Prolonged Warfare

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Hey there, and thank you for joining us at the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

This is the weekend edition where we often look at things cultural, but always more in depth.

Today we're probing the question of what leads to prolonged wars, and we will take up that subject when we come back after this break.

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We're back and it's a big topic today.

I have lots of questions for you, Victor, on prolonged wars in history, but I know that you're working on a article on the Ukrainian war and why it's become so prolonged.

And I have a quote from your article that hasn't been published yet, so you may be changing this, that I thought was very interesting about the war in Ukraine.

You say this, quote, now the war devolves further into a contest of mass and weight.

And if I could just insert here for the listeners that he's talking about after the initial start of the war with all the hoopla about Russia, it didn't pan out as a quick war as Russia had expected.

And so he says, right, it's devolved into a contest of mass and weight.

Tons of explosives blowing up pathways for massed troops.

grabbing a few more charred miles of ruined landscape.

And what I really like about that sentence is that it shows the irony of war, that we are blowing up, or that in this case, the Russian army is blowing up and destroying the very thing it wants to attain.

But I was wondering if you could elaborate more on that article, because it does try to explain the prolonging nature of war in the Ukraine right now.

And then maybe we can turn to other wars where we've seen that happen.

When you're going to have a thunder road or a lightning war, take Saddam out in six weeks, three weeks, whether Gulf War I or Gulf War II,

or if you're the German army and you're going to invade on June 22nd, 1941, and you're going to do supposedly the Soviet Union what you did to Poland or France.

This blitzkrieg, the problem with it is it's not just a tactical challenge, but it's also you have to have strategic consideration.

So let's put this in the context of Ukraine.

So on February 23rd, Putin, who had been massing troops, feels that because of the Russian-speaking borderlands and the problems that Ukraine had had with coups and Russian and anti-Russian governments, the fact that Zelensky was a comedian, the fact that the United States had abandoned Afghanistan, a humiliating retreat, etc., etc., Joe Biden's presidency.

No, I don't want to get into all of that.

World oil prices were high, his coffers were full, the West was importing oil, et cetera, et cetera.

So he thought that he could decapitate the Zelensky government with a mobile strike, take an airport, have a long column of fast-moving armor.

He'd invested in sophisticated

air and armor, and he felt that, you know, with the air cover, he would just come in, have commandos take the keep

areas around Kiev, cut it off, take the radio stations, power, and then this mobile column, sort of like a blitzkrieg column, a van Guadarian or a patten, would come in and then he would present the world with a fait accompli.

He had done it in eastern Ukraine, he had done it in Ossatia, he had done it in some ways in Crimea.

And then it didn't work because he miscalculated, as many Blitzkrieg strategists do.

The first thing is there was no wide-scale sympathy

for a Russian coup.

That meant that he had misjudged the Ukrainian population and he didn't think, A, that they would come out of the woodwork and oppose him.

And then B,

he didn't understand that there was an asymmetry there about weaponry.

He misjudged the Ukrainian military response the same way that Hitler did the Soviets.

He felt they were backward people.

They wouldn't be equipped.

He had no idea.

They'd already had in their possession 2,000 T-34 tanks, and they were partisans.

And the same thing with Ukraine.

They had already, not a lot, but they had British and American anti-tank weapons and anti-air weapons.

And they began to destroy this column.

And they impaired the ability of airborne troops to take territory and then stage rage.

And within 10 days,

they were the heart throbs of the West, as Zelensky was.

They had stopped that mobile effort.

And the West,

Putin was under the impression, given its decadence, that it would just acquiesce, especially because Joe Biden had come in and said, you know, we're not going to sanction the Nordstrom pipeline, but we are going to cancel the East Med pipeline idea.

And he had cut back oil.

And he thought, wow, these people are really going to be vulnerable.

And so they won't make a peak.

But they didn't realize the radical support in the West for Zelensky.

And he didn't realize who he was.

They thought he was a two-bit comedian.

He turned out in this particular case to be a master of media.

He galvanized people to his cause.

It was almost,

I can get into it later, but for a variety of reasons, the West responded to him in a way that Putin had not anticipated.

And then all of a sudden, the spigot was increased of sophisticated Western weaponry.

Okay.

At that point, Blitzkrieg was failed, doomed, and everybody announced that Putin had been humiliated.

But, you know, Putin had a country, and this is, you know, everybody said the same thing about Russia.

Everything, buddies said the same thing about France in 1914 when the Schlieffen Plan looked like it would encircle

Paris.

But the problem is that Putin had resources.

The area of Russia is, what, 30 times larger than Ukraine.

The population is somewhere between three and four times larger.

The GDP is 10 times larger.

And in his way of thinking, there is a Soviet modus operandi,

and it even transcends the Soviet system.

It goes way back, and that is mass and weight.

And so what Putin then decided he would do, he pivoted people that had written him off.

But by April, May, June,

they had decided to concentrate on consolidating the borderlands, and they were going to do that in two ways.

One, with artillery and missile strikes, and obliterate sectors, almost like we did in Vietnam with Khe Song.

Sector by sector, obliterate it, and then send in troops to occupy the wreckage and then advance, advance, advance.

And he's done that.

So the areas before the war that Ukraine and Russia were disputing are now mostly, mostly in Russian hands.

And he's now, in addition to that strategy, he was waging a war of terror.

So people do that when they can't really,

their original objectives have to be modified.

So he's sending missiles and terror strikes that hit apartment buildings, shopping centers all over central and eastern Ukraine.

Kiev.

And

that's where we are.

We're landlocked.

And when you get landlocked in a war, as the Germans found out by December of 1941, or the Germans found out,

I think you could say by October of 1914.

And then you consolidate, you build trenches or you mash your army and stay stationary around Moscow.

And then something has to change to break that deadlock.

And there's a number of ways you can break it.

historically.

You can break it by the entry of new weapons.

You can break it by the entry of new allies, such as the Americans, belated, and by 1918, 17 and 18, they were starting to appear.

The Russians were starting to build T-34s, not at 2,000 on the battlefield, but 20,000.

The Germans thought that they could, you know, they started to develop Panzerfiles, et cetera, new tanks themselves, the Panther type.

So you try to have new weapons.

or you get a new command.

You get new generals, and Putin's gone through a lot of them, that feel that the ossified, calcified former command had resulted in this

stagnation, or you look for new fronts.

If you're Britain after the Somme or during the Somme,

you say to yourself, this is intolerable.

We're not going to send the youth of Britain to be ground up in Flanders.

So they look at places like Gallipoli or the Middle East.

Maybe you can

find a soft seam and go into Constantinople and knock out Istanbul and knock out the Turkish element of the Central Powers.

Or maybe you can take the entire Middle East and consolidate oil and

ensure your supplies to Suez, et cetera, et cetera.

So you have to find new allies.

And how does that apply to Ukraine?

Think about it.

I mean, we were so proud of this Western boycott and we had Chancellor Schultz in Germany sounded like he was, you know, the admiral at Lepanto in 1571, talking about Western solidarity and they were going to produce their own coal and natural gas, da-da-da-da-da-da, send all these weapons to the battlefield.

That never really happened yet.

And Europe is starting to get exhausted by the Ukrainian soar.

We've already sent 40 billion.

I guess we're up to 50 billion.

And we're getting to a gut check time.

We have to decide what we really want to do.

Do you want to save Ukraine at what price?

And we can talk about that in a second.

But it's a different war now.

It's a war of stagnation.

And they're looking, Russia has found new allies.

India, of all places, the world's largest democracy, is buying Russian oil and breaking the Western boycott or sanctions.

China, India and China together are 2.

almost 2.8 billion.

They're almost 40% of the 45% of the world's population.

how can you have a sanction against russia when those two countries are buying its oil and enriching putin and the price of oil is at all time highs and then you have countries not just north korea and iran and most of south america that's pro-Putin but you also have a NATO ally Turkey Turkey had a picture with Putin the other day it's the only Islamic nation inside NATO and has the largest army.

So

our idea that the West controlled the commerce of the world has been sorely challenged.

So Putin found new allies.

He found ways to get around what we said would be a crushing sanction.

He's looking at new weapons.

He's got these

planes that will shoot missiles without entering into Ukraine, Air Sports' terror campaign.

He's got a,

they've assassinated a lot of commanders.

He's bringing in new commanders.

He's bringing in everything.

So he sees this as a war of of prestige.

He can't lose.

And then we in the West are looking at sending them multiple missile platforms, new types of long-range artillery.

We've been talking about giving them

slightly out-of-date initial first model F-16s or F-15s.

We're escalating in that regard.

And so

this quagmire and that happened in World War

I and it happened on the the Soviet front, it starts to escalate.

And there's, I haven't even mentioned the brutality.

Each side believes that it can be more brutal.

We romanticize Ukraine, but it's ethnically cleansing every Russian out of any position

of power or authority, civilian or military,

on the rationale that they can't be trusted.

And it's not, this is a wartime dictatorial government for all of our romance, that it's a democracy.

So So as this stagnates, you should expect the escalation in barbarity.

You should be escalation in aid, escalation in the velocity and lethality of weapon supplies, escalation in the number of people who get involved, anything possible to break this somber dung stalemate.

Yeah, sure.

And is it going to take out a whole generation of young Ukrainians, do you think?

I mean, that's where...

It's hard to know.

I mean, the Russians, we claim that 50,000 of them have died, maybe 10,000 Ukrainians.

They're on the defensive.

Usually the defense loses fewer soldiers.

They tend to be man-for-man,

more experienced than the Russian conscripts.

But there's something

untoward about people in the United States.

who won't discuss anything other than a complete victory over a nuclear power and are willing to insist on that to the last Ukrainian.

And that's, I mean, how do you get the Russian army out of the borderlands and Crimea, in the case of the borderlands where 70% of the people, even if they want to join Ukraine, are Russian speakers?

How do you distinguish

who is what?

And how do you get a defensive army that's amazingly lethal and successful with anti-tank, anti-armor, anti-aircraft weaponry firing from entrenched positions.

How do you get them the armor and the air support so it's a mobile column?

And that's a question I don't think we've answered yet.

I don't think the Ukrainian military is ready to storm in with mobile columns and sophisticated offensive.

weaponry and tactics to expel the Russians.

And people understand that.

So the next level of escalation, everybody should be quite aware of what people in the United States are talking about.

And I say the United States because Europe, I mean, they sent a few German tanks this week.

Big deal.

And Eastern Europe doesn't have the wherewithal to do it.

And France is hesitating.

And the reason they are is they're not just energy dependent, but they are terrified.

that he's going to go into a NATO country and then NATO will have to go to war or he's talking so promiscuously and his supporters about the use of a nuclear weapon against Europe.

So

they're in a conundrum.

But the point that I'm making is: people in the United States are going to have to ask themselves, if you think Ukraine is going to win, and if you think Ukraine will expel all the Russians, and if you think that any idea of a,

you know, a third-party negotiation or a plebiscite to see what the people in the borderlands want to do and some arrangement where Ukraine would be like Austria, wouldn't be a member of NATO, wouldn't be a member of the Russian Federation.

It would be as Austria or Finland was after World War II.

If you consider that appeasement of treason, then you have to tell us what you're going to do to break this Somme Verdun meat grinder that's destroying the youth of Ukraine and Russia.

And the answer is, I've heard them.

The answer is one, they want to sell sophisticated American, American, not

second, first-generation MiGs from the 90s, but American planes so that Ukraine can shoot down every Russian plane and even if it wants to, stage raids into Russia.

And number two,

they want to send harpoon missiles that would be ship to shore cape, shore to ship, that could take out the Black Sea fleet and therefore stop the supply of Crimea, et cetera, from Russia.

and allow Ukraine to send its valuable food and earn foreign exchange out to the Black Sea.

They not only talk about American planes, but American lift capacity that would allow, with a wink and a nod, Ukraine to continue these stealthy attacks on Russian refineries, depots, staging areas near the border.

And they, you know, let's face it, there's been six to seven Russian high-ranking generals that are assassinated.

How do the Ukraine know where they are?

Well, they know where they are from Ukrainian but American partnered intelligence.

And we've even bragged about that.

The Biden administration has leaked that.

So if you want to do all of that and defeat Russia in the sense of destroy its ability to be offensive, then you've got to talk about escalating in a new environment against a nuclear power.

We don't know what the rules of the post-Cold War world are yet.

Yes.

Victor, I wanted to ask you

about that, because there seems like there's two directions one can think think about that.

But let's take a break first and then we'll come right back to pursue these questions further.

All right, welcome back.

And Victor,

what I'm seeing is that the West has a choice, right?

That they stop Putin.

And as you're suggesting, that's going to be a terrible difficulty.

I guess that's an understatement.

Or if Putin persists, which it seems like he is, and he wins, then the other former republics of the Soviet Union may be at risk because he will be emboldened to do more since the Ukraine is probably the biggest and the jewel of all those republics.

So what choice does the West have if that is the problem?

They have a lot of bad choices.

There's three choices.

You have choice one, status quo, a stagnant, somber done, Passchendaele-like situation.

And there is two sides.

They're dug in.

And then Russia tries to grind down Ukraine.

We try to supply it to stand it.

That's one.

Number two,

at some point, the West says we need energy.

And

Europe is what I'm talking about.

And the Americans say, we've given you 50 billion, and these people have nuclear weapons.

We can't, we'll just, we can't continue to escalate.

And Russia takes eastern Ukraine all the way up, and maybe including Kiev.

And then there is some type of settlement.

Or third, they take Kiev and they say, you know, this was the largest country

of the breakaway republics.

And compared to that, Lithuania or Latvia or Estonia would be quite easy.

And more importantly,

it would rub NATO's nose in it because of the NATO membership.

And then when you start to look at that situation, you think that, well, why is he suicidally doing this, Putin?

Why would he

lose 40 or 50,000 people?

Well, he sees himself as Vlad.

the Great, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Stalin and his way of thinking.

I restored Ossatia.

I got Georgia back in.

I put down those crazy Chechnyans.

They're part of the Russian Federation.

I brought back eastern Ukraine.

I've got

Crimea.

Now I've got half of Ukraine, maybe all of it.

And I will look at the Baltic states.

And then when you look at the map, there's not, I mean, there's some of these

areas that are already pretty much, I mean, Belarus is still,

it's de facto pro-pro-Putin, and Armenia is de facto pro-Putin.

Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, all of those areas, they have relationships with Putin and this would accelerate that.

In other words, Putin would have the influence of saying, you like us, our people are controlling your country.

It's time to get more integrated with the Russian Puerto Rico.

And before we knew it, he would have the former territories of the Soviet Union along with its population and resources.

So that's the third alternative.

So you either supply them enough to make sure they don't lose and you have Verdun for a number of years, or you

let Putin win because

you can't maintain it, or you escalate.

And I mentioned that.

So that's the third.

And by escalation, you give them missiles and planes, sophisticated anti-aircraft platforms.

And then they...

to win, remember this, I mean, they got to be offensive.

To get them out of the country, you can't just, you don't have the weight or the flesh to push him back.

So you've got to sink the Black Sea fleet, Black Sea fleet.

I don't think we should do that, but you have to do it if that's what your choice is.

You have to destroy their food and fuel conduits into Ukraine.

You've got to attack the Russian border on the Russian side.

Then you have to send a message to...

the other republics that Putin is not going to go into, because he's going to lose, and you're willing to do almost anything.

And if that is your third alternative, you have to count on the fact that Europe will not be there.

They will not help you.

They will not,

they need natural gas from Russia and they need oil.

So I think people have to look at history and see that there's choices and then they have to decide.

What I don't like is all of these people.

It's, oh, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine.

They fly Ukrainian flag.

We're giving them all this aid.

Okay, you're giving them somewhere so that they haven't lost and

there's Stalingrad.

And I understand that because you don't want him to take over all these other former republics.

But now that you're giving them aid, you've got to decide whether you're going to continue the aid at a level to stop this nuclear power or at least fixate him where he is, fix him where he is, I should say, or you're going to have to radically, in a time of stagflation and disunity and oil prices and all these problems at home, you're going to have a full-born war that you're a surrogate enemy of a nuclear power.

No.

We've never done that.

I don't think we've...

Vietnam was a little different, but this is different

in this era.

So you can attack Russian assets with American advisors or American intelligence or American weapons, but at some point, as you become more effective and Ukraine wins, you have to game out what Putin, from his point of view, will do.

Can we take a step back into history a bit?

Because you have been referencing World War I and World War II.

And I was wondering about that World War I.

The Germans did expect that they would have a quick war if they implemented the Schlieffen Plan.

And what happened, or at least most of the accounts that I read, that they didn't actually implement the Schlieffen Plan as it was intended to be implemented.

So you've just stated that getting landlocked is something that leads to prolonged war.

And so we've looked at that very closely.

But with the Schlieffen Plan, I think it was General Moltke that was to take a north Moltke

that was to take a northern army all the way around to the western side of Paris.

And he made the decision to simply go straight down from the north.

And that made it so that the French had a very short front to defend.

And then they were able to do it and dug in and did do it.

And so that was part of the failure of the plan was part of what led to the prolonged war is what I'm trying to suggest.

And what are your thoughts?

Yes, he, the Moltke the Younger, I think he was known on, he modified what had been a plan by Schlieffen for 20 or 30 years.

It was the big wheel versus the short wheel.

And he was afraid that the French would have interior lines and you, as the wheel got bigger and bigger and made this curly queue around Paris, and

then it would be harder and harder to supply.

So he cut to the quick, but he cut too soon.

And when you do that, you're exposing yourself.

You're not encircling a large enough of the enemy mass.

And you're not taking that full gamble.

And then if you cut it short, you can in turn be outflanked.

And that's what happened.

And so then there was a race from

Italy all the way up to the North Sea to fortify what people had and you were in a static situation.

But the Germans had done very well in 1870, 71 and they figured that a quick Schlieffen plan, the older Molke would have followed and Schlieffen, that idea would have sort of done what the Russians wanted to do with Kiev.

It would have, or what we thought we would knock out Baghdad and Chakana, then everything would fall apart for the Iraqis.

They thought that the French, as they did in 1871,

7071, would fall apart, fight, and they would have a quick war.

Yes.

And I don't know whether had they done the big wheel and

connected to the original blueprint of Schlieffen, it would have worked.

But the problem that the Germans didn't quite understand is they were fighting a two-front war with Russia, and then they had France and

Britain on the Western Front, and they were fighting, the Austrians were fighting Italy on the southern front, and they did not have a navy to speak of, and yet there was the British Empire, as in World War II, had enormous assets.

It could import all sorts of industrial goods and food from Canada, from Australia.

It had the wherewithal to do that.

So if Germany had been prepared for a long war, they would have said to themselves, we have to be able, other than just U-boats, which they thought they could stop imports into Britain.

They almost did it, but they have to be able to challenge the British Empire at sea.

They have to keep the Americans out.

They have to knock the Russians out.

And then they almost did that.

They kept the Americans out until April 1917.

They knocked the Russians out, you could argue, by November 1917.

They rushed over a half a million men to the Western Front.

And then

the problem was that they were blood drunk on all of their acquisitions.

They had taken a million square miles and 50 million people.

They were almost to St.

Petersburg in World War I.

So they didn't send over a million and a half of Austrians and Germans.

They used an occupation force that was almost a million people to consolidate Western European Russia.

And so they were always man short.

And then the idea was they were going to have a spring 1918

offensive and go all the way to the coast and knock out Britain and France before America could arrive in force.

It almost worked, but

ultimately, when you're in these stagnant areas, you have to ask yourself

leadership, Elan, strategy, all of that's important.

But when you're in a slog, what happens is mass and resources.

And as in Hitler, thought he had learned the mistakes of World War I.

And he said he would never have a two-front war.

Of course, he ended up with one.

And we can get into that sometime.

But the point I'm making is when you look at the combined resources of Britain, the British Empire and Russian.

Soviet Russia and the United States, and you looked at Japan and Germany and Italy, it it was just pathetic.

I mean, in terms of population and area and natural resources, industrial production.

The United States alone had more wherewithal than all three of the Axis power.

And the same was true of the Central powers in World War I.

So when you get into this stagnation, then do you really think that Ukraine has the wherewithal, the population, the strategic space?

the industrial production to challenge Russia?

I don't understand all of these observers.

They say, oh, you know, Russia's got a smaller economy than

the 11th economy in the world.

It's smaller than South Korea.

It's down to 140 million people.

It's not the Soviet Union with 240.

And you think to yourself, okay, and

whom is it fighting?

What is it fighting?

It's not fighting the United States.

It's not fighting NATO.

It's fighting Ukraine right on its borders.

So in terms of logistics and supply it's got belarus to the north it's got a lot of advantages and it's much bigger and wealthier and more populous than ukraine so in this type of war that's going to start to increasingly be a factor

well i was also thinking that in addition to landlock and failure of strategy that the comparable power of each army made a difference too.

In other words,

while the German army seems to me to have been stronger somewhat, it was still a comparable army to the French army in World War I and World War II.

And so that that also leads to potential for prolonged war if your strategy fails, for example.

But I was wondering if you could talk to us about Vietnam.

What prolonged that warfare for us, especially since we're talking about strategy?

It seems like strategy does need to change sometime, but maybe Vietnam lacked a strategy to some extent.

Or what are your feelings about that?

Well,

in the case of Vietnam,

the model was Korea.

And I know that sounds crazy because we only saved half of Korea, but we did save South Korea.

And South Vietnam was analogous.

And we felt, you know,

if the United States does want to save and try to reform a country and maybe it'll eventually evolve into a constitutional system, which South Korea had, it hadn't at the time of Vietnam, but it was on its way, then we can do it.

And we were still confident after the, we hadn't been in a serious war since World War, since Korea in Vietnam.

And we thought that the same thing would happen, that the Soviet Union would supply the South Vietnamese as it had, and maybe the Chinese in Korea, but we would win.

But the problem was

there was all sorts of differences.

One was that Korea is an open landscape.

It's very cold.

It's mountain.

I mean, it's ideal for air operations.

And

China, while it did invade Korea, was not a nuclear power.

In the Vietnam era, China had developed nuclear weapons, so had the Soviet Union.

So we weren't going to blow up Chinese staging areas in China along the whole, and we weren't going to blow up Soviet ships in Haiphong Harbor.

So there was no way to stop the supply.

We tried to bomb the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

We just couldn't do it.

There was no way that the United States politically could go into Laos.

We tried to go into Cambodia.

campuses exploded.

But when you have those sanctuaries, and Thailand was supposedly our our ally, but it wasn't really.

I mean, it was compromised because Laos, Cambodia.

So

how do you stop supply depots, refugees,

help in all those countries when you can't go into them?

And if you look at Vietnam on the map, it's a little different than Korea.

It's bordered.

It's not really a peninsula itself.

And so

it's a longer way from a staging area like like Japan.

So it was much harder to supply.

There were sanctuaries that the United States, for a variety of political reasons, couldn't go in.

China and Russia had a partnership that was, I think, more developed than in the Korean War.

They were both nuclear powers.

And then the United States of 19

June, 1950 was not the country of, you know, March, April 1965 or 64.

It was a different country.

And so what was politically tolerable in the Korean War was not politically tolerable in the middle of a cultural revolution at home.

There just weren't going to get recruits to support that war.

And then finally,

leadership matters.

The reason that we won Korea to be frank wasn't Douglas MacArthur.

It was one brilliant person named Matthew Ridgway.

And when he took over in December of 1950, he inherited an army that was destroyed, shattered, longest retreat of the Marines in its history.

It was going to shortly lose again Seoul, which it did.

They were in retreat, and yet within three months,

the troops were well fed.

They were better protected from the cold.

They had increased weapons.

The F-86 was on its way.

B-29s were going to try to resume daylight bombing and he had artillery strikes and he was on his way

through a series of offensive to recapture all of South Korea up to the 38th parallel and a little beyond.

But we didn't have anybody.

I don't want to attack people, you know, just gratuitously, but General Westmoreland was not Matthew Ridgway.

You could argue that Creighton Abrams was, but he came in much too late.

It was too late.

People had soured on the war.

But Matthew Ridgway saved the Korean War.

And he was, if you look at his career, it was brilliant.

And the subtext of Korea was

that generation

killed probably one million people in the People's Liberation Army of China.

And they probably killed a half million North Koreans.

And we thought we can,

there were no protests on American campuses when B-29s started using napalm and started destroying entire battalions of Red Army troops.

And along with artillery, that was the real story of the Korean War, the enormous fatalities that the U.S.

Army inflicted on Chinese and North Korean troops.

And when you tried it again in North Vietnam, in jungles where the terrain was different and it was a whole different political system, people in the United States were not going to allow that in so-called not in my name is what they said.

So it was just, it wasn't going to work like Korea.

So

the

home front does make a big difference in the vietnam war then in every war yeah i mean that was what gave hitler a message to obtain power he claimed that falsely in world war one that they were on the offensive in march and april or february march april may

and then they were stabbed in the back and there were socialist revolutionaries, so-called Jews, he said, that stopped.

That was not true.

The Americans had put a million men in Europe and they were going to end up with 2 million.

And had they wanted, had they listened to Pershing, they would have been in Berlin.

I mean, the German army was devastated.

That was a big mistake because the German people never had a foreign soldier on their soil.

Had they had that in World War I,

they would have learned the consequences of going into Belgium and France.

But

you have to have a population that supports German people, they suffered terribly from embargoes and maritime blockades in World War I, and they did not break until the very end, even though in World War II, they didn't break to the very end.

And that's why Germany lasted so long.

And same thing with the British people.

You have to have support.

In the case of the United States, the problem was it was considered an optional war.

We weren't being attacked.

It was like a Mideast war later.

It was an optional war.

People felt.

The administrations of Johnson and Nixon were unable, and Jerry Ford were unable to say the American people effectively: if you lose Vietnam,

we're going to lose the Cold War and we're going to become communist, and they're going to take over the whole world.

Nobody believed that, as they had believed in Korea, that was true.

And so, a whole generation of much more affluent, leisured students were not going to be drafted.

And that created a it sparked Vietnam War sparked a whole civil rights uh women's gay every type of reform

issue and

you know

and then nixon to continue that war cynically but correctly ended the draft and when he i saw it i i went to uc santa cruz uh you know

in 1971 and i had a draft number

of 280, I think it was.

They were calling up.

I just turned 18.

And they were not, they, in theory, if you were 40, you could be subject, but there were no longer any land operations.

And by after the Cambodian excursion, there was no more protests.

By my second, end of my second year,

all of the

when I got there, I could not believe it.

The demonstrations, breaking windows, charging downtown, and then the Cambodian, that thing went crazy, and then it was over.

As soon as they, nobody said a word from 73, 74, 75, because the draft was over.

It seemed like that commanders at

late or as the 1960s were transpiring,

they had to deal with that home front issue in the planning of their war as well.

And I guess that probably made it very difficult to plan

the country in half.

But there was no general, I mean, I think H.R.

McMaster had written that.

There was no general that came to the Johnson administration and said, look,

this current strategy of search and destroy or Vietnamization until Creighton Abram is not working.

And we don't have the public support for it.

So you either have to adopt, let us have a new strategy or we have to get out because we're going to destroy the country and we're not going to win.

And then I think the tragedy was when they did develop a new strategy and they began to seriously bomb the north.

And I mean, they killed over 40,000 people, including Russian advisors.

And they made it very difficult to supply the South.

And they brought the war home to the people who started it in Hanoi.

And then under, you know, whether you...

Operation Phoenix or whatever you like it or not, they began to take out Viet Cong.

So you can make the argument by the end of 1972,

the Viet Cong had failed and there were not Viet Cong sizable presence in the South and the North was being hammered.

And then I think you could argue that Watergate sort of destroyed that Vietnamization.

I think you had not had Watergate, the United States might have still, in the 11th hour, pulled off a South Korean settlement.

I want to just turn for a moment to a war fought in the Roman period, just to go back even further and ask you about its prolonged nature, and that is Hannibal's invasion in the Second Punic War of the Italian Peninsula.

What would it be that made that a 10-year affair?

Well, you know, I mean, it was more than it was the Punic War.

I'm talking off the top of my head, but it's my feel.

So it was 218 to 201,

and it was 17, 18 years.

And the the idea was that

Rome had fought this successful devastating war

in the first Punic War and had finally won and built a fleet etc etc

and so Hannibal's idea was that you're never ever going to be able to defeat the Roman army it has a naval capacity it's all it's going to prune off the

the Carthaginian Spanish presence etc so the only way to settle this thing was to go into the heart of the monster.

And so, you know,

in 217, I think it was, they invaded

through

Spain.

Nobody thought you could go over the Alps.

And then another series of four battles, I think it was Tychinus,

the cavalry battle.

in 218, and then they went into, and they won, and then they wiped out, what, 10 to 15,000 Romans, excuse me, 30,000 at Trebia,

the Battle of Trebia, and then they repeated it again.

They went into the worst of all.

They killed 15,000, 20,000.

I think the biggest thing, it's in Roman literature.

They took over 10,000 prisoners at Lake Tethsemane.

And if that wasn't enough, and then finally the

The capstone was that tragedy where you had these incompetence Vero and Paul Paulus in 216 were at the Battle of Canai, an outnumbered

Carthaginian force did a double envelopment, something that had captivated generals ever since, that could you suck in a mass larger than yourself and then have your mass, your center, hold until your two wings encircled it?

And no, one encirclement is difficult, but a double encirclement is almost impossible.

And, you know, know there was i don't know 90 000 it was a huge army and

the result of that they killed almost 70 000 livy and polybius have these really graphic descriptions especially livy of what what the what the scene of the battlefield was like afterwards they killed 60

60 000 captured 10 000 it was a disaster and at that point all of italy was wide open.

And

the Gauls came in.

I mean, they wiped out an entire army in an ambush.

And then some of the allies started to defect.

Capua was almost in Tarentum, these traditional Greek states.

So all of a sudden, what had been

just Sicily was starting to look like Hannibal had stopped all Roman expeditionary forces and was going to unravel the Italian-Roman Confederation.

And the problem was that, I guess this has been, this was a rhetorical exercise.

If you were a little Roman kid, you know, for the next 400 years,

when he defeated the Roman consular armies at Canai, should he have gone right to Rome?

I think most people think he should.

So then that

stagnated into a war of attrition for 11 years.

And when it was all said and done, something has to change that the Macedonian distraction.

Philip V didn't help, thought that that would that would make a change.

Sicily didn't defect, it stayed into Roman hands that thought that it would.

And then his brother decided to help.

That didn't work in 207.

He was maggio in 205.

So they didn't have the wherewithal is what I'm trying to say.

They had one great expeditionary army, and they didn't have the ability.

And then

finally, you were going to be up against the Roman system, and Romans tended to have sort of like the Union Army in the Civil War or us in World War II.

Finally, you get in a talented military, you get to the real geniuses that don't do well in peace, but they do well in war.

And Scipio came on the scene, Publio Scipio.

And by once he was given command in 205,

that was the end of it.

Hannibal had met somebody who was a wonderful tactician, organizer, and was his equal in tactical matters, maybe better in strategy.

And then it was all over at Zama in 2002.

But my point is that that was an effort to

hit the enemy at home, even though you didn't have the aggregate strength, based on the principle that in a war of attrition, the smaller power is going to lose.

It would be almost as if Zelensky had an airborne column that went into

central Russia and tried to make the Russians go back home, or that somebody, you know, like Hitler had

always talked of an America bomber.

You know, that if he had stationed an American bomber, the Portuguese had to give him the Azores or something, that he would have been able to distract the American war effort by bombing New York or something.

Before we go to a break, Victor, can I ask you, would it be fair to say that the brilliance of the commander is part of what prolonged the war

when he's commanding a military that is not as large or as capable, but yet he has some brilliance.

I mean, it must have been Hannibal's sheer

personality, his sheer ability on the battlefield that really kept the Carthaginian military going.

Yeah, from a disinterested point of view, when you're looking at it and one side doesn't have the resources and apparently not the talent, and then it's losing, and then suddenly this one person by sheer force of genius and

personality says, I'm going to go over the Alps and I'm going to descend into northern Italy.

And in four battles, I'm going to wipe out the existing deplorable manpower of the moment and then unravel the Italian Confederation.

And then they're going to sue for peace.

He had it all right, except they're going to sue for peace.

It's very hard to think of any Roman Republican government that ever sued for peace.

And so that was the problem.

And the same.

It's like saying Robert E.

Lee, who was not very good on the offensive in Pennsylvania, but but when you put him on the defensive, whether in 1863, four, or you put him

in the last year of the war out in front of Richmond,

you were playing into his strength.

He prolonged the war.

Yes.

They never took Richmond.

They came up behind him, but and they surrounded it.

They fought a war that Lee was a genius at at the end.

They had to.

They had no choice.

They wanted to end the war, take Richmond, knock the Confederacy out, but that he had interior lines, and he, once he curved his offensive spirit and realized that he could bleed the Union Army in 1864, he prolonged the war.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They did bomb Richmond to smithereens, though, it seems, or at least the pictures I've seen.

Looks like they did a hell of a lot of damage to

once a city.

Looked like a, you know, sort of moonscape after they got done with it.

Well, let's take a break, Victor, and then come back and talk a little bit about classics.

We're back.

And Victor, I just brought up

ancient Roman battle, and I know that that's part of the classical heritage we have.

And you've never really actually talked about what classics is.

And I have just one question myself, but you might want to address your listeners.

What's the difference between a classical education and a humanist education?

Well, they're similar.

A humanist education, then, if you want to see the classical definition, Cicero in his pro archaea, that is a speech on behalf of Arceus, the poet, who he thought deserved citizenship because of his

intellectual and artistic talents, he said that omnes artes qui per tenet ad humanitatum, all the arts which pertain to humanity, meaning the best of humanity.

So

a humanitarian is art and music, literature, starting from the ancient world all the way through the medieval period, the scholastic period, into the Renaissance, on through the Enlightenment, into the Romantic period, into the founding of the American Republic, etc.

If you talk about a classical education, it's humanitarian and a lot of classicists go on and try to be broad, but you're talking about a concentration on Greece and Rome, roughly, I mean, I'm going to be an arbitrary, but from the Mycenaean period, somewhere you have classicists that will start as early as 3000 or 2,500,

then

Mycenaean, Minoan period, Crete, and then all the way through the Roman period to somewhere in the 5th century AD.

So it's an enormous range, but specifically, most classicists, it has that element of literature.

And literature doesn't really begin, does it, until around 700 in the city-state with Homer's epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

That's really the beginning of a traditional purist classical education all the way to, you know, late Roman works like Boethius or something.

And what does that mean?

What does classics mean?

I really want to emphasize this because there's been this attack on the study of Greek.

The center of it is Greek and Latin, that students as undergraduates take two or three years of Latin and Greek, and they read literature in Latin in Greek, and they try to master the major authors in the undergraduate period.

And then when they choose to continue their studies and do a PhD or MA, they can go into other office.

But what would that be?

That would be to read either the Iliad or the Odyssey, parts of it in Greek.

That would have some lyric poems or Hesiod, Works and Days, or Theodomy.

That would mean that you would have some familiarity with Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Rip.

You might have read the Bacchae or the Oedipus or the Prometheus, or maybe I don't think you'd read the Oristia for most undergraduates very hard.

And then you would have some familiarity with the historians, Herodotus and Thucydides, maybe Xenophon,

maybe a little bit, dip yourself into a rhetorician or an orator like Lysias.

And then on the Roman side, you would have had to read something of Virgil, Horace, maybe a little bit.

Some people get into Ovid, and I don't think Propertius and Tobolos at the undergraduate label.

And then you would have some familiarity with Libby, maybe even Tacitus.

And so that would be the center of a classical education.

But then there's all of these satellites, these planets that revolve around it.

And what are those?

If you were to continue, you would have something of the science of epigraphy.

You would be able to read Latin and Greek inscriptions on stone.

And that would mean you'd bypass, and these would be official documents, not literary, but you would have some idea of what the Greeks and Romans said about themselves in a government capacity.

You would know something about papyrus, how that genre emerged, how you read papyrus.

You would have an archaeological element.

You may have excavation digging.

So you would understand that you want, if I take any word and I say honey, house, horse, a classical education in the strict academic sense means you can find out what that is by A, going through literature and you can search the 90 million Greek words with a computer in a nanosecond, every mention of horse in all of Greek and Latin literature.

Or, and then you would go, I want to find all the inscriptions on stone about cavalry or deployment of horses for government service.

And then you would look at archaeology and see what are the excavation reports of horse burials or something.

and so that is what classics is: it's archaeology, literature, and language, inscriptions.

And then there's these other additional sources of knowledge.

Numismatics, where you study ancient coinage,

this can be, you know, underwater archaeology, etc.

But there's these peripheral sources, and then, but it's based on philology.

If you don't know Latin or Greek, you can't pursue any sophisticated inquiry in the ancient world.

And

classics, if it's taught right and the professor understands it's the creation of Western civilization, then people,

you take a humanities course, you start with Homer,

and you probably have the Playwrights or Thucydides, then you go into Virgil.

And the point I'm making is certain values that reappear in the beginning in Greece and Rome become the foundation to see how they're transformed, neglected, enhanced, modified, rejected through the Western tradition.

And what are those values?

They're things like the individual, reason versus superstition, constitutional or consensual government versus monarchy or autocracy, what type of economy you have, what's the relationship between religion and government, what's the status of women, what's the status of self-critique and free expression against the state.

All of those values occur first and only in the West.

And that statement's very controversial today but

so far

yeah so far i mean the woke movement has not suggested that the aztecs had democracy or the zulus had anybody like homer or and and that's just that's just a fact doesn't mean there's not a rich tradition in india and china that everybody should study and it's better to know as much as you can the aztecs had very sophisticated astronomical abilities on the calendar.

But when you're talking about that type of civilization that's Western and which seems to be what the world, for better or worse, wants to embrace, free market capitalism, separation from church and state, a Christian tradition or Christian values,

hierarchy of the individual, checks, free expression.

role of reason over superstition, all of that that comes from the West.

It has a lot of critics from the very beginning because it tends to be so successful in the creation of leisure, affluence, capital, that it can create what we know as decadence or the Romans call Luxis, excess.

Thank you, Victor.

And that's probably why you are the, and I'm going to remind everybody, Martin and Ily Anderson Senior Fellow in History.

in military history and classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

You can be found at your website, victorhanson.com.

Please come subscribe, $5 a month or $50

for an annual subscription.

We welcome everybody.

Victor, thank you very much for all of the discussion and answering my questions.

And I hope some of them were our listeners' questions.

Thank you.

And I'm very appreciative that everybody listened in.

Thank you.

Yeah, thank you.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we're signing off.

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