plawolf
Lieutenant General
I was going to drop this, but it is actually pretty relevant to the longer term possible strategic development of this war.
There are many many major problems with trying to pivot from a conventional war to an asymmetrical war strategy.
If you look back at history, it is exceptionally rare for a country to loose a conventional war and then pivot to asymmetrical warfare and win. Not without direct intervention of foreign powers at any rate. Where the underdog have won, it usually start the other way, with a rag tag force winning asymmetrical warfare and then growing into a more conventional force able to fight and win conventional battles, and there are very good reasons for that.
I personally believe the two most critical reasons for that are to do with competency and moral.
As with all things, starting out is the hardest, especially from nothing. It’s common knowledge that all self made millionaires sat their first 100k is the hardest to make. Starting and winning a resistance movements is incredibly hard and dangerous, like evolution on fast forwards and luck will only get you so far. It’s no coincidence that successful resistance leaders all have legendary mythology surrounding them. There is of course a lot of hype and propaganda, but there is also a lot of truth in it as it takes a once-in-generation or even once-in-a-millennium kind of rare talent to be able to pull something like that off. Elensky is nothing like such a rare talent, if he was, he wouldn’t be loosing this war so badly with all the cards he had been gifted.
This is a core reason why western backed astroturf resistance movements always gets crushed so easily. It’s not true ground-up movements lead by people who earned their positions of leadership, they are lead by western cronies whose main talent is in kissing western ass and asking how high when their western masters barks ‘jump’. Little wonder they inevitably lead all stupid enough to follow them to ruin and death.
And it’s not just a talent problem with just the top leadership. The best people to fight and win an asymmetrical war for you are also the kind of people who would have already signed up first to join the regular military. Guess what happened to most of them if they are drafting up old men, women and cripples?
Starting an asymmetrical war is playing massively against the odds, to do so after all the best fighters in your society have already been chewed up loosing a conventional war? That’s even stacking the deck even more against yourself.
The second factor is that resistance movements live and die on belief and hope. How much belief do you think the guys getting blown to bits on the daily by Russian artillery, drones and airstrikes have in their leadership to keep on fighting as glorified terrorists with worst odds and guaranteed firing squad treatment if caught?
There is a third, less general and more specific to Ukraine factor that massively works against asymmetrical warfare against Russia. Demographics.
The places where asymmetrical warfare have won are also places where life is plentiful, short and brutal. You need Jai Hind level birth rates to win, because you need to have more blood to spare than the enemy have the will to spill it. That’s something Ukrainian demographics couldn’t come close to achieving anytime soon. So the Ukrainians will literally run out of people to fight long before the Russians loose the will to keep killing them.
