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phantom000 wrote: ↑Mon Mar 28, 2022 11:37 pm
Victory is about achieving a goal and to do that you need to know what your goal is and how you can achieve it, otherwise the fighting can never end. It's like a NASCAR race without a checkered flag, you just go around and around in circles until everyone's dead.
Yes, precisely.
Historically, one of the traditional ways of dealing with being able to capture territory that can't be held is to destroy it, in order to deny it to the enemy. The Romans didn't use the tactic so much, but Alexander the Great did, as did the Mongols - partly as a terror tactic to convince other cities to surrender and submit without a fight, partly to eliminate a potential threat at their backs.
It's one of the big differences between warfare in the modern world and the ancient. Now armies invade someplace, can't hold the territory and pacify it, and end up retreating after a variable length of time in which their forces get chewed up by guerilla fighting. Notably, they do NOT kill everyone there, raze all constructions to the ground, and poison the earth.
"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four. If that is granted, all else follows." -- George Orwell, 1984
phantom000 wrote: ↑Mon Mar 28, 2022 11:37 pm
Victory is about achieving a goal and to do that you need to know what your goal is and how you can achieve it, otherwise the fighting can never end. It's like a NASCAR race without a checkered flag, you just go around and around in circles until everyone's dead.
Yes, precisely.
Historically, one of the traditional ways of dealing with being able to capture territory that can't be held is to destroy it, in order to deny it to the enemy. The Romans didn't use the tactic so much, but Alexander the Great did, as did the Mongols - partly as a terror tactic to convince other cities to surrender and submit without a fight, partly to eliminate a potential threat at their backs.
It's one of the big differences between warfare in the modern world and the ancient. Now armies invade someplace, can't hold the territory and pacify it, and end up retreating after a variable length of time in which their forces get chewed up by guerilla fighting. Notably, they do NOT kill everyone there, raze all constructions to the ground, and poison the earth.
Sparta were notorious for this. Every time Athens beat them back they just set fire to the olive fields and went back home.
Says a lot about Russia that they are as primitive as the Ancient Greeks.
Spartan society sucked, even by the standards of the time, and they couldn't exercise their admittedly superior soldiers because they had to stay home to keep the slaves in line; they generally ended up being recalled to deal with rebellions back in Sparta.
I do note that the people in charge of Russia seem to believe wealth is stolen rather than created. Even with the general devastation left by the Soviets, Russia is rich in resources and has some of the best scientific programs in the world. They're going unused. Their computer science talent is being dedicated to hacking other countries' systems. Fallow fields, man.
"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four. If that is granted, all else follows." -- George Orwell, 1984
Sparta kind of exposed the inherent flaws in racial-based empire. The Spartans could conquer shit just fine but they could never increase the number of their soldiers and only spread themselves out more because only Spartans could be Spartans. The Romans loved the Spartans and thought they were cool as hell but when they ran out of soldiers from Rome, they made everyone in italy into a Roman citizen.
Even as soldiers the Spartans were a paper tiger. Their reputation went a long way, but their actual performance against other Greek cities was about 50/50. It would have been worse without Persia giving them a fleet to fight Athens. Macedon basically stepped on them with a regional garrison and then they were never relevant again except as a tourist trap.
...for space is wide, and good friends are too few.
hammerofglass wrote: ↑Thu Mar 31, 2022 3:34 pm
Even as soldiers the Spartans were a paper tiger. Their reputation went a long way, but their actual performance against other Greek cities was about 50/50. It would have been worse without Persia giving them a fleet to fight Athens. Macedon basically stepped on them with a regional garrison and then they were never relevant again except as a tourist trap.
I admit it never gets old telling Internet Nazis (legally distinct from actual Nazis) how the Sacred Bands of Thebes whooped the Spartans ass.
I actually just read a really good thing about how real life Sparta was different from the pop culture image of it. Author is a professional university historian, so there's real sourcing to follow up on if the more informal bloggy one peaks your interest.
The remarkable detail of the declassified intelligence assessments must also be especially galling to Putin, a former KGB officer and intelligence chief. And they leave open the possibility that Western intelligence agencies have the capacity to see deep into the Kremlin's war effort and internal politics, which is likely to infuriate the Russian leader and could open further cracks in his regime.
The willingness of Western governments to be so open about what they are seeing inside Ukraine and Moscow has surprised even some veteran spies.
"It makes intelligence professionals, even former ones like me, nervous, because, of course, it's so ingrained in us to protect sources and methods," Steve Hall, former chief of Russia operations for the CIA, told CNN's Ana Cabrera Thursday.
Sounds like it's one of the classic conundrums of intelligence, that acting usefully on it requires the chance of giving away how you got it (e.g. the apocryphal story about the bombing of Coventry; whilst the details aren't as normally portrayed it's still a useful illustration of the problem).
If intelligence is to have any value it needs to be acted on, which always runs the risk of problems caused by showing that you actually know. But if you don't do that there's no point in knowing anyway.
It's rarely the case with important decisions that you can follow some pre-determined guidelines and get the right answer without actually having to think and make a real decision (whatever the Trek Prime Driective zealots would think - today's review is pertinent there).
