Quotulatiousness

August 30, 2022

A cynical (or realistic) view of the fighting in Ukraine

Filed under: Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Severian put up a guest post at Founding Questions from “Pickle Rick” analyzing a recent article in the Marine Corps Gazette on the Russo-Ukrainian War so far:

Marinus divides Russian operations, and operational goals, thus tactics, into three discrete geographic parts. Northern Raiding and feints realized through mobile warfare, Southern Occupation through clear and hold, and Central Attrition operations through artillery firepower.

1. Northern operation. Marinus’s central thesis is that the Northern operation was a giant raid, intended to fix Ukrainian commanders’ attention on the threat to Kiev, and prevent them from reinforcing their defenses in the south. In this, mobile warfare, using the battalion tactical group, was the main strategy used. Marinus posits that taking and holding Kiev was never a goal in this operation. Left unsaid in his assessment were two key points that go beyond his narrower operational focus.

First, I’m sure that the Ukrainian Army’s top command was likely not in complete control of defensive strategy or deployment. Zelensky, the Ukrainian Auto Parts King — (“I make politics for the Ukrainian working man, because that’s who I am, and that’s who I care about!”), and his American “advisors” were. Note that we have no idea who Ukrainian General Marshall is, who his Supreme Commander Eisenhower is, or his battlefield Patton is, even if one existed. I mean, we got fawning coverage of President Comedian, looking tough in his cammies on TV, a lot — by which I mean every fucking day, a mythical fighter ace, the “Ghost of Keeeeeev”, but nobody wanted to manufacture a real hero Uke general, steadfastly leading his troops with steely eyed resolve from the front?

C’mon, that’s Propaganda 101. Shit, even Big Red let Marshal Zhukov ride a white horse at the Victory Parade.

I don’t think that is inadvertent. The goons at State and the Clown Intelligence Agency, having engineered one coup, sure as fuck don’t want an actual no shit popular hero, ethnically Ukrainian general to be a viable political alternative to the UAPK they handpicked and installed after this clown folds the Big Top. (Francisco Franco, Kemal Ataturk, or Wladislaw Sikorski say hi from history!). To hear it from the Ministry of Propaganda, Zelensky is commanding the troops himself, and that’s for once likely not far from the truth. It’s Zelensky being “advised” by whatever retards from [Washington DC] who are actually commanding the Ukes, which brings me neatly into my next point — Putin and his generals initiated this feint to Kiev precisely because they correctly predicted that Zelensky and his American masters would expect it and react to it as they did, regardless of anything the Ukrainian generals said.

Why is that, you might ask? Because that is the only strategy that AINO’s Very Clever Boys, Girls and Trannies can conceive of, and the only way they conduct war. Send in the Air Force to blow up everything in an enemy capital, launch a blitzkrieg style invasion aimed at cutting off the enemy army, encircling it, forcing the unmotivated piss poor enemy conscripts to surrender in place or die trying to pull back, and driving on to the capital to pull down the statues of the recently deceased or deposed Dear Leader who was The Next Hitler, declare victory, then institute Regime Change and Operation Endless Occupation. Putin and the rest of his generals are just stupid vodka fueled gopnik Ivans, and couldn’t possibly be headfaking us and outsmarting us. We went to West Point and Harvard, and are automatically the Best and Brightest. Remember when the MoP and the Fistagon were squeeing like little girls at those incompetent Ivans floundering about within artillery range of Keeeev, and the 100 mile long convoy that everyone saw “stuck” on the road to the Sacred Capital, that was so visible and obvious you could see the fucker from space, that just sort of disappeared, along with the great and decisive Battle of Keeeeev that was going to be a bloody defeat for the evil Russians?

You’ll never hear anyone ever admit it, but they just got posterized because their hubris and arrogance was exactly the thing [Putin] used against them.

маскировка (Maskirovka), you stupid fucks, is a Russian MILITARY CONCEPT, and you forgot it. Check yo self before you wreck yo self, as von Clausewitz wrote. Master P didn’t fight your war, he fought a modern Kabinettskreige and that is fought for an entirely different set of objectives, as we will see below.

2.Southern operation. This is the forgotten stepchild of the war so far, but quietly could be the one front with the longest lasting strategic effects. Marinus disposes of this front relatively quickly, noting that it really is operationally the bread and butter of traditional warfare, take ground and hold ground, move on to the next objective. Strategically, this is different from ground taken in the northern front or even parts in the central, however.

The object here is permanent occupation and Russification to deny the rump state of Ukraine any coastline and landlock it. This, unlike territory in the north or even in the Donbass, is not a bargaining chip on the table at the peace talks. Denying this to the Ukrainians after the war prevents them from ever “inviting” any US Navy ships into the Black Sea to base themselves at a Ukrainian port and serve as a potential casus belli, hamstrings Ukraine from seaborne economic activity with Turkey across the Black Sea, thus making sure whatever left of Ukraine is unable to function without massive land route economic as well as military aid, making it a drain, not an asset, to Globohomo and AINO.

[…]

3. Central operation. Marinus here details the real decisive front in the war, calling it “Stalingrad in the East” (Clunky, since Stalingrad was a very different kind of battle, but it has name recognition as a byword for the Eastern Front and the Russian way of war). Honestly, it is far more like a giant Battle of Verdun, but only for one side.

Here is where I’m going to proclaim how happy my artilleryman’s heart is […] because Marinus says that in the Russian way of winning wars, you can’t spell PARTY without ARTY. Not Special Operations Operating Operationally, not drone warfare “fought” by fatass pimply nerds in some air conditioned room half a world out of danger, not bombs away from 30,000 feet, or armored divisions imitating Rommel. Fucking old school howitzers, chucking metric tons of high explosive on infantry, dropping regimental sized TOT and Shake and Bake when they get in the open. I predicted that here in the beginning of the war and a lot of you can look that shit up if you don’t believe me. Guess we ain’t obsolete anymore, assholes.

Everything the Russians are doing in the Donbass and Central front, operationally and tactically, hinges around artillery as the decisive arm, the fulcrum that the other arms orbit around, which is very, very different than the American way of war. Again, as in the north, the Americans “advising” the Ukes had never, literally never in living memory, faced an enemy with air superiority and firepower superiority, much less both combined. They have absolutely no answer for it.

August 13, 2022

QotD: Erich von Manstein

Filed under: Books, Germany, History, Military, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One parallel between the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the conduct of the Second World War that has hitherto escaped notice concerns the relationship between the dictator and his generals. Just as the German General Staff obeyed Hitler’s orders, even when they knew him to be leading them not only to defeat but to depravity, so the Russian high command has capitulated to Putin despite realising that his war was not only a mistake but a crime.

In the Britain of the Sixties, a certain mystique still attached to the generals of the Third Reich. In their stylish uniforms and their gleaming jackboots, they had swaggered. Only two, Keitel and Jodl, were executed at Nuremberg; the rest got away with murder.

Even some of those who were convicted of war crimes had friends in high places. One of the most prominent was Erich von Manstein, the architect of many German victories both in the Battle of France and on the Eastern front. He was also complicit in the genocide of more than a million Jews and others by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen in Ukraine.

Yet Churchill was among those who successfully campaigned to have Manstein’s 18-year sentence reduced to 12, of which he served only four.

Manstein’s memoir Verlorene Siege (translated as Lost Victories) appeared in 1958, a key text in the mythology that depicted the Wehrmacht as “clean” and laid the blame for war crimes on Hitler. Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of the postwar Federal Republic, also played his part in the rehabilitation of Manstein, on the grounds that West German rearmament required a sharp distinction between the Nazis and an untainted military tradition as the basis for the new Bundeswehr.

Daniel Johnson, “The moral blindness of Putin’s generals”, The Critic, 2022-05-10.

July 21, 2022

Prime Minister Look-At-My-Socks shocked to discover that betraying an ally has consequences

Filed under: Cancon, Germany, Government, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Andrew Potter outlines why the Ukrainian government is unhappy with Prime Minister Photo-Op’s decision to break the sanctions on Russia as a favour to Germany:

Well, one thing is for certain: There isn’t going to be a “Justin Trudeau Lane” anywhere in Ukraine any time soon.

In case you missed the drama last week, Trudeau found himself on Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s shit list after Canada announced, on July 9, that it would allow Siemens to return to Germany up to six gas turbines for the Nord Stream 1 pipeline that were being repaired in Montreal. Russia was threatening to shut down the pipeline and cut off the flow of gas to Germany, which is facing a very serious energy crisis.

In response, a furious Zelenskyy summoned Canada’s ambassador to Ukraine for what one presumes was a solid chewing out, after which the Ukrainian president posted a video in which he lit into Trudeau for “an absolutely unacceptable exception to the sanctions regime against Russia”. As Zelenskyy put it, the problem isn’t just that Canada handed some turbines back to Russia, via Germany. It is that it was a direct response to blackmail by Russia. And if Canada is willing to bend when its sanctions become politically uncomfortable, what is to stop other countries from carving out their own exceptions to their own sanctions, when it suits? Furthermore, Zelenskyy added, it isn’t like this is going to stop Russia from shutting down the supply of gas to Europe — the turbines were always just a pretext, an opportunity to cause strife and stir dissension amongst the countries allied with Ukraine against Russia.

Trudeau — who spent the weekend flipping pancakes at the Calgary Stampede — must have woken up on the Monday wondering what had gotten into his old buddy in Kyiv. After all, hadn’t Trudeau, along with other members of his cabinet, made it clear through their many, many tweets on the subject that Canada stood by Ukraine? Hadn’t Canada sent enough money, arms and humanitarian aid to Ukraine? Hadn’t Trudeau himself paid a visit to Kyiv in May, to re-open our embassy and to underscore just how seriously Zelenskyy should understand Canada’s commitment?

[…]

Ultimately, the problem here is a serious failure by Canada to manage Ukrainian expectations, brought about by the profound mismatch between the level of our rhetoric and the clear limits of our commitment. For Ukrainians, there is a moral clarity to the Russian invasion of Ukraine that, from a Western perspective, has not been present in any other conflict since the Second World War. Zelenskyy assumed that Canadians saw that. He assumed that if Ukrainians were going to be slaughtered, the least we could do would be to stick to our principles, even if it meant asking the population to suffer economic harms and the government to manage genuine political discomfort.

He assumed wrong.

Five months into their war for survival against the genocidal Russian regime, the Ukrainians have learned something important about Canadians: When it comes to our foreign affairs, we don’t mean what we say. When we say we stand with a country, that we fully support them, that we will help defend them or hold their enemies to account, there’s always a “but” or an “until” or an “unless”. We will stand with you, unless it’s politically difficult. We will help you, but not if it means genuine sacrifice. We will support you, until the costs get too high. Then, all bets are off.

The bigger point is this: Canada doesn’t do moral clarity anymore. Whether it is our business dealings with China, our arms sales to Saudi Arabia, or sending a diplomat to a garden party at the Russian embassy in Ottawa, we are always and everywhere hedging our bets, fudging our principles, letting down our allies.

July 18, 2022

General Patton Orders War Crimes – WAH 069 – July 17, 1943

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, History, Italy, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 17 Jul 2022

This week, we see a contrast in the way different civilians behave within occupied Ukraine, Patton orders war crimes, and Jewish resistance give up one of their own fighters.
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July 8, 2022

The Russian way of war

Filed under: Europe, Military, Russia — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In First Things, George Weigel identifies what we’ve learned about the Russian “way of war” from the ongoing conflict with Ukraine:

Four and a half months after Russia invaded Ukraine on the Orwellian pretext of displacing a “Nazi” regime — a regime that enjoys a democratic legitimacy absent from Russia for two decades — what have we learned about, and from, the Russian way of war?

We have learned that the Russian way of war is inept strategically, tactically, and logistically: an army using inferior equipment, bereft of competent non-commissioned officers, and replete with ill-trained draftees; an army that relies on brute force to bludgeon its way toward its objectives. We have learned that the Russian way of war willfully obliterates cities and deliberately destroys economic infrastructure. We have learned that the Russian way of war targets hospitals and schools, cultural and educational institutions, churches, synagogues, and mosques in an attempt to eradicate a culture and a nation that Russian president Vladimir Putin insists has no right to exist, save as a Russian vassal. Thus the twenty-first-century Russian way of war breathes the spirit of eighteenth-century imperialism, with President Putin comparing himself to that quintessential Russian imperialist, Peter the Great, and telling schoolchildren asked to name Russia’s borders in a geography bee that “the borders of Russia never end”.

We have learned that the Russian way of war is insensible to casualty rates, its own army’s and Ukraine’s. We have learned that the Russian way of war includes abandoning the Russian dead or disposing of their remains in mobile cremation units, so that body bags don’t flood the home front and raise questions about the wisdom of Putin and his generals. We have learned that the Russian way of war includes the humiliation, torture, and probable execution of prisoners of war. We have learned that the Geneva Conventions on the humane treatment of POWs mean no more to the Russian military and its political masters than does the Fifth Commandment.

We have learned that the Russian way of war includes the use of cluster munitions and unguided missiles specifically forbidden by international law. Thus the Russian way of war systematically violates the two in bello (war-fighting) principles of the just war tradition: proportionality of means (no more force than necessary to achieve a legitimate military objective) and discrimination (non-combatant immunity). We have learned that the Russian way of war features widespread rape, gross theft, and the summary execution of civilians, as well as kidnapping civilians in Russian-occupied territories, relocating them, and attempting to coerce them into renouncing their Ukrainian allegiance.

We have learned that the Russian way of war includes illegal blockades of Ukrainian ports to prevent grain shipments, thus threatening starvation in Third World countries. We have learned that the Russian way of war includes energy blackmail, threats of nuclear-weapons use, and blatant bullying of other countries, including Lithuania and Kazakhstan.

July 5, 2022

Dijon mustard … made from Canadian and Ukrainian mustard seeds

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Food, France — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the New English Review, Theodore Dalrymple explains why Europeans have been experiencing higher shelf prices and shortages for Dijon mustard recently, over and above the ordinary supply chain disruptions of the pandemic years we’ve all had to get used to:

Among myriad smaller consequences of that war is an acute mustard shortage in France. Mustard has all but disappeared from supermarket shelves, having first increased in price dramatically. This has surprised everyone who lazily assumed that Dijon mustard came from Dijon. Why should a war waged in Ukraine lead to the disappearance of mustard throughout France? After all, the famous brands, familiar to everyone, proudly announce on their labels that they are Dijon mustard. Can there be anything more French than Dijon mustard?

Perhaps the mustard is elaborated in Dijon, but the mustard seed, it turns out to everyone’s surprise, is imported from Canada and Ukraine. Apparently, Canada has seen a disastrous harvest of mustard seed, while there is no need to explain the shortage in Ukraine. Dijon mustard is about as local to Dijon as a modern soccer team is local to the city in which it has its stadium.

What is striking about this mustard crisis, unimportant except to those trying to make a proper vinaigrette or lapin à la moutarde, is its revelation of a perennial aspect of social psychology: namely, a resort to conspiracy theory. For some say that there is not really any mustard shortage at all — that mustard has disappeared from supermarket shelves because the supermarket chains are hoarding it, that they have a plentiful supply in their warehouses and will release it little by little, thereby profiteering by the resultant high prices. The war in Ukraine is only a pretext.

This is an old, indeed medieval, trope in times of shortage. There may well have been times, of course, when people really did hoard for the purposes of profiteering, but people rarely hoard something that is in abundant supply.

Yet many people require no evidence or proof to believe in the hoarding story. Does it not, after all, stand to reason? Do not merchants try to maximize their profits, and is hoarding not an easy way to do so? Practically all the mustard in France is sold in supermarkets — themselves a cartel that could easily agree to remove the product from the shelves. Surely no further evidence is needed.

June 8, 2022

The Climate Wars are dead, merely collateral damage from the Russia-Ukraine War

Filed under: Europe, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

JoNova links to this Foreign Policy article by Ted Nordhous, signfiying the end of a “lame Cold War substitute” as the conflict in Ukraine pushes it decisively off the agenda for most western nations:

Four days after Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest assessment of the impacts of global warming. Leading media outlets did their best to pick out the most dire scenarios and findings from the report. But the outbreak of the first major European war since 1945 kept the report off the front page or, at the very least, below the fold. “Climate Change Is Harming the Planet Faster Than We Can Adapt” simply couldn’t compete with “Putin Is Brandishing the Nuclear Option”.

Meanwhile, the headlong rush across Western Europe to replace Russian oil, gas, and coal with alternative sources of these fuels has made a mockery of the net-zero emissions pledges made by the major European economies just three months before the invasion at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland. Instead, questions of energy security have returned with a vengeance as countries already struggling with energy shortages and price spikes now face a fossil fuel superpower gone rogue in Eastern Europe.

In the decades following the end of the Cold War, global stability and easy access to energy led many of us to forget the degree to which abundant energy is existential for modern societies. Growing concern about climate change and the push for renewable fuels also led many to underestimate just how dependent societies still are on fossil fuels. But access to oil, gas, and coal still determines the fate of nations. Two decades of worrying about carbon-fueled catastrophes — and trillions of dollars spent globally on transitioning to renewable power — haven’t changed that basic existential fact.

Virtually overnight, the war in Ukraine has brought the post-Cold War era to a close, not just by ending Europe’s long era of peace, but by bringing basic questions of energy access back to the fore. A new era, marked by geopolitically driven energy insecurity and resource competition, is moving climate concerns down on the list of priorities. If there is a silver lining in any of this, it’s that a shift of focus back to energy security imperatives might not be the worst thing for the climate. Given the scant effect international climate efforts have had on emissions over the past three decades, a turn back toward energy realpolitik — and away from the utopian schemes that have come to define climate advocacy and policymaking worldwide — could actually accelerate the shift to a lower-carbon global economy in the coming decades.

The issue of climate change burst into the global debate just as the Cold War was coming to an end. As one existential threat seemingly receded, another came into view. For much of the international community, particularly the United Nations and its agencies, climate change also became much more than an environmental issue, offering an opportunity to reshape the post-Cold War order to be more equitable, multilateral, and politically integrated.

Nonetheless, when the framework for climate action emerged in the early 1990s, it built on the experience of the Cold War era. U.S.-Soviet arms control agreements became the model for global cooperation on climate change. Just as the superpowers had signed treaties to gradually draw down their nuclear weapons stocks, nations would commit to draw down their emissions. Yet the first major agreement to propose legally binding limits on emissions — the 1997 Kyoto Protocol — was dead from the moment the U.S. Senate unanimously rejected its terms, even before the negotiations had been finalized. Combine U.S. opposition with the understandable reluctance of energy-hungry, fast-developing nations such as China and India to even consider limiting emissions, and the inefficacy of international climate action was set.

June 7, 2022

100 days of fighting in Ukraine

Filed under: Europe, Military, Russia — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Andrew Potter rounds up the latest open source data on the Russo-Ukrainian war of 2022, and notes that the briefly enthusiastic western nations — having all posted Ukraine flags on their social media accounts and boycotted Russian vodka — are now noticeably suffering from battle (cheerleading) fatigue and are all rather obviously hoping Ukraine will sue for peace with the Russian aggressor:

We are now just past the one hundred day mark of Vladimir Putin’s insane invasion of Ukraine. But even as the Ukrainian forces are fighting ferociously for Severodonetsk, with president Volodymyr Zelensky making an amazing visit to troops right on the edge of the front lines of the eastern salient, a few Western leaders marked the occasion by suggesting that it’s getting on time for them to think about giving up.

According to Zelensky, Russian forces currently control around one fifth of Ukrainian territory, mostly in the east and the south. As he pointed out last Thursday in an address to the Luxembourg parliament, this is an area that is much larger than the entire Benelux region.

For Russia, this has come at a considerable cost. Reliable open source intelligence estimates put Russian losses at over 31,000 soldiers killed, 3,300 armoured vehicles and another 2,500 trucks destroyed, 200 lost aircraft, 175 helicopters, and 13 ships or boats. All of this for a “special operation” that was supposed to take no more than a long weekend including the victory parade, with the invaders welcomed as liberators.

Dear as this has been for Russia, for Ukrainians the price has been much, much higher. Reliable estimates of Ukrainian military losses are hard to come by, but something around half of the Russian figures is probably in the ballpark, though they could easily be much higher. Zelensky has not been totally shy in talking about losses; the other day he said the Ukrainian forces were losing 60-100 fighters a day, with another 500+ wounded, in fighting in the east.

These are staggering losses (recall that Canada lost 158 soldiers over the course of more than a decade in Afghanistan), but they don’t even begin to compare with what has happened to Ukraine’s civilians and to its cities. This war has been going on for so long, reports of Russian outrages and war crimes now so numerous, that history-making acts of outright barbarism have come and gone from the news pages in a matter of days: Bucha, Kramatorsk, Mariupol … the list goes on and grows. When all this is done, how many dead, deported and disappeared Ukrainians will there be? If it is 50,000 dead in Mariupol alone, a million or more is not out of the question.

For a few days and even weeks, the narrative was that Putin had gravely miscalculated. He clearly expected the Ukrainians to roll over and for the neighbours to just shrug and look the other way. Instead, the Ukrainians fought back and NATO and the West were galvanized into support and action. If Putin was worried about Ukraine bringing NATO and the EU to his doorstep, well, his worst nightmare had come true, with Sweden and Finland applying for expedited admission to the alliance.

But as degraded his army, as inept his generals, as degenerate his kleptocracy might be, Putin has always had a couple of aces up his sleeve: The abiding and reliable perfidy of the Germans and the French, and the increasing inability of the American-led anglosphere to maintain its focus. As Putin sees it, as this war stretches on the Americans and the Brits will lose interest, and the burning desire of Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz to help Putin “save face” — i.e. give Russia some Ukrainian territory — will grow increasingly appealing.

June 1, 2022

Vintage Russian T62 tanks reported in Ukraine

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Russia, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As with all discussions of the ongoing fighting between Russian and Ukrainian troops, it’s very difficult to be sure that what is being reported is in any way accurate — both sides pulled out all the stops on the PR/propaganda/disinformation machinery months ago. At Thin Pinstriped Line, Sir Humphrey seems to be convinced that the reports that the Russians have been dis-interring mothballed Soviet-era T62 tanks to send into combat in Ukrane are believable enough:

“Soviet T-62M MBT Standard Battle Tank” by Gary Lee Todd, Ph.D. is marked with CC0 1.0. To view the terms, visit https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/?ref=openverse.

The Russian Army has taken such significant losses of materiel that it has been forced to pull vintage T62 tanks from reserve, and commit them to front line operations. This statement makes plain just how costly the Russian advances have been in the Donbas area, and raises questions about what, if any, value, there is from retaining a war reserve of vehicles and equipment.

It is difficult to get an accurate picture on just how disastrous the Russian losses have been so far in the war, but most estimates suggest that at least 700 tanks have been destroyed, with many more damaged or captured. Each loss represents not only a small reduction in combat capability to Russia, but usually a far more valuable, and irreplaceable crew.

Russia is not a nation that likes to throw military equipment away, far from it. Their equipment is designed to be simple, reliable and last a very long time. As the outstandingly good website WW2 after WW2, which keeps track of what happened to military equipment after the war, lovingly documents, Soviet era equipment from WW2 just kept going (note, do not click on the link unless you wish to be sucked into a very big time sink!).

With huge reserves of people, no constraints on space or spending, and a mentality of “stores are for storing, not scrapping”, Russia has long kept ancient and utterly obsolete equipment in storage depots long past the point of being of any meaningful value. It is almost certain that there are still Russian Army depots out there with WW2 era equipment waiting for a recall to the colours if required.

The challenge facing Russia though is that due to the rampant corruption, the inability to hold units to account and ensure that readiness is tested, and just the sheer scale of the stockpile, most of the vehicles in their arsenal are probably not combat ready, and have probably been cannibalized beyond repair. Despite having thousands of T72 and T80 in service and storage, it seems that they are not deployable.

This poses a real challenge for Russia on two fronts – firstly, to bring the T62 out of retirement and into front line service as attrition reserves poses a significant support challenge. The vehicle is not compatible with later models of Russian tanks, so will require bespoke logistics support – placing further pressure on the already creaking supply chain.

Additionally, although simple to operate, it still requires crew to use it – with four, instead of three crew needed, this poses an additional headache for the Russian Army, which will have to find 25% uplift in tank crews to operate them properly. At a time when the Russians are low on people, and have churned through a significant proportion of their main army, it will require extraordinary efforts to find bodies to crew these tanks.

Bodies is perhaps the operative word here, for this is likely to be the fate of the crew in these vehicles. The T62 is utterly outclassed and completely obsolete for the environment in which it is operating. It may be good for gunning down demonstrators or strangling democratic protests in third world nations (the joy of socialist dictatorships), but against a highly experienced army, fighting with advanced equipment to defend its homeland, it is utterly hopeless. While it can still have some effect, the T62 units going into action are certain to be outclassed, outgunned and out of time when they face the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

Update: After I scheduled this post for publication, I saw that Berhard Kast (Military History Visualized) had posted a video analyzing the evidence, which you can check out here.

Update, 1 June: Apparently it helps when you include the link to the original post. Who knew?

May 21, 2022

Ukraine & T-72: The death of the tank? | The Tank Museum

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Russia, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Tank Museum
Published 20 May 2022

Tank Museum Curator David Willey explores the current conflict in Ukraine and the performance of the T-72 tank; putting it into historical context and exploring other times during the last hundred years when the death of the tank has been predicted.

Consider becoming a Patreon Supporter today: https://www.patreon.com/tankmuseum

00:00 | Intro
00:40 | Wider context
11:01 | Tanks in History
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May 18, 2022

For the Canadian government, announcing new programs is far more important than implementing them

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It often appears that the Liberal government in Ottawa operates almost exclusively on an “appearance only” basis: whatever the situation, it’s the “optics” that matter the most and actual delivery on announcements barely counts at all. It doesn’t help at all that the media generally has the same set of priorities, because they need things to talk about on news shows and the headlines don’t write themselves in the newspapers — and legacy media’s social media concerns are even more about flash and clickbait than their primary product.

Canada has been quick to announce new initiatives to help Ukrainian refugees, but true to form, very slow to actually make any of these initiatives happen, as Joti Heir discusses in The Line:

Justin Trudeau has always had a strong affinity for the symbolic gesture, especially when the media are around to record it.

It’s almost as though the Canadian federal government is working buttocks-backward when it comes to the Ukrainian refugee file. After Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, helping Ukrainian refugees get to a safe place fast was the biggest concern. However, now, close to three months later, the bigger concern is how to help the refugees that are in Canada or making their way here.

“We are seeing an increasing amount of frustration within our community about the pace with which programs and announcements are being implemented,” says Orest Zakydalsky, senior policy analyst with the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC).

“For example, a month ago, the prime minister announced income support when he co-hosted the [StandWithUkraine] telethon with the European Council president, he announced there would be income support for people coming to Canada. A month later, they’re not available.”

The announcement on April 9 indicated that Ukrainian refugees would be able to access $500 per week for a period of up to six weeks. At the same time, it was also announced that housing support in the form of two-week hotel stays would be provided. Both programs do not appear to have been implemented.

“We appreciate this is a very difficult situation for governments, this is a crisis that emerged very suddenly,” says Zakydalsky.

“On the other side, the other problem is that the people that are in Europe, that have left Ukraine, that are looking to come to Canada, see these announcements and quite reasonably think that when a program is announced it is available.”

April 20, 2022

Khrushchev – Stalin’s Loyal Enforcer?

Filed under: History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 19 Apr 2022

Nikita Khrushchev has served Joseph Stalin faithfully for the past decade. He’s a career commissar and party man. So, when war breaks out, are commissars like Khrushchev little more than Stalinist enforcers? Or is there more to the institution than that?
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April 15, 2022

Volodymyr Zelensky has become a “pop cultural admixture of Churchill and an ’80s action hero”

Filed under: Europe, Government, Media, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Andrew Potter explains how Ukrainian President Zelensky has shamed all the western leaders — like Trudeau — who have been long on rhetoric and short on action to support their claimed values:

“Volodymyr Zelensky Official portrait” by http://www.president.gov.ua/ is licensed under CC BY 4.0

When asked by journalists to explain his refusal to head for safety, Zelensky has made it clear that he has no wish to die, and that he fears for the lives of his loved ones (his wife and kids have since been moved to relative safety.) But, he added: “As for my life: I am the president of the country, and I simply do not have the right to it.” Sure, he could flee to preserve his own life. But, he has said, how would he explain his actions to his kids? As Zelensky sees it, he has no choice in the matter. His duty requires that he remain and lead his country in the fight; to do anything less would be dishonourable.

But while his Last Action Hero schtick has proven enormously popular with European and North American audiences, Zelensky’s refusal to leave Kyiv, and Ukraine’s insistence on fighting off the Russians instead of capitulation, has put our so-called leaders in a bit of a bind.

To begin with, Ukraine’s refusal to capitulate to Russian aggression has forced many governments into taking steps they almost certainly would have preferred to avoid — economic and political sanctions against Russia, costly shipments of arms and other aid, diplomatic side-choosing, rethinking of trade agreements, and so on. Ukraine’s defence is coming at a pretty high cost, and the final bill is far from being tallied.

But beyond the economic and political price that is being paid to support Ukraine, there is the extraordinary amount of cognitive dissonance Zelensky’s behaviour has generated amongst the leadership of the West. Honour? Duty? Sacrifice? What century does he think he’s living in?

For centuries, honour reflected the sorts of qualities that gentlemen were expected to possess: dignity, integrity, courage. But it is hard to even talk about honour now with a straight face. It brings to mind 19th-century aristocrats in wigs and hose, demanding satisfaction and challenging one another to a meeting over some best-forgotten offence. The old honour codes couldn’t survive the triumph of the values of liberal democracy and the arrival of what Francis Fukuyama famously called the End of History, where the willingness to risk one’s life for abstract ideas or principles has been replaced by voting and economic calculation in the public sphere and “the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands” in the private.

Today, the old notion of honour survives only in small and isolated precincts of (mostly) male society, places like the military and some sports, places where how you behave in front of your peers matters more than comfort, more than money, more than health, maybe even more than life itself. The rest of us have become versions of what Nietszche derided as “the last man” — creatures of liberalism who have no pride, take no risks, and desire only comfort and security.

April 14, 2022

“This might just be the dumbest, most ill-advised and lethally consequential thing Biden has said since taking office”

Filed under: Europe, Government, Military, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brendan O’Neill on Joe Biden’s most recent maybe official/maybe “Joe being Joe” moment on the Russia-Ukraine conflict:

Once considered a gaffe, Biden doing this again might have been a good move.

Bumbling Joe Biden isn’t funny anymore. It might be amusing when your crazy uncle blurts out something unexpected at a family dinner. But when the most powerful man on Earth does it? Not so much. Yesterday, “in passing”, as the Guardian put it, President Biden referred to Russia’s war in Ukraine as a “genocide”. This might just be the dumbest, most ill-advised and lethally consequential thing Biden has said since taking office.

The circumstances in which he uttered the g-word, in which he made the most serious accusation you can make against a nation state, were bizarre. He was in Iowa, at a public discussion on the use of ethanol in petrol, of all things. Then – “in passing” – he said: “Your family budget, your ability to fill up your tank, none of it should hinge on whether a dictator declares war and commits genocide half a world away.” And so did an announcement about the lifting of restrictions on ethanol use in order to reduce the price of fuel turn – “in passing” – into the United States of America accusing the Russian Federation of committing the most heinous crime known to man.

It is unclear whether accusing Putin of genocide is White House policy now, or if Biden was just running his mumbling mouth, as is his wont. Pressed by reporters as to whether he really meant to say “genocide”, Biden said: “Yes, I called it genocide because it’s become clearer and clearer that Putin is just trying to wipe out the idea of even being Ukrainian.” Not surprisingly, other world leaders were a tad alarmed. French president Emmanuel Macron rebuked Biden for his “verbal escalations”. We need to be “careful” with our terminology, he said, rightly.

It remains to be seen whether this is the White House consciously upping the ante or just Biden having another senior moment. He has form, after all. At the end of March – again in passing – he called for regime change in Russia. “This man cannot remain in power”, he said about Putin in an “off the cuff” remark at the end of March. Most of us make jokes off the cuff or express exasperation off the cuff – Biden expands America’s war aims off the cuff. The White House swiftly walked back this unscripted declaration of regime-change hostilities. Before that, Biden made a blunder that suggested US troops had been deployed to Ukraine. The White House walked that back, too. “[We] are not sending US troops to Ukraine”, a spokesman clarified.

Maybe the White House will walk back the “genocide” thing as well. Though it might be too late. The word’s out there now. And not just from the mouths of those irritating liberal commentators and laptop bombardiers who think every war is a genocide (except the ones they support, of course, like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya), but from the mouth of the American president himself. Make no mistake – this is incredibly dangerous war talk. It transforms Ukraine from an undoubtedly bloody conflict that has global implications into a possible site of further external intervention and fighting. Indeed, the United Nations’ policy on “The Responsibility to Protect” expressly obliges the Security Council to take action – ideally diplomatic action, but if that fails, then military action – in order to “protect populations from genocide”. If Russia is committing genocide, then the US and its allies have a responsibility to stop it somehow. This is the dire, destabilising situation Biden has either blunderingly or consciously pushed the world towards.

April 11, 2022

Ours is a fundamentally unserious culture, two examples

Filed under: Education, Government, Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray provides some examples of just how decayed western culture has become in our headlong flight toward total unseriousness:

In Europe this month to lead the diplomatic response to a war, the Vice-President of the United States responded to a question about refugees by giggling and cackling and babbling in typical form:

And then the “fact-checkers” at Reuters explained that she actually didn’t giggle and cackle and babble, because, okay, she did cackle and giggle and babble, but she didn’t cackle and giggle and babble specifically about the refugees, so it doesn’t count: “It is clear from viewing the longer video in context that Harris and Duda laughed at the awkwardness of not knowing who should speak first. There is no evidence that Harris was laughing at the refugees or the crisis in Ukraine.” The question was about refugees, and she laughed — she laughed a lot — right after the question, but Reuters apparently called no tagbacks before the play, so no points accrue.

So we have an awkward and ineffective playactor who occupies the position of a political leader, but lacks the stature or ability to go along with it, and we have journalists who labor to protect people in powerful political positions from the possibility that people will notice who they really are and what they really do. We have political leaders who aren’t political leaders, and journalists who aren’t journalists: the form without the substance.

Meanwhile, a recent debate on the topic of free speech at Yale Law School — the nation’s top-ranked law school, which produces presidents and Supreme Court justices — began with law students screaming abuse (“I’ll fight you, bitch”) at one of the panelists, before walking out as a group and continuing to shout and pound on the walls of the adjacent hallway.

Now: The students were angry at the panelist, the bitch they wanted to fight, because she’s an anti-trans social conservative, and couldn’t you just die? But the thing that law students are learning to do is be lawyers — advocates for a position in a formalized exchange of competing views, in controversies that play out in open court. They’re training at the profession of making an argument. The point of sitting through an argument made by a person whose views you despise is that you can learn about something you want to fight against; you can see what the enemy says, and how she says it, and so do a part of the work of preparing yourself to advance a different position. So we have law students, people training for a debate-and-exchange-centered profession, who don’t want to hear things they don’t agree with. It’s like a minor league baseball player saying he refuses to touch a baseball, because baseballs offend him, but anyway, when are you assholes sending me up to the major leagues? We have people who want to occupy the profession of the law without preparing for the substance of professional engagement with competing positions: the form without the substance.

(Doing what journalists do, now, the fact-checkers explain that none of this puts points on the anti-free-speech scoreboard: “The students made their point at the very start of the event and walked out before the conversation began.” It is precisely the point that 1.) law students 2.) walked out before the conversation began. In ten years, oral argument before the Supreme Court will be that Woke lawyers stand up and scream I’M NOT GONNA LISTEN TO THIS SHIT, YOU ASSHOLES at the justices, then storm out and descend into a long round of day-drinking while waiting for the court to rule in their favor, because oh my god they CAN’T EVEN.)

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