ANDREI RAEVSKY—The title of this article is a quote by the famous Chinese general, strategist, philosopher, and writer Sun Tzu who lived 2500 years ago. And while it is true that warfare has dramatically changed over the past millennia (for example, operational art was added as an intermediate level between tactics and strategy), the fundamental logic of Sun Tzu still applies. To grossly oversimplify this issue, you could say that tactics are the means toward an end that has to be defined and the definition of that end goal is strategy. Again, this is ridiculously oversimplified, but for our purposes that is good enough.
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LARRY JOHNSON—Ignore the fact the Russia has stepped up its missile strikes on key infrastructure during the past two months. If Ukraine’s tanks are moving and the Russians are losing, according to Lipson, then why does Ukraine desperately need hundreds of tanks from the West? If Ukraine is winning and Russia is being defeated on the battlefield, why is the West not preparing its victory party? Cobbling together a failed NATO summit in Ramstein this past week is not a sign that the West is confident of Ukraine’s military prospects.
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BIG SERGE—Russia’s surprise decision to voluntarily withdraw from the west bank of Kherson in the first week of November, there has been little in the way of dramatic changes to the frontlines in Ukraine. In part, this reflects the predictable late autumn weather in Eastern Europe, which leaves battlefields waterlogged and clogged with mud and greatly inhibits mobility. For hundreds of years, November has been a bad month for attempting to move armies any sort of significant distance, and like clockwork we started to see videos of vehicles stuck in the mud in Ukraine.
The return of static positional warfare, however, also reflects the synergistic effect of increasing Ukrainian exhaustion along with a Russian commitment to patiently attriting and denuding Ukraine’s remaining combat capability. They have found an ideal place to achieve this in the Donbas.
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SCOTT RITTER—The information operation run by the Troika had failed. Their plan to cancel voices in opposition to their respective points of view had backfired—what should have been a quiet, small-town panel had now garnered global attention, exposing the pro-Ukrainian position as ideologically weak, while allowing a fact-based appraisal of the Russian position.
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BATKO MILACIC—It remains to be assumed that more than 35,000 people were buried, cremated, abandoned on the battlefields without any record. Namely, this approach to losses creates the ground for the work of black transplantologists, who, according to a number of Russian human rights activists, are ready to remove organs from still-living soldiers with the help of their own command. Anyway, 35,000 donor kidneys for the modern Western world, where their transplantation has long become a routine operation, is a rather small figure that cannot even satisfy the current demand of people who have been standing in line for transplantation for years.
