I've been thinking about this for a long while and I'm curious what others think.
Posted by
Will Hunting (aka kelly)
Feb 27 '22, 08:50
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War is now un-winnable for nations that the international community cares about.
Russia is at least losing the PR battle in Ukraine. We know they're taking some losses, but we can't tell what their victories look like because the Ukrainians are making the most of the social media game while Russia is focused on winning via pure might.
But let's say that what we're seeing, Ukraine is fighting them to a middling draw with some advances toward Kyiv but also significant losses along the way is reality.
Since the end of WW2, what wars amongst the elite nations of the world ended in total victory? Korea is still a war. Vietnam was a loss for the US. Afghanistan was a loss for the Soviets. Iraq 1 is as close to a win as possible, but all we did was push the bad guy back into his borders. Afghanistan for the US was a 20 year failure. Iraq 2 for the US was a failure. Georgia in 2008 was a draw.
War is unwinnable now because to win, you have to dominate the population so heavily that the entire soul of a nation is ripped out and replaced by resignation of defeat. You do that by making everyone cry.
But since we saw the horrors of WW2, we put rules in to minimize civilian impacts...to which the bad guys only exploit. The strategy book of guerilla warfare is well-known now, to the point that we're posting the how-to's on Twitter for Ukrainians to follow.
So, that massive prepared army gets cut time and time again, until it bleeds out by a thousand paper cuts. If they follow international convention. If not, well, we'll see horrors that take us back to 1945.
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