The comment identifies Mikhail Tukhachevsky with deep battle, or operational warfare, and uses Desert Storm as a modern illustration of moving quickly enough to deny an enemy time to react. Such officers and ideas could have made the Red Army much more dangerous once it went over to the offensive. Their destruction in the Great Purge raises a wider counterfactual about what Soviet armed forces might have achieved with their professional generation intact. A parallel with the unusually high mortality among senior Royal Navy officers in 1938-40 shows that abrupt losses of experienced leadership can damage institutions even when the causes differ.
Notable Point · 22:02-23:25
Soviet purges erased operational-warfare expertise
A discussion of Tukhachevsky and deep battle shows how political murder destroyed expertise, then compares that loss with the Royal Navy's prewar deaths among senior admirals.