>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.
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.
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.
Including (under most interpretations) women who marry someone who is not a Muslim man, men who do not follow things like prayers and proscriptions on loans, etc etc.
This isn’t theoretical either, it’s actively practiced by wide portions of the religious population in most (but not all) Islamic countries.
These are fundamentally at odds with western thought, are they not?
The ideal ‘Good Muslim’ in most Muslim countries is nearly diametrically opposed to ‘Good Man/Woman’ in nearly every western country - idea-logically and in the details.
As someone who has lived in a country with a large Muslim population, it’s not made up.
To the point being hit on/flirting with a Muslim woman in these countries can get you targeted with physical violence in some cases.
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.
> 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.
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
>sums up what is wrong with modern conflict --- the abandonment of the moral high ground
The idea that the west fought "moral" wars was always a hollow lie - whether in Vietnam, Serbia, Iraq or Libya - if you dug under the surface of why these wars happened and how they were prosecuted it quickly becomes obvious that the supposed humanitarian concerns were propaganda window dressing covering for naked imperial ambition.
Nowhere has this been proven more conclusively than with than the unconditional support provided for the genocide in Gaza.
>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
This story - Fukuyama's book - has become a kind of symbol of the nadir of western hubris.
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.
> 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.
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.
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…
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.
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".
"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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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?
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.
[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.
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.
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.
Including (under most interpretations) women who marry someone who is not a Muslim man, men who do not follow things like prayers and proscriptions on loans, etc etc.
This isn’t theoretical either, it’s actively practiced by wide portions of the religious population in most (but not all) Islamic countries.
These are fundamentally at odds with western thought, are they not?
The ideal ‘Good Muslim’ in most Muslim countries is nearly diametrically opposed to ‘Good Man/Woman’ in nearly every western country - idea-logically and in the details.
As someone who has lived in a country with a large Muslim population, it’s not made up.
To the point being hit on/flirting with a Muslim woman in these countries can get you targeted with physical violence in some cases.
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.
> 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.
The challenge is that per well documented Islamic teachings (and written material), those teachings are actively blasphemous. Not exaggerating either.
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.
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"
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.
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>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
Western beliefs? Do they include colonizing other people and taking their land and freedom?
>sums up what is wrong with modern conflict --- the abandonment of the moral high ground
The idea that the west fought "moral" wars was always a hollow lie - whether in Vietnam, Serbia, Iraq or Libya - if you dug under the surface of why these wars happened and how they were prosecuted it quickly becomes obvious that the supposed humanitarian concerns were propaganda window dressing covering for naked imperial ambition.
Nowhere has this been proven more conclusively than with than the unconditional support provided for the genocide in Gaza.
>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
This story - Fukuyama's book - has become a kind of symbol of the nadir of western hubris.
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
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?
> 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.
"make a desert and call it peace". There's still two million people in Gaza.
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.
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…
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.
A checklist approach to strategy is only useful if your adversaries are foolish enough to use a checklist themselves.
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".
"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.
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...
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.
You cannot say something that can be considered even sligthly positive about Russia and its strategy.
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.
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.
American Civil 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”.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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?