In the previous posting on this subject, we looked at the problem Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has with starting a war of conquest when neither he nor Russia (despite their fantasies) were prepared for it, and for trying to deceive others into thinking it was anything other than an attempt to increase his own personal wealth and power, for which others were paying with their lives, liberty, and property. Today we look at the problem Putin has on his hands due to continuing a war of conquest (or any other kind), when it was painfully obvious from Day One the attempt has failed — at least to anyone applying reason to the situation.
First, of course, Putin’s strategy relied completely on taking Kyiv immediately. No, not three days as advertised, but immediately. The only problem a successful campaign of the sort Putin imagined he was carrying out should experience is the inability to move fast enough to take the ground abandoned by the victims, or to flank the victims, cut them off, and force a surrender. The moment there is anything other than minor, token, or temporary resistance, momentum slows, and the effort fails, even if any gains are held.
This is what happened in World War I at Gallipoli, when a delay in the invasion of Turkey gave the Turks time to regroup and organize their defense. What resulted was a stalemate and a bloodbath that decimated ANZACS. We see the same thing in the eastern part of Ukraine, where Russia has been losing more than 30,000 troops in a single month. Russia is losing more soldiers in two weeks in Ukraine than they lost in ten years in Afghanistan . . . and for what? To continue an invasion that has been losing ground?
An invasion, any attack in war, must gain its objective quickly, or it is a de facto loss. You may kill a lot of people and destroy everything in sight, but all you’ve gained is a lot of dead people and created devastation (Ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant — “They make a desert and call it peace”). Recall the scene in the film Patton in which George C. Scott gives a speech to the troops and tells them he doesn’t want to hear that anyone is “holding their own.” That wasn’t a pep talk so much as a realistic assessment of the sort of war the real Patton knew they had to fight and win. If you aren’t making immediate and steady, even rapid gains, you are losing. When an attacker loses momentum, he loses the battle and almost always the war.
In an invasion, an invader can’t stop, even for breath. The most valuable and expensive commodity in war is time. The aggressor must use as little of it as possible, while the defender needs as much of it as he can get. Not to keep dragging Hollywood into this, but we see this repeatedly in The Longest Day.
The Allied plan depended on getting off the beach as fast as possible and moving inland to take positions from which it would be suicidal for the Germans to dislodge them. Had they not been able to do so, the high command was ready to call off the invasion and wait for another day. It would have been a disaster, but not a complete one, and would have seriously damaged the war effort — the Normandy invasion was the largest military operation in history and was not intended to have even the slightest chance of failure or delay. On the German side, the delay in releasing their armor for a counterattack proved to be fatal. As the military adage has it, success depends on “getting there fastest with the mostest.”
When the British staged a premature invasion of France early in World War II, it was almost immediately obvious it had failed. Not being insanely stupid, the British pulled out as fast as they could rather than try to hold on to their few gains. They managed to turn a military debacle into a rallying cry and carried on the fight another day.
From the very first, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was inept, almost a comedy of errors, if the stakes and the cost weren’t so high. His soldiers were told they were on maneuver, and it was not a real military operation. Most of them lacked complete or adequate equipment, while all of them were mentally unprepared. The last thing you want in battle is unprepared troops — especially when you are the aggressor! That is why you try to take the enemy by surprise, so that the opponent’s soldiers are the ones who are unprepared, not you.
In Ukraine, however, it was obvious Putin was going to invade. The people of Ukraine, while hurrying either to escape or fight, knew what was going on. That alone should have told Putin to call it off. Instead, in a bizarre twist, his own soldiers were the ones taken by surprise, both by the Ukrainian response and by their own leadership.
Then, instead of securing the areas they occupied, the Russians began looting and terrorizing, with Ukrainian plumbing being a favorite prize and rape turned into a weapon of war. Evidently, the Russians are so full of . . . well, you know, that they needed Ukrainian toilets to help them take care of it, so to speak. The Russian invasion turned in a matter of hours from a “stroke of genius” (according to at least one U.S. politician who doesn’t seem to understand basic military science) to a blood-soaked fantasy, a complete folly, with overtones of terrorism.
Invasion and attack are a matter of minutes, at most hours. Napoleon, a true military genius, always maintained Marengo was, in effect, two battles: “I lost the battle of Marengo at 5 o’clock but won it back at 7.” The Man of Destiny knew he was beaten, so he regrouped, and came back and won. He never repeated a mistake.
The opponent who finally beat him, Wellington, had to retreat many times, but was never routed; the Iron Duke was, as many historians noted, masterful in retreat and preparation for another day, when other commanders would simply have turned tail and run away, never to fight again. A retreat handled properly can turn a defeat today into a victory tomorrow — especially when the defeated party learns something each time and the victor starts making mistakes. In the American Revolution, George Washington lost more battles than he won — but he had a winning strategy and won the battle that counted: the last one.
Putin never learned this lesson and keeps making the same mistakes over and over. His army tries to gain small victories today at tremendous cost and at the expense of the big victory tomorrow. He doesn’t know how to cut his losses, even when it’s obvious he has failed — as is proven by the fact that the Russian invasion lost momentum almost immediately, and not only didn’t gain ground at the required rate, it lost ground. The Russian dictator is even repeating endlessly one of Hitler’s most fatal errors — shifting from purely military targets to civilian ones to terrorize the population into submission.
During World War II, Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to switch from hitting the RAF to going after the cities — the “Blitz” of London. Ironically, after the war, the British high command revealed that when Hitler changed tactics, the RAF was almost on its last legs, and were even thinking of recommending England consider negotiating for terms. Another two weeks, and some of the experts thought they were finished.
When Hitler switched to hitting civilian targets, he bought the RAF time to regroup, to say nothing of infuriating the British and building their determination to resist at all costs. In addition, every bomb that fell on London was a bomb that did not fall on a military target. Hitler strengthened the British ability and will to carry on a war by the very tactic he used to try and weaken it. A missile Putin uses to take out a children’s hospital is one that can’t be used to destroy a Ukrainian artillery post.
Instead of continuing an obvious debacle, and killing and kidnapping children, Putin should have called off the invasion, made some fatuous excuse nobody would believe (“They misunderstood orders”), regrouped, and tried again later . . . assuming he survived the usual purge. Putin probably realizes this, if nothing else, and keeps the war going to stay in power. He is aware the moment he stops, he is a goner, and the Russian economy is ruined whichever way it turns out.
At this point Putin is probably a goner, anyway, win or lose (although defining what would constitute a “win” for him at this point is a trifle vague), as the territory he has “liberated” is devastated, the Russian economy is in ruins (except for those profiteering from the war), a key demographic — men between the ages of 18 and 40 — has been decimated (and it was bad before), and except for other criminal and terrorist states like North Korea, has no friends left.
Continuing a failed military operation, special or otherwise, is a serious and extraordinarily stupid mistake . . . but Putin has made yet another, even more stupid mistake, one that suggests a degree of “knavish imbecility” that, when combined with his other mistakes, may be unequaled in military history . . . although knavish imbeciles keep trying it. We will look at that in the next posting on this subject.
#30#