Comments by "" (@efghggdxlmfn33) on "Kursk: Tactical Success/ Strategic Suicide" video.

  1. The war of maneuver versus the war of attrition. To most Western experts, attritional strategy is counterintuitive. Historically, the West preferred the short ‘winner takes all’ clash of professional armies. Recent war games such as CSIS’s war over Taiwan covered one month of fighting. The possibility that the war would go on never entered the discussion. This is a reflection of a common Western attitude. Wars of attrition are treated as exceptions, something to be avoided at all costs and generally products of leaders’ ineptitude. Unfortunately, wars between near-peer powers are likely to be attritional, thanks to a large pool of resources available to replace initial losses. The attritional nature of combat, including the erosion of professionalism due to casualties, levels the battlefield no matter which army started with better trained forces. As conflict drags on, the war is won by economies, not armies. States that grasp this and fight such a war via an attritional strategy aimed at exhausting enemy resources while preserving their own are more likely to win. The fastest way to lose a war of attrition is to focus on manoeuvre, expending valuable resources on near-term territorial objectives. Recognising that wars of attrition have their own art is vital to winning them without sustaining crippling losses.
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  2. The AFU banged its head on Russian defenses in Kherson for months throughout the summer and autumn 2022 and took atrocious losses. An entire grouping of AFU brigades was mauled in Kherson without achieving a breakthrough, and this even with Russian forces in a uniquely difficult operational disposition where they had their backs to a river. Kherson was only abandoned months later due to concerns that the Kakhovka dam might fail or be sabotaged (it did in fact end up failing), and due to Russia’s need at the time to economize forces.
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  3.  @jackzgb1232  Western military-industrial complex is profit-oriented, where private companies manufacture military products and can stimulate government defense spending to maintain their business. This can create economic incentives to sustain prolonged endless wars. In contrast, Russian/Soviet/Chinese/N.Korean military-industrial complexes, managed by the state, focus on achieving strategic military objectives and winning wars rather than generating profit. -80% of 3 & 4 star generals leaving the gov join the arms industry -700 former Pentagon and other gov. officials now work at a top 20 weapons contractor -Congress members routinely become arms industry lobbyists
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