...And that is the degree to which all of the knottiest decisions in protracted war are intricately tied to questions of timing and opportunity, in addition to resource adjudication... I wrote about this back in the fall through the prism of Vegetius: (2/9) warontherocks.com/2024/10/attr...

Our desire to distinguish neatly between strategies of attrition & annihilation is satisfying but in fine often overly simplistic. "There is thus a time & place for entrenchment, a time & place for maneuver, a time & place for artful shadowboxing, & a time and a place for brutish collision." (3/9)

"The supreme art of military leadership consists in accurately diagnosing the exact moment “opportunity offers,” i.e., when that momentous change in techniques, tactics, and procedures are most urgently required." (4/9)

The Ancient Greeks had a specific word for this: kairos, a term distinct from the more familiar chronos and which, by characterizing that precious and elusive sense of propitiousness — either in war, athletics, or rhetoric — marked the quality of a moment in time rather than its quantity. (5/9)

Correctly identifying that “kairotic moment” and deciding to transition from a strategy of attrition to one of annihilation, or of entrenchment to one of movement, has always been a deeply risk-laden decision, and therefore frequently controversial. (6/9) www.jstor.org/stable/27902...

As Marshal Foch wrote in his memoirs, "changing in the face of the enemy from the defensive to the offensive was one of the most delicate of all decisions, presenting, in view of the vast effectives of modern armies, a most exceptional difficulty of execution." (7/9)

"Such a change, if it is to be successfully initiated and then followed by that forward movement without which there can be no victory, requires minute preparation." In short, these are eminently challenging, and morally fraught decisions..(8/9). www.amazon.com/Memoirs-Mars...