Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "Art of War - Chapter 5 - Posture of the Army - Sun Tzu Revisited" video.

  1. Wars are basicly the same as in the past. An encircled army is doomed unless it breaks out, and this is as true today as thousand of years ago, because an army still needs food and supplies to survive regardless of how many super-tanks it got. And the principle of concentration of force and "getrennt marschieren vereint schlagen" is as true today as in the past. And attacks on the flanks is as big of a threat today as in the past. And deception may have taken new forms today with stealth aircrafts and dummy tanks, but it still plays just the same important role as in the past, since it can confuse an enemy to misalocate its forces and abondon their strong defences and getting lured into ambushes and getting entire armies destroyed. On a general level one can say that all the good commanders in history have applied the same recipies behind their successes. They have first of all commited themselves to achieving a clearcut goal - instead of acting confused in trying to achieve a multiple number of changing goals. Most of them have been skilled in the art of the element of surprise, and constantly taken the advantage over their confused enemies, and acting with such speed and aggressivness that the enemy does not have any time to make any well organized counter-measures. They have been good at playing the game of taking calculated risks. And they have been good at concentrating their own forces so they can fight the enemy with a superior force. They have been masters of co-ordinating armies so they close enough to support each other if the enemy starts an attack, but still they move independently enough to not clog up the roads with long supply trains so troop movements gets slowed down. And when a good oppurtunity of fighting the enemy appears, then multiple armies can attack him simultanuously and inflict huge losses on the enemy - something that was as true in Cannae 216 BC as in Königgrätz in 1866 two-thousand years later. I don't consider military history a waste of time, because I think there are lot to learn from the past. And even if some things do change over time, I still think there are lots of things that can be learned from recent wars. Tomorrows wars will not be much different from the wars of today, and the wars of today will have much in common with wars recently fought yesterday. Studying Vietnam, the Balkan wars, Chechenya, Iraq, Afghanistan can tell us a lot about the effectiveness of different modern weaponsystems - from tanks, to planes, and helicopters. Just as the armies in World war 1 that learned from the history lessons of the past wars (Manchuria, the Boer war, the American civil war etc) did better than those armies who didn't. The Brits and Germans understood the importance of digging trenches and using uniforms with colours that blended in with the enviroment - while the French didn't, and they therefore suffered enormous losses thanks to their colourful red-blue uniforms and their lack of training to use a spade, and their proportionaly low amount of engineer troops compared to the German army.
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