- Clashes between the Libyan National Army (LNA) and forces of the Government of National Accord (GNA) continue in the area of Tripoli Airport near the city of Tripoli.
- A Libyan National Army (LNA) warplane struck Government of National Accord (GNA) positions in Swani and the Ramlah area;
- A LNA spokesman announced that during recent clashes in southern Tripoli 31 GNA fighters were killed and 21 military vehicles were captured by the LNA.
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Since when did wars become impossible to win? No actor small or large seems able to win a crushing long term victory.
That’s because modern wars have become wars of attrition, whereby a war, and even battles are long drawn out processes, where its hard to pinpoint an exact moment, but you can notice that at some point the tide of war has shifted. It does any general well, including the arm chair ones, to keep that in mind. Because the desire to seek that decisive all crushing determining battle has led more countries into ruin then actually fighting that battle and losing it. The Western allies in WW1 pissed away millions of their soldiers in trying to seek that decisive battle that would win them the war, the Germans gambled everything in knocking out the USSR in one decisive campaign in 1941 and ended up in the greatest war of attrition in history. The Japanese similarly tried to seek that one decisive naval battle that would win them WW2 and also ended up in a grinding slogging match they could never hope to win. Again and again the US tried to create a decisive battle against North Vietnam, only to forever be denied such a battle as their enemy just melted away into the jungle. Only to lose that battle in their own public opinion when they finally got it during the Tet offensive.
In this case Hafter could probably have defeated the GNA if Tripoli was close next to Benghazi and he could bring his full strength to bear. But now he’s fighting at the end of an immensely long supply line through desert terrain so he’s not able to do so. So we are again left with a war of attrition, with no clear turning point and we are still unable to tell which side is slowly gaining the upper hand or not.
No doubt that’s all true. Still though it seems war alone is insufficient to solve conflicts when once before it was.
Feels like exhaustion. Makes me wonder how resource depletion wars would look like. Like this slow drip fraying. Like why did Syria Iran and Russia stop last year? Been little progress and no shows of strength just small arm militias occasional air strikes.
Wars can solve conflicts, but you have to keep in mind that a war is only won once the other side agrees that they have lost. And it has to have a clear achievable objectives. If you go back into history you’ll see that most wars did not have clear achievable objectives. Did anyone really win WW1? The Germans were losing, the tide of war had moved in favor of the Allies, but did they win any of the objectives that they set out to achieve? In WW2 the UK and France went to war to safeguard Poland, yet by the end of the war Poland had been sold out and handed over to Stalin to do with as he wanted. All the UK and France had achieved was that by war’s end they were on the winning side. Alexander the Great won all his battles and created a great empire. Within years of his death it fell apart and got divided among his generals.
As for Syria, yeah, the pace of combat slowed down significantly. But the Axis of Resistance basically defeated every Jihadi enclave and group that was within its means. Idlib was not within its means because Turkey declared it off limits and Russia desired greatly to create a massive split between Turkey and the West. And East Syria was also off limits because the US had declared it so, and Russia was not going to go war with the US over Syria. Russia had set clear goals at the start of its intervention. To safeguard its bases in Syria, to safeguard Assad’s regime, to defeat Jihadi extremism in Syria before it could spread to Russia, and to do so within the limited military means that it had. It has basically achieved most of those aims and now seeks to use diplomacy where military might can no longer take it. And that too is the sign of smart political thinking. A military solution at all cost that does not secure the original war aims is no solution worth aiming for. If war is the continuation of diplomacy with other means then diplomacy is the continuation of war with other means as well. You gotta know when to use what instrument. When all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail. When you have both a hammer and a screw driver your options for problem solving increase greatly.
I’d wonder what the actual objectives in ww2 and ww1 were. Saving Poland wasn’t probably it. A useful cause belli but no desire to save them I’d bet. History is written by the winners you can’t trust it.
Still though I think new round of weaponry is called for. Next gen tactical nukes drone swarms space weapons who knows what else can be innovated to bring victory to the battlefield.
I’ve never had much luck understanding diplomacy. I like to play online strategy games. I almost always end up getting ganged up and wiped out lol. But I have fun dying gloriously in battle fighting half a dozen enraged enemies.
>>>I’d wonder what the actual objectives in ww2 and ww1 were. Saving Poland wasn’t probably it. A useful cause belli but no desire to save them I’d bet. History is written by the winners you can’t trust it.<<<
It probably originally was to save Poland. Of course Germany was starting to get out of control and something had to be done about it at some point. And then it became a question of national survival, especially for the British, and then about who ended where on the map of Europe once the fighting would stop.
As for WW1, every country had its own reasons. The French wanted Alsace Lorraine back at all cost, the British did not want one strong continental power on the European mainland, the Germans feared encirclement on many fronts, the Austrians that the rise of Slav nationalism might breakup their empire, I’m sure the Czar had his plans too. By the time the war got really going nobody was still following their original war aims any more and it became more of a case of stubbornly trying to win at all costs, no matter what meager benefits could be gained by it. In the end the French did regain Alsace Lorraine, but it had broken France’s back in lost manpower and national morale, and she would never recover, causing its unprecedented defeat in 1940. In the end no country that was among the winners was satisfied by the victory. They were just glad that it was over.
Funny thing about WW2 history writing is that a massive part of it was done by the losers. German generals wrote the history of that war, especially on the Eastern Front. Which is why we have to this day the idea that Hitler was a moron who refused to listen to his sensible generals, who only lost because of Hitler and the endless swarms of Russians throwing themselves at the Germans with reckless abandon. And of course none of these Germans knew anything about what happening behind the frontline. No sir, what war crimes?
>>>Still though I think new round of weaponry is called for. Next gen tactical nukes drone swarms space weapons who knows what else can be innovated to bring victory to the battlefield.<<<
New weapons rarely change warfare that greatly. It’s how armies use those weapons in what way that determines how wars are won. The Germans won for a long time because they were smart enough to use combined arms warfare, a tactic that the Allies had used against them in 1918 but for some strange reason had forgotten by 1940. Once Germany’s enemies got their shit back in order and relearned the art of combined arms warfare the Germans lost their advantage and started losing.
>>>I’ve never had much luck understanding diplomacy. I like to play online strategy games. I almost always end up getting ganged up and wiped out lol. But I have fun dying gloriously in battle fighting half a dozen enraged enemies.<<<
In which case you should learn how to make alliances with other players and learn to play them against each other. In which case you also learn how diplomacy works.
I will not debate with You about WW1 and 2, but the German planes was “Gentleman” war plans.
It was expected France by loosing their northern parts for a while would negosiate and give Germany influence fx having Morroco, Algier or parts of it, which was cheated away from Germans.
Therefore it was a bad plan for defating France as a country. A real war plane would be to take Paris as they did in 1870.
Preussen felt almost equal to Britts, French and above Italiens. But look at the maps. Fx they had nothing of importance and potential importance apart from deserts and moskitos.
None at that time could see, the Empires later went into instability and many places even today as Syria/Iraq remain as permanent chaos.
I don’t think that taking Paris would cause the French to collapse in WW1 though. They were much more determined and resolved back then then in 1940. It didn’t even win the Germans the 1870, as they had to besiege Paris until 1871. The real knockout was destroying the French army at Sedan. And the whole point of the Schlieffenplan was to annihilate the French army. Sucker them into Alsace Lorraine, as was the French war plan, draw them deep into Germany, then come in from behind through Belgium and the Netherlands and crush them. It was one giant attempt at creating a decisive battle.
I reckon the aims of getting some North African colonies was just extra bonus the Kaiser tacked on for good measure. The real aim was to prevent a two front war between France on one end and Russia on the other. That had been the point of the Schlieffen plan since before Wilhelm II became emperor. The German Schlieffen plan WAS the German war aim and strategy. Everything else, like it making any sense to go to war, if was smart to piss of the British, or why colonies were even necessary, was made irrelevant to the plan. The warplan became the goal in itself, whatever strategic benefits could be gained would be sorted out after the war. And it had to be carried out at some point soon, before the Russian army had modernized to such a point that it could mobilize more rapidly then the time frame allotted for the German army to defeat France. It’s a very interesting case as to what happens when you let the generals call the shots, and not the politicians.
Thats how it was. Its also strange, that Der Kaiser being a peacefull person for many many years suddenly made WW1.
It really was a strange clusterfuck where every military staff was enslaved to their war plans and feared that whoever got to mobilize their armies first and send their war plan into action would get the upper hand. So the moment a crisis erupted all the politicians got badgered by their general staffs to order a mobilization and start the war. Akin to how during the Cold War both sides feared a nuclear sneak attack so it was really tempting to do that sneak attack first.