From trunk to tail, elephants are a logistics nightmare.
And that begins almost literally at birth. For areas where elephants are native, nature (combined, typically, with the local human terrain) create a local “supply”. In India this meant the elephant forests of North/North-Eastern India; the range of the North African elephant (Loxodonta africana pharaohensis, the most likely source of Ptolemaic and Carthaginian war elephants) is not known. Thus for many elephant-wielding powers, trade was going to always be a key source for the animals – either trade with far away kingdoms (the Seleucids traded with the Mauyran Indian kingdom for their superior Asian elephants) or with thinly ruled peripheral peoples who lived in the forests the elephants were native to.
(We’re about to get into some of the specifics of elephant biology. If you are curious on this topic, I am relying heavily on R. Sukumar, The Asian Elephant: Ecology and Management (1989). I’ve found that information on Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) much easier to come by than information on African elephants (Loxodonta africana and Loxodonta cyclotis).)
In that light, creating a breeding program – as was done with horses – seems like a great idea. Except there is one major problem: a horse requires about four years to reach maturity, a mare gestates a foal in eleven months and can go into heat almost immediately thereafter. By contrast, elephants reach adulthood after seventeen years, take 18-22 months to gestate and female elephants do not typically mate until their calf is weaned, four to five years after its birth. A ruler looking to build a stable of cavalry horses thus may start small and grow rapidly; a ruler looking to build a corps of war elephants is looking at a very slow process. This is compounded by the fact that elephants are notoriously difficult to breed in captivity. There is some speculation that the Seleucids nonetheless attempted this at Apamea, where they based their elephants – in any event, they seem to have remained dependent on imported Indian elephants to maintain the elephant corps. If a self-sustaining elephant breeding program for war elephants was ever created, we do not know about it.
To make matters worse, elephants require massive amounts of food and water. In video-games, this is often represented through a high elephant “upkeep” cost – but this often falls well short of the reality of keeping these animals for war. Let’s take Total War: Rome II as an example: a unit of Roman (auxiliary) African elephants (12 animals), costs 180 upkeep, compared to 90 to 110 upkeep for 80 horses of auxiliary cavalry (there are quite a few types) – so one elephant (with a mahout) costs 15 upkeep against around 1.25 for a horse and rider (a 12:1 ratio). Paradox’s Imperator does something similar, with a single unit of war elephants requiring 1.08 upkeep, compared to just 0.32 for light cavalry; along with this, elephants have a heavy “supply weight” – twice that of an equivalent number of cavalry (so something like a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio of cost).
Believe it or not, this understates just how hungry – and expensive – elephants are. The standard barley ration for a Roman horse was 7kg of barley per day (7 Attic medimnoi per month; Plb. 6.39.12); this would be supplemented by grazing. Estimates for the food requirements of elephants vary widely (in part, it is hard to measure the dietary needs of grazing animals), but elephants require in excess of 1.5% of their body-weight in food per day. Estimates for the dietary requirements of the Asian elephant can range from 135 to 300kg per day in a mix of grazing and fodder – and remember, the preference in war elephants is for large, mature adult males, meaning that most war elephants will be towards the top of this range. Accounting for some grazing (probably significantly less than half of dietary needs) a large adult male elephant is thus likely to need something like 15 to 30 times the food to sustain itself as a stable-fed horse.
In peacetime, these elephants have to be fed and maintained, but on campaign the difficulty of supplying these elephants on the march is layered on top of that. We’ve discussed elsewhere the difficulty in supplying an army with food, but large groups of elephants magnify this problem immensely. The 54 elephants the Seleucids brought to Magnesia might have consumed as much food as 1,000 cavalrymen (that’s a rider, a horse and a servant to tend that horse and its rider).
But that still understates the cost intensity of elephants. Bringing a horse to battle in the ancient world required the horse, a rider and typically a servant (this is neatly implied by the more generous rations to cavalrymen, who would be expected to have a servant to be the horse’s groom, unlike the poorer infantry, see Plb. above). But getting a war elephant to battle was a team effort. Trautmann (2015) notes that elephant stables required riders, drivers, guards, trainers, cooks, feeders, guards, attendants, doctors and specialist foot-chainers (along with specialist hunters to capture the elephants in the first place!). Many of these men were highly trained specialists and thus had to be quite well paid.
Now – and this is important – pre-modern states are not building their militaries from the ground up. What they have is a package of legacy systems. In Rome’s case, the defeat of Carthage in the Second Punic War resulted in Rome having North African allies who already had elephants. Rome could accept those elephant allied troops, or say “no” and probably get nothing to replace them. In that case – if the choice is between “elephants or nothing” – then you take the elephants. What is telling is that – as Rome was able to exert more control over how these regions were exploited – the elephants vanished, presumably as the Romans dismantled or neglected the systems for capturing and training them (which they now controlled directly).
That resolves part of our puzzle: why did the Romans use elephants in the second and early first centuries B.C.? Because they had allies whose own military systems involved elephants. But that leaves the second part of the puzzle – Rome doesn’t simply fail to build an elephant program. Rome absorbs an elephant program and then lets it die. Why?
For states with scarce resources – and all states have scarce resources – using elephants meant not directing those resources (food, money, personnel, time and administrative capacity) for something else. If the elephant had no other value (we’ll look at one other use next week), then developing elephants becomes a simple, if difficult, calculation: are the elephants more likely to win the battle for me than the equivalent resources spent on something else, like cavalry. As we’ve seen above, that boils down to comparisons between having just dozens of elephants or potentially hundreds or thousands of cavalry.
The Romans obviously made the bet that investing in cavalry or infantry was a better use of time, money and resources than investing in elephants, because they thought elephants were unlikely to win battles. Given Rome’s subsequent spectacular battlefield success, it is hard to avoid the conclusion they were right, at least in the Mediterranean context.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: War Elephants, Part II: Elephants against Wolves”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-02.
February 13, 2024
QotD: War elephant logistics
February 12, 2024
A mustard lover’s journey
Every week, Substack helpfully sends along a collection of new-to-me Substacks to entice me to subscribe to yet another — in Substack’s ideal world, I’d be a paid subscriber to many, but I don’t live in that world, I’m afraid. Saturday’s mailing included Chloe List’s paean to the condiment mustard, in all its many guises:
A Mustard Deep Dive
I have so many feelings about mustard I don’t even know where to start. It’s my favorite color (marigold, mustard yellow, same difference). I’m from Chicago. I love hot dogs. If you don’t understand, google “chicago ketchup”. I blow through jars of dijon like it’s nobody’s business because can you even make a good salad dressing without it? Just last week, I went to a German restaurant and ordered a plate-sized chicken schnitzel that was more or less a vessel for eating their incredible mustards (one sweet, one spicy). All to say, it’s a perfect condiment and it doesn’t get the love and respect it deserves. And let me tell you, the Mustard Rabbit Hole did not disappoint. The packaging is so inspiring and sincere, and I’m this close to booking a flight to Europe so I can buy some mustard in a tube (more on that below). Anyways, please enjoy this deep dive into a product category that is seemingly untouched by trendy packaging design in the best way. But first …
1. Mustard for the person who has the palate of a 277-year-old
Grey Poupon was founded in 1866. Colman’s was founded in 1814. Maille was founded in 1747! I didn’t know just how old these legacy brands were until I started researching this letter, but after digging further it’s not all that surprising. Mustard as a spice is one of the earliest on record, appearing in Sanskrit manuscripts around 3000 BCE, and mustard as a condiment dates back to the early Romans. I’d love to see how they were storing this colorful condiment back then, but I’m quite pleased with how these brands are jarring it today. Per usual, this is one of my favorite categories in this deep dive because of that whole “timeless cool” thing that always wins for me when it comes to packaging design. Side note, I’m now obsessed with vintage mustard pots.
2. Mustard for the person who longs for the days of “Harvest Gold”
What’s “harvest gold”, you may be asking? Picture the “before” photo of a fixer-upper kitchen remodel in Domino. Or any number of recent brands that have been bringing back that avocado green and orange/yellow palette. All to say, these bottles and jars look like they could be set pieces on The Brady Bunch or That ’70s Show. And because apparently mustard brands can do no wrong, these are all working. They don’t feel try-hard or overly designed, but rather truly feel like they time traveled 50 years to the future. I especially love that top left bottle of Finnish mustard and the type on Mister Mustard. Also, Mustard Girl would be a great Halloween costume.
Yalta, When Stalin Split the World – a WW2 Special
World War Two
Published 11 February 2024Indy and Sparty take you through the negotiations at Yalta as The Big Three thrash out the shape of the postwar world. As the splits between East and West continue to deepen, who will come out on top?
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Look at Life – Amphibian DUKW (1962)
Classic Vehicle Channel
Published Apr 23, 2020The military have finished with their amphibious truck know as the DUKW. They’re sold off to the general public for use in civilian life, including divers and even a group of monks.
February 11, 2024
The Battle of Manila Begins – WW2 – Week 285 – February 10, 1945
World War Two
Published 10 Feb 2024The American advance on Luzon has reached the Philippine capital, and it looks like they have a real fight on their hands with the Japanese there. There are supposed to be two new Allied operations starting in Western Europe, but one is delayed by flooding. The Allies do manage to eliminate the Colmar Pocket in the west, though. On the Eastern Front, there are new Soviet attacks in Pomerania and East Prussia, as well as out of the Steinau Bridgehead to the south, and in Budapest, it looks like the Soviet siege might soon end in victory.
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February 10, 2024
The War Goals to End WW2 in 1945 – a WW2 Special
World War Two
Published Feb 8, 2024While World War Two looks like it is about to end, the belligerent powers have vastly different goals for that end. Differences that may or may not prolong the war, will decide the survival of tens of millions of people, and the future fate of all of Humanity.
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“Ukraine is running out of soldiers to man the front”
In the second part of his review of the situation in the Russo-Ukrainian War, Niccolo Soldo discusses why the plight of Ukraine’s military is getting worse, not better:
Since the previous entry was published, several key developments continue to make the outlook for Ukraine even gloomier than it already was then. The Ukrainian-held city of Avdiivka is now falling to Russian forces. This city is right next to Donetsk, the largest city in the Donbass. It is from Avdiivka that the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) have been shelling that city for almost a decade now. It is considered by many to be the location with the strongest fortifications along the entire front line. Its capture by the Russians would be a significant victory, not just because of the size of the battle, but especially because it would spare the city of Donetsk from any future artillery barrages from the Ukrainian side.
Since the last entry, the ongoing fight between President Zelensky and his top general, Valeri Zaluzhny, has broken out into the open. Zelensky has indicated that he will be replacing Zaluzhny (and others) in order to “shake up” Ukraine’s war effort, a move that the general refuses to accept. The two Z’s do not see eye-to-eye, with observers informing us that Zaluzhny has called for the UAF to pull out of Avdiivka in order to buy time and not lose more men and arms in defending a city that they would lose in due time. [NR: Zelensky announced that Oleksandr Syrsky has replaced Zaluzhny on February 9th.]
Making matters even worse for the Ukrainians, the US Senate failed to agree to send more money to Kiev to help them in their fight against the Russians. Ukrainian officials told the Guardian that the failure in the US Senate “… will have real consequences in terms of lives on the battlefield and Kyiv’s ability to hold off Russian forces on the frontline”. US Aid For Ukraine President Yuriy Boyechko sounded an even gloomier note:
Everyone was hoping that US won’t let us down, and now we find ourselves at a very difficult place. People are losing hope little by little. We don’t have time for this because we see what’s going on at the front. The more time we give for the Russians to build up their stockpiles, even if the aid is going to show up it might be too little too late.
Newly-elected Polish Premier Donald Tusk criticized Senate Republicans by invoking the memory of Ronald Reagan:
And not to be outdone, Politico is blaming who else but Donald Trump.
The EU did finally manage to convince Hungary to agree to a new 50 Billion EUR package for Ukraine, but European leaders all agree that it is “nowhere near enough”, and requires the USA to chip in just as much as a minimum to sustain the war effort. This package is to be spread out until 2027, but Ukraine faces a funding shortfall of 40 Billion USD this year alone! From the linked article:
“Everyone realizes that €50 billion is not enough,” said Johan Van Overtveldt, a Belgian conservative who chairs the European Parliament’s Budget Committee. “Europe realizes that it needs to step up its efforts.” And by that, he means finding money from elsewhere.
World Bank estimates put Ukraine’s long-term needs for reconstruction at $411 billion.
Money is one thing (and a very, very important thing at that), but all the money in the world doesn’t address the elephant in the room: Ukraine is running out of soldiers to man the front.
Napoleon’s Revenge: Wagram 1809
Epic History TV
Published Jun 21, 2019Six weeks after his bloody repulse at the Battle of Aspern-Essling, Napoleon led his reinforced army back across the Danube. The resulting clash with Archduke Charles’s Austrian army was the biggest and bloodiest battle yet seen in European history, and despite heavy French losses, resulted in a decisive strategic victory for the French Emperor.
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QotD: When Manchuria became Manchukuo
Further unpleasantness ensued in the wake of World War I, when both Imperial Russia and Republican China collapsed. The Japanese had a big railroad project of their own going in the Kwantung Leased Territory, which was threatened by the chaos. Moreover, the big Japanese railroad project had grown — as Japanese industrial concerns tend to do — into a ginormous, all-encompassing combine known as Mantetsu.
So far, so recondite, I suppose, but stop me if this part sounds familiar: Mantetsu was so big, and so shady, that it was all but impossible to tell where “the guys running Mantetsu” ended and “the Japanese government” began. And it gets better: Thanks to the Japanese Empire’s distinctive (to put it mildly, and kindly) administrative structure, it was equally hard to tell where “the Japanese government” ended and “the Japanese military” began. Even better — by which I mean much, much worse, but again feel free to stop me when this sounds familiar — “the Japanese military” was itself composed of several wildly different, mutually hostile chains of command, all competing with each other for political power, economic access, and glory. Best of all — by which, again, I mean worst — since Mantetsu was so big, and so wired-in to every level of the Japanese government, it basically got its own army, which was effectively separate even from the Army High Command back in Tokyo.
Here again, the granular details are insanely complex, and I’m not qualified to walk you through them, but the upshot is: Thanks to all of the above, plus the active enmity of the rapidly-rearming Soviet Union and the rapidly-accelerating chaos of the Warlord Period in China, Japan’s foreign policy ended up being dictated by the Kwantung Army, with almost no reference to even the High Command, let alone the civilian politicians, back in Tokyo. A particular warlord giving the Mantetsu Board of Directors — or, you know, whoever — grief? No problem — boom! Oh, that didn’t solve the problem, and now the politicians are dragging their feet? Might as well blow up a different part of your own railway, seize a whole bunch of territory on that flimsy pretext, and set up a puppet government to give you cover …
I don’t expect y’all to follow all the links right away, so trust me on this: Nobody involved in any of that stuff ranked higher than colonel. Indeed, the guy most “responsible” — if that’s really the word — for all of this stuff was a staff pogue, also a colonel, named Kanji Ishiwara. He and another staff pogue, Seishiro Itagaki, who was head of the Kwantung Army’s intelligence section, orchestrated the Japanese invasion of China, and while it’s oversimplifying things a bit too much to say those two clowns started World War II in the Pacific, I’m not stopping you from saying it.
From there, events took on a logic of their own. The rest of the Army was soon committed to the war in North China, which rapidly became the war in all the rest of China. The Navy, not wanting to let the Army hog all the glory, had gotten in on the war a few years prior to the Marco Polo Bridge, and soon enough they were causing all kinds of international grief on their own account. Put simply, but not unfairly, you had the Navy chasing the Army, and the Army chasing itself, all across China, with the civilian politicians lagging way behind in the rear, desperately trying to catch up, or even just figure out what the hell was going on …
Severian, “Lessons from Manchuria”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-21.
February 9, 2024
Rome: Part 2 – Consolidation of the Republic
seangabb
Published Feb 8, 2024This course provides an exploration of Rome’s formative years, its rise to power in the Mediterranean, and the exceptional challenges it faced during the wars with Carthage.
Lecture 2: Consolidation of the Republic
• The Roman Revolution against the Kings
• How Brutus put his own sons to death
• How Horatius kept the Bridge
• Scaevola and Lars Porsena
• The Roman Constitution: an Overview
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The (so-far limited) ability to read the Herculaneum Papyri may vastly increase our knowledge about the Roman world
Colby Cosh on the achievement of the three young researchers who were awarded the Vesuvius Challenge prize earlier this month, and what it might mean for classicists and other academics:
On Monday morning, Farritor and two other young Vesuvius Challenge notables, Youssef Nader and Julian Schillinger, were announced as winners of the grand prize. Nader and Schillinger had, like Farritor, already won Vesuvius Challenge prizes for smaller technical discoveries, and Nader had in fact been a mere heartbeat behind Farritor in producing the same “porphyras” from the same scan. After Farritor nabbed his US$40,000 “first letters” prize, the three decided to combine their efforts to net the big fish.
The result is a text that represents about five per cent of one of the thousands of scrolls recovered — and there may be more not yet recovered — from the Villa of the Papyri. The enormous villa was owned by an unknown Roman notable, but there are clues that one of its librarians was the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus of Gadara, who lived from around 110 to 35 BC. Until his identity was connected with the library, Philodemus did not receive too much attention even from classicists. But the Vesuvius Challenge efforts have now yielded fragments of what has to be an Epicurean text — one which discusses the delights of music and food, and condemns an unnamed adversary, possibly a Stoic, for failing to give a philosophical account of sensual pleasure.
The recovery of dozens more of the works of Philodemus would be — one might now say “will be” — a world-changing event for the classics. We know Philodemus was close to Calpurnius Piso (101-43 BC), the father-in-law of Julius Caesar and a likely owner of the doomed villa. He almost certainly had a front-row seat for the prelude to the end of the Roman Republic. We know he wrote works on religion, on natural philosophy and on history: even his thoughts on music and poetry would be of marked interest.
But nobody knows what else, what copies of older works, may be lurking in Philodemus’s library. At this moment antiquarians know the titles of dozens of lost plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides and Aristophanes; we are missing major works of Aristotle and Euclid and Archimedes and Eratosthenes. We know that Sulla wrote his memoirs and that Cato the Elder wrote a seven-book history of Rome. Any of these old writings, or others of equal significance, may materialize suddenly out of oblivion now, thanks to the Vesuvius Challenge. It’s an impressive triumph for the idea of prize-giving as an approach to solving scientific problems, and the news release from the challenge offers a discussion of what the funding team got right and where the project will go next.
His Year: Julius Caesar (59 BC)
Historia Civilis
Published Jul 5, 2016
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QotD: “Five, Four, Three, Two, One. Thunderbirds Are Go!”
Although there had been earlier offerings from the same stable, such as Supercar, Fireball XL5 and Stingray, and others which followed, it was Thunderbirds that gripped my generation and has never really let go. Set in the future, the genre devised by Gerry Anderson focused on the heroic exploits of secret but benevolent organisations operating from remote or hidden bases on land, in the sky or on the moon. Equipped with advanced technology, their missions were to protect civilisation from aggression, accident and sabotage, countering devious, often extra-terrestrial opponents. It was his brother’s service in the RAF that gave Anderson a life-long fascination with flying machines. Thunderbird Field at Glendale, Arizona, where his older brother learned to fly, provided a name for the series.
In his future worlds, planet Earth is generally united under a world president, in contrast to the traumas of the recently passed world war. Each programme featured life-like puppets, filmed in what Anderson dubbed “Supermarionation”. They were tributes to his brother. It was on 27 April 1944 that these future television series were really born. Flight Sergeant Lionel Anderson never got to pilot Stingray or Thunderbird One, or fly an Interceptor from Cloudbase, for during the early hours of that April Thursday, his twin-engined Mosquito was hit by flak on a night intruder raid and crashed near Deelen in Holland. Now he and his navigator, Sergeant Bert Hayward, lie in the corner of a cemetery in Arnhem, “Mourned by his devoted parents and brother Gerald”, as the Commonwealth War Grave headstone reads.
The war traumatised Gerry Anderson, whose Jewish grandparents had fled pogroms on the Polish–Russian frontier. He would complete his own national service in the RAF and experienced two more dramatic flying events. In 1948, he saw a Mosquito — his brother’s aircraft type — crash during an air display, killing many bystanders. Later a Spitfire came in to land without its undercarriage lowered. The helplessness he felt, and need for some divine intervention, such as that provided by the World Aquanaut Security Patrol (Stingray), International Rescue (Thunderbirds), Spectrum (Captain Scarlet) or Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organisation (UFO), provided more seeds for the future series, where the world was united and fought external foes. In German, the last was screened as Weltraumkommando SHADO, but the concept precisely echoed the UNIT organisation of Doctor Who.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s we were promised robots, space travel, lunar colonies and travel to Mars. Films, television series, science fiction short stories and magazines guaranteed it to the point of entitlement. Airfix plastic model kits, cardboard cut-outs on cereal packets, Matchbox, Corgi and Dinky diecast toys reinforced this expectation, underwritten by the real, manned Mercury missions of 1961–63, Gemini space launches of 1965–66 and Apollo craft of 1968–72. Gerry Anderson’s vision (shared by the American script writers of Star Trek, which debuted exactly a year after Thunderbirds on 8 September 1966) of a world government did not seem absurd to the young minds of 1965. It is partly the innocence of those years which touches us today. I, for one, still feel short-changed.
Peter Caddick-Adams, “Broadcasting anniversaries”, The Critic, 2023-11-04.
February 8, 2024
“Mwa-mwa-mwa”, they said
Chris Bray expands on the topic of yesterday’s post about the legacy media wanting you not to do your own research because it might lead to the “wrong” kind of answers:
I’m a hundred pages into a book I’ve been meaning to read for years, and I meant to spend last night reading it. But then I accidentally looked at social media.
For years, now, I’ve been watching as journalists and politicians connect a set of fact claims to a conclusion that has nothing to do with the evidence they’ve just given: This happened, and this happened, and this happened, and, trust us, all of that means this. It snaps your head back, because the statement about the meaning of the evidence is so ridiculous they can’t possibly have failed to notice. The news is frequently a series of bizarre interpretive non-sequiturs.
I wrote about a favorite example here, as an army of Barack Obama hagiographers described The Lightbringer’s glorious childhood in Indonesia. He went there with his mother and Indonesian stepfather in 1966, during a massive purge of communists by the army that included a great deal of mass killing, and Obama’s biographers describe the future American president being a young child in a place where rivers were choked with corpses and soldiers marched prisoners through the streets. Then, casually, they conclude that his time in Indonesia was idyllic and warm, and Jakarta was the place where this wonderfully decent future leader learned the gentle values of civic engagement and democratic pluralism.
See also this example, from back in the days when I didn’t have many subscribers, discussing an op-ed piece that described the Freedom Convoy as a movement of anti-government radicals who wanted to live in a society with no rules at all and marched on Ottawa behind the banner of authoritarianism to implement their fascist agenda.
Over and over again, reading the “news” that these people write, you catch yourself muttering but you JUST SAID …
Fact claims don’t add up, categories clash, paragraphs self-refute, sentences start out insistently claiming X and then wander into a firm insistence upon Not X before the period arrives at the end. The great complex of global news and politics has the internal consistency and logic of the day ward at a mental hospital.
Last night we seem to have suddenly turned the knob on that machine up to eleven, BECAUSE HITLER IS IN MOSCOW TO DO AN INTERVIEW. The people who are proud that we’re fighting authoritarianism by arresting the leading figure of the political opposition and throwing him off the ballot are also very angry that Tucker Carlson is interviewing an autocrat, and they hate autocracy, so Tucker Carlson must be arrested and bankrupted and barred from returning to the United States, to stand up to authoritarianism. I had a moment last night when I sincerely wondered about the wisdom of paying attention, because the experience of hearing from The Responsible People™ became painfully hallucinatory.
The officials at the EU get to decide who counts as a real journalist and who gets ruined, to protect democracy. Ukraine is the brave and incorruptible vanguard of ideal democracy, by the way, and so pure it floats, like an ad for soap. Nothing bad has ever happened there, you Nazi, but now Satan Putin’s vampire fangs drip with innocent blood, and there’s absolutely nothing else to say about it, send cash.
Watching people like Bill Kristol and David Frum comment on real-world events now is like watching a homeless drug addict having a psychotic break at a bus shelter. The connection between fact and interpretation has become painfully severed. A whole layer of allegedly high-status people have gone barking mad. We need to arrest everyone who disagrees with us about politics or else we’re going to lose our system of open society to authoritarianism, and you really ought to smoke some of whatever we have inside this glass pipe.
The lead-up to the Russo-Ukrainian War
At Founding Questions, “El Barbudo” has a guest-post on the situation in Ukraine, including a lot of background to the outbreak of full-scale combat with Russia’s “Special Military Operation” strike that was intended to decapitate the Ukrainian government and capture Kyiv in February, 2022:
Britain’s Ministry of Defence regularly posts these situation maps through their Twit-, er, I mean “X” account. This is the most recent one from 2024-02-02.
One framing point: the Russians are fighting a conventional, industrial war, for real-world (economic, territorial and national-security) objectives. The Ukrainians are fighting a proxy information war — large-scale armed propaganda, if you will — where the primary purpose of battlefield action is to feed political-warfare objectives, and thereby maintain western support. Seen from Kyiv, the centre of gravity (the thing from which Ukraine draws its strength and freedom of action) is western support — making narrative (as seen from the west) central, while the media is enlisted as a conduit for narrative warfare. Hence, through a western media lens, what you’re seeing is carefully curated to influence rather than inform. (Nothing new here — I defer to the historians, but I think Paul Fussell made this point about World War Two. Ask yourself when was the last time you saw a dead Ukrainian soldier, intact or otherwise.)
What that means is that battlefield defeats can be managed, as long as the narrative — the core of the war, as western sponsors see it and as the Ukrainians therefore are forced to see it — can be maintained. What’s causing the current crisis is not so much the death, destruction or loss of territory (though those are real). It’s that the mismatch between rhetoric and reality has finally reached the point that people are noticing.
[…]
Ukraine has been at war with Russia in some fashion since 2013, with violence first spiking into the open in February 2014. The Ukrainians call the 2014-2022 period the Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) but it involved fairly heavy fighting — against Russian-backed separatist militias in the east, and internal to Ukraine among various factions including, yes, the Banderite nationalists (“neo-Nazis”) beloved of Russian media and Canadian parliamentarians alike, though they’re less prominent now (mainly because a lot of them are dead).
We should also note how this arose — first Russia and the U.S. forcing Ukraine to give up its nukes in 1994, then NATO expansion after Bosnia, and (publicly acknowledged) US interference in Russia’s 1996 election to ensure Boris Yeltsin got re-elected, creating a sense of threat in Moscow. Then Kosovo 1999, Bush and Putin’s failed attempt to make nice after 9/11, Estonia, Georgia, the Reset Button of 2009 and betrayal over Libya in 2011. (Hillary promised no ground troops or regime change, persuading then-president Dmitry Medvedev to abstain on the UN Security Council Resolution that authorised the intervention, only to renege on all counts then laugh on live TV when she found out Gaddafi had just been sodomised to death with a bayonet).
All of which infuriated the Kremlin, and confirmed the West was not “agreement-capable” (they have euphemisms in Moscow too) leading them to intervene in Syria to support the Assad regime. Then came the Ghouta gas attack of September 2013 — in which Obama failed to enforce his own Red Line, and John Kerry had to beg Sergey Lavrov (Russian foreign minister) to save us from the consequences of our own weakness … which convinced Russian leaders we were not only threatening and untrustworthy, but also weak. More great work there.
Russia’s seizure of Crimea followed, four months after the red-line debacle. It was clearly a result of Russian hatred and contempt. (Oderint dum metuant — the hatred was long-standing; what was new was the realisation, after Ghouta, that they had nothing to fear). Crimea was also a reaction to a US-backed revolution in Ukraine (Euromaidan), and the operation’s popularity should have made it clear that Ukraine is seen by Russians, of all political orientations, as integral to their identity, along with Belarus. No Russian politician could tolerate western advisers or weapons in Ukraine … which was the policy pursued after 2014. (There’s a chicken-and-egg security dilemma here. The west was reacting to perceived aggression from Russia, which was reacting to perceived western aggression. Both sides saw themselves as innocently defensive, and the other as aggressive.) [NR: Emphasis mine.]
Putin, by Russian standards, is a relative moderate on Ukraine — he frequently gets panned by war bloggers, retired generals and divers chickenhawks for being soft on the west, not prosecuting the war hard enough. If the neocons got their way and he was regime-changed, his replacement would likely be far worse for their interests — someone like, say, Nikolai Patrushev. Putin gets painted as Hitler in the media, but this is an artefact of the Alinskyite approach American political/media players take to any conflict: first freeze the target (no negotiation is possible) then personalise the enemy via an individual leader (Bin Laden, Mullah Omar, Saddam, Gaddafi, Kim etc), then paint that leader as irrational and evil (without limits, restraints or goals except to be evil). From that point, it’s good versus evil, any means necessary, war as moral imperative. Putin is the latest foreigner to get this treatment, Trump the latest domestic equivalent. Trump’s greatest foreign policy crime, in fact, may have been his willingness to treat Putin, Kim, Xi, MBS etc. as rational actors worthy of respect (for Trump values of “respect”) rather than moral pariahs. This has hilarious consequences when people previously given the pariah treatment (Maduro, MBS, the Taliban) need to be rehabilitated via creative retconning so the narrative can keep rolling.
Anyway, from 2014 to 2022 the war was pretty static, with a few bigger battles (Debaltsevo the main one), artillery exchanges and trench warfare: a foreshadowing of how things are today, though without the massive tech acceleration we’ve seen since February 2022, and far fewer casualties.
Trump’s people have suggested Putin was frightened of him, which is why Russia didn’t invade during Trump’s term. There may be some truth to that (Trump after all reversed Obama’s prohibition on lethal aid) but it’s more likely the Russians just saw Trump as dangerously unpredictable, a decision-maker who never fully controlled his own government, especially on Ukraine (see Impeachment #1). The Russian way of war involves predicting an adversary’s reaction to provocation, then doing just enough, ambiguously enough, to achieve a fait accompli without triggering a response. This goes back to Trotsky and Tukhachevsky in the 1920s, but when your adversary is Trump, it becomes impossible to predict the trigger or the reaction if you piss him off. (Qasim Soleimani says hi). There was also one particular battle in Syria in February 2018 where US SOF killed some large number of Wagner guys by refusing to play their little games, and when the Russians complained Trump basically said it served them right.
Once Trump was gone — with Washington in disarray after January 6th — the Russians sensed an opportunity, and began building up around the Ukrainian border from April 2021. Then in August, when we covered ourselves in glory during the Great Kabul Pants-Shitting, the Russians probably thought they had the measure of Biden — who they knew of old — and decided we were so flaccid they’d get away with a lightning move against Kyiv, “Crimea 2014 on steroids”. (PS: when neocons start overtly asserting, in their in-house journal, that “the Afghan withdrawal did not trigger the Ukraine invasion” you know it’s true — even if the Russians hadn’t already said as much, in as many words.)
So, the Russians tried Crimea on Steroids in February 2022 — and their plan failed by breakfast on D Day, triggering the protracted war of attrition we have now. The reasons were partly bad luck for the leading Russian air-assault units attempting to seize the airfield at Hostomel outside Kyiv, partly good initiative by U.S. and U.K. trained Ukrainian SOF and territorial defence guys, partly over-compartmentalisation on the Russian side — key players were kept out of the loop for OPSEC reasons, and the invasion was mostly planned by political hacks with limited military understanding. (Why should we have the monopoly on that?) This video is a decent open-source account of that happened.
