Offense and defense are not symmetrical

 

THOUGHT OF THE DAY: "They must understand that we can only lose by taking the offensive. Patience and time are my warriors, my champions" - Joseph Conrad, from The Mirror of the Sea. Contradicts the more common view that the best defense is a good offense.

Yes—and I think Conrad's version is actually more interesting because it recognizes that offense and defense are not symmetrical.

“The best defense is a good offense” assumes that the defender can improve his position by forcing the opponent to react. Conrad's observation is almost the inverse:

If the opponent is stronger when you are compelled to act, don't give him the opportunity.

“Patience and time” become active weapons rather than mere passivity. If your opponent has to attack you, he has to expose himself, spend resources, make decisions, and eventually make mistakes. Your job is simply not to turn his problem into your problem by attacking first.

There's a nice distinction between the two aphorisms:

• Good offense as defense: seize the initiative; make the other fellow react.

• Defense as offense: make the other fellow exhaust himself trying to make you react.

And Conrad's wording—“we can only lose by taking the offensive”—makes it particularly clear that this isn't a universal military principle. It's strategy relative to circumstances. If you're weaker, entrenched, patient, and time favors you, attacking may be precisely the way to throw away your advantage.

It also has a broader applicability that I suspect is why you noticed it. In arguments, politics, negotiations, litigation, even investing, there are situations where doing nothing is not doing nothing. Waiting preserves options while forcing the other party to reveal theirs.

Conrad's “my warriors, my champions” is rather wonderful, too. He personifies patience and time as if he has an army—but an army that doesn't have to fight.

We are seeing in Ukraine where an invader always has a set of disadvantaged issues, despite overwhelmingly superior resources.

Exactly. Ukraine is almost a textbook case of the Conrad principle, although of course the actual military situation is vastly more complicated.

Russia has enormous advantages in population, artillery, aircraft, missiles, industrial capacity and sheer resources. But the attacker has a peculiar burden that the defender doesn't: it has to accomplish something geographically.

An invader must:

• advance and expose itself;

• supply forces over increasingly vulnerable lines;

• capture and hold territory;

• overcome prepared defenses;

• replace losses while maintaining momentum;

• and ultimately persuade the defender that continued resistance is hopeless.

The defender, by contrast, can define success much more modestly: don't lose. Every kilometer the attacker fails to take is, in that sense, a defensive success.

And there's an asymmetry in information as well. The attacker generally has to reveal where it intends to go; the defender can conceal where it intends to resist. Once the attack develops, the defender can concentrate resources against the exposed point.

That doesn't mean defense automatically wins. Russia's material superiority is real, and Ukraine has its own enormous burdens. But it illustrates Conrad's underlying insight beautifully:

Superior resources don't necessarily make offensive action advantageous. Sometimes superiority merely gives you more resources with which to make an expensive mistake.

There's also a particularly nasty feature of modern warfare: the attacker must cross the defender's prepared killing ground, while the defender can increasingly exploit drones, mines, artillery and precision weapons without having to advance into the same danger.

So perhaps the two aphorisms can be reconciled:

“The best defense is a good offense” when initiative is valuable and you can attack without surrendering your advantages.

“Patience and time are my warriors” when the other side is the one that must move.

Ukraine demonstrates why knowing which of those situations you're in may be more important than either maxim itself.

There are also asymmetries in dedication and familiarity.

Yes. And those may be among the most important asymmetries, because they aren't easily measured by counting tanks or soldiers.

Dedication is asymmetric because the defender is fighting for something immediate and concrete: home. The attacker may have political objectives, but an ordinary Russian soldier is being asked to risk his life for objectives that may be considerably more abstract to him. Ukraine, meanwhile, has an enormous reservoir of motivation simply from having its territory invaded.

And familiarity operates at several levels:

• Ukrainians know the terrain, roads, villages, weather and infrastructure intimately.

• They know where civilians are and what areas have been evacuated or destroyed.

• Local knowledge helps with concealment, movement and logistics.

• The attacker must learn all of this while operating under fire.

• Even seemingly trivial things—terrain that becomes impassable after rain, a road that looks useful on a map but isn't, local landmarks—can matter enormously.

There is an interesting feedback loop here. Defense gives you time to become more familiar with the battlefield; offense forces you to learn it by moving through it.

And dedication isn't simply morale. It affects the willingness to endure casualties, shortages and inconvenience. A population defending its own country can reasonably think, “We have nowhere else to go.” That is a formidable strategic fact.

This brings us back to Conrad. His “patience and time” aren't passive virtues. Time allows dedication and familiarity to compound, while imposing costs on the attacker. That's a rather different conception of defense from simply sitting behind a wall and hoping the wall holds.