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Defense wasn't stronger than offense in a physical sense. It's just that the proper doctrine and training for dealing with the new technological reality was not developed until the Ludendorff offensive in the last year of the war.

This dynamic crops up pretty often in historic wars, in which it's less the technology that determines the result but how well the humans are trained. The Civil War in the US was also a slog because of the poor level of training among both enlisted and officers. There was a tendency among poorly trained or untrained volunteers to 'go to ground' to hide from gunfire. Neither infantry nor cavalry really learned how to charge properly because of deficiencies in training, which made the battles go on for a lot longer than they would have otherwise.

It was a similar situation with WWI. It is very, very complicated to coordinate artillery and infantry and to properly plan a successful penetration through fixed defenses. This came to be more or less a solved problem by Germany under Ludendorff's new doctrine.

A lot of the breezy summaries about WWI about it being static also only apply to the western front, because there was lots of successful maneuver warfare in the east. That's why Ludendorff got the job to try to end the war in the west after his success against Russia.

We see this every day with the technology industry: often we have a technology that works well years before we can get people to use it properly or to make it user-friendly enough for everyone to understand readily. Coordinating artillery with infantry movements required lots of work in math/statistics and drilling plus lots of data collection to make the plans and timetables realistic.

Brits had successfully broken lines using combined arms in 1917 starting at Cambrai. Pershing at Cantigny was much later but the first US example.

Canadian national identity is partially defined by the victory at Vimy Ridge which happened before Cambrai. Obviously, my history textbooks are heavily biased, were the lessons learned at Vimy Ridge applied to Cambrai?

The difference isn't up to trench warfare, machine guns etc. It's that industrialized agriculture had been developed, and thus you could still feed millions of people who were fighting. That's what created the resiliance to prolonged war. In cultures without industrialized agriculture, losing that many people to war would doom everyone. If you wanted to survive, you'd have to stop for harvest or if you lost too many people, you couldn't harvest fast enough.

The resilience that suddenly was there in WW1, was that there were so many people you could throw into the fire, suddenly.

> In cultures without industrialized agriculture, losing that many people to war would doom everyone.

The Black Death killed an estimated 40-50% of Europeans between 1347 and 1351, but the survivors were not doomed. In fact, living standards increased as the amount of agricultural land per person increased.

Sure, but less people means less mouth to feed, whereas supporting the large conscript armies of the 19th and 20th centuries just meant less farm workers, and if anything more required calories.

To clarify what dukeyukey said a little further:

The Black Death killed 40-50% of the population indiscriminately. Wars killed able-bodied men in their prime almost exclusively—removing a huge chunk of those best able to bring in the harvest (many able-bodied women can help, of course, but some percentage of those are pregnant or caring for babies for much of the day), without removing a proportional chunk of those who cannot contribute as much but still need to eat.

> Wars killed able-bodied men in their prime almost exclusively

Definitely not true and increasingly not. Civilians, especially old and vulnerable die due to violence of soldiers, general violence, lack of food, medicine, having to move without support and so on. Armies extract very much needed resources and destabilize places.

Plus, civilians are often targets - WWII notoriously killed more civilians then soldiers.

Being soldier of front line is massive risk factor. But they are not exclusively victims, as non soldiers people die due to their activity everywhere they go.

I was referring to wars prior to WWI—those where the loss of manpower was directly relevant to the harvest.

And sure, wars could target civilians, and sometimes did. But what you can be guaranteed of in a war is that soldiers will die.

> And sure, wars could target civilians, and sometimes did.

They very often do. It is not exceptional. In pretty much all wars, civilians die. Cities, villages, farms get attacked and destroyed along people in them. War where civilians don't die would be an exception.

Also, wars happen where people live.

> I was referring to wars prior to WWII

In those, civilians died too, cities/villages were attacked for fun and profit and all that.

In addition, prior wold wars, armies lived off the land. Meaning taking food off whoever happened to live there, by force if necessary. Meaning, additional deaths off lack of food.

and it changed the balance of supply and demand of labor, increasing the price, causing rulers to try and implement price controls.

> It's that industrialized agriculture had been developed, and thus you could still feed millions of people who were fighting.

That sounds like a factor in determining how long an attacker can sustain attacks, but the underlying hypothesis is that defense far outweighed the ability to sustain attacks.

To quote the OP:

> "But the real problem was that, for the first time since castles vs. troops without cannon, defense was stronger than offense."

The opposing forces in the US Civil War sustained large armies in the field for years even before widespread industrialized agriculture. In some ways it was a preview of WW1, showing the difficulty of breaking through defensive positions.

> There have been societies that couldn't even think about that problem.

This sounds like what Iain Banks referred to as an OCP - an Outside Context Problem [0].

As TFA describes:

"Crudely put, it occurs when you don’t have the right conceptual tools for the job. The result is an inability to make sense of what is happening and a resulting tendency to force phenomena into crude, distorting pigeonholes."

I suspect the cautious thinkers are always alert, to the point of being hyper-sensitive, to this risk - manifesting in imposter syndrome through excessively cautious, highly qualified caveats around their messages, etc.

We circle back towards a generic DK effect, while introspection leads to further introspection.

[0] http://outsidecontextproblem.org/

>for the first time since castles vs. troops without cannon, defense was stronger than offense

In the seminal book "On War" which was published in 1832 and is still required reading in many military academies, Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz explicitly says that defense is stronger than offense.

Maybe this intensified in WWI

Potentially what actually happened and von Clausewitz mention something about this, is that the armies had no ability to "think" fast enough to deal with any breakthrough. As mentioned the ability to plan and undertaken the first action was always there; the assault, the counter attack. But the subsequent actions were impossible to plan for and impossible to execute on the fly. These were old school armies; communication was antiquated and initiative was practically non existed.

I mean, to some extent, defense will always be stronger than offense—offense always needs to travel to get there, for instance, while defense happens where you are—but the degree makes a big difference.

If, all else being equal, it takes a force of 1500 attackers to overwhelm 1000 defenders, defense is still stronger than offense, but you can still expect to be able to make progress relatively easily.

If, on the other hand, it takes 5000 attackers to overwhelm 1000 defenders, suddenly you have to make very different kinds of calculations about what is worth the cost, and what is even strategically feasible to take without destroying your army's ability to fight.

This is still true and accepted military doctrine. We look for at least a 3:1 force ratio before considering attack a viable option. It's not exactly scientific and plenty of military historians have questioned the validity of this rule of thumb, but it still is the official doctrine, at least of the US Army. I can't speak for other countries.

Force ratio doesn't have to be strictly numerical, though. Offense can have better weapons, rely on element of surprise, and we also like to attack during really bad weather because it sucks a lot more to be dug in during a rainstorm than to be on the move. There's also some advantage in indirect fire in that it's easier for artillery to hit a stationary target than a moving one, so provided your artillery itself is mobile enough to survive counterbattery strikes, that goes to the offense. Unless the defense is so well dug in that artillery can't even affect it. So it depends on a lot of things.

But in general, defense always has the advantage. They get to choose where to fight, they can prepare their positions, they don't need to expose themselves.

I guess it's reversed in cyberwarfare if you want to think of it that way, but it's really not analogous. It's never been all that difficult to sneak a small surgical force inside an enemy perimeter, but you can't take and hold land that way, which is what attack versus defense force ratios are thinking of. This is more of a law enforcement thing, which has always relied on either having more cops than criminals or extremely harsh punishments. The issue here is we can't enforce the law against foreign actors if the host nation won't help. When actual Americans have been caught breaking into American computer systems, they've totally had the book thrown at them and I think that really has deterred domestically launched cyberattacks. It's not like the NSA can't find you, but if the only way to actually stop you is to send in Seal Team Six, that isn't worth starting a real war over.

> But in general, defense always has the advantage. They get to choose where to fight, they can prepare their positions, they don't need to expose themselves.

I'm curious about the "they get to choose where to fight" question, actually.

I can see where this would apply on a tactical scale, like if I'm preparing an ambush. But on an operational scale, doesn't the attacker choose where and when to fight?

Tactically, defense is stronger than offense in that you need a numerical advantage to defeat a prepared defense.

Strategically, there is a lot of value in the attack because you can choose the time and place of fighting to your advantage. This didn't pan out on the Western Front of WWI for a variety of reasons.

Now we have cyber domain where this is definitely not true.

Not sure.

Let's say we have fortifications. People are needed to man them. This is understood by everyone. Entry points are checked, etc.

Compare with 'cyber' systems. How many people are adding features, working on bugs and the like, versus how many are even looking into security vulnerabilities?

Translating to the physical domain, it would be as if we were building a fort, then moving almost everyone to build extensions or new forts, with a handful responsible for the security of all fortresses - and the paths in between them! In the dark.

The fact that most systems are not immediately "owned" speaks volumes on how difficult this is to accomplish. Barring zero days, the main way one gets compromised is by making mistakes (not patching, leaving systems unsecured, etc). That is, there's a door that's open and unguarded...

It's clearly true: it's cheaper to prevent vulnerabilities than to find and exploit them.

"Defense vs Offense" is underspecified for this disagreement. Considering "defense" as the developers writing an application, and "offense" as the reverse engineers attempting to exploit it, defense may still be cheaper in some scenarios.

If you consider "defense" as an organization attempting to provide a service securely, and "offense" as all the security threats they are exposed to, it seems hard to argue that the defensive side has any sort of advantage over all of the attackers.

Is it cheaper to find and prevent ALL vulnerabilities than to find and exploit ONE?

Does this assume a stable and relatively slow rate of change? Because at some scales I imagine preventing vulnerabilities could be equally difficult.

I get what you are saying but just to clarify to some who may read that literally, the Zulu kingdom is nowhere near extinct. It's monarch and governing structures are still around too.

off-topic

I agree fully that a "modern" military will always win against one that depends on "old" doctrines exclusively. I have interesting tales of both English and Zulu officers on how the war proceeded, how the Zulu court knew their fate and had come to choose death, and the English officers who did not want war to begin with.

The Zulu are most certainly not extinct.

:) The writer probably sacrificed facts to the satisfaction of instancing an "A-to-Z" («Atzecs to Zulus»).

Additionally, The British severely underestimated the Zulus along the lines of the parent, with at least one devastating effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Isandlwana

kwaZulu is no longer an independent kingdom though, and hasn't been since 1879. Yes, the Zulus defeated the British at Isandlwana, but still lost the war.

kwaZulu remains part of the Republic of South Africa, despite recent troubles from Zuma/Zulu loyalists.

Guerilla warfare is a consequence of modern ethical standards, not technology. One side can "force a decision" by executing non-combatants. Such policies were par for the course in the first half of the 20th century.

Guerilla warfare is older than conventional warfare.

I used the present tense.

You also said "modern". If guerilla warfare predates modern times, it can't be caused by something in them.

"Cause" doesn't necessarily mean originate. They could have meant it in the same way that one could say "leaving food out will cause you to get ants."

If you add "being effective" to "guerilla warfare" it works, I think that's what was meant.

> for the first time since castles vs. troops without cannon, defense was stronger than offense.

Huh? Castles couldn't beat troops without cannon. If you got besieged, your options were to be relieved by an external army, surrender, or lose.

They could force a drawn-out engagement, though, which in many cases the attackers couldn't support. You needed a lot fewer people to defend a castle than to assault it.

It seems much easier for the attackers to supply themselves (even in a foreign land) such that encircle-and-wait would virtually ensure an attacker victory if no one came to the defender’s aid.

Even where besiegers outnumbered the besieged by a huge margin it still often took months or even years to defeat a castle by siege, yet if the same two forces met in open battle it would be over in an hour or less. This clearly shows that in castle warfare the defence has a huge advantage.

> It seems much easier for the attackers to supply themselves (even in a foreign land)

That's a modern-transportation perspective. Unless the siege happens to be on a waterway and you supply that way.

Land-based logistics for pre-modern armies was _hard_. The standard solution was to keep the army on the move and forage as you went, so you kept stealing food from new peasants, but that's not an option for an army laying a siege. On the other hand, if the castle/town knew a siege was coming they would move things like livestock from the surrounding countryside inside the walls, and the grain stores were likely _already_ inside the walls.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Nuremberg explicitly mentions supply as a problem for the besieging army in that case, and that's an early-modern army, not premodern. http://hundredyearswar.com/Books/History/Sieges.htm also says "the siege was often lifted because the besieging commander ran out of food to feed or money to pay his troops".

In practice, what this meant is that you would not even start a siege unless you had some idea that you could ensure supply, which was the common situation.

Supply wasn't the only factor: disease, troop morale, sabotage, etc. Few generals would have prolonged a war if they could do anything about it.

If the west would commit to occupying every inch of territory the "geurillas" threatened to take hold, I think it would go differently, but nobody seems to want to make such a full commitment. Maybe that's just intractable.

I guess, it didn't help especially that not the trenches were the apparent phenomenon, but the enormous advances in artillery and their impact, to which trenches were a reaction.

Makes me wonder whether we could have defeated an organization such as Taliban with say COVID. The very unfortunate side effect (understatement) would be all the civil casualties, but that is also part of guerilla warfare (e.g. happens in Israel/Palestina conflict as well). But nevertheless, something like COVID could've been used as a biochemical weapon, with the side launching it being vaccinated, or knowing how to deal with it beforehand (the 'SARS experience advantage'). Its not even far fetched (though I am not arguing that was the purpose of!) because that's how the Spanish conquered large parts of America (Re: Aztecs).

A disease which mildly inconveniences men of fighting age for at most a couple weeks makes a poor weapon.

They would be full of grief and anger at losing some of their grandparents, but that won't affect their ability to fight and would be likely to motivate them to continue.

Smallpox had up to 90% mortality in Native American populations, across all demographics. Fair to say it was a different beast.

Jeez, just drown the land in VX-5 then, seriously, it's faster, probably cheaper, and actually safer. I mean, your goal is already quite clearly "kill the entire country's population" — because you have trouble with guerilla warfare only when the population actually supports them and replenishes their resources, including human resources — so just go with a more optimal tool, would you.

Perhaps surprisingly the main problem with current warfare isn't the lack of options to kill enough people in some general area.

Although if you were to go in that direction COVID-19 would be a minor inconvenience when it comes to warfare so I'm not too sure what you're aiming at there. The Spanish "used" diseases that were a heck of a lot more severe.

The point is to strike at the enemy the moment they are weakened. Western societies were severely weakened in March 2020 onward to summer 2020. They were on lockdown, there have been logistics problems, which had impact on things like police and secret service. I very much doubt military are exempt from it. Being in a good condition isn't a guarantee you remain unaffected, and the danger of being affected mildly is that you spread it further.

Lockdowns were a political choice to minimize impact on healthcare systems, not something that governments necessarily had to do. Obviously guerilla movements aren't going to suspend operations just because of a respiratory virus. The vast majority of Taliban combatants are young and metabolically healthy enough to be at virtually zero risk from COVID-19.

(And it should go without saying, but the concept of biological warfare is so abhorrent that it should never be considered as an option.)

SARS2 made it to Afghanistan, you know.

Did the Taliban lock down? Of course not.

So we've done this experiment and you're simply wrong.

We've done the experiment indeed; see the historical example of the Spanish conquistadors. Other than that I'm not aware of it, so we don't know if such an attack could work. Its a hypothesis.

The original SARS and MERS were too deadly to spread widely. In order for the attack to work, you don't need a disease which is lethal. All you need is a disease which makes your enemy ill enough to attack their infra, while you're immune (e.g. via full vaccination, or because of group immunity from antibodies).

Right now, Israel is practically immune to COVID (and was the quickest to get vaccinated), while their surrounding regions are not. This could give them an advantage in warfare, should they decide to initiate such (legit or via proxy). Which, incidentally, is also why is was clever of Israel to pay large sums of money for the vaccines.

You're just not getting it.

For one thing, the initial wave of smallpox wasn't an attack, it was just an ordinary infection. Incredibly deadly but it wasn't deliberately introduced.

For another, comparing smallpox with covid is so thick-headed that I'm not interested in discussing things with you anymore.

> For one thing, the initial wave of smallpox wasn't an attack, it was just an ordinary infection. Incredibly deadly but it wasn't deliberately introduced.

Irrelevant.

Covid isn’t lethal enough to really make much of a dent in their numbers. Even with a collapsed health system, overall mortality from covid is around 1.5%. Significant to be sure, but very far from the 80-90% mortality of European diseases in the native populations of America.

Viral warfare is an absolutely stupid idea. It’s almost assured that the weapon would escape containment and find its way into the population, and as we’ve seen vaccines are of limited benefit if enough people won’t take them.

I support your assertion that viral warfare is a terrible idea. But I wonder, if you pre-announced what you were going to do and then did it, Would you not successfully co-opt the primary vehicles of leakage?

I really do suspect that if, for example, some basement biohacker terrorist decided to release an engineered bird flu with high fatality, once having staged their distribution mechanism, they wouldn’t be able to arrange for the other countries to contain it simply by providing input information about what was about to occur.

It’s true that they would be small incidents, but essentially if you can disseminate the knowledge widely enough, and the effects are horrific enough, probably you would have de facto containment.

I have dreaded the scenario since my 20s, and that was a long time ago, and the scenario is many, many times easier than it was at the time.