I’ve been working on the Roman war in Ethiopia for several days now (looks like it’s been a month) and I really can’t figure out what victory looks like. I think Rome lied.
3 years have passed, a third of the country has been occupied, some 200,000 Ethiopian soldiers and another 500,000 civilians have died (mostly from famine since Rome controls the country’s major supply of fresh water), and then what?
Everywhere that permits maneuver warfare has been maneuvered. Every target worth bombing has been bombed. Rome is now leveling every shitty little village it comes across and burning every field, advancing like a plague of locusts. And then what?
Capture or kill another 100,000 soldiers? The enemy can just raise 100,000 more. Starve another million people? They’ve got 79 million more. All the major population centers, what’s left of them, are guarded by 7000 canyons. If you want to bring tanks they have to travel along the three paved highways, which are now long shooting galleries.
And then what? You’ve stretched the supply train 1000 miles invading from two directions, captured the capital city, obliterated everything in your wake, and then what? The enemy can just disappear into the mountains and wage guerrilla war for the next century.
What qualifies as victory that isn’t burning the entire country to the ground and killing every last person?