A Lesson Learned Too Well
In 1952 an American naval officer described two kinds of war. One you can draw with arrows on a map. The other you only notice when it is already too late. Europe is fighting the second kind, and Germany is particularly bad at seeing it.
In short: Some wars move along arrows on a map. Others accumulate from small incidents that nobody adds up. Russia is waging the second kind in Europe to win the first kind in Ukraine. Germany is the hinterland it needs to wear down. In law, Germany is not a party to this war. In fact, it is in it. Moscow is betting on our fatigue, and fatigue is a decision.
Two kinds of war
I was reading Max Hastings on the Korean War [1], which is to say I was reading about something else entirely, when I tripped over an idea that isn't even his. It belongs to Joseph Caldwell Wylie, an American naval officer who fought in the Pacific and then, in 1952, sat down to think about what he had seen. The result was a short essay in the Naval Institute's Proceedings with the thrilling title "Reflections on the War in the Pacific" [2]. Required reading for cadets, presumably. It has not let go of me since.
Wylie distinguishes two ways of waging war. The first he calls sequential: one step follows another, each built on the last. Nimitz driving across the Central Pacific, MacArthur coming up from the south through New Guinea and the Philippines. Island, landing, next island. This is the war of the history atlas, with fat arrows pushing towards Japan. You can draw it. You can tell it. Hollywood has filmed it more often than anyone can count.
The second he calls cumulative. No chain, no plot, no hero. Just a vast number of small actions that have nothing to do with each other and none of which decides anything. His example was the American submarine campaign against Japanese merchant shipping. A freighter here, a tanker there, a few every week. No battle, no victory parade. And at some point Japan simply had no oil, no raw materials, and not enough rice in the cities. Critical mass, reached at a moment nobody could have named.
Wylie was no romantic about pinpricks. He did not believe cumulative war could win on its own. It works through the sequential one [3]. The submarines did not defeat Japan, but they decided how much resistance the Marines would meet on Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Hold on to that thought. We will need it.
We only believe stories
What fascinates me about Wylie is not the strategy. It is the psychology hiding inside it. Sequential war is made for human minds. It has places, dates, a front line, a narrative arc. Cumulative war has none of that. It arrives as a series of small news items, each one looking like an accident, a coincidence, a local matter for the police.
We are not built to add things up. We are built to follow stories. A hundred small events with no visible author do not register as one big event. They register as a hundred small ones, each forgotten before the next arrives. Psychologists have names for this, from normalcy bias to the boiling frog that probably never existed.
I prefer a simpler term: collective stupidity. The kind that happens when everyone understands their part and nobody understands the whole.
So Wylie's real point from 1952 is almost a theory of perception: a war without arrows does not look like a war. Not because people are stupid individually, but because this kind of war tells no story, and stories are the only thing we reliably believe.
A war without arrows does not look like a war.
Two Germanys, two lessons
I was thirteen when the Wall came down and fifteen when I moved from Berlin to the Frankfurt area. I grew up with both Germanys, and with both of their lessons.
West Germany learned never again to be the perpetrator. The trauma of defeat and almost complete destruction settled into its culture as a deep pacifism. Rearmament, yes, the Cold War demanded it. But the army was to be civilised, fenced in, a "citizen in uniform", and never really thought of as an instrument of foreign policy. Along the way, the West unlearned the word war. Morally, that was right. Historically, it was an achievement. I do not want to give back a single gram of it.
East Germany drew the opposite lesson from the same history. It called its readiness for war antifascism, raised its children with toy tanks, plastic AKs and films of Red Army victories, and saw the class enemy behind every border. The word war was never a problem there. It was everywhere, and so it meant very little.
Both lessons were prescribed by the state. Neither helps to recognise a cumulative war. One could not say the word. The other said it about everything. Unified Germany inherited the Western one.
Thirty years of drift
To be fair, West Germany once knew how to defend itself. A pacifist society, yes, but with an army that could fight. Until 1990 the Bundeswehr was built for one scenario: Soviet tanks pouring through the Fulda Gap, and an army strong enough to stop them. Some of the equipment from that world is proving itself on the Ukrainian front today: Marder infantry fighting vehicles, Leopard tanks, Gepard anti aircraft guns.
Then came more than thirty years, from reunification to Chancellor Olaf Scholz's "Zeitenwende" speech in February 2022, in which national defence was simply not a topic. Not a small topic. No topic at all. NATO moved east, Russia spent a decade reorganising itself, and the focus shifted to international terrorism. Our security, a German defence minister declared, was being defended in the Hindu Kush. Many laughed. I found it plausible, although anyone who knows that region's history since Alexander the Great knows you are better keeping your hands off it.
Meanwhile, at home: cutbacks, savings, drift. A whole generation long. Germany forgot how to defend a country, its own or an ally's. A society can learn a lesson so well that it can no longer see the next situation. Military historian Sönke Neitzel caused a small scandal a few years ago by calling for a revival of a warrior ethos, meaning the ability of a society and its soldiers to actually fight. He was attacked for it, of course. He was also, uncomfortably, onto something [4].
A society can learn a lesson so well that it can no longer see the next situation.
This is not a German peculiarity. Every organisation I have worked with has a rule that saved it in the last crisis and will strangle it in the next one. The lesson becomes identity. Identity does not like to be questioned. And so the very thing that once made you wise now makes you blind.
I do not call this cowardice. It is more like a blindfold that comes off slowly, and every inch of it hurts. Since the Russian invasion, Germany has supported Ukraine with weapons, money, political weight in the EU and a home for its refugees, and it acts more decisively today than it did in 2022. But the recognition keeps running behind the facts, and the price of every delay is paid by Ukrainian women and men, not by us. Waking up takes too long. There is no snooze button left.
Not at war, not at peace?
Which brings me back to Wylie, and to the present. Germany's current chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has found a lovely formula for our situation: we are not at war, but we are no longer at peace either [5]. A very German state of matter. Somewhere between the platform and the train. Delays due to operational reasons.
Meanwhile the list grows. Espionage, cyberattacks, disinformation, drones over military bases and chemical plants, arson at electrical substations, incendiary devices in parcels, fake videos ahead of the last federal election. In August, a drone carrying explosives at Leipzig airport, which failed, and which the German government, for once, publicly attributed to Russia [6].
Poland, the Baltic states and Finland get the harsher version, with border provocations and people shipped to the frontier as a means of pressure. In the Balkans, Moscow barely needs to push. Old sympathies do the work.
Read with Wylie's eyes, this is textbook cumulative war. But not, strictly speaking, a war against Germany. Cumulative war works through a sequential one, and the sequential war is in Ukraine, where the arrows are, and the front lines, and the place names I remember from the battles of the Second World War. People fight and die again there.
Russia is waging a cumulative war in Europe to win its sequential war in Ukraine. We are the hinterland. The depot, the bank, the political backing. And the hinterland is supposed to get tired. Do not mistake hinterland for sideshow. Russia still has the advantage in mass, and in a war of attrition it could probably outlast Ukraine on its own. Not with Germany behind Ukraine though. That is precisely why we are a target. If the German contribution crumbles, the arrows will start moving again, and not in Ukraine's direction.
Here is the part I overlooked at first. We are waging a cumulative war too. Sanctions, export controls, weapons, training, intelligence, billions in aid, the hunt for the shadow fleet. None of it decides anything. All of it together is meant to exhaust Russia's war economy.
Let us be precise about what this is. It is legal. Ukraine was attacked, and the UN Charter grants every attacked state the right to defend itself and every other state the right to help. Under international law, supplying weapons does not make Germany a party to the conflict, whatever their type or scale [7]. Russia's sabotage on European soil is covered by nothing. One is decided in parliament and can be scrutinised. The other depends on being deniable. The structure is symmetrical. The morality is not.
But legal is not the same as clean. German tanks, German artillery, German air defence: they kill Russian soldiers. Soldiers who invaded a neighbouring country, but soldiers nonetheless. We should be able to say that without flinching and without apologising. In law, we might not a party to this war. In fact, we are in it.
So are we at war with Russia? Cumulatively, yes. What I miss is that anyone says so out loud.
Pride without victory
Germany has given Ukraine money, weapons, intelligence, technology, political cover, and a home to more than a million refugees [8]. Ask a German whether that is something to be proud of and watch the face. Not embarrassment, exactly. More a kind of reluctance. We do it, but we do not own it. Delivering weapons, training soldiers, rearming: in the German vocabulary of the last thirty years and more, these are words with a bad smell. Each of them marks a farewell to a reality we had grown comfortable in, and nobody likes to celebrate a farewell. So we do the right thing with the face of someone doing something slightly indecent. What is missing is the sentence that should come with it.
Yes, we stand by this. Yes, we are taking up the fight against Putin's autocratic regime and its neo imperial project. We are setting something against it, and we want Moscow to know that we are steadfast and that we mean it.
I think it is time to be proud of it. Not triumphant. There is nothing to triumph about in a war nobody wins. But pride does not need victory. It can come from knowing what you are defending. In Ukraine that is not only a border. It is an idea of society and of the human being: that people may choose their government and get rid of it again, that a person is not the property of the state, that the stronger neighbour does not get to write the weaker one's history. Someone who grew up behind a wall does not take any of that for granted. Helping to defend it, at a cost we chose to bear, is an act of self binding. And self binding, as I have argued elsewhere [8], is where dignity actually comes from.
Pride in a fight is not the same as glorifying it. This is where the warrior ethos Neitzel called for sits uneasily with the citizen in uniform, and it should. I do not want to resolve that tension. I want a society that can hold it: able to fight, and still disgusted by the idea that fighting is glorious.
If we mean it
Saying it out loud is only the beginning. If we accept that we are in a cumulative war, a few things follow, and none of them is comfortable.
Deliver more, and deliver faster. Every month of public agonising over a weapons system is a month the other side reads correctly as hesitation. Answer the attacks at home instead of filing them: attribute them publicly, expel the people behind them, sanction them by name, and protect the infrastructure we have been happily leaving open. Rebuild the foundations a defending society needs: conscription in some form, civil protection, the ability to keep the lights on when someone wants them off.
And yes, think about answering in kind. A cumulative war that only one side fights is not a stalemate, it is an invitation. I say this as someone who takes the limits seriously. Answering in kind cannot mean becoming what we oppose. No attacks on civilians, no disinformation against our own public. The target is the apparatus that attacks us, not the people who live under it.
The most obvious step is also the most humbling. Learn from Ukraine. For more than four and a half years Ukraine has been the world's hardest school of modern war, with drones that change generation every few months and a battlefield organisation that is faster, flatter and more improvised than anything in a NATO manual. Our armies should not merely train Ukrainians. They should be trained by them. Joint development of drones, joint doctrine, officers embedded in both directions. For a German army that spent decades perfecting the paperwork of peace, that would be a cultural revolution. A welcome one.
Who gets tired first
Cumulative war has no decisive battle and no day of victory. Wylie knew that. It has only one question: whose accumulation reaches critical mass first. Will Russia wear down our willingness to carry Ukraine before we wear down its ability to keep fighting?
Moscow is betting on the hinterland. Not on our weakness, but on our fatigue. On the moment when enough people ask whether all this is really worth it. When the next aid package feels like a burden rather than a choice. When the drones over the next chemical plant are a local news item again, somewhere on page seven.
But fatigue is not weather. It does not simply happen to us. It is a decision, taken a thousand times over, in budget debates, at kitchen tables, in the voting booth. And Moscow is watching every one of them. Every time we look away, it takes note. Every time we name what is going on and stand by it, it takes note too.
Fatigue is not weather. It is a decision.
Wylie wrote about the Pacific in 1952. That his distinction fits Europe in 2026 so well is not a compliment. Neither to him, nor to us.
Notes and sources
[1] Max Hastings, The Korean War (London: Michael Joseph, 1987).
[2] J. C. Wylie, "Reflections on the War in the Pacific", U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 78, no. 4 (April 1952). For context see the Army War College's War Room essay on Wylie.
[3] Wylie developed the idea further in Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1967; reprint Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1989). A useful summary is the review in Strategic Studies Quarterly.
[4] On the warrior ethos: Sönke Neitzel, Deutsche Krieger. Vom Kaiserreich zur Berliner Republik (Berlin: Propyläen, 2020). The book was sharply criticised, among other things for its view of the Wehrmacht as a source of tradition, e.g. by Wolfram Wette in the Frankfurter Rundschau, in German.
[5] Friedrich Merz, speaking in Düsseldorf on 29 September 2025, as reported by Reuters.
[6] On the Leipzig attack and the attribution to Russia, see this interview by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and Correctiv, both in German.
[7] Research Services of the German Bundestag, WD 2 - 029/22 (2022): military support through arms deliveries, "regardless of their type and scale", does not cross the threshold into participation in the conflict. In German.
[8] According to the German government, around 1.35 million refugees from Ukraine were living in Germany in mid 2026. Report.
[8] Rolf Kreitel, "On Borrowed Tablets".
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