Ukraine’s Forces and Firepower Are Misallocated, U.S. Officials Say Front page headline in the New York Times.
During the United States Civil War, most European countries had observers. Very few European observers thought they were looking at the future; almost all of them thought the Union Army, under General Ulysses Grant, was a primitive – third-world if you will – army that could not compare to proper European armies. They – both the Union and Confederate troops – were not disciplined and couldn’t even stay in formation.
The European observers felt so superior that they did not see the changes in war brought on by the changes in weaponry. When World War I started, they tried to fight it with their tried and true tactics. Tactics developed before the machine gun, and they suffered tremendous casualties. This superiority complex – in terms of everything, including raw intelligence – is a first-world affliction.
The subheading in the NYT article was that American strategists say Ukraine’s troops are too spread out and need to concentrate along the counteroffensive’s main front in the south. That pisses me off; American strategists have no idea what is happening. They have not even been to the theater. These experts have never won a war; hell, their side has had complete air control in every battle in which they have ever fought. Yet, here they are, thousands of miles from the front, telling the Ukrainians how to fight their war.
It’s embarrassing.
I just love your rants! And your writing. You’ve raised an interesting point and I would like to get this thought out in front of the American military pundits.
Agreed, absolutely. Read Max Hastings quite new, very long, very thorough book called ‘Abyss’ on the ever-memorable Missile Crisis in Cuba and discover, again, how wrongheaded most military heads were.
Correct me if I’m wrong but in my lifetime these guys, despite air superiority in every one, have never won a war [except that one, back when I’d barely arrived here, when they gratuitously employed the ‘nuclear option’] despite starting quite a few.