Simplicius observes the way technology has created a paradox that currently provides a significant advantage for the side with the ability to “be in the most places at once” rather than the traditional principle of “getting there first with the most”.
It is the age of paradox in warfare: where de rigueur total dispersion of forces appears to make high casualty densities obsolete, yet the entire length of the battlefield is overwatched by the most unprecedentedly powerful and accurate systems in history, like Iskanders, Kinzhals, Zircons, HIMARs, etc., which allow the carrying out of near-instantaneous kill-chains—from detection to transmit/distribution, to fire order within moments.
This is why the only way to fight and advance has come down to dispersing your strategic operations over the widest possible scale, so that the end goal becomes the totality of victory rather than specific operational objectives like: “Capture this area of cities.” Such a task requires the concentration of forces, from divisions, brigades, battalions, whose every staging action is monitored with almost total transparency by the enemy.
This ‘war of the future’ will be won by the most flexible, resilient, and adaptable force—the force which can pull punches, use feints, and reorientations all along the entire combat line in the most expedient manner. Russia is showing this today by utilizing a confounding rotation of active fronts to not only unbalance the AFU, but to stress their mobility and logistics to the extreme. When you have the advantage in logistical infrastructure and facility, you can ‘daze’ your opponent by conducting small operations across a scattered range of fronts, causing them great stress in trying to keep up.
In the Avdeevka battle, we saw Ukraine being forced to pull significant amounts of elite units from several fronts like Zaporozhye and Bakhmut to reinforce the crumbling Avdeevka lines. When that finished, Russia launched a Zaporozhye attack, overrunning depleted AFU positions there as a result, with AFU unable to reinstate reserves fast enough. The same goes for the Kupyansk and Kremennaya regions: reports spoke of AFU’s desperate troop pulls from Kupyansk to bolster defenses in northwest Bakhmut, where Russia has likewise started a series of attacks.
It’s like pricking a spinning drunk with a needle from every side—he hardly knows where he’s being hit, nor has time to orient himself correctly. Lacking logistical mobility—in the form of physical haulers like HETs, transports, etc.—Ukraine gets the worst of it in being forced to constantly run around plugging leaks in the flooding deck.
Taking into account everything I said above and in the rest of the paid article regarding Ukraine’s NATO ISR overmatch plus the prevalence of drones in general and how they’ve vastly limited maneuver warfare, we know that the only way to truly win is to stretch your enemy on every front and defeat him in detail while bringing to bear your greater logistical and economic resources…
The concluding point is that it’s not about capturing particular towns or regions, the real work being done is internally—the AFU is being gutted and hollowed out. This is why it’s so difficult for blinkered pro-UA observers to understand the true underlying dynamic of the conflict. They judge the war algorithmically: Russia has only captured a few kilometers so that means Russia is not succeeding. But they fail to take into account the intangibles, that the very moral and mechanical fiber of the AFU is coming apart at the seams.
It’s intriguing to note that the principle described by Simplicius appears to be a fractal one, as the BRICSIA alliance is observably stretching Clown World on every front, and, for the most part, defeating it in detail while bringing to bear its greater logistical and economic resources and exploiting Clown World’s logistical weaknesses in order to destroy the neo-liberal world order and win World War III without going nuclear.
We know Clown World is crumbling in every sense, militarily, economically, philosophically, spiritually, morally, and most of all, in morale terms. It is increasingly – and observably – desperate and insane. And it is more dangerous than ever because it, and all its servants, are correctly afraid, and so they are tightening their grip and lashing out on every side, in every polity Clown World controls. If its global ambitions weren’t so ambitious and its rule weren’t so illegitimate and unpopular, it would be cutting its losses and retreating to a defensible core, but it can’t because no such core exists.