This is a map of the Battle of the Somme in the summer of 1916.
Over 18 weeks, French and British forces advanced 10 kilometers capturing a little over 300 square kilometers. In total, this brief conflict on a small battlefield killed or wounded more than a million men.
From this we can make some observations. First, every space has a maximum capacity before it becomes oversaturated. So if a thousand men are struggling to take a hill, sending two thousand men doesn’t necessarily help with anything except create more casualties.
Another observation is that firepower has greatly increased since then. More can be done with less and concentrating more assets isn’t even a good idea because that is more that can be destroyed.
Looking at the big picture, wars are won by destroying the enemy’s means to resist. There are two ways to do this and they are not mutually exclusive.
The first is to destroy the enemy’s men and equipment. Russia is doing this. And note that high destruction of men and equipment does not automatically mean territorial gains. If there is a cauldron or “fire bag” that the enemy continually pours more men into, then there is not a need to change this. If they want to continue pouring men into the cauldron, why stop them?
Ukraine has a strange strategy in this regard. At first they defended untenable positions long after they should have retreated. Now Ukraine has emptied their Donbass fortifications to go play in Kursk. This is great for TickTock videos of looting Russian grocery stores, but it also means that those fortifications which should have held out for months are now falling in days, sometimes hours.
The second method is to destroy the enemy’s industrial capacity. Most of Ukraine’s military industrial complex is not located in Ukraine, so seizing territory for its own sake does not really make sense like it would in a war against an independent sovereign country that is self sufficient.
Soon short, this is a modern war, and like other modern wars recently, it defies cookie cutter ways to measure it. Especially for an audience with a five second attention span that demands daily updates when there really isn’t that much concrete information
Ian Kummer
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