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To rephrase/edit a comment I posted here 3 months ago: I think this whole sh*tshow is yet another consequence of Western Europeans generally lacking a perspective on their own continent’s history and acting accordingly. It has been true in almost all cases that the Russian army blunders and stumbles during the initial phase of any war, even regardless of it aggressing or defending, but then shows itself to be capable of gradually learning and adapting even if the final outcome is defeat, as in WW1 for example. See the Brusilov offensive of 1916 in that case, characterized by John Keegan as “the greatest victory seen on any front [of WW1] since the trench lines had been dug on the Aisne two years before” (as quoted in Wikipedia). And there are cases when the important lessons are only learned after the war, such as the war against the Japanese in 1904-5 (which, by the way, wasn’t a cakewalk for the Japanese army by any means). I assume this is the consequence of the intellectual sloth and naïve romanticism that generally characterize the Russian people, the legacy of languishing as slaves for centuries etc., probably the Mongol yoke also has something to do with it, but this is largely beside the point. There are also a few cases when that initial period of incompetence is rather short, like during the naval war against the Ottomans in 1788-91, whom were soundly beaten.
In the case of WW2, the Red Army clearly demonstrated an ability to gradually gain competence, although the results generally appeared only in the final phase of the war. The offensives in the territory of present-day Belarus, Moldova, Romania and Poland in the summer of 1944 or the invasion of Manchuria in 1945 were impressive by anyone’s standards. The Russians are slow to learn maybe, but they do learn. Even the Afghanistan war wasn’t just a series of one blunder after another, just look at the battle for ‘Hill’ 3234 for example.
It seems that Western Europeans apparently have this usual tendency to concentrate on Russian blunders while ignoring every other factor and then assume that winning against them will be easy, and also have a way of convincing their big American brother of this.
What a garbage theory. Astrology for geopolitics. "And on the second moon of the third year of war, the russian, as always, will have learned his lesson and win". Predicting future events from nothing more than the eternal essence of the participants.
So, do the americans, or the french, not learn, in war? You say his essence makes the russian learn slow, yet, sometimes, against the turk, the russian still learns fast. And the theory predicts the russian ends up winning, but of course, russians lost quite a lot of wars, even in wars where they appeared to be slowly learning at first, in accordance with their eternal destiny.
Such as?
It doesn't. I never claimed that. What I did claim is that it's grave folly to look at the initial blunders of the Russians and then assume it's all they will ever keep doing and thus expecting final victory over them as self-evident.
Judging by the German campaign of 1940, the French indeed do not learn, and we don't have later examples to judge. With respect to the US, unfortunately we can conclude that learning anything from Vietnam was quite difficult. American politicans also appeared to have learning from the Panama and Kuwait conflicts that making war can be made easy and bloodless, which is also just hubris.
The customary reward of defeat, if one can survive it, is in the lessons thereby learned, which may yield victory in the next war. But the circumstances of our defeat in Vietnam were sufficiently ambiguous to deny the nation (that) benefit. – Edward N. Luttwak
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