每日英語跟讀 Ep.K522: What 70 Years of War Can Tell Us About the Russia-Ukraine Conflict

Any Russian invasion of Ukraine was long expected to play out as a kind of postmodern war, defined by 21st-century weapons like media manipulation, battlefield-clouding disinformation, cyberattacks, false flag operations and unmarked fighters.

俄國對烏克蘭的任何入侵早已被認為會是一場後現代戰爭，由21世紀武器界定，如媒體操縱、戰場假消息戰、網路攻擊、栽贓行動以及無名戰士。

Such elements have featured in this war. But it is traditional 20th-century dynamics that have instead dominated: shifting battle lines of tanks and troops; urban assaults; struggles over air supremacy and over supply lines; and mass mobilization of troops and of weapons production.

這些的確是這場戰爭的特點。但主導局面的仍是20世紀的傳統動能：戰車與部隊不斷變化的戰線、城市攻防、爭奪制空權和補給線，大規模動員軍隊與生產武器。

The war’s contours, now nearly a year into the fighting, resemble not so much those of any future war but rather those of a certain sort of conflict from decades past: namely, wars fought between nations in which one does not outright conquer the other.

這場持續近一年戰爭的輪廓，不太像任何未來的戰爭，較像是數十年前的某種衝突，也就是一方未完全征服另一方的國與國戰爭。

Such conflicts have grown rarer in the period since 1945, an era often associated more with civil wars, insurgencies and American invasions that have quickly shifted to occupation.

自1945年以來，這類衝突愈來愈少，這一時代往往較常跟內戰、叛亂及美國入侵後迅速轉變成占領的有關。

But wars between nations have continued: between Israel and Arab states, Iran and Iraq, Armenia and Azerbaijan, India and Pakistan, Ethiopia and Eritrea. These are the conflicts that military historians and analysts, when asked to draw parallels with the Russian war in Ukraine, tend to cite.

但國與國間的戰爭仍繼續上演：以色列和阿拉伯國家、伊朗和伊拉克、亞美尼亞和亞塞拜然、印度和巴基斯坦、衣索比亞和厄利垂亞。當被問到能跟俄國在烏克蘭戰爭相提並論之事時，軍事史學家跟分析人士往往會引用這些衝突。

“You have these big commonalities. In Korea, for example,” said Sergey Radchenko, a Johns Hopkins University historian, referring to the Korean War. “Big conventional battles. Bombardment of infrastructure.”

約翰霍普金斯大學歷史學家拉德琴科在談到韓戰時說：「這些有很大的共同點，像是在韓國，大型傳統戰鬥、轟炸基礎設施。」

Every war is unique. But certain trends that have played out across this subset of conflicts, including in Ukraine, may help to shed light on what drives week-to-week fighting, what tends to determine victory or failure and how such wars typically end — or don’t.

每場戰爭都獨一無二，但包括烏克蘭在內的這類衝突中出現的某些趨勢，可能有助於闡明何者導致一周又一周的戰鬥，以及決定勝利或失敗的因素是什麼，還有這類戰爭通常如何結束，或是不會結束。

One after another, Radchenko said, such wars have started over fundamental territorial disputes that date back to the warring countries’ founding and are therefore baked into both sides’ very conception of their national identities. This makes the underlying conflict so difficult to resolve that fighting often recurs repeatedly over many decades.

拉德琴科表示，這樣的戰爭一場接一場，起因可追溯到交戰雙方建國時期重大領土爭端，因此已深植於雙方各自國家認同之中。這造成潛在衝突難以解決，戰爭經常在數十年間反覆發生。

Those wars have often turned, perhaps more than any other factor, on industrial attrition, as each side strains to maintain the flow of materiel like tanks and anti-aircraft munitions that keep it in the fight.

也許比其他任何因素還重要的是，這些戰爭往往轉向工業消耗，因為雙方為了繼續戰鬥下去，都在努力維持戰車和防空彈藥等物資的產出。Source article: https://udn.com/news/story/6904/6948318