How to Lose an Already-Lost War – Nine More Lessons from Sun Tzu

“Ukraine is slated to receive the first ten of 31 promised Abrams tanks in mid-September, according to a Defense Department official and another person familiar with the discussions, who like others interviewed for this story was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive plans,” the Washington newspaper Politico reported. “Western officials hope the arrival of the tanks will give Kyiv’s forces the edge they need to push through Russia’s fierce defenses in their grueling counteroffensive.”

An enormous amount of crucial strategic information is revealed in this one tame, hapless, obedient paragraph of Orwellian Newspeak.

First, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and his political puppet-masters in the White House and the State Department have no conception of land war over the past 120 years. And the past summer’s charnel house of brave, shamefully needlessly sacrificed young Ukrainian soldiers have not dented any of their warlords’ impenetrable skulls.

The idea that 31 tanks will make a difference to land operations in Ukraine is risible. 31 tanks would not have made a grain of difference even to the pin-prick scale US and British military operations in North Africa and Sicily in 1942-43.  

Second, it does not occur to these mighty Men of Decisive Decision and Policymaking Brilliance that the Russian Army has been enthusiastically knocking out Abrams tanks over the past year and has become highly proficient at cost effectively doing so. 

Third, the true significance of the cornucopia of $75 billion and more worth of US and other NATO ordinance to brave Ukrainian boys miserably trained, led and directed by stupid, brutal incompetent thugs has fulfilled the dream of every Soviet and Russian Army officer for nearly 80 years. It has given them an enormous war game – conducted under optimum conditions – to learn how to operationally neutralize all the most numerous and modern Atlantic Alliance weapons systems.

Fourth, the positive learning curve has been entirely on the Russian side.

Austin, his generals and their NATO peers have shown not the slightest sense that anything has gone wrong, that new tactics and weapons-use combinations and sequences may be needed. Yet war is all about quick decision-making turning a dime learning from inevitable failures and unanticipated circumstances. In other words, Intelligent, Directed Adaptive Evolution (IDAE). 

Fifth, the most simple, obvious and important lessons of Sun Tzu are being ignored by America’s military genius Ignoramuses and Thoughtful Pundits yet again. 

For Sun Tzu emphasized, victory and defeat are never a consequence of the quality or superiority of the weapons employed, nor of their number. Tactics, strategy, small unit training and direction and intelligent generalship govern all and decide the outcomes.

Unless the disparity in weapons is obvious and overwhelming, idiot tactics will always fail, no matter how often the weapons and ammunition are endlessly replaced.

 (Douglas Haig yet again throwing away a million lives and two million more wounded and prematurely dead in World War I, Friedrich Paulus not having a clue how to respond to Vasily Chuikov’s extraordinary improvisation of on-the-spot tactics for fighting rattenkrieg – the war of the rats – in the ruins of Stalingrad. Idiot British generals gallantly charging 88mm dug in anti-tank guns with their lousy already obsolescent tanks in the North African Desert in 1941-2.) 

Sixth, Sun Tzu anticipated the wisest US investors of modern Wall Street by 2,400-plus years or so: Never throw good money after bad. Never reinforce failure. Cut your losses. Invest your resources only in success.

Seventh, the Biden administration’s catastrophic losing strategy that has inflicted a bloodletting of generations on the suffering Ukrainian people and all for nothing is going to continue. They do not want to stop it. They haven’t a clue how to stop it. They do not even realize that they need to stop it.

Eighth, from the Seventh Circle of Dante’s Hell, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara is laughing. His incremental escalation strategy in Vietnam that humiliated and defeated the wealthiest, most powerful nation in human history – his own – lives again! He has been vindicated! If only by more condemned diabolical fools.

Once again, a long-failed strategy continues because none of the geniuses who cooked it up in their collective mediocrity has any clue how to do better. And because none of them has the clarity or moral courage to admit they are fools and losers and that they were so from the beginning. None of them has the guts to cut the losses. Or the simple human decency to end the suffering and the dying.

Once again, Sun Tzu would not have been surprised.

Ninth, it has been the fashion over the past half century or so to say that West Point and the endless flood of Napoleons, Macarthur’s and Patton’s it continues to turn out to global awe and acclaim has finally caught up with North Vietnam’s General Vo Ngyuen Giap in the 1960s and 70s. They have finally learned to read Sun Tzu and even give courses on him.

Except none of this is more than by-the-rote book learning to look good. It is as the Bible’s Book of Proverbs memorably puts it, A Parable in the Mouth of Fools. Words of eternal wisdom mindlessly recited by performing parrots with no comprehension or internalization of the cognitive thought processes whatsoever.

Nothing has been learned. Nothing has changed. The March of Folly of the Gadarene Swine to their own destruction to the rousing beat of the National Anthem and their favorite John Philip Sousa rousing tunes continues unabated.