War between great powers is unlikely to be short, even if an enemy achieves surprise and wins an early victory against you. But that doesn't mean it isn't cheaper and safer in the long run to keep your enemy as far away as possible.
Good advice against relying on a presumed industrial advantage that no longer exists:
The democracies must not pattern the traditional Western complacent practice of allowing the enemy to conduct a surprise attack in order to mobilize its domestic population, like the 1940 Fall of France or the 1941 strike on Pearl Harbor. During the Cold War, NATO was faced with the dreaded choice of triggering a tactical nuclear war either at the commencement of hostilities along the East German border before most of NATO’s divisions were overrun, or in a last-ditch desperate defense on the Rhine, and it was this uncertainty that held the USSR at bay.
The sudden rebel offensive that collapsed the Assad regime's security forces in Syria in less than two weeks certainly is a cautionary tale of ceding the initiative to your enemy on the assumption you can absorb the first blow.
I've long advised that it is best to keep enemies far from America to reduce the risks of an enemy jumping on us. Indeed, I warn against dangling our best military assets in tightly packed bases too close to enemies, fearing that will tempt them to start a war with a surprise offensive to take out our best units early. Like the Japanese in the original, that enemy may be wrong about how much they can exploit that. But the war will be longer and more costly for America because of it.
The solution is to support allies who keep enemies at a distance, whether in the Pacific or Atlantic. With Russia the current active threat, I've noted that distance from Russia is our friend. I'd much rather have the line in Ukraine than in central Europe.
When we bow to hollow Russian nuclear threats, we essentially let the Wookie win. Do that once and we'll face that threat again and again. The closer our front line gets to the Rhine the higher the cost of defending, the bigger the risk of losing a conventional war, and the higher the risk of nuclear war. And the risk of re-establishing deterrence against a nuclear power will be high.
And if we lose that European barrier? Well, we have centuries of experience with that problem in the Atlantic, don't we?
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
NOTE: I'm adding updates on the Last Hamas War, including the revived Syria multi-war, in this post.
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NOTE: I made the image with Bing.
