[kolme]

> And one of the things to know about war is that the offense always has the advantage

I'm no military expert, but wasn't it exactly the opposite?

The attacking army needs to be bigger than the defending army and will suffer way more casualties,even if they are successful.

[fullshark]

The premise is that the offense knows the battle plan beforehand and the defense doesn't I believe, one of those "be aggressive" executive metaphors I think he internalized but not the reality of ground warfare, since probably the US Civil War when trench warfare took over at the latest.

[borski]

Not necessarily. The Trojan Horse wasn’t so disastrous because it was filled with way more soldiers. It was because they had penetrated all of the defenses and had the element of surprise.

Iran just sent I-don’t-know-how-many drones and missiles at Israel like a few months ago. A few of them landed, but most were caught and intercepted in the air. Here’s the thing: if even one of them had hit, say, the center of Tel Aviv, or the old city in Jerusalem, it would have been a massively successful attack, even if none of the other ones had done any damage. The size of zero armies was measured in that exchange.

[latexr]

The Trojan Horse is a myth. It’s as meaningful an example of military strategy as Gundam robots.

But even if those were real they would still not support Schmidt’s point that “offense always has the advantage because you can always overwhelm the defensive systems”. The Trojan Horse didn’t overwhelm defenses, it penetrated them and destroyed the enemy from inside.

[borski]

Sure, that's fair - I don't mean to imply that it is always true, and 'overwhelm the defensive systems' isn't the language I'd use. All I mean is that specifically targeted strikes, at the right targets, at the right time, can sometimes be far more important than who has the bigger army. Sometimes if you cut off the head, the rest of the snake really does kind of just die.

[meiraleal]

I guess the meaning is that defending already starts losing. It is much better to be in the offensive, it takes your enemy much more effort to go from defense to offense

[CRConrad]

Deep strategic thinker and tactical expert[1] that I am, I agree: As the old maxim goes, "the best defense is a good offense".

[1]: Having watched the evolution of a football team's tactics from 5-v-5 (2 min, age 6-7) to 11-v-11 (2*45 min, age 18-19). A regular Strategos, me.

[TrapLord_Rhodo]

but you are missing context here. His point was that once cheap $500 drones can be produced at an industrial scale, in a highly automated fashion you can completely overwhelm any defensive measure that could be put in place.

Normal warefare is based on "Manpower" and you reference "Army". He further goes on to explain that artilery, tanks and any kind of "land army" is completely obsolete.

[CRConrad]

The word "explain" works a bit like "know" (and perhaps "teach", I think). No, you don't "know" that the Earth is flat; you just mistakenly think so. (And no, you don't "teach" kids that the Earth is flat; you just mislead them.)

To say that Schmidt "explained" that artillery, tanks and armies are obsolete implies that that is true, which... At the very least, remains to be seen. The correct term would be something like "He further goes on to bloviate about how artillery, tanks and..."

[bjornsing]

But when those “casualties” are drones perhaps it turns out to be true?

[tetha]

It might be a reference to the blue-team red-team asymmetry, and how in cybersecurity the attacker has an advantage. The attacker there only needs one success and can rapidly try different avenues, while the blue team just needs to miss patching one system and that's it. And while patching may be technically simple, the organizational efforts around it are sometimes... eh.

In war, defenders can entrench more and more and a lot of work and planning is put into hitting either before the defenses are up, or not at all.