Andrew Roberts: evaluation

Transcript context

…Oh, interesting. This just preempted and I guess answered a question I was about to ask you, which is it’s remarkable to me that the three to one ratio which Clausewitz first came up with has stayed consistent for, I guess, the answer is that it hasn’t. But I was about to ask, well, it’s weird that for hundreds of years, with all these new technologies, that that ratio is still the one that people use, that technicians still use. Yes, well, as I say, they did until sort of well into our lifetimes. But they’d be mad to, today, because that has altered, especially, of course, in built-up areas in the kind of situation which one gets in Gaza with lots of high-rise buildings, fewer now than there were, to be frank, but lots of built-up areas. You can look at, for example, the Battle of Monte Cassino, where because the Allies flattened the monastery, actually the rubble was easier for the Germans to defend with machine gun nests and so on, than if the actual building had been left standing. So, there is an argument, actually, that you do better if you don’t blast the buildings, as you saw also in Mariupol, which you mentioned earlier. And then there’s, of course, Stalingrad, where they fight something called Rattenkrieg, which is essentially "rats’ war", because people are fighting down in the sewers. It’s hand-to-hand stuff. It’s extremely vicious, where every building, every room has to be fought for, sometimes down with bayonets. So this kind of fighting, which of course is heavily full of high casualty rates, might well be the one that we’re about to see the IDF enter in Gaza. That’s a scary comparison. Gaza becomes Stalingrad. I didn’t think of it that way, but that’s wow.…

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