with their upcoming demographic nightmare and Han-centric/low-immigration society.
People like to point that out, as if they found the hidden flaw, but which western country doesn't have a demographic nightmare?
If we are at apocalyptic prophecies, the world demographic situation might be resolved by AI and diminishing need for working hands
The most corrupt government in American history (Trumps) is the one that is the most eager to give Russia everything they want. They are kind of trying to make America loose.
Morally purer government would do better in the competition between Russia and America.
Russia is essentially a mafia with a gas station.
The problem is, this mafia has a shitload of nuclear weapons. Without those, their vast land holdings east of the Urals would’ve already been taken by China.
Both China and Russia have concentrated vast amounts of power into a single person, it gets bloody and chaotic when the ‘one powerful man’ dies and there’s a power struggle.
> “war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on by other means.”
If _and only if_ War is utilized as a last resort. Otherwise this is self serving nonsense used by the political class which utilizes war to orient the population and to maintain a dark and grotesque part of our economy.
It's 2025. Institutions like the "Modern War Institute" not just existing but also pumping out this outdated amoral claptrap is obscenely depressing.
> If _and only if_ War is utilized as a last resort
Nope, always. War is politics by violent memes. Pretending it is only used in the last case is incredibly dangerous, since it ignores both provocation and deterrence.
Then that's not "political intercourse." I understand that war is not actually used as described in the quote. Which is the point. These military ideas of war are romantic fantasies.
Although I'm sure the victims of all the holocausts in human history will be heartened to know that it was just politics by a different means.
> that's not "political intercourse"
The full phrase is "the political intercourse of Governments and nations" [1].
Clausewitz's point is that if "such intercourse is broken off by war, and that a totally different state of things ensues, subject to no laws but its own," then not only does international law become irrelevant, but diplomatic resolutions to war impossible. Rejecting that war is a continuation of politics underwrites atrocity. (If war only happens as a last resort, and you are at war, it follows that you've exhasuted all non-military avenues to ending the war.)
> These military ideas of war are romantic fantasies
Clausewitz wasn't a military romanticist. To the extent here are romantic ideals at play, it's in pretending war isn't a continuation of politics.
> I'm sure the victims of all the holocausts in human history will be heartened
Why is this relevant to the correctness of the theory? Should we reject the heat-death hypothsis because it's uncomfortable?
I've already argued why rejecting war as a continuation of politics rejects diplomacy as a way to end wars. The Third Reich is a good demonstrator for why rejecting the political component of war is dangerous on the other end. Appeasing Hitler makes sense if parties will only pursue war as a last resort. Acknowledging his political interests, on the other hand, would have shown why--in that case--appeasement was destabilising.
[1] https://www.clausewitzstudies.org/readings/OnWar1873/BK8ch06...
> Victory in this environment requires more than technological superiority. It demands clarity of purpose, coherence between means and ends, disciplined execution, and moral restraint—the very fundamentals Clausewitz insisted upon. These are not optional in the urban century. They are decisive.
If I learned anything from both Gaza and Ukraine, it's that its the complete opposite that's true. You go clearing from house to house, some AQB fighter is gonna pop-out of a tunnel and pop an IED into your Merkava tank. You do that enough times and your army's morale is going to be shot. You wanna win, you have to bomb dual use assets and only fight when its needed. If you can do a hunger siege, flood by bombing a dam or something else, then do that.
You are just giving an example of how lack of "coherence between means and ends" leads to failure.
A military occupation (means) is not an effective way to achieve lasting control over the civilian population (ends) unless much of the population is already on your side, so it is foolish to try to use those means to achieve those ends.
Russia has also been hurt quite badly by lack of moral restraint in the war against Ukraine (which in the context Clausewitz used it I believe means more whether you have rational control of your actions than whether your actions are "good" or "bad"). Attacking civilians is usually extremely ineffective at achieving anything other than making leaders feel good that they are hurting their enemies and usually just hardens the enemy's resolve to continue fighting.
I think Russia has been quite restrained. I'm not defending them in any way, but many Ukrainians still have electric power, running water, and other trappings of modern society. If the present Russian regime chose otherwise I'm not sure that they would. It doesn't take a great deal of precision to mission-kill water works and other civil infrastructure that has survived in rear areas.
It seems to me both sides have been sending signals with their respective attacks on 'homeland' targets, rather than going fully gloves-off. Agreed that it's not working out for the Russians.
Nations have tried what Russia is trying with much, much more explosives and demonstrated that strategic bombing doesn't really work. Ukraine's infrastructure is intact because Russia is unable to destroy it. To the extent that such attacks have a useful military purpose, it is mainly in tying up air defense capabilities that could be protecting military assets.
Russia targets Ukrainian Infra. It goes down and ukraine brings it back online. They also have air defense assets protecting key infra. Russia doesnt leave it up because of moral reasons, they're doing what they can to win and that includes attacking the grid.
I think it's a bit insane to think that Russia couldn't completely and totally obliterate civilian central infrastructure in Ukraine if it wanted to. It's not like these locations are hidden or top-secret, or like Ukraine has the ability to completely and inevitably stop the attacks.
However, whatever wins this achieved would probably instantly be overshadowed by the negatives. Think of mass famine, relocation, refugee-ism, ... Not to mention a destroyed infrastructure that the eventual owner needs to rebuild as a first priority. Not even to mention the increased levels of international condemnation due to such a targeted attack on a civilian population.
> I think it's a bit insane to think that Russia couldn't completely and totally obliterate civilian central infrastructure in Ukraine if it wanted to.
It really can not.
> It's not like these locations are hidden or top-secret, or like Ukraine has the ability to completely and inevitably stop the attacks.
You'd be surprised how much explosives you need to actually destroy the infrastructure. Russia simply doesn't have enough long-range rockets, and drones can't carry large charges.
"make a desert and call it peace". There's still two million people in Gaza.
[flagged]
You can't learn these from either Gaza or Ukraine. Neither is over. Not even close to an end. Both are longer and the technologically superior side suffered more than expected.
> the technologically superior side suffered more than expected.
In the case of Ukraine, it is unclear whether you are talking about Russia or the US ?
It’s essentially just this; in urban warfare with entrenched enemies you can choose who suffers, but not whether there’s suffering. The endeavor is inherently horrific, and that horror in both the cases of Ukraine and Gaza are dictated by the decision by one party to use the urban environment to maximize casualties. Whether it’s the Russians in Bucha or Hamas in tunnels under schools, both are fully aware of what they’re doing.
Unfortunately the mentality of most people has been grossly oversimplified to the point of staging everything as a melodrama.
<snark> Well, according to this, maybe the US cities have nothing to fear from the troops sicked onto them by the current administration. Seeing that a clarity of purpose, coherence between means and ends, disciplined execution, and moral restraint are a sine qua non for success here. </snark>
I found this to be a remarkably uninsightful work. He somehow negates the inherent drama of war with the milquetoast prose and myopia of an academic. Much of what he says is in fact false, presumably because he is far from the action and relies on Clausewitz as a crutch for thought.
The key nodes to control have to do with supply chain, energy and information; ie depots, road and rail, bridges, factories, substations and data centers or satellites.
Ukraine has severely weakened Russia by attacking those points, as Russia has Ukraine.
Beijing could well defeat Taiwan (and the US by proxy) by controlling its sea lanes, cutting its cables, and jamming its radio spectrum.
China might be able to blockade Taiwan for a while but China's own SLOC are far more vulnerable. They are dependent on critical food, energy, and mineral imports — most of which pass through a few choke points where they are still unable to project sustained naval power. The US and its allies could cut those off at any time and China lacks the internal reserves to survive a long blockade.
It sounds like we agree on the larger strategic point.
The PRC seems to be doing a good job building out its energy infra, fwiw. And it shares a massive land border with an ally and energy producer.
The author seems to be more interested in the past than in the present or the future. They must've been rereading Clausewitz as Russia was turning Bakhmut, Vovchansk, Toretsk, Chasiv Yar et al. to _literal_ rubble. They speak of some abstract "urban warfare", where "Every strike is a message, every misstep a liability", where the reality is basically a grid-like approach of how to deliver as much kinetic energy per square kilometer as efficiently as possible.
I have a sense that articles like these is why a lot of people think the "academics" are completely disconnected from the reality.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is one of the mini-case studies analyzed in the piece, specifically for its note that Russia's disregard for Clausewitzian principles has failed to bring it meaningful success.
It should also be noted that, objectively, Russia's war has not been a success. It also has not been a failure, except in the grand strategic sense of provoking the realignment and reinvigorating of NATO it was meant to prevent.
Russia: starts a war to prevent it from having a much longer land border with NATO.
Outcome:Russia's land border with NATO is now 1300km longer.
That sounds like "the leg amputation operation was a success, other than the fact that the patient died on the operating table". That "except" is doing rather a lot of heavy lifting.
I have absolutely no idea what Russia was expecting from their three day special military operation, currently on 3 years, 7 months, and 2 weeks. But surely whatever they were thinking, if I could go back in time and paint them a picture of how the situation is today, they'd jump out the window (or be 'helped' out of them, as appears to be a popular pastime in Moscow this decade). This has to be on the levels quite near 'worst than our worst case scenario'.
I think Von clausewitz's revenge on the russian plan for Ukraine hasn't even begun yet. If Russia ends up wanting to turn lands they currently occupy in lands they annexed (a land that is productive and well on its way to just being culturally subsumed), the cost of that operation will be even larger than the astronomical cost they are paying to gain them: Their utter disregard for Clausewitzian planning means it'll be one heck of an insurgency.
Unfortunately, Russia is one of the most ruthless countries in this regard and will simply massively replace the population, starve it out, or otherwise eliminate any odds of low morale amongst the populace or active insurgency by simply replacing the entire population.
But that also destroys all inherent economic productivity other than natural resources. Russia already has plenty of land and plenty of resources; what they need is more people in general and productive, creative members of society in particular, neither of which you can make happen by starving a population that hates you for how you fought that war and still holds out hope they can drive you out.
>if I could go back in time and paint them a picture of how the situation is today, they'd jump out the window
Debatable. The war itself is basically a massively failure, but it completely stabilized the regime. Whereas 5 years ago there were clear questions about what would happen after Putin died, ZOV-logic is enough to power the regime for the next 10 years.
20 years of careful building of liberal oppositions by highlighting corruption is now out of the window. FBK, Kats, Volkov, etc are now all abroad with no chance to return; literally no one gives a fuck about corruption that's not military related. The new "liberal" party that replaced Navalniy & Co (Noviye Lyudi) is basically only liberal in economics.
The only thing that will decide if Russia ends up winning or losing in the long term is whether the "Pivot to Asia" strategy that they basically were forced to take will end up working.
> Debatable
This war either ends eventually or we move back to 'there are clear questions about what is going to happen to the stability of the regime' territory.
And when it ends we... also move back to that.
Probably, anyway. I have no crystal ball and you make a good point; the regime has enjoyed nearly 4 years out of stability out of this, that's a win of some sorts.
You are right, but also expect some high noble goals from russian leadership. It was supposed to be an easy land grab, a very valuable land grab full of heavy industry and literal gigatons of natural gas. There was never a rich greedy person who didn't want more. And lets not forget they weren't that far from success in first days - if they won Hostomel airport, Kyiv would probably fall and with it the rest would be a domino effect.
Especially given how russian elites are just several pyramids structured (and behaving) exactly like typical mafia. They only go for themselves, screw the rest. They only think now and maybe tomorrow, long term planning ain't a strong point of decision makers to be polite. Nihilism all around, to the very top. The whole war became purely an ego game, emotional stupidity of little boys who simply refuse to lose face (and thus life and legacy) even when colossal fuckup they created is right in their faces all the time.
But is is actually colossal fuckup to them? No it isn't, they get some international hate but plight of commoners is completely irrelevant to them, and who cares when you still have billions all around the globe. Also don't underestimate the capacity of russian population to just quietly accept brutal oppression and go on, its not something west can fully grok. Life of a human being has no value there, that's still the case as it was.,
> And lets not forget they weren't that far from success in first days - if they won Hostomel airport, Kyiv would probably fall and with it the rest would be a domino effect.
I think the war would have been very short if Zelensky hadn’t rejected the USA offer to evacuate him, asking for ammunition instead.
> But is is actually colossal fuckup to them? No it isn't, they get some international hate but plight of commoners is completely irrelevant to them
Maybe it isn’t a colossal fuckup to them _yet_. The plight of commoners was irrelevant to the tsars, too, until it became very relevant, and then, it was too late for them.
My comment originally contained something along the lines of "When the invasion of hostomel failed, they should have ended their operation on the spot" but that felt too presumptuous.
But perhaps it did inform my sense that this war is such a shambles. Because of what Moscow must be thinking about what could have been and how close they came.
I disagree with the 'plight of commoners' comment, though.
This war is being paid by the oligarchs. The printers are printing rubles nonstop and sending them to the commoners. It's not like the russian economy is creating that value (quite the opposite; it's bleeding value). That means the massive amounts of rubles that the oligarchs hold are worth way, way less now. Also a bunch of them have flown out windows.
The plight of the oligarchy that has supported this regime for decades doesn't seem "irrelevant to the tsars" to nearly the same level. There's the sense that the regime has shown they can screw over the oligarchy without repercussion and that can be considered 'a success', but I'm guessing there will be repercussions. Just, now right now, the populace presumably likes the situation partly because they are now much richer (at the cost of the oligarchy) than before. But once this war ends, or drags on too long and the economy collapses due to it - I think we're going to be back to this being a total failure of an operation for the tsars.
Annexing Ukrainian lands and making them productive was never the primary Russian strategic goal. What they wanted to do was establish defensible strategic depth. There are no natural geographic borders (like mountain ranges or wide rivers) between NATO member states and Moscow so Russian leaders still fear a land invasion from Western Europe (which has happened a couple times before). If they controlled Ukraine then they could make an invasion by NATO much more difficult. I'm not trying to justify Russian aggression but from an amoral geopolitical perspective there was a certain logic to it.
That never made sense to me for various reasons.
Firstly no one in Ukraine or NATO had any thoughts of invading Russia. Even now after Russia launched its war, no one wants to invade Russia. Why invade some godforsaken place with the world's largest nuclear arsenal? Makes no sense.
Second if they wanted to invade they could have gone from Estonia or Latvia which share a border with Russia and are fairly close to Moscow and St Petersburg.
My take is the Russians regard Ukraine as Russian lands and Ukrainians as their property and felt the west was trying to steal it from them by promoting democracy and independence.
I'm not claiming that it makes sense to a rational outside observer, I'm just pointing out part of the strategic calculus from the perspective of a paranoid Russian leader. They conceptualize the world in a fundamentally different way that's hard for westerners to intuitively comprehend. And obviously that wasn't the only factor, they thought they had multiple reasons for acting.
Except Putin is not, and has absolutely never been paranoid of NATO invading Russia.
He literally believed the west would barely react to this invasion. They didn't even take hundreds of billions of dollars of hard cash out of foreign accounts.
Russia continues to pull defensive weapons like SAM systems from the NATO border to use them in Ukraine
Because "NATO invasion" has always been bullshit.
The strategic calculus was that Putin has spent a decade killing anyone who tells him something he doesn't want to hear, so a couple years ago he heard "We could take over all of Ukraine in 3 days and they would welcome us with open arms" and he believed it.
Vladimir Putin genuinely believed that they could blitz Ukraine and be thanked for it.
A reminder that for Putin to genuinely believe that Ukrainian people who the soviets killed and repressed quite significantly would choose to be Russian willingly, he must have believed that EuroMaidan was not genuine protest.
Putin believes the CIA did it.
Which is yet again another reason why the "Protection from NATO" argument is horse shit, because Putin does not believe that a country has to be in NATO for it to be used against Russia.
Let's assume for a moment that this is true. In 2014, when Russia first invaded Ukraine, European militaries were in the process of unilateral disarmament. Military units were being disbanded, bases were being shut down, equipment like Leopard tanks was being sold to places as far away as Chile. The US removed its last permanent heavy equipment from Europe in 2013. The few countries that still had conscription were debating a move to much smaller professional armies.
If a leader in Moscow had truly feared an invasion from the West, why would they have needed to do anything other than sit and wait for the disarmament trend to continue?
Perhaps it was the other way around: the leader in Moscow saw all that and believed that no one would have the resources to stop him?
Exactly. The West did next to nothing when Russia invaded Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, Crimea, Donbas and Lugansk... no wonder then that Russia kept taking if we kept giving. We should've acted sooner. We would've saved hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives if we did.
The reality of Bakhmut is one of failure, massive time and resources used, which led to an attempted coup
What? The latter part discusses the current battles of Kyiv and Gaza in some depth.
Choosing Kyiv as an example of a modern urban warfare is really weird, as there wasn't really much urban fighting at all (with the exception of some Russian saboteur groups in Kyiv), since the main Russian army didn't even make it into the city because their logistics got blown up in the outskirts.
Also, we are talking about the most technologically advanced war that ever took place, where the iteration cycles are measured with weeks. The Russo-Ukrainian war of the beginning of 2022 looked very different from what it currently is. For the actual modern urban warfare see the cities I mentioned.
Thanks for the clarification. Yes, I absolutely agree that this analysis was lacking.
I would then ask you about your mention of:
> turning Bakhmut, Vovchansk, Toretsk, Chasiv Yar et al. to _literal_ rubble
Leaving aside the horrible ethics. Would you say that this was an intentional strategic approach by the Russian leaders, as a mechanism of avoiding the difficulty of urban warfare, or an unintended side-effect of trying to conduct urban warfare?
I think they just lack the sophistication to do it any other way. According to their own doctrine, they should be trying to flank and encircle a city, cut off enemy logistics and reinforcements, and suffocate the defenders. But in most cases they were unable to to do, so they just default to pure destruction. It's just simpler to bomb everything that could shelter Ukrainian defenders. Russian artillery and aviation is not really known for their precision. There is nothing surgical about their approach. They are just throwing tons and tons of explosives at urban centers until they are stopped or there is nothing left to bomb. I think the siege of Mariupol was the only somewhat successful Russian urban operation in this war.
I appreciated the historical context, but was disappointed that it seemed to fizzle to nothing at the end, just circling around "Urban warfare is messy; bummer". I mean, I was hoping that it could offer at least the basics of a strategy for any of Russia, Ukraine, Hamas or Israel to achieve a decisive victory, but couldn't find any. My mind kept yelling "What would Clausewitz do in this situation?" but left at empty-handed as I was at the start.
It actually had the gall to finish with:
> Clausewitz offers no checklist for success in cities, but rather something more valuable. What he offers is a way to think clearly ...
I'm pretty sure that a checklist for success would have been more valuable.
Clausewitz's writing (and especially On War) is very abstract and philosophical, to the point that when he mentions specifics it's almost incongruous.
There's a bit in On War where he descends from a lofty discussion on what victory means and how generals should should figure that out before the battle starts, to state abruptly that chasing a fleeing enemy is a bad idea, particularly through a forest, because it's a good way to get your forces strung out and cut down. This part is so vivid I've often wondered if he or a superior officer succumbed to enthusiasm and Clausewitz learned this lesson the hard way.
One problem with reading Clausewitz is that he was writing in an era of large set-piece battles where you had blocks of infantry that still marched around in square formation, cavalry charges and so on, though centuries-long practices were changing thanks to Napoleon's tactical innovations. Clausewitz writes in generalities rather than specifics because commanders of the time were very familiar with standard dispositions and didn't need them laid out in detail, and likewise strategic ideas like trying to ravage your enemy's supply lines and bypass forts hadn't changed significantly in millenia. Clausewitz was trying to give shape to the questions of whether and why one should go to war in the first place, how to break out of escalatory cycles so you don't end up isolated and so on. I often think he has more to say to the fields of international relations/statecraft than to pure military analysis.
If you prefer something less abstract there's a good small book by Machiavelli on the topic (confusingly also titled On War; easiest to find as a double-volume with The Prince) and of course Sun Tzu. I think the Samuel Griffith translation is the best one because Griffith was a marine officer in addition to being a scholar. Lidell-Hart's book Strategy also stands up to repeat reading and functions as a great roadmap of European military history.
A checklist approach to strategy is only useful if your adversaries are foolish enough to use a checklist themselves.
> A checklist approach to strategy is only useful if your adversaries are foolish enough to use a checklist themselves
Checklists aren't immutable. Having clear pre-war plans and procedures doesn't preclude changing them. But going in without them almost assures defeat.
Well, yes, a "checklist" (his word) might be too much of a strawman, but what would be useful would be a strategy in the game theoretical sense - a decision mechanism of actions conditional on different situations (e.g. "If the enemy is hiding in a network of tunnel under civilian population, you should wait until ... and then randomly ..., but if they ... then reverse course and instead ...").
Quoting again from the author's closing remarks:
> Victory in this environment requires more than technological superiority. It demands clarity of purpose, coherence between means and ends, disciplined execution, and moral restraint—the very fundamentals Clausewitz insisted upon. These are not optional in the urban century. They are decisive.
But that's so vague that I can't help but again yell "But what is decisive?!", "What should the commanders/politicians do in practice?". It's almost astrology in how it doesn't say anything objectionable.
In one sense, your checklist is whatever you wrote down before starting:
> Clausewitz also famously wrote, “No one starts a war—or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so—without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.”
You could also make a checklist of stuff like "reduce effectiveness of enemy's forces" and "minimize damage to your own ability to wage war" - but that's basics which any upperclassman at a military academy could recite, in regard to pretty much any war ever.
It's been 2 centuries since Clausewitz was writing about military theory. He's still widely read because his ideas are big-picture abstractions. Bridging the gap between his abstractions and what to do, with whatever current-day/recent-tech forces you happen to have - that's the job of your flag officers and their staffs. Though their "checklists" will keep changing, as the war progresses.
Well said. But I'm still left with the question - have we actually benefitted in any way from these two centuries of military theory? If anything, it seems to me that wars are less decisive, more prolonged and often more deadly than they've been in Clausewitz's time.
If we treat kinetic warfare as a game, I suppose you could argue that as in any other game, the more knowledgeable and more experienced the players are, the higher the likelihood of a draw. But then, seeing the harm that this is doing to the world, should we not see about changing the rules of war to reduce this likelihood and make things more decisive again, with the aim of reducing overall harm to civilians?
> have we actually benefitted in any way from these two centuries of military theory?
"How to win" theories - when correct - favor those with the motivation to take them seriously, and the smarts to apply them correctly. I hope that overlaps nicely (in Venn diagram terms) with your "we".
Plausibly, some wars have been prevented by military theory - because a nation analyzed their situation, and decided that starting a war would be a bad move.
> If anything, it seems to me that wars are less decisive, more prolonged and often more deadly than they've been in Clausewitz's time.
That's somewhat an effect of our larger nations and populations, the industrialized basis of modern warfare, and how heavily modern "get firearms, dig in" military technology favors the defense. BUT - pre-Clausewitz wars could also run a very long time - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Year%27s_War or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years'_War or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Year%27s_War or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punic_Wars or ...
> If we treat kinetic warfare as a game...
Human "games" are generally balanced, or darn close. Vs. very few modern wars were started by anyone who thought things were nicely balanced.
> ...should we not see about changing the rules...
If you mean military tech or practices aimed at cutting such harm - 'most every modern military is forever working on that.* If you mean treaties banning land mines, or napalm, or nerve gas, or whatever - when well done, those can be quite useful. But in game terms, they are (at most) just changing the costs (in economic, human, and political terms) of making a "break the treaty" move.
*Edit: Unfortunately, they're also working on some conflicting goals - like "require even more firepower for our enemies to defeat" and "apply even more firepower, to defeat our enemies".
Military theory struggles to provide serious benefit above trite things because the actual reality of war changes every single day.
The most successful military theory is still the extreme basics: Your troops will do better when they want to do war. You need to feed troops and give them plenty of ammo. Training matters.
Adapt or die
>But then, seeing the harm that this is doing to the world, should we not see about changing the rules of war to reduce this likelihood and make things more decisive again, with the aim of reducing overall harm to civilians?
Why would I follow your "rules of war" if it causes me to lose? There is no global authority to force anyone to follow rules, that's the whole point.
If there was, there would be no war.
It seems to me that making wars longer and less decisive helps weaker parties. Would the Vietnamese have preferred a shorter and more decisive war against the US, or Ukraine against Russia?
Shorter and more decisive wars also encourages war. If there's the possibility of winning quickly and thoroughly then you might choose to start a war. If you know it's going to be a bloody and tedious affair no matter what, you probably won't.
The modern world is remarkably peaceful compared to centuries past. We're at the point where having an active war of conquest in Europe is utterly shocking. Imagine going back to 1925 and saying "I can't believe a European country is taking parts of another European country by force, it's nuts, nobody does that!" They used to call that "Tuesday." The same is true in much of the rest of the world. And why? A lot of it is because it just doesn't work very well anymore. Russia has had very little return for 3+ years of invading Ukraine. Israel has spent two years invading Gaza so far and annexing the territory looks unlikely regardless of the military outcome. War used to be something a country might plausibly benefit from starting in some situations. It's really hard to make that case now, and that's how I want it to be.
People really don't have an appreciation for how destructive dragging a "classical" army across the countryside actually is since it hasn't happened much since the advent of the railroad.
There's a reason it was considered newsworthy and bold when Sherman did it and he was incredibly restrained because he was operating in his own country.
"What should the commanders/politicians do in practice?"
It simply depends. No situation is unique.
Israels strategy towards tunnels for example is to blow up and level everything. Ukraine does not deem that acceptable to the russian tunnels inside Ukraine.
What Russian tunnels in Ukraine? The battlefields are of very, very different sizes, and the Ukraine war is mostly not taking place in occupied cities at the moment.
They ain't in use like in Gaza, but just google for "russia tunnels ukraine" if you are curious.
They are used to get past strong lines of defense for example.
They were used during the urban fighting, but they don't play any serious role.
What do you mean it depends? What does it depend on?
I was hoping that being "the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute" [0], the author could offer some actual advice on strategy. Or what is the institute for? Hopefully not just for writing essays.
As for Israel's strategy towards tunnels, I actually have no understanding of what's going on there, but I can just say that whatever they're doing has not been effective in achieving a decisive victory, and is thus ipso facto not a good strategy. So I'm wondering what might a good strategy have been. The author now has two years of hindsight - could he not use that time and information to offer some alternative approach?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Spencer_(military_officer...
"What do you mean it depends? What does it depend on?"
The terrain, your avaiable forces and equipment, the morale of your soldiers, the main goal of the operation, the short, mid and long term plans. Outside reactions.
Strength of enemy. Outside reactions, will the enemy get more support if X happens or less, will it matter if key target is achieved before time Y, ...
There is no magic bullet for something as complex as urban warfare.
If you want to level all, just use a nuke. But there seems to be reasons, why that is not a valid option. If you go with lots of ground troops, you will have casualties. Here the question how much is acceptable to your own population.
If you go fast, you achieve a different effect then going slow. Etc. Etc etc.
The issue is mainly the hostages, as any tunnel or building may contain one that really slows the pace of advance considerably and ironically increases palestinian suffering
Also probably to note that much of the "ideological" battles in early Europe, whether it was legitimacy for the throne or religious conflicts tended to end in sobering sieges not unlike Gaza. The difference is they actually all did starve to death when they refused to surrender. Siege of La Rochelle as the climatic battle betwen King Louis and the Huguenots, the population declined from 22k to 5k, comparable to Gaza. But the Huguenots really did loose in the end when they were too weak to resist entry.
Russia is following Clausewitzian principles pretty assiduously.
They've got a set of 3 clear objectives and their tactics on the ground, e.g.
* prioritizing attrition over the capture of territory.
* avoiding urban fighting where possible (e.g. a multi-year avoidance of zaporizhia and kharkiv).
* minimizing civilian casualties.
Reflect not only the objectives, but the desire to avoid a lot of the "messiness" the author referred to. The fact that Ukrainian civilians fear busification more than drone strikes is a testament to that.
None of the other parties (Ukraine, Hamas, Israel) appear to follow clausewitzian logic, though.
If this was remotely true, they'd have won the war already. Russian operational and strategic decision-making has been a bonfire of blazing incompetence since the beginning, which is what led to things breaking down into WWI-style attritional warfare.
Leaving the moral dimension aside, this entire war has been basically two JV teams going at it since the beginning. NATO would have wiped the floor with the Russian military based on their performance so far, and it's surprising considering what a juggernaut everyone claimed the Russian military was pre-war.
> NATO would have wiped the floor with the Russian military
Considering my interests and those of my country I would like to believe, but reality do not provide much support for such hopes.
> and it's surprising considering what a juggernaut everyone claimed the Russian military was pre-war.
It is true, but they improved immensely during 3 years of intense conflict (the same for Ukraine). On the other hand NATO has most experience in bombing people in Africa and Middle-East.
War with Russia wouldn't be the same as battle of Timbuktu.
>If this was remotely true, they'd have won the war already.
They're invading the largest country in Europe armed by a military bloc constituting 60% of world military spending. Which part of that screamed quick to you?
>Russian operational and strategic decision-making has been a bonfire of blazing incompetence
They somehow managed to achieve a body bag exchange ratio of 44:1 and an extreme busification crisis in Ukraine with a volunteer force.
It's a more impressive showing than Iraq.
>led to things breaking down into WWI-style attritional warfare.
Putin announced the strategy of attritional warfare in March 2022 after the land bridge was secured, so one could hardly argue that this wasnt the plan.
Ukraine has done a good job of playing into their hands by trying to cling on to land long past the point where it becomes defensible and getting enveloped in cauldron after cauldron.
Hence the issue where Ukrainian civilians are now more afraid of their own government's roving kidnapping gangs than living under Moscow's rule.
That part is probably going to be the real kicker in the end.
The amount of total financial support provided to Ukraine is lower than that which Russia has earned from the same bloc. And military support is the smaller fraction of this total. So, the support has been important but without Ukraine deciding to resist Russia vehemently, the Donbass would have long been conquered.
I do agree with your criticism that in certain places, such as Bakhmut or Avdiivka, Ukraine has lost many men needlessly when in an indefensible position. Saying that, Russia is making at best incremental gains for huge casualties. They certainly aren't going to conquer the rest of Donbass by this year or even by the 4th anniversary.
>The amount of total financial support provided to Ukraine is lower than that which Russia has earned from the same bloc.
The amount of aid sent during the war totaled up to about $300 billion, which is roughly equal to the Russian military budget for the same period.
Thats not counting all of the "soon to be expired" stuff they handed over in 2022/2023, declaring it was worth $0 because it would have been disposed of.
>Saying that, Russia is making at best incremental gains for huge casualties.
For every body bag they get back theyve recently been handing over 44.
Territorial gains are only relevant for them right now insofar as it serves their overriding goal of attrition.
>They certainly aren't going to conquer the rest of Donbass by this year or even by the 4th anniversary.
If it serves the overall goal of attrition im sure theyd be happy to drag it out beyond February. Theyre not on a deadline.
The problem is that the more the Ukrainian army gets hollowed out by attrition now, the faster and more complete the eventual collapse will be.
> Which part of that screamed quick to you?
Congratulations, you’ve shown superior strategic capability than Putin’s entire pre-war military brass.
> where Ukrainian civilians are now more afraid of their own government's roving kidnapping gangs than living under Moscow's rule
Was this written by AI?
>Congratulations, you’ve shown superior strategic capability than Putin’s entire pre-war military brass.
Congratulations on deluding yourself into believing he's losing this war against all of the evidence I guess.
>Was this written by AI?
Have you used it so much that you cant distinguish it from real life any more?
Try talking to some Ukrainians some time - ones that live there.
> he's losing this war against all of the evidence
He’s not winning on the timelines his military brass originally predicted.
Putin and Ukraine are in a stalemate. That takes Russia off the table as a near peer to the U.S.
> Try talking to some Ukrainians some time
I have. They’re not on that part of TikTok.
> Putin and Ukraine are in a stalemate. That takes Russia off the table as a near peer to the U.S.
Ukraine, with currently most capable and experienced military in Europe, supported by western countries, is losing. Slowly and while making Russia pay, but losing nonetheless. And if you consider demographics, it kinda lost already. Most people that escaped west won't get back, and many men that were forced to stay will leave soon after they will be allowed to.
For last few decades US victories were even less clear and made against countries like Iraq and Afghanistan.
>He’s not winning on the timelines his military brass originally predicted.
Untrue. I remember them being asked for a deadline in a press conference in March 2022 and they said (verbatim) "it will take as long as it takes". Theyve not deviated from that position either, because Clausewitz.
That "3 days to kiev" thing was General Mark Milley's prediction to congress, which was later morphed by western propaganda into "Putin's goal" and is now presumed by the terminally naive to have been the overriding goal.
>Putin and Ukraine are in a stalemate
If it were stalemate the body bag exchange ratios would probably be a little lower than 44:1 and the TCC probably wouldnt be kidnapping quite so many men out doing a grocery run.
I suppose if you've completely swallowed Ruscist propaganda, this all tracks.
You cannot say something that can be considered even sligthly positive about Russia and its strategy.
I think you can explain Russia's poor performance somewhat from Clausewitzian principles:
"primordial violence, hatred, and enmity" - weren't really there - most Russians viewed Ukrainians as their brethren.
"Chance and Probability" - the Russians have proved pretty inflexible. I mean after they failed to take Kyiv in three days they could have gone home and saved a lot of bother, maybe keeping some lands in the south.
"Reason and Policy" - didn't make much sense. Few Russians wanted to go to war so Putin could lord it over the Ukrainians as well as the Russians. This looks more like a political move by Putin to keep power.
If Russia had actually had a clear objective to annex Ukraine they could have mobilised and knocked them out in no time but instead we have a mess and kind of stalemate which to me seems to be moving in Ukraine's favour as they can now hit most targets inside Russia.
> minimizing civilian casualties
Russians target civilian objects - apartment complexes, hospitals, metro entrances, passenger trains. Constantly do a second strike when emergency crews arrive. They use drones to hunt civillians who live near frontline.
Gazan civilian casualties eclipsed Ukrainian within about two weeks.
Militaries routinely use civilian objects for military purposes, so that these objects are targeted isnt meaningful in and of itself - like the time a pizza restaurant was targeted and it later emerged that the restaurant hosted a rather large military gathering.
Obviously because Gaza is virtually defenseless and Israel has roughly one active duty soldier for every seven adults in Gaza. It's less of a war than just a massacre.
Ukraine and Russia on the other hand are relatively evenly matched, so killing civilians is much harder.
Ukraine doesn't.
No, they do. They used to shell Donetsk routinely.
Lol. They don't call Russians orcs for nothing, you know.
Obviously, there is a plenty of content with this search: urban warfare site:il filetype:pdf
The checklist is one's own ethics and morale guideposts --- every interaction with others has to be done with a consideration for the long-term strategic goals rather than short-term gains --- Clausewitz argues that the will of the people of whom the military is an extension of and their ethics and mores have to be taken into account and all actions done in accord with what will make an acceptable news story.
Consider the old adage:
>Never do something which you wouldn't want your grandparents to read about in a newspaper, or to discuss with them over Sunday dinner.
By extension, a military force should:
>Never do anything which when shown on the evening news would result in a Congressional inquiry (or a War Crimes Tribunal).
I'm all for "Be excellent to each other", but in war, the first and foremost consideration is whether the strategy is effective. I'm not a big Clausewitz scholar, but I can't imagine that he or any other general would accept a strategy that prioritises the well-being of the opposing side to the point of their own side admitting defeat.
As I see it, the only way that we can have "Rules of War" is by proving that a war can be won while maintaining them. Otherwise (and unless you have a magic wand to make humans non-aggressive), these rules are worse than useless, because they limit the more ethical side, while making them lose to the less ethical.
Friend, I have respect to where you are coming from, and ask you to please think a little longer term.
You don't prioritize the well-being of the other side, but you do want to avoid radicalizing them. The more reasons they have to surrender, the more likely they are to surrender, thus ending the conflict sooner AND keeping the end conditions one they are comfortable living under.
If instead they feel they are in a fight to the death, then you have a much tougher battle on your hand because they will fight to the death. You'll still win (maybe) but it's going to cost you in personelle and time and money.
Next aspect. Moral of your troops. Everyone wants to be a hero, very few people join the military because they want to kill. And those that are in it to kill tend to be toxic leaders which is really bad for the rest of the team.
"Rules of war"/"rules of engagement" are methods that allow your troops to maintain their humanity and sense of purpose under horrific situations. You give up that and you are now undercutting the fighting power of your own forces.
The military did not come up with these ideas to make themselves weak. They came up with them and enforced them because they are the source of strength.
In WWII the Allies didn't take any steps to avoid radicalizing the other side. We implemented starvation blockades and fire bombed cities, killing millions of enemy civilians. They surrendered unconditionally because they were utterly destroyed and had no more capability it resist.
But that's the question - how do you fight honorably and win? How many examples can you offer (from any time in history), where the winning side conducted the campaign in a "gentlemanly fashion" (or however you want to call it), won, and got the respect of the losing side and lasting peace?
To address your concern-- if two people are fighting and one thinks "I won't hit below the belt" that person is at a tactical disadvantage. Even worse if they think the other side has also agreed to that rule.
So in that sense you are absolutely correct.
But I invite you to think bigger. If one side lays siege to another side's city, and offers terms of surrender, the city needs to believe that the terms will be honored otherwise they don't surrender.
Which is a large part of European history during the period from the middle ages up until Napoleon figured out how to use artillery, i.e. hundreds of years of examples where "fighting honorably" was the winning strategy.
How does WWII strike you?
Notice that Germany and Japan are now strong allies.
Also notice that many people think the cause of WWII was that the WWI surrender forced unsustainable terms on Germany thus fueling the resentment that lead to WWII.
> Also notice that many people think the cause of WWII was that the WWI surrender forced unsustainable terms on Germany thus fueling the resentment that lead to WWII.
And many historians dispute it. Partly because those terms were standard for the time and better then what Germans themselves planned to enact after they win.
And partly because the German population never believed they lost the war. They believed they would winning absent "stab in the back". That is why the allies insisted on actually conquering Germany with no in between solution. The victory had to be absolute.
American Civil War?
I wouldn't quite say that the former Confederate states fully respected the Union's victory as saying something good about the North [0], and in some ways still don't, but otherwise it is a good example.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy
and one more time, sorry, you triggered a rant.
if you can't count on your troops to be disciplined enough to follow your rules of engagement, how can you count on their discipline to follow your other orders? If you cannot show them that you are also disciplined, how do you expect them to maintain their respect for you as a leader?
If you don't have honor, what are you fighting for? Troop moral is what wins wars.
what's worse than death? Not having anything worth living for.
very very few people find honor in being the most evil person. And those few who do make very bad leaders; you either avoid having them in your armed forces or you limit their impact.
If one of your squadmates is an "I'll do anything to win" person, how can you trust them not to ditch you if that is their best survival option? Prisoner's dilema situations are common in battle
I encourage you to visit a US military cemetery. You will sometimes see shrines to the military virtues. Courage, honor, pride, family, discipline all rank pretty high.
The broader point is that an unethical military victory erodes your political support, which might lead you to win the battle but lose the war.
I think the lesson is that you can never be sure that you will meet your military objectives—failure is always a possibility—and the blowback from that failure will be more limited if you appear to have conducted your war with adequate respect for noncombatants.
Failing to conquer a nation (or depose its government, or secure some land, or defend a border, or whatever your objective is) may be shrugged off by your own nation, and you may even be able to normalize relations after some time. But if you abuse the noncombatant population, you often create bitter enemies, generational hatred, and global pressures on your society from third party observers. In the worst case this eventually escalates to mutual threats of genocide and total war.
Even if a nation wins a conflict through sheer brutality, they may lose the occupation, or the reconstruction, or good relations with important partners, or all of the above. And they may create an enemy who will one day return with a vengeance.
From my reading of history, there's no straightforward correspondence between the ethics of the winning side and its ability to have good relations with the losing side. As a clear anti-example, in later stages of WW2, the allied forces were very willing to engage in attacks on population centers to achieve a decisive victory faster (particularly: Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima and Nagasaki), and the resulting relationships between the allied countries and Germany and Japan could not have been more positive even if the most optimistic poet in 1944 were to written lyric poetry about the best possible future.
To be clear, I'm not advocating for cruelty, but I'm wondering if going back to an approach of "surrender or we'll kill you all" would save more lives than the current situation of "do everything you can to avoid doing too much harm at any one time", which ends up prolonging conflicts indefinitely.
> resulting relationships between the allied countries and Germany and Japan could not have been more positive
I think there may have been a "lesser evil" aspect to that. The Allies had good relationships with West Germany almost immediately after the war because they were saving the defeated Germans from the USSR. Japan reconciled with the USSR but there are still tensions between Japan, Korea, and China over the war.
In both cases the aggressors were the first to engage in atrocities, and their atrocities were much more severe than those inflicted upon them. So both seem like a unique case. Additionally, both were part of a global conflict, which is uncommon. In a global conflict there aren’t many bystanders who can effectively implement sanctions or apply diplomatic pressure.
> I'm wondering if going back to an approach of "surrender or we'll kill you all" would save more lives than the current situation
This is just as likely to provoke a “fight to the death” response from the defender which is often enough to prevent you from achieving your objectives. There are very few large conflicts where the objective is simply “eliminate the defenders”.
Anyone can pretend to have this and that ethics when its comfortable and easy, its only under extreme duress when all pretenders are revealed.
The obvious counter example is WWII. The victorious Allied forces conducted widespread strategic bombing campaigns and starvation blockades against Axis civilian targets. This was highly effective and saved the lives of many Allied personnel but judged against some modern criteria could have been considered "war crimes": for example, see the fire bombing of Dresden. None of the Allied leaders were put in front of a tribunal because the strategy worked and Congress was fully on board. The uncomfortable reality is that sometimes the only practical way to win and preserve your own forces is to massacre enemy civilians on an industrial scale.
Whether or not strategic bombing was actually effective in WWII is widely disputed.
The strategic bombing campaign absolutely reduced Axis manufacturing capacity and fuel supplies. There is no serious dispute about that point. There is some academic dispute about whether it was the most effective use of Allied resources but by the second half of the war the US had plenty resources to spare so that dispute is kind of moot.
In the case of the active conflicts (Gaza, Ukraine), it seems that there is a strong disconnect between internal-facing media and political will and external facing media on potential allies.
I would have liked some more unpacking of how this disconnect would have been interpreted by Clausewitz.
It also struck me that as an outsider to these conflicts, I assume that the combatants are acting rationally from the perspective of the adage (“No one starts a war—or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so—without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it“) and I judge the morality based on the inferred intent. That would also have been interesting to unpack…
Take a city. Take two.
Our "government" ( who ever "our" pertains to within the US) has been lied always lied and will continuing on lying to the people within the American society.... But so long as the people accept They will continuing on doing
Manufacturing consent for war is important, news at 11. Snark aside, it's getting harder to generate moral high ground to maintain the facade of LIO supremecy. The problem with modern American imperialism (and European colonialism) is it's hard to sell to your (multicultural) people we need to to sacrifice blood and treasure to remove/occupy bad/inferior people on the other side of the world. More after decades of mass media recognizing you're actually sacrificing blood and treasure to collateral damage a bunch of civilians. More so when the spoils of war seems meagre relative to cost, and all the resources prosecuting one could have been focused on domestic serenity. Clausewitz (mostly) lived in a context of fighting for survival/dominance against neighbours, which I guess is apt for RU/UK, ISR/GAZA discussed in this article but the actual belligerants in either war are less sustained by morality / or need moral cover as realist interest. Who needs moral cover is however their sponsors, and really we're talking about US+co who needs to convince constitutents of the moral cause to support proxy wars, instead of just admitting: we get to cripple RU by sacrificing UKR, or keeping MENA influence is worth starving and killing tons of kids.
Are we now seeing belligerents changing military strategies to ones that will make manufacturing consent difficult? As in, traditionally adopting tactics that lead to civilian casualties is a trade-off between increased effectiveness and damage to the populous. However can we say that now both aspects are positive because sympathetic victimhood makes it difficult to support a proxy war? Is this the way both fronts are fought at once in modern war?
There is quite obvious reason that Israel does what it does - commiting an equivalent of mass child sacrifice is quite good at uniting Israelis even if lot of them protest against that.
If you are hated by everyone outside your tribe, you will stick with your tribe, because you have lost other options.