Quote Originally Posted by Rank amateur View Post
Depends on your opponents aversion to causalities.
Not really, loss of vehicles means more than casualties, it means a loss of combat capability. With the Russians (and there are others) who don't care about casualties, their own or anyone else's, the casualty factor is not a significant issue -- but combat capability has to be one...
...By any definition, Hezbollah conducted a successful defense.
Possibly true -- that it was successful obviously owed a very great deal to Israeli incompetence and miscalculation, so the 'credit' is not all due to Hezbollah. It is quite dangerous to assume that a tactic that works in a particular geographic, state of training and cultural setting (and all are very important) can be universally applied. Not to mention that whenever someone pulls off a successful offense or defense, every military guy in the world studies it in an effort to develop a counter -- usually successfully...
But if the point you're making is that Georgia was stupid getting into a war with a much bigger, better armed opponent, your point is well taken.
Now that's true -- but I suspect there's a lot more to it than that. On both sides. Russia's op was a FSB op with the well prepped and rehearsed military as an instrument. What was Georgia's?