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To: Rockingham
" . . . traditional Russian military practice, which assumes that victory can be achieved through brute force, indifference to casualties, and heavy conscription."

Like Ike on D-Day? Like Truman? Like Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Like incinerating entire cities, man, woman and child?
62 posted on 11/26/2023 7:59:23 PM PST by Steve_Seattle
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To: Steve_Seattle

Ike (and US/British military doctrine) stressed massive material superiority, not indifference to casualties. Both Britain and the US lacked the manpower and the public buy-in to risk Soviet or WWI scale tactics.

Tha Allies used massive firepower, artillery and air, plus operational maneuver, logistics systems, engineering and construction, helped by the availability of endless fuel, in preference to human bodies, whenever possible.

This limitation was explicitly stated in the planning documents created at the time. Its an interesting area of study, the “operations research” level of allied strategy, and the related economic analysis. The Axis and the Soviets did not plan like this, to their cost. Ex of many related documents https://www.jstor.org/stable/2518970


96 posted on 11/26/2023 10:56:54 PM PST by buwaya (Strategic imperatives )
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To: Steve_Seattle
Have no illusions. War is always about killing the enemy with the most potent means available at the least cost to your side. Run the numbers in the cruel accounting of war and the A-bombing of Japan was a tremendous success in terms of the avoided cost for the US of an invasion.

I once worked for a man who spent most of WW II training to be a troop leader in the first wave to invade Japan. He and his fellows -- all volunteers -- expected to die in the first hour if they even made it ashore. He was a big fan of nuking Japan.

Anyway, my comment was not intended as a criticism but as an observation based on Russian military history and their conduct in the current invasion of Ukraine. Russia's large population traditionally meant that it could usually field large armies and overwhelm opponents -- as Napoleon and Hitler both learned. As Putin has found though, modern US and NATO smart weapons have changed the equation to the advantage of small, better equipped military forces.

106 posted on 11/27/2023 1:27:58 AM PST by Rockingham (`)
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