John Larroquette, an actor, once gave this definition of insanity:
“It’s the repetition of the same action expecting different results. Like jumping out of a 40-storey building, breaking every bone, spending six months in hospital, going back to the same building, up to the 39th floor, jumping and expecting it to be different. It is NEVER different.”
Russian commanders keep doing the same things over and over, because their superiors keep ordering the same things over and over.
At airports and bridges.
The result is consistent. Ukraine expects troop or resource movements at certain bridges and airports, and then blows them up.
I’m not saying the Russian soldiers are insane. Far from it - the same errors were made by both sides in World War 1. We had a lot of war diaries and poetry confirming it.
Seems to me that Russian commanders (like in World War 1) can’t think of doing anything smarter than throwing resources and people into the same meat grinders over and over, hoping for a different result. Their plans are utterly dependent on the Ukes failing to hit targets on bridges or in airports that they’ve had months of practice on.
Definition of insanity, in action.
“Russian commanders keep doing the same things over and over”
Their culture reinforces that they rigidly stick to their rulebook/playbook, or they get weeded out from promotion.
The Ukrainians know the Russian playbook as well as the Russians themselves, so they can well predict what to expect.
China. Human wave attacks in Korea. Again and again and again, under the twin theories that the Americans are going to run out of bullets eventually, and we have too many peasants...