Modern wars are won by grinding, not by genius

[rangerrebew]

Modern wars are won by grinding, not by genius

Written by
Cathal J Nolan
Associate professor, Boston University
May 13, 2017

War is the most complex, physically and morally demanding enterprise we undertake. No great art or music, no cathedral or temple or mosque, no intercontinental transport net or particle collider or space program, no research for a cure for a mass-killing disease receives a fraction of the resources and effort we devote to making war. Or to recovery from war and preparations for future wars invested over years, even decades, of tentative peace. War is thus far more than a strung-together tale of key battles. Yet, traditional military history presented battles as fulcrum moments where empires rose or fell in a day, and most people still think that wars are won that way, in an hour or an afternoon of blood and bone. Or perhaps two or three. We must understand the deeper game, not look only to the scoring. That is hard to do because battles are so seductive.

https://qz.com/980648/modern-wars-are-won-by-grinding-not-by-genius/

[The_Reader_David]

Modern wars are won by grinding, not by genius

Actually, they are won by both: 

Look up the details of how Stalin passed the complete plans for Operation Mars to the Germans as cover for Operation Uranus (the Stalingrad counter-offensive) and thereby also established complete trust in a Soviet double agent, whose subsequent feeding of a mixture of good and bad information to the Nazis was important to the rest of the conduct of the war.

Or consider how the Cold War (by your leave, WW III, just fought in slow-motion thanks to nuclear deterrence) was won.

It's just that genius must now be applied at the strategic, rather than operational or tactical level, to be decisive.

[Smokin Joe]

The author misses something in this

Instead, we grow restless with attrition and complain that it’s tragic and wasteful, even though it was how the Union Army defeated slavery in America, and Allied and Soviet armies defeated Nazism.

by assuming the "defeat of Salvery" or military defeat was the sole objective. The motivation of the Union forces and the Soviets were similar, as much to punish and destroy as to to merely defeat; the South for daring to secede, the Nazis for their perfidy and brutality.

Yes, a war can be won in a day, but it often takes some preparation to get to that day.


But even then, it took two.

[rangerrebew]

Yes, a war can be won in a day, but it often takes some preparation to get to that day.
 

It also helps having Russia invade Manchuria about the same time.

[Smokin Joe]

It also helps having Russia invade Manchuria about the same time.

IIRC, that was opportunism on the Russian's part. The writing was on the wall, whether we had to invade Japan or not. As it turned out, we did not, well, not as an amphibious attack, only an occupying force.

I checked, the USSR invaded from Aug 8 through Aug 20, Hiroshima was bombed on August 6, 1945.
Yep. Pure opportunism.