So, what is there right before success? Its a massive attack, a huge one. Ofcourse that attack was successful, but what if that attack would have actually failed?
Lets look at some examples. The nuclear attacks on japan ended world war 2. Since those two attacks happened within a few days, we can, for convenience combine them in a single attack. The question is, what if that attack was not successful. What if japan would had decide to continue the war. What if japan had some secret weapon to actually prevent such attacks in future, a better air-defense for example.
It turns out, and this is the point of this article, that there were a series of attacks in planning. Nuclear attack was just the first one and luckily for americans it was successful. But, if it was not, there were other equally promising attacks in pipeline, so the outcome was a given anyways.
One such in-pipeline attack was a full scale invasion of japan by america, like d-day. Americans have estimated half a million deaths of their own soldiers. Americans have gone so far as to actually have a special medal made for dead soldiers of that invasion, half a million such medals.
Another such in-pipeline attack was a soviet invasion of japan. At the end of war in europe, soviet union being free to use troops elsewhere, has already broke peace treaty with japan and was rushing forces to the japanese front. Field marshal zhekov, who was the supreme general at field of all soviet troops in all theatres of war was already there in the region, preparing for an attack.
So, what comes before success is a huge blow, the blow that kills the enemy and results in a decisive victory. But, its also important to note that success do not depend on that one blow, there are usually other blows waiting to be used if the first ones fail. So, what comes before the final blow, is a series of equally powerful blows already in motion, its an overkill kind of situation but that is how victory usually comes.
What comes before the series of blow, is huge preparations. Factories producing materials in large quantities. The key is that the rate of production of materials is greater than the rate of those materials getting consumed in field, atleast by a factor of two, and usually by a factor of three or more.
What comes before production of those materials in huge quantity is securing of infrastructure. You have to have your production facilities, your factories, farms and hospitals secured from enemy raids. If you still have to worry about your production facilities getting destroyed then you are far from victory.
So, first you secure your production-facilities. Then you produce huge quantity of materials. Then you set in motion multiple blows, one coming after another, if the first ones fails. Thats how victory comes.
When you are studying something, you are trying to conquer something. Your production facilities here is the time you set aside to study, and necessary stationary stuff such as writing materials and books. You are constantly invaded by job duties if you are working, house errands especially if you are living alone and other stuff that keep you away from studies. Your first step must be to secure your production facilities. You can do that in a variety of ways. One such way is to hide. For sometime escape from above mentioned distractions and focus. Reduce trips to market, friends and parties to the minimum. Once this is achieved, attack your target, the subject you are trying to study from multiple fronts. One front might be understanding the philosophy, another the need, yet another the practicality, yet another applications and experiments. Its like starting at multiple positions simultaneously, then moving towards target in parallel on multiple paths. Soon, thing get connected. One chain fit in another. You see how a particular need is met by a particular practical method that might not be very beautiful. How a certain philosophy matches boundaries of a certain experiment etc.
Fall of soviet union came from a three-prong attack: the afghan war, reduction of oil prices, arms race with americans. With afghan war getting long and more and more expensive for soviets, arabs flooded market with oil far above demand hence reducing prices. Since soviet union was an oil exporter, this alone reduces income of soviets to a third. While having extra burden of supporting a war, america started an arms race and since soviets had to run with that arms race, the total effect of these three killed soviet union. In this case, unlike the situation above, the three blows acted in parallel. Ofcourse the blows did not start in parallel. Afghan war started in 1979 and got deep after 1983. Oil flood came around 1985. Arms race started around 1986. The first one didn't kill, so the second one was started, then the third one.
What came before these was ofcourse securing of production facilities. In case of afghan war, the ground was held between 1979 and 1983 by afghans on their own, so the production facility there, the afghans, were secured. Then when the massive help came after 1983, these production facilities were used to produce local soldiers in large number to be used in the blow.
In case of oil flood. Far before the 1980s, the infrastructure of production was developed during 1960s and 1970s. Huge oil deposits were found. Skills learned. Wells dug. Refineries built. Then when the signal came. The production facilities produced oil in huge quantity to give the blow.
In case of arms race, america has already got the infrastructure, the basic technology, the factories, the roads, the engineers already in place and in abundance. Then when signal came, all of these were put in use to make the blow.
In case of nazi invasion of soviet union, there was also a three-prong attack. This time the attack was all in term of actual war. Nazis invaded soviet union at three places in parallel. Why were the nazis defeated? There were other reasons too, but one reason is, none of the three attacks could have killed the soviet union on its own. Thats the point. Each of your multiple blows must be able to get success for you on its own. The right strategy for nazis was to invade ukraine, to get control of both farms and mines. Then the soviets would never be able to get enough food and raw-materials at first place to produce enough to support the war, even if they were able to secure the production facilities. Actually without enough raw-materials, weapons and ammunition and even soldiers couldn't be mustered in enough number to even secure the production facilities.
This gives us an important lesson. Before the securing of production facilities came, there is another thing, it is availability of raw-materials. Without raw-materials you are never going to produce enough security stuff to secure your production facilities. Without production facilities secured you are never going to produce enough materials to have a massive blow on enemy. Without massive blow its very hard to win over the enemy.
It may happen that you have already produced enough materials, that is converted raw-materials to materials in enough number that you do not care about the availability of materials. You not even care about security of production facilities. The problem is, in war time its very hard to guard and defend the stockpile of materials. A large quantity of them is bound to get destroyed. Also the war may got extended beyond your planning in which you can run short of materials. Also some of your units may defect taking away with them some of the stockpiles.
When you are studying something, the words and diagrams in books is raw material. Also words and actions of teachers is also raw material. The learning process is conversion of these raw materials into knowledge. Knowledge is a set of rules. Some of these rules are about what a thing can be and what a thing cannot be. Some of these rules are about dependencies between entities, such as, if you do such and such action, then such and such outcome will produce. Knowledge is nothing but rules. Knowledge is the material, the finished good. Once you have knowledge, all you have to do is go apply that in your field. Its like using materials in a war.
Population cannot increase without surplus of food. Huge efforts, to the level of fatal blows to enemy, usually cannot be made without abundance of materials.
At the time of mongol invasion of central asia, the khwarzam empire collapsed pretty soon. Mongols raided and martyred all the population, including women and children, thereby killing production facilities of people. Ofcourse factories were also destroyed, thereby killing production facilities of materials. Then when the only surviving son of khwarzam shah, Jalal uddin tried to stop mongols, he faced huge problems. With the empire gone, there was no way to produce materials. All he could do was ask for help from remaining muslim countries. He did a great job on that and was able to gather army again and again and fight with mongols repeatedly but was unsuccessful. One reason of this failure is, while Jalal uddin couldn't recover losses from wars, mongols could. The mongolia was never invaded by muslims and was producing new mongols in huge numbers, so mongol losses were easily recovered. Given the low-tech situation of that time, destruction of factories was not a huge problem because similar factories could be set up pretty easily. Also since world still had abundance of raw-materials as most of the mines were never even discovered at that time, the materials were also not a problem. The problem was lack of people. With mongols martyring everybody on their way, the production facilities of khwarzam empire was destroyed beyond recovery during the period of war.
Sometimes it work to have one single blow, i.e. do not have other blows waiting in pipeline or already working. For example the conquest of caesar and alexander. Alexander took countries one by one, first egypt, then persia, then afghanistan etc. Caesar first took the goth, then some other parts of europe, then egypt. None of these two used parallel blows. If we look close we can find that victories of these two generals depended on these generals themselves. It was not a systematic kind of thing we see in world wars and fall of soviet union etc. For example if caesar had died in one of the wars in goth, the other roman generals of the time couldn't have continue the series of success. Same goes in case of alexander. Therefore we should take these two cases as exceptions that prove the rule.
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