As we approach a point marking the beginning of the war’s 5th year, it is time to discuss how we assess the war’s overall dynamics, strictly from a military standpoint. One method many analysts use is the pace of territory capture. However, this methodology has a serious issue🧵:
2/ Generally, this is not a bad method of analyzing battlefield dynamics, as the history of wars shows far more cases of states advancing along frontlines or into enemy territory before a war ends in their favor than the opposite. The devil, however, lies in the details
3/ Putting aside other domains of war, such as economics and socio-politics, battlefield dynamics are often judged by metrics like casualty rates and square kilometers of controlled territory. This can produce a distorted picture, a problem I informally term the “Sahara Fallacy”
4/ So what is the “Sahara Fallacy”? Imagine a scenario where an attacking side must choose how to allocate military resources, either to seize 10 square kilometers controlling the strategically vital Suez Canal or 1,000 square kilometers of random, landlocked Sahara desert.
5/ Capturing the desert produces immediate territorial gains, but of little military value. Seizing the small Suez area, by contrast, provides immediate tactical, operational, and strategic advantages, yet on metrics like occupied territory it appears as only a minor gain.
6/ Thus, the principle can be formulated as follows: The battlefield value of territory lies in the tactical, operational, and strategic leverage it provides. Metric based assessments that reduce warfare to casualty figures and surface measures such as area gained can produce misleading interpretations of battlefield dynamics when detached from the territory’s operational and strategic value.
7/ So what does this mean in our case? Simply put, if Russian forces move into a sparsely populated and lightly defended town surrounded by open steppe in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, territorial metrics may suggest accelerating gains, but not necessary a battlefield dynamics change
8/ Thus, if the goal is to assess changes in battlefield dynamics, relying solely on kilometers as a metric risks falling into this fallacy. An important caveat is that territorial advances are not irrelevant, only that they cannot serve as a standalone indicator of dynamics
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