Quotulatiousness

June 27, 2023

“No one seems to understand what the hell just happened in Russia”

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

Discussing anything to do with the Russo-Ukraine war is difficult enough due to the signal-to-noise ratio in the information we get from both sides and (theoretically) disinterested observers. Trying to read the tea leaves in the events over the weekend was just an utter waste of time, despite the potentially earth-shaking possibilities being thrown up. The weekend dispatch from The Line doesn’t pretend to have any deep analysis to offer, which I think is by far the wisest approach:

“Sir Humphrey Appleby” tweeted this, saying it was “the intelligence update slide every DI analyst secretly dreams of producing …

As we write this, roughly a day has passed since the sudden end of what briefly looked like a massive event with the potential to reshape global politics for a generation … before it fizzled. The rebellion of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group and its bolt toward Moscow was a stunning story, until it wasn’t. And that itself is a stunning story. Yevgeny Prigozhin, former chef and now Wagner leader, suddenly called off his mutiny, and it just … ended.

Really?

When the mutiny began on Friday, and especially when Wagner seized the southern city of Rostov, home to a major Russian military headquarters overseeing the invasion of Ukraine as well as a million other people, we were surprised, but the more we thought about it, we weren’t particularly shocked. There had been obvious signs of an imminent rupture of some kind in recent months; Line editor Gurney had wondered on Twitter how long it could last before something snapped. That was about three hours before the entire country seemed to snap and Prigozhin marched into Rostov and began moving north.

Events proceeded at a fairly frantic pace after that, with Wagner troops advancing almost all the way to Moscow while Russian security forces fortified the city and tore up roads along the route. It wasn’t clear to us that Wagner had enough men to actually take the city and potentially capture key members of the government. But it wasn’t clear that he didn’t: there are two sides of that equation — the troops Prigozhin had and the troops Putin could count on to oppose Wagner. It was the latter group that captured our interest.

Wagner encountered some resistance along the way, but not much. Most of Russia’s army is deployed in Ukraine, of course, and much of what’s left is now of famously poor quality and morale. But even those military and security forces that were able to block Wagner’s advance didn’t seem that interested in the job. There are reports that some units went over to Prigozhin’s side, but it seems that most of them just did … nothing in particular. And waited to see what happened. For a few hours, we wondered if Prigozhin’s small force would be just large enough in the face of a Russian military that seemed to have no appetite for battle on its own soil.

We can’t pretend to explain the bizarre conclusion to this chaotic day and a half, with an apparent deal brokered by Belarus seeing Wagner’s advance on Moscow called off, a broad amnesty granted to all participants and Prigozhin apparently set to continue to oversee Wagner’s global operations from Belarus in some kind of exile. This is all just wildly unrealistic. Prigozhin cannot be the last person around to realize that he’s put a target on his back and that he’ll soon experience some kind of fatal medical emergency or tragic tumble out of an open window. The moment his mercenaries took Rostov, he had only one path forward: all the way to the Kremlin. What the hell he’s thinking is frankly beyond our ability to guess, and we have fairly vivid imaginations. It’s baffling.

Nor will we try to guess what this will mean for Russia. In a situation like this, your Line editors would normally simply confess that we don’t have the deep knowledge of Russian domestic politics to turn ourselves into credible instant-experts on this. We’d seek out someone with that knowledge. We could interview them, solicit a column from them, or even — as we’ve done in the past — allow someone with deep expertise but who isn’t permitted to speak on the record in public to provide a blurb for one of these dispatches, to run under our shared byline. But in this case, we had to reject all those options, because at least for right now, all the experts seem as baffled as we are. No one seems to understand what the hell just happened in Russia.

We can say with at least reasonable confidence that if you happen to be named Vladimir Putin, it isn’t good. When Prigozhin announced that he was ending his mutiny and began withdrawing his forces from Rostov, the locals cheered them like some kind of conquering heroes. That’s gotta be on Putin’s mind. Also on his mind: the apparent, ahem, reluctance of much of his military and domestic security force to rally to his side during the crisis. This has wounded Putin. Time will tell how badly. Time will also tell how many other people in Russia today have carefully watched recent events, have adjusted their understanding of the facts on the ground there, and are now pondering a variety of intriguing options accordingly.

And the last thing time will tell is what Putin feels he must now do to assert his authority, such as it is. We must recall that whatever Putin’s domestic troubles, he has problems on the battlefield, too. While we haven’t yet seen major breakthroughs by Ukrainian forces, they are not yet fully committed, and their counteroffensive does seem to be making gradual progress in multiple sectors. Events of recent days can only hurt Russia’s combat performance and morale.

We wish we could offer you all a more firm and decisive statement to wrap all this up. But the best we can honestly promise you is that we’ll keep pondering this, trying to figure out what the hell happened, and we’ll certainly be watching this. It’s been a strange war. And we suspect it might get stranger still before it finally ends.

The most recent Defence Intelligence update map from the British Ministry of Defence shows what is thought to be a reasonably accurate representation of the battlefront in eastern Ukraine:

June 22, 2023

QotD: Nuclear non-proliferation and the Russo-Ukraine war

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Military, Quotations, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The failure of the earlier League of Nations was crucial to preparing the way for the Second World War. Today, we see none of this, with most participants — excepting North Korea and Iran — still playing by the rules. This is where we return to Nevil Shute. Twice, using his technical expertise, Shute attempted to predict future war in a novel, and twice he got it wrong. With On the Beach, the author wrote of a 37-day war that “had flared all around the northern hemisphere”. Albania had dropped a “cobalt bomb” on Naples, which escalated into wider conflicts and eventually a Russo-Chinese exchange.

As one of Shute’s characters, a scientist, explained, “The trouble is, the damn things got too cheap. The original uranium bomb cost about fifty thousand quid towards the end. Every little pipsqueak country like Albania had a stockpile of them, and every little country that had that, thought it could defeat the major countries in a surprise attack”. Significantly, Shute’s future war, set in 1963, wasn’t triggered by the usual NATO-Warsaw Pact arsenals of nuclear weapons, but the proliferation of them elsewhere. Then, as now, it is not Russian or Chinese aggression that should worry those with nightmares of nuclear cataclysm, but that of other countries. Thanks to the NPT, IAEA and the UN, these possibilities are contained. Today, the world’s weapons of mass destruction stand at one tenth of their number during the Cold War.

Indeed, the very origins of the current Ukraine crisis illustrate how the international order has managed to contain potential proliferation. When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, Ukraine possessed the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal, greater than those of Britain, France and China combined. Kyiv soon realised it couldn’t afford to maintain the warheads and remain a credible nuclear military power. A solution was found, whereby the weapons would be destroyed, but only in exchange for security assurances that the United States and Russia would respect Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity.

What Ukraine signed on 5 December 1994 was the Budapest Memorandum of Security Assurances, in which Bill Clinton for the United States, Boris Yeltsin for Russia and John Major for Great Britain promised to protect Ukraine and its territorial integrity in recognition of Kyiv surrendering the protection of its nuclear arsenal. There was no mention of military guarantees, which Ukraine assumed were implied. Additionally, Kyiv promised to adhere to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

After the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014, the G7 nations complained that Russia had breached the Budapest Memorandum. Vladimir Putin replied evasively that since, in his view, a new regime had seized power from Ukraine’s previously pro-Moscow premier Viktor Yanukovych, “Russia has not signed any obligatory documents with this new state”. Since then, Russia has lied and prevaricated over its betrayal of Budapest. In 2016, Sergey Lavrov went so far as to claim, “Russia never violated Budapest memorandum. It contained only one obligation, not to attack Ukraine with nukes” — a gross distortion of the Memorandum’s many obligations.

However, the West responded in 2014 only with mild economic sanctions. Arguably, the apathy of the anti-interventionist Barack Obama and David Cameron, influenced by a London awash with Russian money, emboldened Vladimir Putin. Few experts disagree that had the West responded in 2014 as they did in 2022, Russia’s expansionist ambitions into Ukraine would have ended long ago. Yet, there is plenty of room for optimism. The Russo-Ukraine conflict has not spread because of the international order and its treaties. Apart from North Korea and Iran, neither of whom have quite perfected their devilish devices, nuclear proliferation of third parties has been held in check.

The Kremlin shows no sign of taking steps to escalate to a nuclear level. It is not in its interests, or those of its allies, to do so. None of the 32 nations who recently abstained from condemning Russia in the 24 February UN vote would welcome Vladimir Putin and his cronies flinging nukes around. The qualified support of major powers like China, India and Pakistan is attached to the cheap oil and arms procurements they have negotiated with Moscow. Any hint of Tsar Vladimir “going nuclear” would see their abstentions morph into support for the West. Putin, for all his rhetoric, cannot afford to go it alone with just the six who voted with him at the UN. In military terms, they offer nothing.

The world’s various international arms treaties provide plenty of optimism that this will remain a regional war. So far, Putin’s threats have melted away as the morning mist. The scenario he implies, akin that in On the Beach and other nuclear-war-scare novels and films, is so unlikely as to be discounted. They and all the rest of the post-apocalyptic genre are written as nail-biting entertainment, not history or current affairs.

Peter Caddick-Adams, “Putin, Shute and nukes”, The Critic, 2023-03-09.

March 19, 2023

Ron DeSantis as an American Neville Chamberlain

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Andrew Sullivan points out the inanity of comparing Florida Governor and potential presidential candidate to former British PM Neville Chamberlain over DeSantis not including the idea of increasing support to Ukraine as “a new Munich”:

Governor Ron DeSantis speaking with attendees at the 2021 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA at the Tampa Convention Center in Tampa, Florida on 18 July, 2021.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.

For a written statement on foreign policy from a potential presidential candidate, it was, I suppose, a big deal. The salient sentence from Governor Ron DeSantis:

    While the U.S. has many vital national interests — securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness with our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural and military power of the Chinese Communist Party — becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them.

It’s open to some interpretation. DeSantis says the Ukraine war is not in the “vital national interests” of the US, but is it maybe still in our general interests? Not clear. And he commits to no further entanglement, which could mean sticking with where we are now, but no more. Sure: no F-16s. But that’s also Biden’s position.

“Territorial dispute?” That set a lot of people off. But of course it’s undeniably, at some level, a border dispute. The entire post-Soviet settlement was a redrawing of national borders — and marked an extraordinarily rapid advance of Western arms and allies to the edge of Russia itself. In any kind of perspective, the current war has come at the end of that now-disputed settlement, and is indeed a debate over where Russia ends and Ukraine — which literally means “borderland” — begins. DeSantis didn’t blame Ukraine for its self-defense. He didn’t defend Putin. He merely proffered a different view of vital US national interests in the medium-term.

The gall!

The Blob declared another “Munich!” — an ancient neocon ritual — and declared the DeSantis candidacy all-but-over. Chris Christie called DeSantis “Neville Chamberlain“; Chuck Schumer asked, “I have to wonder what [DeSantis] would’ve thought if he was around in the 1930s”; Jenn Rubin called DeSantis “pro-Putin“; and the WSJ warned of a return to “isolationism in the 1930s”. This morning, the WaPo dusted down and wheeled out their perennial “appeasement!” editorial. And we got a French-Brooks double-whammy direct from 1983. Churchill envy never dies.

And I’m sorry. But I don’t get it. It is surely perfectly fine for a country to have two political parties that differ on foreign policy. In fact, it’s a critical advantage that democracies have over more rigid regimes: it helps us correct mistakes in time (and sometimes not), change personnel, and adjust to an always changing reality.

And in the 21st century, after the collapse of the imperial ideologies of the 20th, the role and reach of the United States is legitimately open to debate. It makes sense that one party would be more interventionist and one would be less so; it makes even more sense for the conservative party to be the one more skeptical of wars, small and large, and the unintended consequences they invariably entail.

That’s what’s happening — partly in reaction to the catastrophic, and bipartisan, hyper-interventionism of the first two decades of this century, and partly because of the rise of China. And it’s a good, normalizing thing. It will keep pressure on Biden not to escalate any further; and force us to think through the ugly compromises that will almost certainly confront us in the future. DeSantis’ position is pretty much where Obama was on Ukraine — and Obama was not some far-right fanatic. Money quote:

    The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do. … We have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for. And at the end of the day, there’s always going to be some ambiguity.

Replace “core” with “vital” and it’s DeSantis’ outrageous position. Yes, Putin miscalculated badly and invaded Ukraine, which means a new situation, and defense of Ukraine. But the core reality of America’s and Russia’s interests is unchanged. And Putin is not in command of a huge war economy and occupying the Sudetenland. He’s stuck in Eastern Ukraine, for Pete’s sake, and can barely move. China is maneuvering to counter and exploit our escalation. We need flexibility. What we absolutely do not need is some kind of shrill, bipartisan consensus on yet another war — and the usual McCarthyite smears of critics.

March 18, 2023

“Strongmen” all run the same basic “playbook” says scholar

Filed under: Books, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Chris Bray considers the arguments made by Ruth Ben-Ghiat that ropes every “strongman” together into a single, coherent strategy that applies at all times and under all circumstances:

Holocaust scholars have always argued from every possible perspective, and will always argue from every possible perspective, about causation. There’s a school gathered around “No Hitler, no Holocaust”, and there’s Zygmunt Bauman, who barely mentions the man in an argument about the inherently dehumanizing tendencies of the modern bureaucratic state. Christopher Browning depicts a battalion of Order Police participating in state-organized mass killing because of cowardice, habitual obedience, and social compliance; Daniel Goldhagen replies that no, Germans killed Jews because Germans hated Jews, full stop. But in this extraordinary diversity of voices, there is argument. If you ask, why did this happen?, many answers follow — growing out of questions about the operation of power, the limits of moral agency, the basic human willingness to comply, and so on, that aren’t easy to answer.

Then comes 21st century American political scholarship.

Here’s how the publisher explains this book:

    Ruth Ben-Ghiat is the expert on the “strongman” playbook employed by authoritarian demagogues from Mussolini to Putin—enabling her to predict with uncanny accuracy the recent experience in America and Europe. In Strongmen, she lays bare the blueprint these leaders have followed over the past 100 years, and empowers us to recognize, resist, and prevent their disastrous rule in the future …

    Vladimir Putin and Mobutu Sese Seko’s kleptocracies, Augusto Pinochet’s torture sites, Benito Mussolini and Muammar Gaddafi’s systems of sexual exploitation, and Silvio Berlusconi and Donald Trump’s relentless misinformation: all show how authoritarian rule, far from ensuring stability, is marked by destructive chaos.

All that stuff is the same, see, “from Mussolini to Putin”. Pinochet and Berlusconi are the same, Russia and Italy are the same, new postcolonial nations and old reborn nations are the same, resource economies and service economies are the same, 1922 is 2016, modern culture is postmodern culture, mass media is social media — all in a blended mass of social reality and cultural factors, turning the March on Rome and mean tweets into the same “playbook”, which is also the same “blueprint”.

What caused the Bolshevik revolution? Lenin said so. What caused the Holocaust? Hitler said so. Why was there political violence in Chile? Pinochet said so. You can see the richness and complexity of single-actor history with blueprints and playbooks.

Turning the urgent precision of this analysis to the task of understanding contemporary politics, scholars know that Trump’s personality is very bad, but is DeSantis more badderer in the badness of his mean and bad personality? Does he use the playbook, exactly like Lenin and Mobutu Sese Seko? Is he running Florida just like the Congo? (Is Kristi Noem precisely identical to Joe Stalin, Idi Amin, and Tiberius? Depends on how she does in the primaries.)

It’s politics without politics, stripped of systems, processes, principles, historical uniqueness, geographic and economic factors, and competing forces in culture and society. Political power is a weight falling off a table onto a lever; the leader acts, his instruments are acted upon, and the machine of society moves according to the force and direction applied by the leader. Is it significant that our particular political moment is postindustrial, urbanizing, and increasingly made up of social and economic interactions mediated through an electronic screen? No, Trump is using Lenin’s playbook. Politics is all the same, and entirely about names and personalities.

February 25, 2023

One year into Vladimir Putin’s “Three-Day War”

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

Tsar Vlad launched his short, victorious war a full year ago, expecting to have the troops home by spring if not sooner. It hasn’t worked out to his timetable at all. Ukraine still stands, although it’s taken one hell of a battering in the process and drawn in more and more vocal support in the west, which has belatedly been followed by actual military supplies and equipment to replace those expended holding back the Russian forces. CDR Salamander follows up his predictions from last year on how things looked to him at that moment in time:

On the day the war started I made 7-points. Let’s review them and see how I did back on 24 FEB 22.

    1. The remaining delusions about the post-Cold War security arrangements in Europe should be firmly buried. History is back and she has her Festivus pole front and center. She has some issues with us, and we’re going to hear about it.

This continues to get firmer and displayed in stark relief. All the “offsets” and “transformations” and “war is new” snake oil sold the last few decades really should not be allowed to have any public space besides to say, “I was wrong.” Rest assured, that won’t stop them — but the issues we raised over the almost 18-yrs of this blog and 14-yrs of the Midrats Podcast remain true. From the shallow magazines to the fact you never have enough large caliber guns to no war is short … we — and a lot of other people tut-tut’d for years — were correct.

    2. NATO has a German problem. While all the “right people” will not shut up about how wonderful former Chancellor Angela Merkle was, people need to be very clear eyed about what a complete disaster she and the German political class have been over the last two decades. They have starved what should be continental European NATO’s most potent military into irrelevance. Her disastrous feel-good, ethno-masochistic immigration policy weakened European cohesion and fed the worst parts of European political subcultures. Yes, she made a lot of well meaning Germans feel good about themselves, but it was a sugar-high that rotted the teeth and poisoned the national metabolism. While willing to defend Europe to the last Pole and Germany to the last American, she decided to preen in her neo-pagan EuroGreen superiority onomastic politics by ditching clean nuclear power and through the complete corruption of her elite, shacked herself to Russian energy oligarchs and thus the Kremlin. Germany needs to fix herself, and NATO needs to work around her and punish her until she starts to behave like a constructive 21st Century security partner.

Germany has made great progress, but is being dragged kicking and screaming in to the 21st Century.

    3. As our friend Jerry Hendrix pointed out yesterday, the moral leaders in NATO right now are the Baltic Republics and I would add Visegrad nations. You can throw Romania in there too. France will go hot and cold as she fights her desire to do the right thing for European security while at the same time nurse her 1,000 year old drive to be the premier leader of Western Europe. Serious but weaker nations will lean on a reluctant USA and limited United Kingdom … simply because — to be frank — much of the rest of the alliance is not that capable.

I think this graph tells that story well;

The front-line nations are putting their money where their existential threat is.

    4. In line with #1 above, it is time for Finland at least, and probably Sweden, to join NATO. They both have a long and bloody history with the Russians and should see clearly what time it is.

Another check.

    5. Ukraine waited too long to rearm. Weakened and distracted by a corrupt elite, the good parts of her nation could not get ready fast enough. After the first Russo-Ukraine war of 2014 she should have modeled the armed neutrality of Switzerland with a civilian populace trained and armed to the teeth. As we’ve discussed here before with the former Soviet republics and Warsaw Pact nations, every village needs a few ATGM militia teams trained to slow any advance through their patch of land. If Ukraine can, in whole or part, survive without vassalhood, perhaps they could get there. They can only get there if they build a nation people are willing to fight and die for.

Everyone is rediscovering the utility of a good military-industrial complex that can quickly grow to scale. Amazing what the green-eye-shade accounts forced those who actually are supposed to study war to believe.

A few days ago, Dominic Sandbrook explained that the Ukraine-Russia conflict “is not complicated”:

A year ago, as Vladimir Putin launched his so-called “special military operation” to seize the Ukrainian capital, kill Volodymyr Zelenskyy and wipe much of the latter’s country from the map of Europe, who’d have imagined that the third week of February 2023 would begin with Joe Biden strolling around the streets of Kyiv in sunglasses? For that matter, who would have predicted that Mr Zelenskyy, only recently returned from his own trip to London, would be at his side — still the president of a free country, and still very much alive?

Sometimes it’s nice to be wrong. Like many, probably most Western observers, I held out little hope for Ukraine once the drums of war began to beat in earnest. A couple of days after Mr Putin’s brutal invasion began, I wrote a bullish essay looking back at Ukraine’s history of suffering and resilience. But even as I was agonising over my prose, the bleak news continued to pour in. “Now, while I have been writing, Russian tanks are rolling into the suburbs,” I wrote at one stage. Did I think they would be driven back? I didn’t. “Kyiv will rise again,” I wrote at the end. Stirring words, or so I hoped. But the person I was really trying to persuade was myself, and I didn’t succeed.

In truth, I underestimated the Ukrainian people’s resilience, their courage, their love of country. And I was wrong, too, about the Western alliance. After more than a decade of drift and inaction, from the shameful failure to respond to the seizure of Crimea to the near-criminal indifference to the suffering in Syria, I doubted whether any major Western leader would make more than a token protest about the first full-scale European invasion since the Forties. I never expected to see Finland and Sweden jump off the fence and apply for Nato membership. Nor did I imagine that Joe Biden would be so unswerving in his commitment, or so generous with US military aid. Above all, I never anticipated that Kyiv would hold out, that Kharkiv would stand or that Kherson would be retaken. As I say, it’s nice to be wrong.

It’s often said that the war in Ukraine feels like a throwback, returning us to an age when nationalistic strongmen nursed atavistic dreams of conquest, sending thousands of men to die so that they might scratch new frontiers into the soil of Europe. For all the drones and social media gimmicks, the fighting certainly feels old-fashioned: reading David Patrikarakos’s harrowing dispatch from the front line in Bakhmut, it’s impossible not to think of Passchendaele or Verdun. But for a child of the Seventies, perhaps the most old-fashioned thing of all is the spectacle of a genuinely clear-cut conflict, an unambiguous clash of right and wrong, that feels closer in spirit to the struggle against Hitler’s Germany than to most of the wars in my lifetime.

Andrew Sullivan is convinced that the war is just, but worries whether it is prudent — and he calls it not Ukraine’s but “the West’s defensive war against Russia”:

It is right and just to defend a sovereign country from attack by a much larger neighbor; to fight back against an occupying force committing war crimes on a massive scale; to oppose the logic of dictatorships and defend the foundations of democracy; to uphold a post-Cold War international order which forbids the redrawing of borders by force; to unite democratic countries in Europe against a resurgence of imperial Russia; to defang and defeat a poisonous chauvinism that despises modern freedoms for women and gay people.

It is indeed right and just. But is it prudent?

That’s the question I’m still grappling with, in a week which saw the conflict deepen and the two sides entrench their positions further. President Biden’s trip to Kyiv and his speech in Poland have heightened the stakes, turning this into a more obvious proxy war between the United States and Russia … edging gingerly but relentlessly toward something more direct.

He’s all in now: declaring that Ukraine “must triumph” and that Russia cannot win a war that the Russian leader deems existential. NATO armaments are pouring into Ukraine at an accelerating rate. The training of Ukrainian troops is happening across the Continent. Germany is sending tanks. Pressure is building on Britain to send fighter jets.

The US is ratcheting up arms production as fast as it can, while seriously depleting our own Stinger surface-to-air missiles, 155mm howitzers and ammunition, and Javelin anti-tank missile systems. These are good times for arms producers:

    The Army is planning a 500% increase in artillery shell production, from 15,000 a month to 70,000, according to Army acquisition chief Doug Bush … and intends to double the production of Javelin anti-tank missiles, make roughly 33% more Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems surface-to-surface medium-range missiles a year, and produce each month a minimum of 60 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles — which were “almost not in production at all”, according to Bush.

When Ukraine’s effective military is made up almost entirely of NATO equipment, and trained by NATO forces, there surely comes a point at which claiming NATO is not actually at war with Russia gets fuzzy.

November 29, 2022

Near Peer: Russia

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

Army University Press
Published 25 Nov 2022

AUP’s Near Peer film series continues with a timely discussion of Russia and its military. Subject matter experts discuss Russian history, current affairs, and military doctrine. Putin’s declarations, advances in military technology, and Russia’s remembrance of the Great Patriotic War are also addressed. “Near Peer: Russia” is the second film in a four-part series exploring America’s global competitors.

(more…)

November 23, 2022

“What we’re witnessing is, in short, the least expensive generational kneecapping of a geopolitical rival in world history”

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

Stephen Green on the still ongoing Russo-Ukraine war:

Here’s a hard truth our friends in Kyiv need to remember: Lying isn’t helpful. There are limits to our tolerance.

Here’s another: You’re going to have to make some compromises to end this war because your total victory isn’t in America’s interest here; punishing aggression is. When we decide that Russia has suffered enough, you might find yourselves on your own. Come to the table and negotiate accordingly.

Here is a hard truth for conservative Americans — there are fewer of them than you’d assume from reading Twitter or internet comments sections — opposed to us aiding Ukraine for domestic reasons.

There is no doubt in my mind that much of Ukraine remains what it was: A financial playground for America’s rich elites, and that they have done nothing but increase their ill-gotten gains thanks to our part in keeping Ukraine in the fight. But that’s just one of the many prices we pay for letting our civic structures become so rotten.

The hard truth is, enriching a few corruptocrats is still cheap compared to a continent-wide war in Europe — which is exactly what we risked had we let the Russians march right through.

Here’s a hard truth for my Russian friends and their supporters: The point where Putin & Co. had hoped to aggrandize their country or themselves has long passed. It’s time to ask for a ceasefire and come to the negotiating table.

They know this already, of course, except for the most deluded of true believers. The trick is constructing Sun Tzu’s golden bridge for them to retreat across.

The hard truth I must always keep in mind is that Western leadership, particularly our own, is not up to Sun Tzu’s task.

There is another hard truth that Moscow must come to grips with: Putin threw the dice on an expansionary war but shrank his country’s standing instead.

Russia spent more than a decade modernizing its military. It is becoming increasingly de-modernized with every day of fighting in Ukraine. Destroyed T-80 and T-90 tanks — the most modern in Moscow’s inventory — are being replaced by T-62s that were obsolete 50 years ago. Soldiers in their 20s, casualties of war, are being replaced by ill-trained “mobiks” in their 30s, 40s, and even 50s.

It will take far longer than a decade to replace what Putin has wasted.

The way this war has squandered Russian resources, finances, and demographics has serious geopolitical implications. For a few tens of billions of dollars — admittedly, some of them squandered — our Number Two geopolitical rival has had the heart cut out of its conventional military forces, all without spilling the blood of a single American soldier.

October 3, 2022

“We’re one breaking news alert from seeing a day’s work dramatically reduced in importance, if not rendered obsolete forever”

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

It’s a very weird moment in time, as The Line‘s weekly editorial wrap-up notes:

This is perhaps the strangest dispatch we’ve ever written. It is a fact of life in the news business that top headline can change in an instant. We’re one breaking news alert from seeing a day’s work dramatically reduced in importance, if not rendered obsolete forever. Every journalist has known that frustration. And today, as Western officials remain concerned about the risk of nuclear attack, this seems more true than usual. All our little insights into Canadian politics and cultural issues would make a weird second and third item in a dispatch where the lead item was Kyiv going up in a mushroom cloud.

So yes. This is where our minds are. As discussed at some length in our podcast and video this week, your Line editors have been closely watching developments in the war between Ukraine and Russia, and indeed take very seriously threats by the Russians to use nuclear weapons. We understand fully that it is very possible that all of Putin’s talk of nukes is a bluff, intended to rattle the West and encourage Ukraine to accept Russian gains and negotiate.

Neither seems likely — Ukraine is motivated and Western support, though imperfect, remains strong. We also see little indication that Putin could win the war in which he has stranded himself and his country, and we believe that things will only get worse for him. His attempt to mobilize 300,000 has turned into an item of mockery abroad, as pictures of old men and rusted equipment spread across social media. The “annexation” of occupied areas into Russia clearly didn’t deter either Ukraine or its Western backers; Ukraine’s forces remain on the move, with more Western weapons arriving all the time. And meanwhile, on the battlefield, the Ukrainian Armed Forces grow ever stronger: in just the last few hours, they have handed the Russians another embarrassing defeat in the city of Lyman. That city, a local rail junction, was important for Putin’s logistical efforts in the region, and fell into Ukrainian hands with a shocking lack of resistance.

See what we mean? This isn’t going well for Russia, and everything he tries is just stranding Putin deeper in the shit. He could have de-escalated this war at several points. At every juncture he has chosen escalation instead, and that has only made his problems worse — more deaths, more unrest, more humiliation. All of his efforts to intimidate the West or crush the Ukrainians have failed. What can he do? How can he get himself out of this problem? What will happen to him if he can’t?

These are the questions keeping us up at night. Seeing the conflict through his eyes, it’s not hard for us to imagine that Putin will come to view some kind of nuclear use as his only remaining chance to escape this war with his power still in place, or perhaps even simply with his life. After all, all this talk about whether Putin is “rational” depends entirely on how he understands his own circumstances. What may seem insane to us may, in fact, make perfect sense to him, and we suspect one’s definition of reason undergoes a radical re-evaluation when one feels a noose getting ever-tighter around the throat.

So that’s why we think it’s possible. Let’s talk what we think is possible. There are a few different ways he could use nuclear weapons. We are not the experts on this, but your Line editors are, if nothing else, reasonably well read on the topic, and we have spent the last few weeks talking with genuine experts. If we do see the use of a nuclear weapon, Putin could use a single small device on a minor target in Ukraine (or perhaps over the Black Sea) in hopes of shocking NATO and the world through his sheer willingness to break the nuclear taboo. We would expect him to go a bit further, and hit Ukraine with a series of small strikes intended to disrupt its military and seize some kind of conventional military advantage on the ground, on top of the political shock.

Or hey: he could go fully insane and try to terrorize the world into bending to his will by, for instance, attacking NATO directly, or using one of his larger nuclear weapons to utterly destroy a city in Ukraine.

September 29, 2022

Considering weird possible scenarios in Ukraine

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

In The Line, Matt Gurney walks through some until recently unimaginable outcomes of the Russian invasion of Ukraine:

It’s probably time for us to start thinking through some weird possible scenarios for what’s happening in Russia. Because the spectrum of what could happen is a lot broader than it seemed only six months ago.

But let’s start with an important exercise in accountability. In previous commentary, I predicted a lot of things well: that Ukrainian resistance would be very effective, that Russia would have major logistics problems, that the Russians would use mass artillery fire against civilians in place of military advances. I was quick to grasp that Ukraine was overperforming and that Russia was struggling early in the conflict.

But getting some details right didn’t help me avoid blowing the conclusion: I thought Russia would win. Not a total victory, but I thought Russia would seize a lot more of the country before its logistical problems and Ukrainian resistance brought their offensives to a halt, leaving Ukraine with some kind of rump state in the west. I certainly didn’t believe in February that Russia could lose, and I never would have believed that Ukraine could actually win on the battlefield, as it now seems more than capable of doing.

I don’t know if I underestimated Ukrainian capabilities, per se. I always expected them to fight bravely and well, and understood the lethality of modern man-portable weapons against tanks and armoured vehicles. It’s probably closer to the mark to say that I overestimated Russia’s capabilities — I was a cynic on their military and expected it to perform badly, but it’s somehow fallen well short of my already low expectations. It is absolutely delightful to be wrong on this one, but readers deserve the truth: I expected Russia’s military to perform better and grab a much bigger chunk of Ukraine before having to stop in the face of logistical dysfunction and Ukrainian resistance. Part of me wonders if the Russians themselves are surprised by how hollowed out their military had become.

With that on the record, let’s flash forward to the present. As noted above, Ukraine now seems fully able to win the war. As I write this, Ukrainian forces are on the move again in the northeast, and seem to be encircling Russian positions in occupied Lyman. If able to complete this latest manoeuvre, Ukrainian forces will cut off a large force of Russian troops and will also seize control of an important local rail junction, threatening Russian logistics (such as they are) in the surrounding area. Perhaps more importantly to the overall conduct of the war, Russia’s effort to mobilize 300,000 men for the war is running into obvious challenges. Men of military age are fleeing the country. Reports from Russia reveal that the army has little in the way of equipment and weapons for the new draftees, and no system in place to train them. There have been comically bizarre stories of infirm old men getting call-up notices, and of draftees being sent to the front after only a day or two of training … at best.

This isn’t a solution to Putin’s problems. It’s a new problem being created in real time. Even if Putin can find 300,000 men, it seems unlikely he can equip them, and even less likely that he can train them. Whether or not he can transport what men he does round up into the battle area is an open question, as is whether or not he can supply them once they get there.

This is the long way of saying something I’ll now just state bluntly: Russia is losing. Putin’s latest actions reveal that he knows he’s losing. If the mobilization flops, as seems likely, he’ll be losing even worse than he was losing before, and he’ll have damn few options to turn that around.

And this is why we need to start thinking through some weird scenarios.

September 28, 2022

Putin’s nuclear option may not be as decisive in Ukraine as many fear

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

Like almost everyone else, I’m still hopeful that the Russians will not resort to nuclear weapons as their invasion of Ukraine drags on and on — especially as it’s expected that any first use of nuclear weapons will trigger a global crisis or even a new world war. At Quora, John Mark McDonald offers his take on the issue that certainly doesn’t match what most pundits appear to believe:

Atomic cloud over Hiroshima, taken from “Enola Gay” flying over Matsuyama, Shikoku, 6 August, 1945.
US Army Air Force photo via Wikimedia Commons.

As someone who has studied nuclear war for close to forty years now, I am going to give you an answer that will blow your mind. Even if the entire Russian nuclear arsenal were used against Ukraine, it wouldn’t substantially change the course of the war. How could I possibly say that? Because, the power of nuclear weapons has been used as a boogeyman for so long that the actual power of a nuclear detonation has almost no relation to their actual destructive power. No nuclear power can afford to actually use one in combat because it would expose the mythical nature of nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons are hyped to the point that no one contradicts it when a media outlet publishes a statement indicating that even a single nuclear device will destroy the world. This is a blatantly, stupidly, obviously untrue, but never corrected. After all, two were used in WWII. BUT that is just the tip of the iceburg. I thought there had been a couple of hundred nuclear test that prove this point. I was off by over an order of magnitude. There have been nearly THREE THOUSAND NUCLEAR DETONATIONS ALREADY, that are either known or suspected and this has not effected the survivability of life on Earth even slightly.

Well then, how dangerous are nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons, if they weren’t their own catagory, would be classified as incendiary weapons. They set stuff on fire. They set a lot of stuff on fire. In fact they can set things on fire as far as two miles away from the actual detonation. Besides this, nuclear detonation are very bright, capable of blinding people 20–30 miles away. This is only constrained by the curvature of the earth. They also create hurricane force winds as the air around the detonation expands and contracts. If you are outside and unshielded and within a mile of a nuclear detonation, you are going to die.

The problem here is that Ukraine is really big. I mean the size of Texas big. Cities there tend to be spread out in modern times and their larger ones cover over a hundred square miles. The average nuclear detonation are only burn 2–3 square miles of territory. A city the size of Kiev would take on the order of 200 warheads to cover the whole thing.

Which brings us to our next point. Modern cities are just not that vulnerable to incendiaries. Modern city centers and industrial areas are made of concrete and steel. Most of the damage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was done because almost all the buildings were made of wood and paper. The initial blast set the city centers on fire which spread and ended up burning down most of the city. Modern cities are just not that vulnerable. In Ukraine, despite millions of rounds of being poured into their cities, not one of them caught fire and burned to the ground like the Great Chicago or Great London Fires in the 19th century or the fire storms of WWII. In the Japanese nuclear detonations, the brick buildings were still standing, despite being much less sturdy than modern buildings. This leads to the most surprising revelation about nuclear detonations: If you are not outside, you stand a good chance of surviving even within the blast zone. Nuclear blasts are mainly line of sight killers. The vast majority of “radiation” created by an nuclear detonation is infrared radiation, or heat the same as a gas stove or fireplace makes. Unless the building you are in is collapsed by the wind or you fail to leave if it catches on fire or you happen to be in front of a window with a direct line of sight to the detonation, you are probably going to be fine.

Thus we get to the real reason why Putin will not use nuclear weapons: they’re just not all that effective compared to the boogeyman that is in our collective imaginations. Were a nuclear missile to detonate over central Kiev, no one would believe that it was an actual nuclear blast because the city is still there and all the major buildings are still standing.

Secondly, he doesn’t have very many of them. The numbers given for the Russian nuclear arsenal are an outright farce. You get that number by taking of bombs that the USSR claimed to have built, and subtract the number used in their testing program. This leaves you with about 9,000 warheads. First of all, Russia doesn’t have nearly enough delivery systems to put those warheads on. The second problem here is that nuclear warheads have a very short shelf life. Nuclear warheads require a detonator made of conventional explosives. These detonators are some of the most precision pieces of engineering in the history of mankind. A series of explosives has to go off in such a way that the core is hit by the same amount of pressure from all directions simultaneously. If any of those explosives are even slightly off, the nuclear warhead will not go off. You now have an extremely precise machine sitting around a core of material emiting hard radiation. Hard radiation is not friendly to machines. Nuclear warheads need to be rebuilt a least every five years and maintained a lot more often than that. Even with that, a twenty year old warhead is a piece of junk. It’s been more than twenty years since the Putin kleptocracy came to power. I’m sure that Russia has a number of Potemkin warheads that are kept in top shape for inspectors, but given the current Russian system, the Russian nuclear arsenal most likely resembles the Russian tank reserves: the bare minimum kept in service while the rest is a scrap pile.

Currently, the spector of the vast Russian nuclear arsenal is the last card he has in his hand. If he were to actually use it, it would expose that he never had anything but a junk hand and bluffing to back it up.

H/T to Never Yet Melted for the link.

CDR Salamander also looks at the nuclear question:

Some are looking closer at the nuclear option that Russia has. I think they are looking too hard. A good example of this line of concern was in yesterday’s WaPo by Joseph Cirincione.

NB: Before the pull quotes, a fair warning – Cirincione is selling a book titled, Nuclear Nightmares: Securing the World Before it is Too Late, so keep that in consideration;

    Russian President Vladimir Putin is losing his war. If the Ukrainians continue to liberate areas of their country from his invading army, would he actually use nuclear weapons as he has threatened? If so, how? And what would the U.S. response be?

    It is difficult to put percentages on risk. Nor does it really matter. Given the stakes, if the chances are 10 percent or 40 percent, the response would be the same: Minimize the possibility of nuclear use, and prepare responses in advance.

This is when I remind everyone that “we” are horrible at predicting the next war early enough to prevent them. The track record is simply not very good. However, Cirincione has invested a lot of time and effort in looking at this — so we should give his ideas some consideration;

The next quote reminded me of a little reminder a peer gave me back when I was a NATO staff weenie at the other end of the HQ p-way from him. As a JO, he was on the other side of the wire as an JO in the Warsaw Pact. “Americans may not follow their doctrine very well, but Russians do.”

    Russian military writings describe in detail how, if Russia is losing a conflict, it could use nuclear weapons to force its enemy to retreat. This “escalate to de-escalate” or “escalate to win” strategy is somewhat controversial, but it is not dissimilar to various U.S. plans for using nuclear weapons first.

Well, sometimes we follow our doctrine. Sometimes the Russians don’t … but if you are playing odds …

I still stand by my belief — and that is a weak thread, I know — that in the next war, nuclear weapons will be what chemical weapons were during WWII. Everyone had them; no one used them.

If nuclear weapons were to appear on the Ukrainian stage, Cirincione does not have this COA as his most likely … but it is my most likely if one must choose from the “Nuke” basket;

    Demonstration shot. One option is for Russia to fire a nuclear weapon over an uninhabited area — say, part of the Black Sea — as a demonstration of its seriousness in hopes that the West will back down. Some scientists involved in the Manhattan Project urged just such a demonstration shot as an alternative to bombing Japanese cities at the end of World War II. While no one would be killed and there would not be physical damage, the explosion would stop the world in its tracks. There has not been a nuclear weapon used in combat in 77 years. No one has even seen a nuclear explosion above ground since 1980.

This is their neighborhood and fallout will drift to their lands if nukes are used. Is anyone going to buy grain downwind? No. Next to underground explosions, explosions high over the water or in the atmosphere create the least secondary radiation effects. Don’t underestimate the lingering memory of Chernobyl. I see “Demonstration Shot” of the most likely COA of the least likely Nuke COAs.

    As shocking as this would be, Russia would likely reject this option for the same reason U.S. military leaders did in 1945: It is not shocking enough.

Don’t agree. Russia believes their own FITREPs, so to speak. The arrogance of their initial OPLAN speaks to this. They hold most of Central and especially Western Europe in contempt. I am sure a nuke over the Black Sea would be shocking enough (and they’re right).

September 23, 2022

Lessons from the Eighteenth Century for the Russo-Ukraine conflict

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

In Strategika, Edward Luttwak considers what lessons can be drawn from wars of the past to help inform the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine:

Every war must end, but no war need end quickly — neither world war makes it to the top ten in longevity. The nearest parallel to the Ukraine war – the Dutch War of Independence (1568–1648), fought between a smaller but more advanced nation, and the world-spanning Spanish Empire, the superpower of the age – persisted for eighty years because the Spanish kept losing, but there was so much ruination in that declining power.

In our own days, expeditionary wars fought against enemies far away who could hardly fire back, lasted for many years as the different war-ending theories promoted by fashionable generals were tried seriatim to no avail, till the day when evacuation was preferred even if utterly ignominious.

The eighteenth-century wars fought by rival European monarchs who could all converse in French with each other, were enviously admired in the bloody twentieth century, because they allowed much commerce and even tourism to persist — utterly unimaginable even in Napoleon’s wars, let alone the two world wars — and because they ended not in the utter exhaustion of the collapsing empires of 1918, nor in the infernal destructions of 1945, but instead by diplomatic arrangements politely negotiated in-between card games and balls. The 1763 Treaty of Paris that ended the Seven Years’ war and French America, inadvertently opening the way for the American republic, was not drafted by the victorious British Prime Minister Lord Bute, but by his very good friend the French foreign minister Étienne-François de Stainville, duc de Choiseul, who solved the three-way puzzle left by the French defeat by paying off Spain with Louisiana, Britain with money-losing Canada, and regaining the profitable sugar islands for France, which still has them.

And instead of the winners charging the losers with incurable bellicosity as Versailles did with Germany, or stringing them up individually as war criminals, as in the ending of twentieth-century wars, eighteenth-century winners were more likely to console the losers just short of “better-luck next time” — and in a century in which there was war every single year without exception from 1700 to 1800, if one war ended another necessarily started or at least persisted, allowing a “next time” soon enough.

By contrast, the ensuing nineteenth-century wars held no lessons at all for the twentieth century, which was equally bereft of a Napoleonic superman at the start and ample tropical lands easily conquered later on, while the Crimea expedition in the middle was mostly a counter-example of how not to wage war, and the Franco-Prussian war was just as sterile: all it proved was that there really was only one Helmuth von Moltke who could win wars by parsimonious force, unlike his homonymous nephew who lost a five-year war in its first five weeks; and that there really was only one Otto von Bismarck, who crowned his incomplete 1871 unification of German lands by refusing to complete it by unifying all Germans as the Italians were unified, lest the world combine to make a bigger Germany smaller.

Clearly only the eighteenth-century precedents apply to the Ukraine War. Neither Putin nor Zelensky speaks French but neither needs it to converse in their Russian mother-tongue, and if they do not actually talk (Putin demurely said that he could not possibly be expected to negotiate with Kiev’s drug addicts and Neo Nazis), their officials certainly can, and do so often.

When it comes to the persistence of commerce in war — the habit that Napoleon wanted to break with his Blocus Continental against British exports — every day Russian gas flows to the homes and factories of Ukraine on its way into Western Europe, with Ukraine transferring money to Russia every day, even as it attacks its faithful customer. And, Ukrainian wheat is now shipped past Russian navy vessels to reach the hungry Middle East, after a negotiation unthinkable in twentieth-century wars, or in Napoleon’s either.

In Russia, sanctions have certainly diminished easy access to imported luxuries in local franchised shops, but they still arrive via Turkey at a slight premium … or discount depending on the previous Moscow markup. All over Russia the sanctions have been felt in all sorts of ways because the country was actually more internationalized than anyone realized, including Putin no doubt (arriving in Tomsk at 0600 one winter morning at a temperature of minus infinity, the one place to eat was McDonalds).

But unlike China, which must choose between fighting and eating protein — some 90% of its chicken, pork, and beef is raised on imported cereals plus some 150 million metric tons of soya per annum from U.S. and Canadian Pacific ports, or the Atlantic ports of Brazil and Argentina that would be an ocean too far for China-bound vessel – Russia produces all its own staple foods and can therefore fight and eat indefinitely, and neither does it import any energy as China must.

In other words, just as Russian propaganda has claimed from day one, the sanctions cannot stop the war materially, even if they played a large role in the flight of tens of thousands of elite Russians, once again diminishing the human capital of the largest European nation, as the Bolsheviks and Civil War did a century ago, and the opening of borders did again a generation ago.

It is a problem that the sanctions, which end the war by stopping Russia, might cause defections from the Western camp if the winter happens to be unusually cold, a subject on which Angela Merkel – so enthusiastically applauded for closing nuclear power stations and preferring Russian piped gas over American and Qatari liquified gas – has remained strangely silent.

September 22, 2022

Waking – or shaking – NATO’s freeloaders (like Canada)

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Europe, France, Germany, Italy, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

CDR Salamander has a proposal to encourage cheapskate freeloaders like Justin Trudeau’s Canada (although it didn’t start with him … Canada has been freeloading militarily since the early 1970s) to take on more like a fair share of NATO’s needs:

So, what did you wake up to?

    President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday ordered Russia’s first mobilisation since World War Two and backed a plan to annex swathes of Ukraine, warning the West he was not bluffing when he said he’d be ready to use nuclear weapons to defend Russia.

    In the biggest escalation of the Ukraine war since Moscow’s Feb. 24 invasion, Putin explicitly raised the spectre of a nuclear conflict, approved a plan to annex a chunk of Ukraine the size of Hungary, and called up 300,000 reservists.

This should not be a shock to anyone. If it is, perhaps you should consider investing your time in cat-blogging.

It should bring to the front that NATO can no longer allow unserious nations to play like they are anything but security free-riders. They need to contribute their fair share or pay some consequence. Alliances have benefits and responsibilities. You should not have one without the other.

While percentage of GDP is an imperfect measure of contribution, it is better than all the other ones. It is as simple benchmark of national effort.

As these are the best numbers we have, let’s look at 2021 and then forward.

It is amazing that after all Russia has shown Western Europe — both of its nature and the nature of modern warfare — that so many of our NATO allies continue to slow walk defense spending, doing the very minimum to be a full and fair partner in the alliance.

Russian victory — however they define it — or Russian defeat — however Ukraine defines it — will not change the geography or nature of Russia. She is not going anywhere.

So, what’s to be done to encourage nations like Canada to put up or shut up? This might help:

“Out years” are where dragons live, so anyone not on guide-slope to 2%+ by the end of 2023 – when one way or another the Russo-Ukrainian War should be over – will find someway to not get there in a wave of excuses and bluffing.

We should call their bluff.

As such, and this is generous, we need to finally pursue PLAN SALAMANDER for NATO “Flags-to-Post” that I first proposed almost six years ago.

    In NATO, General and Flag Officer billets are distributed amongst nations in a rather complicated way, but this formula is controlled by NATO – and as such – can be changed.

    Entering argument: take the present formula for “fair distribution” and multiply by .75 any nation that spends 1.5% to 1.99% GDP on defense. Multiply by .5 any nation that spends between 1.25% to 1.499%. Multiply by .25 1.0% to 1.240%. If you fall below 1%, you get nothing and your OF5 (Col./Capt) billets are halved.

    1.25x for 2.01%-2.25%. 1.5X for 2.26%-2.75%; 1.75x for 2.76% -3.0%. 2x for +3.01%.

The math gets funky when a lot of people get over 2%, but we can refine it later. Doesn’t cost a penny and will unquestionably get the attention of those nations. Trust me on this. By January 1st, 2024 no more excuses. A small and symbolic punishment, but a good start that may be all that is needed. This is not the second half of the 20th Century any more.

September 17, 2022

In the wake of the Russo-Ukrainian war, Europe’s cold winter looms ahead

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

Andrew Sullivan allows his views on the fighting in Ukraine to be a bit more optimistic after Ukrainian gains in the most recent counter-attacks on Russian-held territory around Kharkiv:

Approximate front-line positions just before the Ukrainian counter-attack east of Kharkiv in early September 2022. The MOD appears to have stopped posting these daily map updates sometime in the last month or so (this is the most recent as of Friday afternoon).

As we were going to press last week — I still don’t know a better web-era phrase for that process — Ukraine mounted its long-awaited initiative to break the military stalemate that had set in after Russia’s initial defeat in attempting a full-scale invasion. The Kharkiv advance was far more successful than anyone seems to have expected, including the Ukrainians. You’ve seen the maps of regained territory, but the psychological impact is surely more profound. Russian morale is in the toilet — and if it seems a bit premature to say that Ukraine will soon “win” the war, it’s harder and harder to see how Russia doesn’t lose it. By any measure, this is a wonderful development — made possible by Ukrainian courage and Western arms.

Does this change my gloomy assessment of Putin’s economic war on Europe, which will gain momentum as the winter drags on? Yes and no. Yes, it will help shore up nervous European governments who can now point to Ukraine’s success to justify the coming energy-driven recession. No, it will not make that recession any less intense or destabilizing. It may make it worse, as Putin lashes out.

More to the point, the Kharkiv euphoria will not last forever. September is not next February. Russia still has plenty of ammunition to throw Ukraine’s way (even if it has to scrounge some from North Korea); it is still occupying close to a fifth of the country; still enjoying record oil revenues; has yet to fully mobilize for a war; and still has China and much of the developing world in (very tepid) acquiescence. Putin is very much at bay. But he is not finished.

Europe’s scramble to prevent mass suffering this winter is made up of beefing up reserves (now 84 percent full, ahead of schedule), energy rationing, government pledges to cut gas and electricity use, nationalization of gas companies, and billions in aid to consumers and industry, with some of the money recouped by windfall taxes on energy suppliers. The record recently is cause for optimism:

    The Swedish energy company Vattenfall AB said industrial demand for gas in France, the U.K., the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy is down about 15% annually.

But the use of gas by households is trivial in the summer in Europe compared with the winter — and subsidizing the cost doesn’t help conservation. Russia will now cut off all gas — which could send an economy like Italy’s to contract more than 5 percent in one year. There really is no way out of imminent, deep economic distress across the continent. Even countries with minimal dependence on Russia, like Britain, are locked into an energy market with soaring costs.

That will, in turn, strengthen some of the populist-right parties — see Italy and Sweden. The good news is that the new right in Sweden backs NATO, and Italy’s post-liberal darling, Georgia Meloni, who once stanned Putin, “now calls [him] an anti-Western aggressor and said she would ‘totally’ continue to send offensive arms to Ukraine”. The growing evidence of the Russian army’s war crimes — another mass grave was just discovered in Izyum — makes appeasement ever more morally repellent.

So what will Putin do now? That is the question. His military is incapable of recapturing lost territory anytime soon; he is desperate for allies; and mobilizing the entire country carries huge political risks. It’s striking to me that in a new piece, Aleksandr Dugin, the Russian right’s guru, is both apoplectic about the war’s direction and yet still rules out mass conscription:

    Mobilization is inevitable. War affects everyone and everything, but mobilization does not mean forcibly sending conscripts to the front, this can be avoided, for example, by forming a fully-fledged volunteer movement, with the necessary benefits and state support. We must focus on veterans and special support for the Novorossian warriors.

This is weak sauce — especially given Dugin’s view that the West is bent on “a war of annihilation against us — the third world war”. It’s that scenario that could lead to a real and potentially catastrophic escalation — which may be why the German Chancellor remains leery of sending more tanks to Ukraine. The danger is a desperate Putin doing something, well, desperate.

I have no particular insight into intra-Russian arguments over mobilization, but there seems to be zero point (other than for propaganda … and that cuts both ways) to instituting a “Great Patriotic War”-style mass conscription drive at this point. The Russian army could absolutely be boosted to vast numbers through conscription. Vast numbers of untrained, unwilling young people with little military training and no particular passion to save the Rodina this time, despite constant regime callbacks to desperate struggle against Hitler in 1941-45. Pushing under- or untrained troops into battle against a Ukrainian army equipped with relatively modern western weaponry would be little more than deliberate slaughter and I can’t believe even Putin would be that reckless.

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.

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.

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