My basic take on the unfolding events in the Ukraine is a technological and tactical one. I think we are in a situation of August 1914 plus weapons of mass destruction (WMD’s), not a situation of September 1939, with or without WMD’s. The condition of immediate survival on the battlefield is to go underground, and that means you and your weapons can’t go anywhere, or at least only so fast as you can dig a tunnel. Most of the conventional wisdom in the newspapers, until very recently, seems to have been 1939, with an occasional bow to irregular warfare and Vietnam. The Russians were able to occupy certain eastern portions of the Ukraine became, in the aftermath of the Second World War, Josef Stalin had planted Russian colonies there. Once the Russian troops had infiltrated  there, supported by a friendly populace, it proved impossible to dislodge them.


In 1815, the year of Waterloo, the effective range of aimed fire (Say a nine-pounder cannon firing case shot, a kind of giant shotgun shell) was about 50-100 yards (*). Since it was expected that an engagement at that range would normally end had to hand combat, concealment or camouflage was of limited relevance.An English soldier wearing  a red coat, and fighting with the bayonet, needed to be able to look out of the corner of the eye and see that there were other redcoats with their bayonets, standing beside him, protecting his back. The Duke of Cumberland's last instructions to the troops before the battle of Culloden in 1745, had been to maintain the “hedgehog“ formation they had been taught. The effective  range of unaimed fire (eg. cannon bombarding a besieged town with cannonballs) was about 1000-2000 yards.

(*) Note on  ranges: the ranges  quoted here are typical actual ranges at which firing was commenced under field conditions, not those those attained in test shooting on a firing range or proving ground. In this case, we would be referring to Captain Mercer’s horse artillery battery at Waterloo, not Captain  Whinyates and his rockets at the preliminary battle of Gennapes.

By August 1914, the effective ranges were up to 200-400 yards for aimed fire and 10,000 yards for unaimed fire. In September 1939, the advent of tank armor reduced the effective range of aimed fire back down to 50-100 yards, except for special circumstances. Now, however, precision guided munitions (PGM’s) restore the range of aimed fire to that of un-aimed artillery fire, to at least 2000-10,000 yards.

At the time of Gettysburg in 1863,  the standard musket was rifled, but it was  still a muzzle-loader, Which meant it had to be fired standing up. Breechloaders were only available in small quantities (Maynard or Henry carbines), or in flawed designs (German Dreyse Needle Gun, French Chassepot). The system was just not set up to furnish the average soldier with a new rifle every five years, no matter what the technology was doing. As late as the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, the art of war was still substantially the same as at Waterloo.

By August 1914, and the outbreak of the First World War, the effective ranges were up to 200-400 yards for aimed fire, typically that of a machine gun,  and 10,000 yards for un-aimed fire, as represented by the classic French "75" howitzer. The First World War was mostly a static positional war, but it had mobile parts, in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. These occurred in places which were simply too empty for large forces to be in continuous contact with each other. In many cases, these places were actually deserts, or at least steppes. Spectacular victories, such as Tannenburg or Beersheba, tended to result from moving off in unexpected directions where the enemy had not seen fit to place sizable troop formations.

There were two anticipatory battles those of Messines and Cambrai in 1917. At Messines, the British had spent a year placing a million pounds of high explosives under the German front line. When these were exploded the British troops were able to pass through the wreckage easily but when they were out of the devastation zone, the same old difficulties recurred.  It would have taken another year to lay on another explosion. At Cambrai the first tanks broke through the German front line, but by the time they had gone a couple of miles at walking pace they were all broken down.  They certainly did not have the capacity to go a hundred  miles at the speed of a horse.

In the Second World War, beginning in September 1939, open flanks were restored by armored vehicles’ comparative imperviousness to small quantities of firepower, and ability to move rapidly past it, particularly as exemplified in the two Ardennes offensives (Sickelschnitt, 1940, and the Battle of the Bulge, 1944). In many respects the Second World War was a continuation of the First World War, after twenty years breathing space, carried out over the same issues, only leading to a comparatively  durable peace. At the level of technology,  the Second World War extended the remaining trends of the nineteenth century by adding the internal combustion engine. A tank did not render the machine gun obsolete— on the contrary  a tank  had a machine gun on the top of the turret.  The advent of tank armor reduced the effective range of aimed fire back down to 50-100 yards, except for special circumstances. Tanks could only advance over congested ground with an infantry screen, to protect them from concealed recoil-less rifles, bazookas, and similar infantry antitank weapons. These weapons only had a range of 50-100 yards, much  the same as the muskets of Waterloo. They were combined with machine guns, and both remained concealed until the attacker's infantry screen was about to discover them. A specialized heavy anti-tank gun (eg. the German "88"), weighing a couple of tons, had a potential range of a thousand or two thousand  yards. But it was problematic whether it would have the field of view to utilize that range.

Probably the most spectacular instance of mobile warfare in densely populated country was the St. Lo  break-out from Normandy in 1944. The allied air forces dropped bombardments on sections of the the German front line roughly comparable in scale to multiple tactical nuclear weapons. When a practice-able breach was created, the tanks went  dashing through,  and swept along, brushing off such defending forces as  could be found in a rear area. They did not stop until they were on the frontiers of Germany.

Nowadays, bombardment on the scale necessary to breach the front line is best carried out by Fuel—Air Explosives, which are and are not weapons of mass destruction. It all depends on how they are used, whether or not they cause mass human casualties, especially mass civilian casualties. Use of fuel air explosives on minefields is not very controversial. Saturation bombing a square mile or so with fuel-air explosives may require tens of tons; as compared to thousands of tons for conventional explosives; or with  tens to hundreds of pounds of nuclear weapons.

Parenthetically, the scaling laws for explosions often favor very small charges. I looked at Brassey’s Infantry Weapons, to find the smallest hand grenade listed. It turned out to be a Dutch model, weighing only four ounces, with a lethal radius of five meters. Assuming one could miniaturize a proximity fuse sufficiently to use with this grenade, and pack them up to form a cluster bomb, we might be talking about three to four tons per square mile.

There were certain special cases which tended to prove the rule. When the line of battle ran through mountains, it was sometimes possible to  set up heavy anti-tank guns in a mountain pass where there was a view for miles. It was thus possible to use the full potential range of the gun barrel. Examples would be Kasserine pass in Tunisia in 1943, and  Mitla Pass in the  Sinai,  during the 1967 Arab/Israeli war.

In the Pacific Island battles of the Second World War, such as Tarawa or Iwo Jima, so many troops were confined in such a small space that it became impossible to maneuver. What ensued was  a classic First World  War battle for one mile, or five  miles, or ten miles; but then, the victor reached the other side of the island. Airfields and harbors were constructed; and a period of naval war ensued; and in due  course, land warfare resumed a thousand  miles away on the next island.

Cities were another special case. You can fight from a building quite well after it has become too damaged to live in. The classic case would be the chateau of Hoguemont at Waterloo.  Burnt-out buildings thus form good strong points for defensive lines. This naturally applies with more force to assemblages of buildings-- that is, towns-- and still more to cities. Not only are there many large buildings, but vehicular movement is constrained to narrow and congested corridors-- streets. Large cities, of course, developed underground railroads and suchlike. The urban reconstruction of the Soviet Union, in particular, after the Second World War was undertaken by the adherents of Le Corbusier. There were suburbs composed of rows of massive apartment buildings set along main roads, and subways, or at least streetcar lines, speedily connecting the suburbs to the city center. As it turned out, these buildings make tolerably good fortresses. The defenders can go up to the top floor and launch inexpensive anti-tank weapons at the enemy in the street below. Conventionally, what you do when you want to put an object of about the size and weight of a heavy anti-tank gun (say an air conditioner) on the roof of an apartment  building, is that you hire a construction crane to lift the object outside the building. However a modern antitank missile is man-portable and can always be carried up the fire stairs  by grunting, swearing young men, in much the same fashion as a sofa or a chest of drawers. A laser designater is still more portable. It is practically impossible to directly assault a city of this type without attacking its civilian population. Vladimir Putin blames the Ukrainian government for shielding itself behind non-combatants, but he would be more correct to blame Josef Stalin.

Using the principle of a Fuel-Air explosive, that is, using a explosion to momentarily create the conditions for a bigger explosion, it appears that there are at least three chemical tracks, [Fuel--Liquid Oxygen (Fuel--LOX), Fuel--Hydrogen Peroxide, and Fuel-- Red Fuming Nitric Acid(Fuel--RFNA)], to making a “Bunker Buster” bomb small and light enough to be delivered by a cruise missile. Two of these tracks do not involve cryogenics. A tank of fuel, and a tank of liquid oxidizer are nested together, wrapped in a jacket of conventional high explosive. When the high explosive goes off, it smashes the tanks, violently mixes their contents, and contains the mixture long enough for the reaction to go forward at very high pressures and temperatures (**). Capt.Bertrand R. Brinley (Rocket Manual For Amateurs,  Ballantine Books 1960) provides a table of Specific Impulses for various fuel-oxidizer combinations in a rocket motor. These will probably be a reasonable proxy measure for “brissance,” or blasting power. It seems that Fuel-Red Fuming Nitric Acid and Fuel-Hydrogen Peroxide have about half the performance of Fuel-LOX. Further, it seems that under the right circumstances, Fuel and LOX can form a kind of gelatin, held together by surface tension, with a blasting power a hundred times that of TNT. Of course, it is also much too sensitive to be remotely usable. Brinley merely mentions it as an illustration of the hazards of meddling with Liquid Oxygen. For Fuel--RFNA, the nitric acid tank would presumably have to have a thin interior coating of glass, thin enough to be flexible like an optical fiber. For Fuel--LOX, it would probably be necessary to fill up he LOX tank immediately before launching the missile, and this might also be the case  for Fuel--Hydrogen Peroxide.

(**) Say, 20,000 PSI and several thousand degrees. High explosives are sometimes used for organic  hazardous materials destruction (eg. dangerous drugs), as they reliably create the conditions for complete combustion.


https://archive.org/details/RocketManualForAmateursByCapt.BertrandR.BrinleyBallantineBooks1960385s_201903/mode/1up

However, even in this case, the debris of the buildings is likely to effectively block the streets.

Stalingrad and Arnhem (Operation Market-Garden) were classic examples of the un-wisdom of trying to fight one’s way into a city. After the Anzio landing in Italy,  the Germans wisely surrendered Rome and retreated to the next mountain range. However this was long after the Italian surrender. Mussolini,  such as he was, had retreated to the Lake Como region, and Rome was no longer a political capital. The industrial capital of Italy, Milan, Mussolini’s home town, was only surrendered in the final capitulation. Rome, like Paris in 1940 and 1944, it was an “open city.”

In 1944, the allied attempt to take Caen in Normandy had been a failure, and the attacks on Cherbourg and Le Havre had failed to gain a working port. The breakout from Normandy occurred in open county at St. Lo, and the first cities to be assailed thereafter were Arnhem and Niiwegen, during Operation Market-Garden. The attack on Arnhem was a failure

Even when well smashed, a city is full of natural fortifications. If it has to be taken, this  should be deferred until the advance in the open country has bypassed it. Of course, a city on a river is likely to have most of the available bridges in a region, and this creates pressure to take the city and its bridges.  A major lesson of Market-Garden was that an army had to have sufficient assault bridging equipment to be independent of bridges on the ground.

Airplanes had terrific range and capacity for un-aimed  fire, subject to certain time lags. At the time of Normandy, the allied air forces could organize a bombardment substantially equivalent to a tactical nuclear weapon on a day or so’s notice. However airplanes were not very accurate,  a byproduct of flying so fast. Only under limited and special conditions could they deliver aimed fire. They could strafe,  that is that is they could fly along the road shooting whatever vehicles they passed over. This was effective against supply columns, and against units moving from one battle to another, but it was not effective against units deployed for actual battle. One type of airplane was accurate: the  dive bomber or Stuka. The German Stuka ace  Hans Rudel managed to destroy five hundred  fighting vehicles, and was of the opinion that an ordinary Stuka pilot could destroy fifty. However the airplane was only accurate because it was slow, and being slow, it was  dangerously vulnerable to fighters and to antiaircraft fire. It was only effective on the Eastern Front because the Soviet Air Force was so very inefficient.

There have not been many “symmetric” wars in recent years, from which to gain experience of electronic and computerized weapons. The American wars in the Middle East have been marked by extreme disparity of force, and their Middle Eastern antagonists  have eventually resorted to irregular warfare. The most advanced American weapons wind up being used for assassinations and such like, “To hit a bull camel on the butt,” as a recent president put it, not for fighting "battles of equals." The controlling examples for symmetric wars  are probably the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, and the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980’s. The main event of these wars was that principal weapons of a conventional army, such as tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, self-propelled guns, and helicopters, proved to be vulnerable to inexpensive precision guided munitions (PGM’s). A powerful  engine, such as that in a tank or airplane, uses at least half of its fuel in the advertising itself to suitable instruments, such as infrared detectors. This is more or less inherently a matter of thermodynamics (***). With the general advance of computers and electronics, PGM’s have become steadily cheaper, and more capable, and more ubiquitous. It is usually possible to make conversion kits for existing “dumb” munitions as well. When attached to equally cheap and expendable drones, PGM's can easily have a combat radius of a couple of hundred miles. The most practical method of reconnaissance is probably the use of instrument packages attached to high altitude drift balloons, operating at 80,000-100,000 feet. An anti-aircraft missile capable of reaching up to that altitude is likely to be far more expensive than a balloon. The essential electronics of PGM’s are commonly found in children's toys. What has emerged is that PGM’s are like machine guns in 1914. When used in symmetric warfare, they tend to enforce a bloodily static positional form of warfare. I do not know how many PGM’s Russia has or can procure. However, as the attacking party, they would be much more exposed to PGM’s than the defending party.

(***) It has been suggested that the heat seeking capacities of missiles may be blinded by multispectral smoke. However,  a couple of tons of fuel-air explosive, particularly when delivered by an expendable drone, are a perfectly acceptable price for destroying a tank. As the naval rating in Nicholas Monserrat’s _Kapelian of Malta_ asks, perplexedly, “when you see camouflage smoke, why not just bomb whatever’s beneath it?” The United States dropped approximately six million tons of bombs during the Vietnam war— if it turns out you cannot bomb accurately, then you just have to bomb a lot. Of course a fuel-air explosive is considerably heavier and more powerful than the sort of shape charge which goes into a conventional antitank missile.  It would therefore be less man-portable, and would tend to be handled as indirect fire artillery. This would mean getting a bigger truck to carry it, and firing it at high-angle trajectory at a range of ten or twenty thousand yards. Alternatively, it could be an air-launched munition.

Since at least the 1960s guerillas, such as the Vietcong, have employed mortars and small artillery rockets  (eg. Soviet 122 mm “Katayusha”-type  rockets) as a means of harassment against occupying troops. These weapons could be stolen from the occupying troops; or obtained on the international black market; or provided by the good offices of a foreign spy agency. With a range of two to ten miles, it was not practically feasible for an occupying power to police all the places these weapons could be stealthily transported to, then fired from. On the other hand, mortars and rockets were very inaccurate, on the order of five or ten percent of range. Military field cantonments tend to look like a cross between a campground and a trailer park. The result was that a small mortar attack did little damage, but had everyone diving for cover. The major military powers developed tracking radars, with which to organize counter-attacks. However, a conversion kit which turns a small rocket into a guided missile, is likely to be  even smaller and more easily smuggled than the rocket  itself, and, as stated, its working components are likely to come from  children’s toys.

The best protection against PGM’s on the battlefield is likely to be a bunker twenty or thirty feet underground. It is not absolutely safe, but it is enough to protect one from the smaller and more common munitions. You can remotely control weapons from the bunker, but you cannot go anywhere. To advance, you have to come up to the surface and go and dig a new bunker somewhere else, or else to dig a tunnel. Of course, alternatively, you can chose not be there at all, to control the weapons and sensors from the other side of the world. There’s an old  maxim: never send a man where you  can send a bullet. In the age of computers,  this translates to, never send a man where you  can send a robot. But then you still lack mobility in the sense of being able to take your weapons and go somewhere else. You can only abandon your weapons. However, there is a significant special case: in urban warfare it is often possible for the defenders to dig short tunnels connecting up pre-existing underground structures. For example during the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the  defenders knocked holes in party walls between buildings, converting blocks of brownstone houses into single big buildings. The following year the Polish  Home Army made its retreat through the Warsaw sewer system. In the case of people defending Le Corbussier architecture,   the basement of such a building functions as a bomb shelter for its  inhabitants,  and it may will be possible to dig hundred foot tunnels connecting one basement to the next. There may well be service tunnels for plumbing, district heating, etc. connecting up the buildings of a whole development. It might even prove possible to get into subway tunnels,  which can be followed for miles.

The one place on earth which is  both politically contested, and empty enough to support mobile land warfare with PGM’s is the border between China and Siberia. If China decides it wants to overrun Siberia, it quite possibly can, keeping a good hundred miles from cities and concentrations of trooops; but concentrating on capturing mines and mining districts. This would give China the economic advantage of owning a much higher proportion of the raw materials necessary to support its manufacturing. Of course this leads us back to a great truth— Vladimir Putin is a very great fool, for creating the conditions under which China could get away with it. As Woody Allen puts it, in _Love and Death_: “We took the village idiot part of the way with us. He was going to a convention of village idiots. Village idiots from all over Russia were gathering…”

The inventions which shaped the First World War mostly took place by about 1860; the key invention underlying  the Second World War was the internal combustion engine invention, occurring, roughly speaking, from 1880 to 1920. The first precision-guided munitions date from the Second World War, in particular the German Fritz X bomb which was used to sink am Italian battleship, the Roma, in 1943. When the Japanese super-battleship had to be sunk in 1945, this was accomplished by a torpedo-eight-style borderline  suicide attack. For a long time, PGM’s were confined to high-value-targets. In fact they were often defined as alternatives to tactical nuclear weapons. For example, a missile which  delivered a nuclear depth charge against submarines could be replaced by a missile which delivered a homing torpedo. Similar changes affected anti-aircraft missiles Intended for continental air defense, where the shoot-down was expected to take place either out to sea, or in the barren spaces of  the Arctic. When one speaks of the advent of PGM‘s after about  1970, one is actually speaking of diminishing manufacturing costs, which meant such weapons could be employed against comparatively mundane targets such as a tank or a bridge, and that PGM’s were employed again at a land army’s targets, instead of the intramural objectives of the Air Force and the Navy.

Of course a tank can be fitted  with the  advanced  new missiles, in addition to its gun. However  this does not  restore the situation to what it was. It merely has the effect of making an encounter between tanks at long range into an exercise in mutual suicide. In 1914, the most ornamental sort of heavy cavalrymen— lancers, currasiers, etc., nonetheless carried efficient magazine rifles in their saddle-buckets. They drew the line at carrying shovels, of course. When war came they had to learn how to dig trenches.


The resumption  of mobile warfare would have to be based on the same general trends as PGM’s, that is, robots which are cheap and expendable, and either automatic or capable of being remote-controlled. Only, they would have to perform a wider range of functions than merely destroying stuff. The notion of maneuver warfare includes the  behavior of the enemy. Enemy units being outflanked react by pulling themselves together and retreating along the lines of communication and supply. In August 1944 the German army retreated from the Atlantic coast to the boundaries of Germany, with minimal fighting. They were probably attracted to this course of action by the belief that once they reached the Westwall or the Rhine, it would be difficult to outflank them, and interfere with their flow of supplies. If the enemy cannot retreat, they surrender or commit mass suicide, according to their nature. However,  if they are not Japanese, they do not normally launch kamikaze attacks. If the enemy does not behave with that particular self-protective response,  maneuver warfare may not be possible. Kamikazi attacks are in the very nature of the military robot. A minefield does not become demoralized by a breakthrough behind it.

The basic tactic of infantry, in the face of heavy weapons, is to conceal the troops in order to get them so close to the enemy that  the enemy cannot use his heavy weapons for fear of hitting his own men. At the time of Waterloo and Gettysburg, as practiced by Wellington and Meade, this worked out  to finding a suitable hill, and positioning the troops on the crest of the hill, where they could easily move in and out of sight. By 1916 when, the implications  of the machine gun and of the modern  artillery piece had sunk in,  the troops were sent into underground shelters just below the trenches which constituted their firing positions.

In 1940 the French garrisons of the Maginot Line forts between the Rhine and Moselle rivers did not flee the German advance. Each fort had abundant supplies, ammunition, in its cellars, not to mention various home comforts. It was rather like a ship at sea, and merely being cut off from the rear did not make the garrison want to leave the fort, any more than sailors would have wanted to abandon ship. In the end, the Maginot line forts surrendered because the French government ordered them to.

Later during the Second World War the Germans formed what were known as static divisions composed of old men with medical issues which prevented them from  walking very far, or  carrying very much. They differed from home guard forces (Volkssturm), in that  they were not employed at home, but  were sent to various places at a distance to defend lines which of the enemy was not considered likely to attack, such as  certain parts of the coast of France. It was accepted that unlike younger troops, they  would not be able to retreat and regroup, when  attacked forcibly. The coast of Normandy was one such place. The static divisions held out for a day or so. They did not fulfill Rommel's aspiration of holding the allies allies at the beaches. But they did at least limit the distance the allies could penetrate before the German high command’s shock had worn off.

In the same battle the American paratroops dropped behind Utah Beach, but they landed in all the wrong places. They formed disorganized small units which could not go anywhere, because the did not know where to go. So each "stick" of paratroops set up a roadblock on the road where it landed. This was enough to prevent German movement towards the new invasion beaches.

Shortly afterwards, the German garrisons of Cherbourg and Le Havre, defending citadels rather than sections of front line, and subjected to ferocious alr attack, were able to hold out long enough for the port installations to be sabotaged.

After the Allied  break out from Normandy, the  German garrisons of the French Atlantic coast ports notably Brest, sent off their U-boats, which the loss of a land connection with Germany made it impossible to supply, with instructions to go to Norway. Then they placed themselves in a state of defense,  and held out until they were ordered by Berlin to surrender, at the end of the war. The Allies  reacted by simply cordoning these ports off, largely using French troops which had been raised in the liberated territory.

In the Pacific war Japan employed Spiderhole snipers. These men were neither too old to walk very far, nor confused about where they were, but they knew they were on an island and there _was_ nowhere to go. The spiderhole sniper waited in his hole until the Americans were around him. Then he popped up, and  began blasting away in all directions until he was killed.

Infantry could still function in a defensive role as long as it accepted that it was going to be outflanked and possibly besieged.

Land mines can be upgraded to perform more and more traditional tasks of infantry. The  core military task of infantry is to hold ground is, that is, to occupy it, and allow or deny passage through the territory. Since the essence of war is death, the winner is the party which can do the best job of coming up with suicide machines.

A suitably designed  landmine can be made much more compact than a soldier. The kinds of tricks which  go into runway denial bombs can, in principle, be adapted to something like a Claymore mine or a Bounding Betty mine, or a mine may be designed to launch a small short distance missile, anti-personel, anti-tank, or even a low-altitude anti-aircraft missile.  There are already small fixed anti-tank grenade launchers, such as the American M24 anti-tank mine, analogous to a Claymore. If the mine is made air-drop-able, it can be dropped by a drone. If one fits this mine wih a device similar to the cheaper sort of cellphone, and a couple of small electric motors to point the mine in the desired direction, it can ultimately be operated from an office somewhere in the world, using its built-in camera to aim. Once such smart mines are in play, you do not have to step on a mine to be killed— you merely have to go within range of one, the same as it would be for dug-in infantry. One can airdrop large numbers of phased-array mesh-wireless transceivers. These would form a robust network, highly resistant to enemy jamming. Each transceiver would fitted with a parachute, which apart from breaking its landing, would tend to  make it hang up in trees, on rooftops, and  on top of telephone poles, places offering a good line of sight for both observation and wireless transmission. The only feasible method of getting through such a minefield is to use a fuel-air or fuel-liquid-oxidizer explosive, capable of touching off the mines’ own explosive over a wide area, and, in the case of fuel-liquid-oxidizer, making massive craters through which troops can pass without worrying about what might once have been on the surface. The effect of these "super-bombs" will also be to kill any enemy troops who might be amidst the mines.



A minefield could be dropped on an enemy troop formation,  thus immobilizing it until such time as its surrender can be negotiated. At this point, the mines could simply be switched off, and the prisoners removed  safely. Faced with one of his units trapped by a minefield, the enemy has only three basic choices: he can order them to surrender; he can lay down his own minefield, making it impossible for them to surrender, or to escape, or to be resupplied; or he can drop fuel-air explosives, destroying the minefield, and his own troops as well.

If the Ukraine wants to carry the war back to Russia, one or the more subtle ways to do it would be  to collect 50,000-100,000 prisoners, and hand them over the Poles. The Poles would then deliver them, less officers, and those who wanted to claim sanctuary in the West, to the border of the Kaleningrad enclave, where it would release them on their paroles not to fight again. They would of course be given a friendly warning about what Josef Stalin had done to returned prisoners of war. Those who chose to return would nonetheless be alert for signs of betrayal. Hopefully they would touch off civil disorders, leading to the secession of Kaliningrad from Russia.

The vision I have of static warfare is something like nuclear warfare in the small. Both sides have fuel-air explosives, which are not, after all, very hard to make, and they methodically pound each other’s front lines, over and over again, until there is a flattened zone, a couple of miles wide, between them. The debris gets burnt off by forest/range fires started by incendiaries, and the fires burn until stopped by rivers. When it rains, vast areas of mud form, rendering movement nearby impossible. The reader will of course observe that this could be a description of Paschendale in 1917.


Perhaps the most ancestral function of an army is to collect taxes.  The army raises the taxes, and the taxes pay for the army. In the 18th century the Marechale de Saxe, in his  book of the art of war, described the process. A body of troops went into a village, and demanded  to see the village’s tax receipt. If the village hadn’t got one,  the troops burned down some houses. No discussion,  no negotiation, no delay, just automatic reaction, and then the troops marched out before reprisals could develop, and did not burden themselves with plunder which would have slowed their progress. The peasants were thus forced to bring food into the garrison town in order to obtain tax receipts.

In theory, this could have eventually evolved into a system of blackmail by cell telephone, enforced by airstrikes. However, a couple of hundred years later, the economics of food had shifted. In nearly all of the developed temperate-zone countries with fairly low population density, and  without special political problems such as communism, agricultural productivity had increased to the point that governments were forced to pay farmers not to farm.

I should like to discuss two significant interventions of military force on the agrarian world. The first was Joseph Stalin‘s forcible collectivization of Soviet agriculture in the 1930's. The  second was the American introduction of Strategic Hamlets  in Vietnam.

Stalin’s problem was that the peasants would not sell food for his factory workers because the factories did not  produce much of anything which the peasants wanted. Stalin might talk about tractors, but he wasn’t very successful in actually producing them. The best Stalin could do was to resurrect feudalism; to make  the collective farm  a prison, with worse living and working conditions than either those in the city or those among  a free peasantry.

The Russian soldiers attacking Kyiev have turned out to be notable looters, stealing everything which is not nailed down, and especially, stealing food, in a kind of a reversion to the 18th century.

The American problem was quite different. Starting as early as the nineteenth century, Americans were supremely confident of their ability to produce food by mechanized methods. American soldiers usually give away large quantities of food to whoever they meet. This is itself an assertion of control: you belong to me therefore I feed you. Their concern was that the food might make its way to their enemies, that they might be in the ridiculous position of paying people to shoot at them.

In the campaign leading up to the Battle of the Litte Big Horn in 1876, the Lakota and Cheyenne were supplied with food they had obtained from the United States government on indian reservations. While living on the reservation, they had managed to hide away food, above and beyond what they were actually consuming, and were able to accumulate a stockpile, which they took with them when they left the reservation. For as long as this food lasted. they could stay out and fight, but when the food ran out, they would have to go back to the reservation.

During the Vietnam War, the United States took a stance which was in many respects a mirror image of De Saxe's approach to requisitioning. The United States displayed very little inclination to economically exploit the peasants of South Vietnam in any recognizable sense of the word. These peasants produced very little which America wanted or needed. Individual Americans were usually hostile towards either the indigenous or the colonial landlord classes. The United States was prepared to feed the population of Vietnam from American agricultural surpluses. But its point of concern was that the Vietcong might be housed and fed by the peasants. The result was the Strategic Hamlets— prison camps where Vietnamese peasants were fed more or less satisfactorily, but could not farm, or share food with the Viet Cong.


The kind of fundamental problem Russia has been facing is that of mass emigration. All over Eastern Europe, people were not waiting for the government to correct itself, but were going off somewhere else, to London, or to New York, or to Toronto, or to Rio de Janeiro, or to Tel Aviv. The more westerly countries in Eastern Europe, such as Poland, could correct this problem simply by taking more immigrants from further east. Russia, however, is near the bottom of the pile.

But even the successful conquest of land is becoming an ineffective means of conquering populations. In 1940, successful conquest of land often meant gaining control of more or less functioning munitions industries, and their associated personnel.

 In the first place, in a reasonably developed country, there are a lot of private automobiles, far more than there were in 1940. Each has  at least a hundred  miles of  gasoline in the fuel tank, and this represents a formidable ad-hoc evacuation capacity. Even a two-wheel-drive automobile can outrun a tank or fighting vehicle over any distance from five miles (beyond gun range) to five hundred miles, and over a surprising range of terrain, at least when the terrain has been quickly improved, eg. when someone like the highway patrol or the boy scouts have knocked down fences to create ad-hoc bypasses across fields, and are directing traffic along these improvised routes.

The second point is that fewer people are employed in the primary sector of the economy, or even in the industries  of the secondary sector closely tied to primary production, eg steel mills. Even in a fairly backwards country, the growth is in the upper secondary sector and the tertiary sector. There are fewer people with any real economic tie to the  land— on the contrary there are many people who feel they have to leave when the grocery store stops functioning, and they have nothing to eat.

Likewise, under urban conditions, people may be housed in tall apartment buildings which become quite uninhabitable when the water, the electricity, the heat, and the elevator are turned off.

It is sometimes the case that an employer removes its employees from the war zone, in order to put  them back to work in a safe place somewhere else.

As far back as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, twenty percent of the population fled the country. This did not particularly concern the Iraqis, who were mainly concerned with controlling oilfields. When they were forced to retreat, they blew up the oil wells, in the hope that if they couldn't have them, no one else would either.

In the eighteenth century soldiers commonly did police work. It would not be something the conspicuously heavily  armed soldiers, the artillerymen, would do, but infantry and light cavalry, bearing substantial the weapons and equipment carried by a civilian of the armigerous class. English soldiers were sent to arrest Members of Parliament.

Vladimir Putin’s stated aspiration was to arrest the members of the Ukrainian government and various politicians. This is not, of course, particular practical, as the leaders could easily have escaped. As it turned out, the leaders made their way rapidly to safe houses in Kyif, where they could not be easily kidnapped, and stood at defiance via video. We thus had the spectacle of the president of the Ukraine, under fire and dressed like a common soldier, addressing the assemblies and conclaves of the world, over the internet.

The kind of people who got caught by the Russian advance in the Ukraine seem to have been those who were either exceptionally destitute or infirm,and therefore unable to take care of themselves. The Russians rounded them up, and shipped them off to repopulate deserted villages in Siberia, but they are still likely to remain public wards. Old men with silicosis from working in soviet-era coal mines are not likely to become efficient farmers, or whatever.

So, summing up, the net rewards of attempts at maneuver warfare are little land, more or less devastated, and even less population, with a high proportion of "incapables." The recommended strategy in such cases is to go on the defensive, with a view to minimizing one's own casualties, and let the enemy waste his strength in futile attacks. Meanwhile, one can employ own strength in some more profitable endeavor.

In 1916, the Germans went on the defensive in the west, and in about a year, they had defeated Russia sufficiently to trigger the Russian Revolution, and to obtain the peace of Brest-Litovisk. However, these gains were squandered in a renewed attempt to take Paris. An alternative would have been to accept the results in the east as a fundamental and permanent change of strategic direction.. Germany could have made peace in the west, instead of the east, as the Kaiser had desired in 1914. A practical proposal might have involved giving Belgium the entire west bank of the Rhine, from Holland to Switzerland, thus creating a powerful buffer state.  Germany could then have got on with subjugating Russia as far as the Volga.

In 1990, Saddam Hussein gave up on his futile efforts to defeat Iran, and invaded Kuwait instead. If he had done it sooner, or more decisively, he might have been able to overrun all of the oil kingdoms before the United States could intervene. As it was, Desert Shield was a very near run thing.

And, of course, after the end of the 1973 Middle East War, Anwar Sadat of Egypt recognized the situation and worked out a peace treaty with Israel which gave Egypt back the use of the Suez Canal.

The Russians generally don’t do very well in hostage-taking situations. They are so eager to end the visible challenge to the authority of the state that  they take undue risks with the hostages' lives.

I do not think the Russian military is generically backwards. Many commentators have fallen  into the error of just saying "It's Russians being Russian." The Russian military  has certain specific deficiencies which result from its  social position, comparatively isolated from the outside world. These include computers and electronics, long-standing areas of Soviet deficiency. Computers and electronics tend in the long run to enable individual action, and are therefore ultimately anathema to dictatorships. This ideological blind spot means a shortage of precision-guided munitions. The Russians are simply very determined to put the clock back.

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