Sarah Paine

What's that?

The terminology comes from Clausewitz.

Carl von Clausewitz, who is a Western guru on conventional land warfare, which means is if you're attacking in a battle, if you go too far, you'll weaken yourself because the enemy will counterattack, send you further backwards than you would have otherwise.

In the case of World War I, you're sending young men over trenches into ongoing machine gun fire.

What do you suppose is going to happen to them?

And this profligate waste of life in these assaults out of trenches, maybe you took a little territory in the first two weeks, but after that, nothing.

These offensives will go on for months and months, racking up hundreds of thousands of deaths.

No more doing that in World War II.

And you can look the death figures for World War I and II.

So in World War I, the British army gets the multimillion-man army that they had coveted.

They deploy it on the main front from start to finish, and they chalk up twice as many deaths as they did in World War II when they have a peripheral strategy.

In World War II, they do make the mistake is they land the big army on the continent, opening move.

But it doesn't do well, and then they reassess, and they get that army off the continent immediately.

This is what the Dunkirk evacuation is, where the French are covering the British as they're decamping from the continent, saving the British army.

And this is why France has such large casualties.

It is doing this, even though France is in the war that long.

So it's going to be a long wait before the British get back on the continent again.

Long wait also for the United States to get in the war.

There's no more going beyond the culminating point of attack.

The way diplomacy is run is also completely different.