Tag: Current Events

The Hard Lesson

On By coilerxiiIn EssayLeave a comment

The Ukrainian counteroffensive has not gained as much ground as hoped for. It’s important to see, as these respected experts did, that it’s not just a matter of insufficient equipment. Anyway, for a bit of Fuldapocalyptic contemporary commentary.

  • There’s the Russians getting better after their initial swing and a miss. Especially as…
  • There’s the problem that everyone, including the US, would struggle with an offensive against an opponent that has had months to fortify an inevitable and obvious avenue of approach over flat terrain
  • There’s the inherent material issues. After all, the last such offense I can think of that was a huge offensive against an opponent materially better in most ways was… the Battle of the Bulge. Which didn’t go so well for the attacker and devolved into a grindfest pretty quickly.
  • But there’s also the issues with Ukraine’s own military. Again, this isn’t something really to blame. Everyone (just look at Kasserine Pass) would struggle with complex operations after quickly raising an army in a rapid desperate period of total war. Yet mentioning these very real issues and mentioning their struggles as being due to something other than just the poor stingy west not giving them 200000000 tanks and a legion of Imperial Knights attracts a lot of angry criticism.
  • Ukrainians have every reason not to think like this, but from a western perspective, having a Ukraine with NATO/similar committment but without a bombed out strip of land in its east is vastly preferable to a Ukraine with said strip of land but still locked in a conflict.

Inputs

On By coilerxiiIn Essay1 Comment

The analysts who swung and missed regarding the (initial phase of the) Ukraine War and the Russian performance in it still made reasonable assumptions.

  • It was reasonable to assume that Russia’s modernization was deep and genuine.
  • It was reasonable to assume that, having spent a year moving the forces, that Russia would also spend a year planning.
  • It was reasonable to assume that modern weapons on the Ukrainian side (like the few Georgia had in 2008) and/or any degree of qualitative superiority would just increase Russian casualties slightly without changing the outcome.
  • Finally, it was reasonable to assume that Russia would follow its paper doctrine, like it did in Chechnya, Georgia, and in 2014.

Of course, it was also reasonable to assume that even a smashed-by-the-fire-strike Ukraine would still fight ferociously, and that a conventional “victory” would just mean occupying a large country that loathed them. Yet few expected something that would have a Voroshilov instructor saying this:

Yet the most baffling part is how the Russians struggled with the very areas where they had a reputation for being good: Operational planning, concentration of force, and air defense. It would be like the U.S. going to war, and not just struggling, but struggling with logistics and air power. Goes to show that even the best model or most well-thought out analysis is only as good as its inputs.

And one of those inputs, and one of the hardest to actually measure, is personnel quality. It came to me as an armchair theory that “professionalizing” the military without creating more incentives for the middle class to join meant that its recruit base, centered around the rural poor, would actually be of lower quality. Then I saw a piece from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project that seemed to reinforce this, containing the explicit quote “‘Contract soldiers are getting worse and worse‘” amidst describing training woes. This would seemingly lead to the worst of both worlds-personnel who are more expensive but not more capable than the previous mass-mobilization system.