Despite being a fundamentally defensive alliance…

Formerly being a fundamentally defensive alliance, when danger of the Second Estate World getting a little feisty was real.

https://www.isegoria.net/2025/07/third-world-was-a-reference-to-the-third-estate/

After that element was removed, the entire card house had to be reorganized from the ground up. Which maybe already could not be done, due to being buried under too much of decaying BS. So it was doomed, however not obviously. And when they went for easy mode, they have sealed their fate.

…most NATO exercises, training courses, and operational plans focus on seizing ground, breaching defenses, and clearing strongpoints. The result is a dangerous conceptual imbalance: armies that are prepared to attack in cities but not to defend them. In reality, they will likely have to do the latter before they ever do the former.

This is not an abstract concern. If conflict erupts in NATO’s sphere of interest, the first units to make contact will almost certainly be defending, not attacking. An adversary is likely to have the important first-mover advantage, seizing the initiative by making the opening moves. Initial objectives in such conflicts will undoubtedly include those large urban areas that straddle the main transportation infrastructure leading farther toward the adversary’s objectives. Potential adversaries know this in advance. They will plan to mass fires, integrate uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) with thermobaric payloads, and conduct urban shaping operations before launching a combined arms assault. They will not wait for NATO to organize a counterattack. War will come to the defenders.

Why, then, are NATO militaries still preparing to assault someone else’s trenches instead of holding their own?

In other words, made much the same mistakes as Red Army under “geniuses” like Toukhachevsky, Jukov, etc. Expecting to fight peasants armed mainly with rusty AKs and IEDs is the only thing that could make it even worse. And evidently did.

Red Army was to be made “the most offensively oriented army of the world”, and indeed it was. Which proved to be a recipe for failure even when fighting Poland.

It sometimes kind of worked in the Winter War, as the Finns were rarely able and willing to risk committing to a counterattack. Of course, then everyone had a hard time with maneuvers simply due to weather.

P.G.Ponedelin: [My] 139 rifle division have built a resilient defense on a front of 30 km, having to the right open space of 50 km and to the left 40 km. The division covered a separate direction.

S.M.Budenny: Were there hostiles ahead of you?

(laughter in the audience)

— from “Materials of the conference of top command cadres of Red Army, 23-31 December 1940”

And with all the overconfidence, statements like «We don’t need mines, we need only mine-sweeping equipment» (per Starinov) etc etc. Then a decently armed, but somewhat deranged proxy turned against one of its masters, these ways of thinking led to failures on a much larger scale than in Poland.

Had the lunatics that rule US/Europe had any sense, any decency, Russia would be a member of NATO (if it still existed) and the EU. China would be an afterthought.