Excellent Piece From Andrei Raevsky.

It is titled:Tactics without Strategy is the Noise Before Defeat. Andrei notes:

The title of this article is a quote by the famous Chinese general, strategist, philosopher, and writer Sun Tzu who lived 2500 years ago.  And while it is true that warfare has dramatically changed over the past millennia (for example, operational art was added as an intermediate level between tactics and strategy), the fundamental logic of Sun Tzu still applies.  To grossly oversimplify this issue, you could say that tactics are the means towards an end which has to be defined and the definition of that end goal is strategy.  Again, this is ridiculously oversimplified, but for our purposes that is good enough.

Then he arrives to this conclusion:

So what can the US/NATO bring to the table?

• A world class C4ISR (very useful, but also potentially very vulnerable)
• A world class submarine force (useful only to fire cruise missiles)
• A large amount of subsonic and mostly outdated cruise missiles
• A comparatively small ground force (with no real air defenses)
• Air forces which have no experience operating in a *very* dangerous environment.
• A very robust nuclear triad

Since we know from Sun Tzu that “tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat” we can immediately see that none of these capabilities has any chance to avoid a NATO defeat.  In other words, US commanders will soon have to face an even worse choice: defeat or nuclear war. I submit that the West currently has neither (real, meaningful) tactics nor any strategy. None. All I see is magical thinking, narcissistic delusions, a mindset shaped by centuries of relative impunity and an over-arching, blind, hatred of Russia and everything Russian. Hardly the ingredients for a victory (under any definition thereof) against the most powerful continental warfare military on the planet.

Difficult to disagree.