[mulmen]

> They can just zerg rush and eat the damage.

The last time the StarCraft doctrine was used in a real war was over a century ago and it did not go well.

> I don't think that Houthi have a lot of cruise missiles piled up.

Are you willing to bet the lives of Egyptian sailors on that assumption? How about your own?

This isn’t a video game.

[red-iron-pine]

Zerg rushes have worked since then. worked for Chinese "volunteers" in the Korean War. Iran-Iraq saw a bunch, and they mostly worked, if you don't mind elementary age kids running through mindfields.

at sea, this approach took down the Russian Fleet at Tsushima Strait. The MCII exercise, contentious as it were, showed that an Iranian attempt at that might have worked.

hell, for all of their losses in Ukraine, the Russians are still gaining ground, and a lot of that came at the expense of modern Straf-Bat penal units.

that said, Egypt is a tank power, not a ship power, and flooding the area with older gear is a good way for most of it to end up at the bottom of the ocean. it's a non-starter of an idea for them.

[kiba]

"Gaining ground" is not really particularly a meaningful metric if you don't take a look at its magnitude and the attrition on equipment and manpower.

It is in any case a full brute force approach that bellies an enemy that is unwilling or unable to train their troops.

Yes, quantity is a quality all its own, but that's why the US military is one of the biggest armed force on the planet. We do literally have the biggest air force in the world, for example.

[bluGill]

> We do literally have the biggest air force in the world, for example.

In fact we have 4 of the top 10: #1 (airforce), #2 (Navy), 4(Army), and #5(marines).

[mulmen]

Who is #3? China?

[bluGill]

russia.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/largest-a...

[golergka]

> Are you willing to bet the lives of Egyptian sailors on that assumption? How about your own?

Egypt usually doesn't have any problems with that. They're not a liberal democracy, so enduring high casualties is not a political problem for them.

[mulmen]

I don’t see the connection. Liberal democracies risk the lives of their militaries all the time. Does Egypt have a history of selecting strategies that needlessly waste military strength in service of their social structure?

[TylerE]

1939 was less than 100 years ago. Didn't go well for Poland. "Blitzkrieg" means "lightning war".

[JumpCrisscross]

> ”Blitzkrieg" means "lightning war"

Blitzkrieg was early combined-arms warfare; its modern iteration underwrites American military supremacy.

Zerg rushing is an r-production analog that uses swarms of cheap, expendable units to overwhelm the enemy numerically. This is closer to the Soviet (and now Russian) doctrine of using humans to absorb ammunition. It fails against combined-arms armies because it lacks manoeuvre. It works when the enemy is production constrained, e.g. Ukraine.

[hef19898]

The Russians, and Soviets, never did this. Their doctrine of mobile combined arms warfare, that worked really well during WW2, is called deep battle.

Zerg rushing works in video games.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Russians, and Soviets, never did this

The Soviets in WWII used human waves against the Nazis. (EDIT: They did not, they used them against the Finns in the Winter War.) That said, the USSR was capable of combined-armed warfare.

Russia has proved incapable of combined-arms warfare. They launched human waves in Bakhmut, and are largely using numerical advantages in raw recruits to push for marginal gains. This isn’t how a modern army fights.

[hef19898]

Soviet himan waves are as much myth as are the Germans calling it Blitzkrieg. The only thing comming close to these himan wave attacks are the failed Banzai charges of desperate Japanese forces. And thoae never worked.

[GolfPopper]

It's not "human waves" in Ukraine, it's advance by attrition in Ukraine, as JumpCrisscross pointed out above. The Russians have not considered themselves limited by causalities, while the Ukrainians have to conserve manpower and materiel. So the Russians can "afford" to throw a bunch of squads out along a front, and if 90% or more are casualties, they don't care, so long as they can take some ground. Then, once they do, they rinse, lather, and repeat. It's a hideous expenditure of human lives, but it has worked tactically. Whether it is a significant gain operationally or strategically, I don't know. (Russia is going to pay a price down the road for losing all those young men, but it won't be paid by the old men sending them to their deaths.)

[JumpCrisscross]

> Soviet himan waves are as much myth

The Red Army definitely used them against Finland. But you are right, they weren’t used against the Nazis.