John Mearsheimer, youtube:
When I was younger and begun my PHD work and then my early career as an academic I wrote about conventional deterrence and I studied the conventional balance in Europe, I studied the Israeli wars very carefully, ’56, ’67, ’73 and I studied WW1 and WW2 too, I know enormous amount about how those wars were fought and of course I was in the American Military during the Vietnam war so I paid great attention to the question of how the United States might be able to win or maybe can’t win that war and so forth and so on and the one thing I learned in all those studies is that you have to have a theory of victory, you have to have a story of how you’re going to win and you have to be able to figure out what are the things that really matter on the battlefield that determine whether the side A wins or side B wins and if you look at the analysis that’s done in the west and by these generals who are on television as well as all of these civilians military experts who are trotted out to tell us what is likely to happen as a result of X, Y and Z on these battlefields, most of them do not have a good understanding of how the wars are actually fought and most of them do not have a theory of victory for winning wars of one sort of another and I think this lack of depth, this inability to sort of analyze wars in a really sort of sophisticated or semi-sophisticated way is really quite stunning and the end result is you have these generals who are trotted out as you know, „great seers of the future”, who end up with egg up all over their face. I mean David Petraeus talking about the counter offensive and where it’s going to lead even when the counter offensive was clearly doomed he was predicting victory and you just sort of say to yourself what’s this guy thinking, where are we here? But that’s the story in the west and why most people in the west think about these different wars so different than we do.