Asymmetrical Warfare

Never Give Your Enemy the Battle He Wants

Funeral for a Ukrainian soldier, early days.

I've been thinking about the American Revolution recently, and how the English soldiers - and particularly their officers - were incensed that the Americans would not fight like proper soldiers, lined up in a field or pasture, facing an opposing line from the other side, firing off a volley or two of musket fire, and then charging with fixed bayonets. Instead, the Americans hid behind trees and stone walls, and sniped at the English as they marched in a column down a charming New England dirt road in the equally charming New England countryside. And then melted away. 

Pretty much what the locals did to the Americans in the Vietnam war. 

Welcome to asymmetrical warfare. Here's a simple rule - never give your enemy the battle he wants. 

I think this is what is happening in Ukraine right now, and I think the media, as well as the Russians, simply don't understand what is going on, or how the dynamic of this war is going to play out. 

Because I think they're making the famous mistake of expecting to fight the last war - or maybe the last war they won. 

Everyone seems to be waiting for Kursk, the mammoth battle in 1943 that took place between the Russians and the Germans, killed simply fabulous numbers of soldiers - mostly Russian, but also great gobs of Germans - and essentially broke the Germans, who never recovered the initiative. It was the largest tank battle in history, and it took place near the Russian city of Kursk, which is not terribly far from the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. 

Kursk is not going to happen in Ukraine. What will happen? I don't know. But I have some ideas.

The Russians want to replicate Kursk, fighting mainly with tanks and cannon. Their infantry sucks. Look for the Ukrainians to fight with infantry, probably at night, and probably in small groups. 

A lot of people, including me, were wondering why the Ukrainians held on so long in Severdonetsk. But, at the very least, they spent their time learning how to fight the Russians at night. Apparently the Ukrainians had night-vision goggles, and the Russians did not. But knowing your advantage in the abstract, and knowing how to use it, when lives are at stake, are two different things. 

The value of a tank on the battlefield has declined dramatically with the development of shoulder-fired antitank missiles, such as the Javelin, which proved very effective against the Russian columns advancing on Kyiv early in the war.

And then there are the drones, often bought at craft stores and MacGyvered to carry explosives over enemy lines and release them at opportune times.

And of course there are the missiles from the United States, which allow the Ukrainians to attack Russian supply depots and headquarters far behind the front lines. And also things like bridges.

Ukraine appears to have launched a major counteroffensive around Kherson. People still seem to be looking for battalions of tanks charging across fields of sunflowers.

I think the real action will not be on the "front line." I think forces will move forward to occupy "front line" positions that the Russians are no longer capable of defending, or have perhaps abandoned, because of activity in their rear that deprives them of food, fuel, ammunition, reinforcements, and contact with their headquarters.

The real infantry fighting, I think, will take place well behind Russian lines, attacking supply depots, military airfields, military headquarters, and choke points on supply lines. These would be bridges.  

I think the Russians have made a major mistake by putting gobs of troops into the Kherson area, on the wrong side of a river where the bridges are being pummeled by the Ukrainians. If those troops get cut off - and it seems like we're pretty close to that - you can look for long columns of Russian prisoners marching out to prisoner of war camps further inside Ukraine, where they will sit out the war. And possibly count themselves lucky to be out of a war where their commanders are such blithering idiots.

See also A Lesson From the Berlin Wall.

Night Lights at Coney Island

Before World War I

Luna Park (1906).

I found these photographs at the Library of Congress. I think they belong to another world. I have difficulty describing what I feel as I look at them. Perhaps it's like flying an open glider through a galaxy of stars, while breathing the air of a warm summer night near the seashore.

Where does the power of these photographs come from? Part of it, I think, is the abstract expressionism inherent in black and white photography. The film only writes down what it wants to write down.

Luna Park (circa 1905).

And then there is the willing suspension of disbelief. We want to be taken away to a strange and beautiful place. Call it Dreamland, if you will. That was the name of an amusement park in Coney Island at this time, and one of these photographs was taken there. No wonder Sigmund Freud visited Coney. He had published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899.

The other three photographs belong to a place called Luna Park. French film director Georges Melies released a film called A Trip to the Moon in 1902. Among its antecedents were two novels by Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and Around the Moon (1870). Meanwhile, in America, an amusement ride called A Trip to the Moon made its debut in Buffalo, New York, in 1901 and stopped briefly at Coney Island's Steeplechase Park in 1902 before landing in Luna Park, which opened in 1903. (For more on Luna Park, see John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century, 1978, pp. 61-72.)

I suppose it's worth pointing out that all of this took place before the Wright brothers became the first to fly like a bird, in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, at the very end of 1903. 

Luna Park (between 1903 and 1906).

Luna and Dreamland were two of the main amusement parks in Coney Island before World War I, and Coney was very popular with the intelligentsia of the time. I recently learned from The New Yorker that Marcel Duchamp visited in 1917. His 1911 painting Nude Descending a Staircase (# 1) helped change the way people look at looking. It's in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 

Duchamp's painting stands at an interesting intersection of still photographs and the new movies. In the 1870s, Eadweard Muybridge invented time-lapse photography, producing still images of a horse, and then people, moving through space. These photographs lie behind the idea of splicing all the images together and projecting them on a screen to produce moving pictures. Duchamp then took the motion of the movies and deconstructed it into its component parts, thereby letting the world in on the secret behind the magic of movies. 

Dreamland (perhaps 1905).

Dreams and lunacy; photographs and movies. And men flying like birds. It was a very interesting time. So many new things, and new ways of looking at things, and people were open to all of it. 

I wonder how the world would have developed if The War to End All Wars had not intervened, maiming people and deforming whole societies with the immensity of its trauma. 

See also City of Lights, Layers at the Beach Front.