If you type "C. A. Brannen" into a search at Amazon books you'll find a series my family published on military history. My favorite is: "Gunning for the Red Baron, C. A. Brannen No. 7:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/158544507X/?tag=pfamazon01-20
So I suppose I should contribute to this thread.
Wars are basically diplomatic disagreements that have gotten a bit out of control. The general idea is that someone is doing something you don't like and to get them to stop, you arrange for bad things to happen to them. They have similar feelings and respond with even worse things. From a physics point of view, this is called "positive feedback". Now it's important to remember that there are standard ways that civilized people do these things. For example, their side "kills babies", our side "causes collateral damage".
The first thing to note is that it's always the other side that caused the conflict. Somewhat illogically, this applies to both sides! Anything our side is doing is simply a consequence of things that the other side did first. It's like when you ask children who started a fight, they will agree that the other did. And there is typically some truth to this; it takes two to fight one way or another. (Oh so sorry, I didn't want to get in the way of your supreme righteousness in picking sides, LOL.)
The best "bad things" that you can do to another country are killing their babies. So EVERY war begins with the two sides accusing each other of baby killing. When I see pictures of broken babies I burst into laughter because this is such predictable human behavior. Now when you're impressing your own side on the truth and righteousness it's important that they be unaware of the other side's version of reality. You do this by spreading your version of reality as widely as possible while suppressing the words of the others. As I write this I am on the western side so I am inundated by the expected western version and must use some effort to find the tiny cracks where the other side's versions are described (I say described as it is in a foreign language I do not know).
It's easy to get the population to hate the subhuman enemy baby killers but there is always some fear that attacking the enemy will cause them to come over here and kill our own babies. This is very important when we're talking about border wars in Europe. Europe has been having border wars for 5000 years. The only time they turn into big deals is when countries which shouldn't be involved decide that they absolutely, positively, must get involved in their own part of the baby killing. This can only be accomplished by the two propaganda objectives; the enemy are subhuman baby killers, and defeating them militarily will be easy. So these are the two themes of propaganda that you can expect the two sides to lie about the most. Don't trust any of it.
Wars end when one side decides that they are beaten and need to surrender. This is very very difficult because all the propaganda about the other side being baby killers has been reinforced by the attacks on their own neighbors which has ruthlessly killed lots of babies right in front of their own eyes. You would think that this is impossible and that countries would fight to the last man but it turns out that after enough babies are dead, it starts to occur to the survivors that it's only a matter of time before the war kills them too and that surrendering to subhuman baby killers might be terrible, but the war continuing is even worse. This can take a long time. On the scale of typical European group wars, WW1 and WW2 were very very short because they were very one-sided. Compare industrial production to see this.
Now you might believe that we've advanced since WW2 and we no longer think of fire bombing as a good way of changing hearts and minds and in this I need to point out the distinguishing difference between small wars (like European border wars; before, hopefully, this one, think of the Franco-Prussian War, for example) and world-wide wars between global superpowers (like the Napoleonic Wars or WW1). For small wars, international diplomacy is important and if it's obvious that you're targeting babies (ooops, I forgot, when we kill babies the correct term is "collaterally damaging babies") they will tend to support your enemy. Since external support is extremely important to small countries they sometimes obey Geneva Convention. (So after video appeared of Ukrainians shooting Russian POWs in the knees the Ukrainian government put out a video announcing their support of the Geneva Convention for a good reason.) But with superpowers fighting superpowers there is no such reason to support the Geneva Convention; instead they target the enemy civilian population directly and with great enthusiasm. The reason nuclear weapons are so desirable is that they provide a way of attacking enemy civilians that the enemy military cannot protect against.
If you want to read a US military paper on the targeting of civilians and why it works you can start here, but in reading this, you must understand that targeting civilians is forbidden by law in the US; so the document must work within that restriction:
"Just War Theory and Democratization by Force", (2012) Military Review:
https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Por...es/English/MilitaryReview_20121031_art004.pdf
With most countries you win a war when you capture their capital city. Sometimes they will give up even before this. But it turns out that in the Napoleonic wars the US and Russia both had their capital cities captured and burned (1814 and 1812), by opposite sides on the Napoleonic wars but neither country quit fighting. This is something that AH would have discovered if he'd managed to capture Moscow in say 1942. In fact, AH managed to kill over 20 million Russians but they just kept fighting and eventually conquered Berlin. Of the major countries around the world, the only ones I can think of that have never been conquered (and are older than a few hundred years) are the US, UK and Russia. Maybe this contributes to why these countries start so many wars. Anyway, the Russian losses in WW2 give you a start at estimating how many Russians you will have to kill before they decide to quit fighting. Note it's much easier to get even world powers to quit a fight that is not on their home territory and the US, UK and Russia have all been tossed out of Afghanistan. The method is basically to do guerilla fighting and be patient. But where countries defend their "home" territory it is not so easy. And face it or not, fact or fiction, the Russians consider parts of Ukraine as home territory where Russian has been the majority language for a thousand years. Getting them to give it up won't be easy, don't fool yourself like AH did.
One of the odd features of countries is the large difference in murder rates between the old world and the new. I suspect this may have something to do with the number of people you have to kill in order to get a surrender so I'm mentioning it here. Everyone knows that the US is a violent country in terms of murder rate but it isn't so much appreciated that the high murder rates apply to most of the countries in North and South America. And of all the world's wars, probably the worst in terms of "just what percentage of the population do you have to kill in order to get the survivors to surrender" was demonstrated by Paraguay in the 1860s when despite being seriously outnumbered, they solved a border dispute by simultaneously attacking three neighbors. They didn't surrender until about 70% of their adult male population was dead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraguayan_War_casualties
If this war spreads beyond Ukraine the two sides will target each others' infrastructure as it is needed to make more weapons. This is due to the under appreciated fact that modern war chews up weapons systems at an amazing rate. The US logistics train assumes that 1% of weapons will be destroyed per day when things are quiet but that losses will far exceed that during active times. What this means is that even though the sides have been stockpiling huge amounts of weapons those piles will quickly be used up and the troops (likely on both sides) will be reduced to using assault rifles and the occasional grenade. Various countries are already out of missiles just by sending stocks to Ukraine. Great time to buy defense stocks, but how are you going to spend your profits? The economic consequences are that global (conventional) wars will quickly turn into meat grinders like WW1; the most important thing will be getting troops to the front. I'm reminded of my calculus teacher in high school in Albuquerque. Juan Raigoza had been a Colonel in the artillery and served in Korea. I took the class just after the end of the Vietnam war. The rumor among the students was that if you acted inappropriately in his class he would make a call to the "Selective Service" and you would be drafted two weeks after you graduated. From there the US army gave you "basic training" which at the time was very brief so that another 2 weeks and you were holding an M-16 in the jungles of Vietnam.
Now the west has already targeted Russian infrastructure (and civilians) in their attempt at destroying the ruble. As is normal for propaganda, the media trumpeted the plan to "destroy the value of the ruble" and went on at length about how it was cratering. And then, somehow, they quit talking about the ruble. If you want to know the explanation for why you stopped hearing about Russia's problems with the value of the ruble you can go look for a recent chart of the value of the ruble/dollar, for example this one:
https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=RUB&to=USD&view=1Y
That's right. As of today, the effort at destroying the value of the ruble failed almost completely and the media didn't bother to tell you about it. You should consider this as pretty good evidence that you are on the receiving end of an excellent, well executed propaganda war for a losing war. Simply put, everything you hear is either a complete fabrication or has been skillfully chosen to support a narrative that is not at all an accurate description of reality. And the reason this fact is VERY important for a wider war is that war is extremely expensive. The reason the US has huge military power is that even huger amounts of money has been spent on it. And that money did not come from US taxpayers. It's from constant budget deficits we've been running by borrowing money from foreigners. Those foreigners loaned us the money because their economies have been growing and they need larger and larger "reserves" of foreign currency. The US dollar has been preferred because it is trusted but the brilliant planners we've elected have likely permanently undermined that trust by stealing Russia's US dollar deposits. This is literally a bank telling you that your money has been taken from you and it cannot possibly make it easier to fund US military operations in a war that the world cannot rationally conclude we will easily win (and be able to pay back those loans). In addition, the Covid induced growth in the money supply is causing inflation which will vastly increase government interest expenditures over the next few years. Together these are not good omens for the economics of fighting a war. By the way, the best book on the economics of war I've ever read is the instant classic "Wages of Destruction, The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy" which I highly recommend even though my family didn't publish it:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143113208/?tag=pfamazon01-20
I should do one more thing and that is to describe what a conventional war expanding beyond Ukraine would involve. First, note that is an undeniable fact that the west has taken the war to be against Russian civilians so far only economically. Well this is not 1938. You know, I see a lot of people talking about some eventual civil war in the US. Fact is that the long horrible civil wars of the past all involved either foreign intervention (Vietnam for instance) or were in countries that were mostly rural (Spanish Civil war for instance). Civil wars in industrialized countries are very short (example: Austrian Civil war, February 12-16, 1934) and the reason is very simple. Rural people can feed themselves, urban people cannot. For similar reasons, I expect that a major war in Europe will be a lot shorter than expected, even without the use of nuclear weapons.
The first place I would target (and trust me, I know these things well) would be the large power transformers that are necessary to move electricity around. They can be easily destroyed by the hypersonic missiles Russia possesses and by US cruise missiles. These can be carried by submarines and simply cannot be avoided. Replacing one of these LPTs can take a few years as they are made by a rather small number of places (which I would also, of course, target with missiles). The result would be that most places in the free world would have no electricity for a very long time. Without electricity it will be difficult to refrigerate meats and undoubtedly there would be mass starvation from the breakdown in transportation. It might be a good time to stock up on spices that go well with human flesh as one of the best selling fast foods could be "People Jerky (tm)". Let's see if I can dig up an article on LPTs...:
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/Large Power Transformer Study - June 2012_0.pdf
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