This is the best summary I could come up with:
Outnumbered and outgunned by the Red Army, the Germans pinned their hopes on a mobile, aggressive defense to stop a relentless series of Soviet offensives in Ukraine and southern Russia.
The US Army’s field manual of operational terms defines active defense as “the employment of limited offensive action and counterattacks to deny a contested area or position to the enemy.”
But that isn’t what Ukraine is doing, Douglas Nash, a retired US Army colonel and author of several books on German military operations in World War II, told Business Insider.
The classic example is the Third Battle of Kharkov in February 1943, when von Manstein’s unleashed a planned counterblow that annihilated Soviet armor pursuing the retreating Germans after Stalingrad.
NATO embraced the concept as a response to the USSR’s numerically superior Warsaw Pact forces, and the devastating effect of modern weapons seen in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
“Yet with overwhelming Soviet military power arrayed against it, NATO — led primarily by the US — felt it had no other choice.” By the 1980s, the US Army had switched to the AirLand Battle concept, which envisaged taking the initiative in offensive operations to defeat an enemy attack.
The original article contains 1,456 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 86%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Good thing Ukraine isn’t fighting the USSR, then.
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Russia inherited most of USSR military industrial base, and they kept it around https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/15/rate-of-russian-military-production-worries-european-war-planners
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That is such a trash headline. The effectiveness of different strategies change depending on the equipment, the chain of command, the conditions of the conflict, and so on and so on and so on. What is its purpose other than to draw a comparison between Ukraine and the nazis?
Exactly. If they’d gone on the offensive you could make a similar headline:
Ukraine’s military is shifting to an offensive strategy against Russia that failed Nazi Germany in WWII
The second purpose is to imply that the war is a futile struggle for Ukraine - and further foment anger that it is being funded by “our government” (in the case of most English speaking nations providing funds to them).
Seems like a reasonable thing to imply.
Anybody with a functioning brain understood that Ukraine could not win this war long before it started. Obama said this plainly back in 2016:
It’s liberal brain rot to rip everything out of context and just assume each concept is a perfectly impenetrable frictionless sphere that exists in the realm of forms.
The real reason for the comparison, however, is to allude to the way the USSR marched to Berlin, liberating most of Europe from the Nazis, defeating 80% of the Nazi forces, and did so through superior supply chains, superior manufacturing, and superior grand strategy (not just battlefield but also social, political, and economic), which creates the spectre of Russia continuing to expand Westward, which creates the case for expanding NATO funding, putting all of Europe on austerity and a war footing, and getting the Americans to show up and fight the Boogeyman.
Keep it classy, sh.itheads.
