- William Schryver: The Object of War Archived Message
Posted by sashimi
on June 12, 2023, 4:34 pm
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12 Jun 2023 In war, territory is the arena, not the fight. For those who have followed my commentary on this war for any length of time, I beg you to excuse me for yet again returning to a topic that has been a recurring theme for me. I feel compelled to do so both because of my frustration that it encapsulates a concept that still remains poorly understood, and more immediately because earlier today I came across a Twitter post wherein the following was stated: "The Ukrainian Army has taken more territory since June 6th than Russia has since the start of this year." I won't even bother to link to it, because it doesn't matter who said it and where. It is an expression that has been almost ubiquitous among Ukraine/NATO supporters in this war - including substantial numbers of supposed "military experts". In essence, it is nothing more than what is commonly referred to as a "cope" - a delusion to which one appeals to "cope" with the cognitive dissonance induced by abundant contradictory indications. Alas, there are mountains of falsehoods consequent to #TheImaginaryWar psyop that are widely held as indisputable truths. But they will eventually give way to the incontrovertible facts. Indeed, in the western media, we have recently begun to see many evidences of this. As historians view these matters in retrospect, it will be much more widely and better understood that NATO and its Ukrainian proxies lost this war - and lost it badly - primarily because of their unvarying devotion to the logical fallacy embodied in the frequently expressed idea that somehow taking and holding "territory" is a meaningful measure of success in war. As I first wrote almost a full year ago in one of my earliest formal commentaries on this war - and as I have incessantly reiterated ever since - the object of war is to destroy the enemy army. If that objective is most effectively achieved by fighting on the offensive and conquering territory, then that is what you should do. If, on the other hand, you can more efficiently and economically destroy the enemy army from a strong defensive position, even if that means ceding territory in order to assume such a position, then THAT is what you should do. Absent some overriding strategic imperative, the acquisition and/or retention of "territory", per se, is a purposeless objective. Indeed, if prosecuted wisely and professionally - and particularly if your firepower greatly exceeds that of your enemy (as is overwhelmingly the case for the Russians in this war) - one can almost always more efficiently and economically destroy enemy forces from a defensive posture. The Russians have consistently excelled in this respect over the course of this war. Of course, I understand perfectly well that a great many - even among pro-Russian analysts - continue to regard the late-2022 fighting retreats in the Kharkov and Kherson regions as humiliating reversals for the Russians. I, on the other hand, from the earliest days of those AFU "counter-offensives", and continuing to the present time, remain thoroughly convinced that both operations were foreseen, plans preconceived, and retreats admirably executed by the Russian high command. Indeed, in my view their hand was forced. -- Cont'd at https://imetatronink.substack.com/p/the-object-of-war |
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