When Trump invades Canada, the key will be rapid advances in the opening 48 hours to take advantage of Canada's odd force disposition.
The country's political and economic center of gravity is the urban corridor from Toronto to Montreal, but a significant share of the Canadian Army is dispersed, with large garrisons in Quebec, Halifax, and the western provinces. Only handful of brigades are garrisoned in the critical theater.
The war will be won quickly and decisively, without massive destruction of Canadian cities, if American forces can establish blocking positions to isolate the urban corridor from peripheral Canadian garrisons. In this maneuver scheme, we utilize highly mobile elements including 1st Cavalry Division and airborne forces to block the highways into Toronto, while an eastern screening group isolates the urban centers from reinforcements scrambling in from Quebec.
We envision inserting HIMARS at operational depths via Chinook slings, saturating Canadian road traffic with rocketry. A mobile firebase ("Firebase Maple") will be established north of Toronto near Lake Simcoe that will have a dominant position over the city's northern approach.
With reinforcements unable to scramble into the critical theater and Toronto severed from the cities in the eastern corridor, the Canadian 31st and 32nd Brigade Groups will be isolated and destroyed. Unconditional surrender is anticipated within 14 days.
If there is a Canadian insurgency, we're calling it the Maplejideen.
As an addendum, artillery airlifted onto Isle Royale in Lake Superior will support an advance out of Minnesota towards Thunder Bay, which will add an additional level of interdiction on Canadian reinforcements moving eastward by rail.
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This December 18th marks the 108th anniversary of the end of the Battle of Verdun - an infamously bloody episode of the First World War which killed over 700,000 French and German troops over nearly ten months of fighting. (1)
Verdun in many ways was the seminal First World War battle, in that it churned up dozens of divisions fighting for apparently meager gains of just a few kilometers. It appears at first brush to be entirely senseless, but the strategic conception deserves close scrutiny. (2)
By the end of 1915, German hopes for a quick resolution to the war had been firmly dashed. The initial command cadre had been replaced, and General Erich von Falkenhayn had taken command of the German general staff with an unenviable strategic position. (3)
Robert Drews book on the Bronze Age Collapse is one of my absolute favorites, and it's one that I find myself thinking about a lot with the advent of cheap FPV drones as a military expedient, as seen in Ukraine. (1)
Drews basic argument is that the collapse of rich and stable late bronze age societies was due to the advent of new technical and tactical methodologies which made the aristocratic chariot armies of the day obsolete. (2)
Warfare in the bronze age centered on armies comprised principally of chariots deployed as mobile archery platforms, with infantry playing a subordinate role as auxiliaries and security troops. (3)
Maybe instead of arguing online about Columbus/Indigenous Peoples Day, you read this excellent book? This dismisses the myth of the helpless native and presents a coherent story of the European encounter with North America.
The key theme here is that Europeans didn’t encounter a virginal land occupied by naïve peoples. North America already had a scheme of geopolitics, with diplomatic protocols, alliance systems, and warfare.
Native Americans by and large did not see Europeans as alien intruders, but as a new chess piece in this power system. Europeans were integrated into the diplomatic web, and native tribes tried to leverage them against each other.
So, the Russians hit Ukraine with one of the largest strike packages of the war - over 200 launches including drones and a wide spectrum of missiles. It looks like they mostly hit power generation and transmission, with a few military facilities sprinkled in. (1)
A few notable things that stand out against other strikes (besides the size) were hits on three separate 750kv substations in western Ukraine, including one in Vinnytsia. (2)
This is very important, because sufficient damage to transmission in the western oblasts will prevent Ukraine from importing European electricity to replace its own lost generation. They've relied heavily on imports to prop up their grid. (3)
To the extent that there is an over-arching strategic logic in Ukraine, I think they are trying to "prove" that NATO forces can enter into direct combat with Russia without a colossal escalation. This is the thread that links their more random strategic choices. (1)
"Look, we invaded Kursk and they didn't nuke us. We shot a missile at their early warning radar and they didn't nuke us. We launched a drone at the Kremlin and they didn't nuke us. It's all a bluff - feel free to deploy a French armored brigade to Kharkov." (2)
Ukraine's mosquito bites obviously don't pose an existential threat to Russia, but they create the perception that Moscow doesn't respond to provocation. Useful idiots in the west have already latched on to this. (3)
Stalin was an ethnic Georgian from Gori. His mother was a devout Orthodox Christian who desperately wanted him to become a priest. His father was an alcoholic shoemaker. The big "secret" of Stalin is that he was a true believing communist with exceptional political skills.
The Soviet regime did perpetrate horrible crimes against the Orthodox church in Russia, but they did this because the church was a pillar of the parochial peasant civilization which they wanted to shatter, not because Stalin had a secret blood vendetta against Christians. Sorry.
I'm not like, some fan of Stalin, but you pretty much explain the guy via the fact that he was actually a communist who believed everything he said about Marxism-Leninism providing a solution to human want. He was a communist, and he was a peerless political operator. That's it.