How sadly typical to ascribe a near-universally known fact by all mankind since the very first wars to a white man just because his words are most commonly used in the western dominated world to today.
This has nothing to do with Moltke being white. All that happened here is that you used a quote out of context, without knowing what the quote actually meant. Accusing me of Orientalism is just a ridiculous (and disappointing) attempt at salvaging that error. I expected better of you dude.... Like, seriously? To be clear: If I was an Orientalist, then I would be busy shooting myself in the head, rather than arguing here with you lolz
Are you honestly not following what is going on in this war?! I had let similar remarks go before because I just assumed it was a weird turn of phrase, but do you actually not understand what is happening on the ground?!
Because it looks like you think the Russians are engaging in a classic battle of attrition of just evenly or even disadvantagedly trading lives with the Ukrainians because they got more blood to spare. That’s a battle of attrition and it is very much NOT how the Russians are fighting and winning this war.
What the Russians are doing is attritioning away the manpower and equipment of the armed forces of Ukraine while minimising their own losses at the expense of time.
The Russians are neither bogged down or taking unsustainable losses, it’s the Ukrainians who are running short of everything and consistently losing ground. It’s a slow grind for sure, and not as ‘sexy’ as western thunder runs, but it’s undeniable effective and also provides enormous economic and political advantages to Russia as winter approaches.
The Russians initially tried that and failed due to their botched penny-pinching BTG ‘modernisation’ attempt. But they demonstrated great initiative and adaptability to very quickly reconfigure their entire war strategy and turn things around very quickly.
Rather than recognise that things had movement on, you seem to just be hang up on how the Russians are not doing revolutionary tacticalKool warfare and have little to offer beyond pointless nit picking and moaning how things aren’t going perfectly.
.... sigh.
You already agreed that Russia was relying on attrition to win in your previous post, so there's no point in going backwards at this point. Your new definition of what Russia is doing is still the actual definition of attritional warfare i.e. exhausting the enemy to win. It is the stupidest form of warfare. And by the way, Sun Tzu also hated it, so at least listen to him if you're not going to listen to me, or Moltke or whoever.
Stop with this politician-like behavior, where you just switch words around to excuse operational mistakes.
If you don’t like how the Russians are conducting this war, how about you suggest how they could have done better?
I did, on multiple threads, but specifically the "lessons" thread (because that thread exists exactly for this purpose.) I posted detailed bullet points there a few months ago and I even posted an overarching concern just yesterday.
What you're doing is even worse than attritional warfare, it's redundant warfare.