Modern military technology seems to become too costly. Recent conflicts in the middle east seem to indicate that low-cost approaches can have some terribly effective successes against much more sophisticated militaries.
One cannot occupy a region milotarily if a large enough portion of the local population is hell bent to oppose that accupation. That's what happened in Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Ukraine is what happens ofnthe imvasion force is met by defenders capable of stopping the invasion. And the war in Ukraine cannot be fought with low tech weapons, heck, everything older than the Vietnam War won't cut it anymore.
The same problems of logistics also do apply to the local opposition. If you run out of weapons or ammunition then you are done. If your supply lines are cut then you are done. It is also the main reason why the two wars mentioned were lost - incapacity of political will to cut the enemy supply lines.
Maybe it would hang around longer if USSR was intact and assisting.
The idea which ended both wars was that continuing this war is a war crime against our own nation even as we continue to score victories.
A majority of these republics were founded by the USSR by carving them out of RSFSR, without the regard of wishes of people who ended up split by these borders.
I guess its karma when USSR wanted to be the example of affirmative action socialist state ran by ethnic minorities, only to get framed for imperialism by the autonomous republics it has created.
These "autonomous" republics were anything but autonomous. They were autonomous within the very strict framework provided by Russia. Puppet states would be the closest description, but even then not fully accurate. On top of this there was no need for Russian help to "create" these fake republics. Nations were completely capable to create their own governance like was for example the case with Ukraine. All what Russians did was to use the cover of communism to continue their imperialist ambitions.
RSFSR contained ASSR (Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics) and these had even less autonomy. Most of these nations should have also been given the opportunity to have statehood as they wanted.
If you were talking about ASSR before WW2 that were transformed into SSR then again, see the previous point.
USSR got the following bits and pieces after WWII:
* Kaliningrad, added to RSFSR
* West Ukraine, added to Ukrainian SSR
* Some ex-Polish lands added to Belorussian SSR (Poland get even more of better, ex-German lands though)
* Baltic states
* Tuva.
Of these, perhaps three Baltic republics were not happy about Afghanistan (and everything else), but they were quite small.
The rest of stuff, such as UkrSSR, BelSSR, Caucasus and Central Asian SSRs, were carved out of RSFSR (Russia) in the 1920's by the USSR, after being part of Russian Empire for a century or more. Most of them did not exist as a separate state previously, especially in the assigned borders. Some briefly existed, often as anarchist or German puppet states, between 1917 and 1921.
USSR did indeed gain control of various Eastern European countries such as Poland or Romania, but they were not part of USSR so they did not have to fight in Afghanistan.
The rest of stuff about nations and statehood opportunity is frankly bullshit. These ASSRs were also carved by USSR out of Russia, and almost universally have 40% to 80% of Russian population within them - the only separatist opportunity they have is to be a particularly poor reissue of Bosnia. People are not stupid and they understand that.
Same in Afghanistan, NATO lost hard after being slowly kicked out of the country.
In both cases, none of the US or NATO strategic goals were achieved, while almost all of the opposing sides were. If you think the US won in Vietnam, Iraq won the Gulf War (number two, in the 90s).
Had UK given up and signed a peace with Germany then it could have been possible that there wouldn't have been what we call WW2 today at all. Given what Germans planned to do then fortunately it didn't happen. We can thank stubbornness of Churchill for this. But Germany made it even worse - it declared war on United States.
But there were no treaties between Germany and Allies until Germany had unconditionally surrendered.
But my claim was a little different. I wrote that US didn't lose until it "lost its sight". I would argue that it was not understood what is US actually doing in Afghanistan and when you don't have any idea what you are doing then you can't win anything.
The victory against Poland was, in the end, meaningless with the failure of Barbarossa. As was the victory against France in the West, as soon as the war in Borth Africa was lost by the axis. There never was a path to Axis victory, and winning the first to rounds by points is meabingless if you get knocked out by round 6. Should be self-explanatory.
Wehrmacht rapid advance was stopped, but it didn't yet mean pushing them out would have been possible without tremendous material support through lend lease, without what there wouldn't have been any adequate Red Army logistics and armor.
USSR was able to produce around 40 000 tanks and this force overwhelmed German armor capacity, but they were able build this much only considering that US provided 400 000 trucks, if it was not so, considerable amount of tank building capacity would have to had been shared to build trucks, but even then the steel to build tanks came from US. On top of this USSR got 14 000 planes and also rail wagons and engines.
If there was a pipe dream then it was Red Army countering Wehrmacht without US material support. Russians like to minuscule the importance of US support but it was substantial and most likely essential for their victory.
Do they? There's a reason they call it asymmetric warfare.
An occupying army of 200,000 needs 200,000 guns.
An insurgent force that wants to shoot up one bus/shop/school/whatever per day only needs one gun a day.
And no, you do not win those kind of wars by brutality. People love to believe that, it just doesn't work that way.
Urbanization statistics for Afghanistan place them at something like 20-25% with most of the population being rural. So even if you occupy the cities and stay for a generation (19.9 year according to https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/mothers-mean-ag...), you haven't really won the war. The first source I found says that in 2017 about 50% of the population was still under Taliban control or where Taliban openly moved about.
The future of the warfare is when you have no high-value targets at all on the battlefield and everything is spread out as evenly as possible.
that would put the utmost importance on communication and orchestration
I'm sure Ukraine air force would love long range AA missiles (to counter the Russian ones) and stealth planes to avoid SAM (but Russians are not using theirs, probably because they suck, but still...).
In the West. In Russia (according to NYT piece), it's $600.
It still remains a fact that the genocidal war started by Russia has not yet been decided and both, attacking and defending sides are trying to figure out the weapon systems to accomplish their military goals and these weapon systems are going through rapid development and "field testing".
It also remains a fact that low tech weaponry used by the terrorist organizations in Gaza has had very limited effect against the well equipped and highly motivated IDF.
What Russia does in Ukraine is a conventional war, not Genozid neither.
Scholars of genocide disagree with your assessment. Russian actions against Ukrainians, from massacres to kidnapping of children and burning Ukrainian books, not to mention declarations that Ukrainians don't exist at all, are obvious signs of genocial intent and genocide itself. https://newlinesinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/English-Rep...
Articles like the infamous "What Russia Should Do with Ukraine" also leave no doubt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Russia_Should_Do_with_Ukr...
After all, why does Putin have so much trouble travelling internationally? Because the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for kidnapping of children, which he openly boasted about, apparently not understanding that rest of the world sees that as a form of genocide.
The only ones I've seen argue against calling Russian actions in Ukraine a genocide are those who sometimes accidentally use Russian phrases when writing in English, that is, the denial is emotional, not fact-based.
Terrorist attack with the intent to destroy as many members of a group as possible is still a genocide.
dang, when it comes to moderation then my intent is not to inflict a flamewar, but as I have pointed out, there is a group of people on HN who are actively supporting genocide against Ukrainians and Jews. We don't call Holocaust a German Jewish conflict for reason.
In Elon Musk biography by Isaacson, Elon explains the importance to why he sued NASA on behalf of SpaceX - in regards to the $227 million sole-source contract NASA awarded to Kistler in 2004; the strength or weight of the importance here outweighed any personal-emotional feelings and relationships he had, he stuck to his guns of seeing the corruption and understanding the negative impact and unfairness to SpaceX - perhaps selfish in nature but if Elon's nature is for fairness and justice, long live Elon.
But yes, save blanket bombing a whole territory, guerilla warfare with necessity-survival will lead to the most creative possibilities.
FPV drones can almost be crafted locally, though, using off the shelf components.
The COTS components are all made in China. That's why no Western military is planning to use them in wartime - that supply chain is depending on the good will of an adversary.
On Ukrainian front both sides go as far as to install CCTV to watch their adversaries' movement while in their improvised bunker. These are also civilian systems which get delivered to the front by volunteers. Ukrainian war is notably BYOD. It helps that both sides figured out to pay good money to soldiers on the ground.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39187161>
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39180235>
Appropriate practice:
See e.g. MC02 where they lost to opfor with what was literally like a cheaply thrown together zerg rush, and then just reset the scenario for a do-over.
I agree so, not all lessons from that particular wargame seem to have been learned. Calling what mounted to a quite brilliant, unconventional strategy a "cheaply thrown together zerg rush" is just blatantly wrong so.
The other aspect that is missed in criticisms of this particular wargame is the fact that there were specific doctrine elements that were to be tested-- now the claimed outcome of those can be debated, for instance the fact that opfor had many restrictions on how they were allowed to employ their anti air defenses-- but a wargame is NOT meant to be a giant game of paintball where when one side gets hit they just pack up and go home, that would be incredibly wasteful. In many cases you have formations planning and training for months to participate in the exercise. The purpose is testing out many different aspects of doctrine, and often times that involves 'ignoring' results of one part of the wargame.
And a successful zerg rush kinda has to be well coordinated, with pretty tight timing, otherwise it doesn't work. It wasn't meant negatively. Maybe I've just watched way too much OGN StarCraft.
That's precisely why I'm calling it a zerg rush. It's cheaper units, en masse, defeating a technology and cost-wise much more expensive foe.
You make a good point about the reset though, it would be a waste of resources to not reset at that point.