Ukraine Follows Imperial Japan's Example in the Attrition of its Military

While Russia follows America's

At the beginning of the Pacific War on December 7, 1941, the armed forces of the Japanese Empire were qualitatively superior to those of the United States in nearly every way. Japan had better ships, planes, torpedoes, and most of all better trained and equipped officers, soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines.

It showed. For nearly a solid six months, the Japanese were triumphant in nearly every battle across half the Pacific Ocean, right through the unsuccessful American torpedo bomber attack on Japanese carriers near Midway on June 5, 1942 depicted above.

Just a few minutes later, American dive bombers got lucky and found the Japanese fleet with no fighter protection and sent three Japanese carriers, with most of their highly trained and experienced crews and pilots, to the bottom of the Pacific. The Imperial Japanese Navy never recovered.

The Japanese kept their best veterans on the front lines, and they kept getting killed. Their replacements, trained by men who mostly had not served on the front against a formidable opponent, were simply not as good at war as their predecessors and got killed in greater and greater numbers.

The Americans, in contrast, sent many of their best veteran pilots and such back home to train their own replacements. They passed on the knowledge that they, and their friends who had died, had learned the hard way. This approach to training worked, and is one reason of many why the United States won the war.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the Ukrainian Army was arguably the best trained and equipped army in Europe. The Russian Army was built around small, mobile units of fast armored vehicles manned by highly trained troops. They ran into well-prepared defenses manned by good troops, and they got thumped.

The Ukrainians counterattacked and did gain significant ground around Kharkov and Kherson. The Russians fell back some and reorganized. Part of that reorganization was to send veterans who had done well back from the front to train the hundreds of thousands of volunteers and activated reservists who flocked to the colors at that time.

Ukraine, outnumbered on something like a 900 mile front, had no such luxury. They needed every soldier they could get on the front. Its best troops and equipment were agonizingly ground down in a months-long battle at a place called Bakhmut, and they have been impossible to replace.

Ukraine lost that battle, but they also lost most of what was left of their well-trained army AND the patriotic volunteers who had wanted to be in the fight as well. Much like the Japanese Navy after Midway, the Ukrainian Army could never be as good as it was after Bakhmut.

The Russians, like the Americans before them, are under no such constraints, and they know it. Do you think the Russians had not studied what the Americans did to the Japanese in World War II, or what they themselves did to the Germans in that same war? Think again.

It is here, however, that the World War II analogy ends. The Japanese troops who were thrown into battle against the American juggernaut for the last three years of the war usually knew little of America or Americans beyond what their government-controlled media told them. They fought bravely, fanatically, and suicidally. It took three long years, but they still lost. They had mostly never met an American, had never traveled to America, and most certainly didn’t have American blood relatives.

The same cannot be said about the typical Ukrainian soldier vis-a-is the Russian he is facing today. Ukrainians and Russians have lived side by side for centuries, and there has been much intermarriage and travel between the two. Even their languages are little more than different dialects of the same tongue. No amount of propaganda is going to convince today’s average Ukrainian soldiers that the Russians are monsters who will torture them to death and maybe eat them.

Perhaps that is one reason why the Ukrainian army has simply ignored orders for more attacks on well-prepared Russian defenses. Hopefully it will be a reason this war ends sooner rather than later.

After all, not even Victoria Nuland or Antony Blinken can make Ukrainians continue to die for the US Empire if the latter decide they are better off reaching a modus vivendi with their not-so-distant cousins.

Perhaps it is more clear to me because my wife’s DNA is half Russian and a quarter Ukrainian, I don’t know, but I certainly hope this is the case. Time will tell, and the less time the less blood and therefore the better.

Thank you for reading, good day, and good luck.