Ukraine Always Get What You Want

Sweden can defend itself

 

Today I learned that Finland is Permafrost Louisiana.

 

Couple of comments from that thread:

"Jesus H Christ I did not realize Finland looked like that. Ugh. One can only imagine the mosquitoes and drenched pantlegs."

"187k lakes, 80% forest and the 6th boggiest country on earth. The mosquitoes are pretty bad yea. But we are also pretty hard to invade."

"Mostly frozen in winter right (great for the Finish army) and assume mostly mud and water in summer. Yes not ideal for the Russians."

"A Danish colleague was telling me that Finland never stopped being in Defence mode since WW2 wrt Russia. Makes perfect sense. Respect"

 

Bought this sweater back in March:

 

The story awhile back that the bridges in Finland have openings so the locals can easily plant bombs is all you need to know about those Mo'fos.
When the time comes, I'm drafting Ukrainians, Fins and Armenians to defend me.

 

Teemu likes Moscow (Mules)

 

I understood engineering demolition points into bridges as a means of breaking a Russian advance. What I did not understand was how badly an advance could be choked by the terrain after they were dropped.

 

Terrain has always dictated operational warfare.

It's not a coincidence that four of the biggest battles of the Civil War - Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, Wilderness, and Spotsylvania - happened in my backyard. It was dictated by the need to get across the Rappahannock River.

It's not that hard for people to walk across open terrain; moving vehicles over terrain is hard, though, and demands roads.

 

Yeah, I get that. We've just seen the Russians get bloodied trying to force a river crossing. It's more that until that post this morning I had never really looked at a map of Finland to understand the degree that lakes and rivers choked off the east side of the country.

I'm nowhere near the Civil War scholar that my father was, but I have an entire bookcase of the best of his Civil War books. You can't read Douglas Southall Freeman's books without getting a sense of the importance of those rivers or the terrain in Virginia.

 

So one of the interesting things w/r to the Civil War and rivers is the contrast between Tennessee and Virginia and their rivers.

In Virginia, the four major rivers (Potomac, Rappahannock, York, James) and their tributaries off the Chesapeake travel east to west, perpendicular to the axis of advance. After crossing one river, the advancing Yankees would reach the next river to cross. This is especially true in Grant's 1864 overland campaign, with Grant confronting each of the subsequent barriers as he headed south, and Lee using each as a defensive position.

But in west and central Tennessee, the rivers (the Mississippi, Cumberland, and Tennessee) flow in a way that served not as defensive boundaries, but as highways to penetrate the south. Especially once Grant took Forts Henry and Donelson, the Cumberland and especially the Tennessee was a real problem for the south, allowing the Union navy to penetrate most of Tennessee and Northern Alabama.

In the East, the rivers were an asset for Lee and the Confederacy. In the West, the rivers were a hindrance to the Confederacy.

 

I have always thought that Grant should have gone to Richmond via water like McClellan did. It would have saved a lot of lives on both sides because he could have been able to get close to Richmond with minimal loss of life. By 1864 the Confederate States did not have a navy that could effectively resist the Union Navy.

I think the reason Grant went the overland route instead is that both Lincoln and Grant, who knew disliked McClellan, would never adopt any plan that McClellan had thought up previously.

 

Grant's target - stated before the campaign started - wasn't Richmond; it was the Army of Northern Virginia, with an eye towards preventing the AoNVa from dispatching troops to other theaters.

"Lee’s army is your objective point. Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also," was his order to Meade.

Grant's brilliance was two fold: 1) Recognizing the true path to victory (destroying the south's capacity to resist, instead of focusing on geographic objectives) and 2) Recognizing the need for simultaneous advance across all theaters, to prevent one inactive theater from reinforcing another (as Longstreet's Corp did throughout 1863).