Opposing Combat Philosophies: Difference between revisions

**After awhile though the British focused on a strategy of emphasizing naval supremacy, imperial intrigue, subversion and what John Keegan once called,"Attrition by Attenuation. This means roughly getting the enemy to overstretch rather then outlasting a massive bloodfest; Risk players will remember the difference which is between two big piles running into each other and waiting until there is only one army in each province. This strategy in fact resembled the [[Napoleonic Wars]] more then [[World War I]] and depended on the inherent efficiency of maritime transport. Some theorists at the time suggested the railroads had made this strategy obsolete but that proved not to be the case not least because a railway schedule can be ripped up by a raiding party tearing up tracks while ships have no need for tracks and if the ships themselves can be hit by raiders, so can the trains. Perhaps more to the point, railways cannot penetrate enemy territory very well because the enemy can always destroy or mine his tracks as he retreats or simply build them to a different gauge in the first place, like Russia did. Whereas ships having no need for tracks can go wherever there is water deep enough for them.

***The three main allies in [[World War 2]] had mutually opposing combat philosophies and had to make compromises to get anything like coordination. The Russian's combat philosophy was set for it as a war of attrition in Eastern Europe by the fact that it was faced with invasion and Hitlers atrocious policies left [[Violence Is the Only Option|no option even unconditional surrender]] besides the most horrible war ever fought. Russians often accused Americans and British of [[Let's You and Him Fight|fighting the war with Russian blood]] and one can understand this feeling from ordinary Russians who did take most of the casualties of the war but it [[Moral Myopia|comes off ill]] from Stalin who had been trying to do exactly the same thing in the early stages of the war(not to mention seeking a jackel's share in Eastern Europe) and then tried to hurry up the Overlord invasion by using the [[Wounded Gazelle Gambit|Americans and Britishers conscience]] as a political weapon. Furthermore Russia seems not to have understood naval warfare or how difficult it was to get a substantial army ashore in Europe. America focused intensely on an almost Teutonic dedication to finding the Schwerpunkt(decisive point in German)and begrudged every asset sent to what it considered a secondary theater or diversion, or more disparagingly a "sideshow." Britain urged investing more in such secondary theaters partly from emotional reactions-it had a Kiplingesque romanticism about sideshows and a tradition going back to Elizabeth I not to mention fear of [[Shell-Shocked Veteran|fear of another Somme]]-but also partly because it thought good could come from such investments and in any event a landing in France was impossible at the time. Americans had to be honest something of a John Wayne syndrome and accused the British of either not wanting to fight or fighting just for their sordid Imperial interests. The British on the other hand felt that they were just wanting to fight smart. Basically the Brits thought they were clever and the Yanks thought the Brits to clever by half. Somehow or other compromises were made. For the most part Russia just fought it's own war and there were few joint ops. Between America and Britain the compromise was roughly to keep the pressure on steadily in the British style and then shift as soon as resources were amassed for a massive invasion of France.