The_Capt

And we were a Charles S Roberts PC Wargame of the Year nominee as well, tell your friends! Very glad you are enjoying the game. It is remarkable to me our little baby is still gaining followers almost two years after it debuted.

Well I am not buying into a "mystery way of the East" in strategic thinking and planning. I think we risk seeing patterns when they really are not there. Russia employed very recognizable subversive-deterrence strategies in all those examples you note. In 2014 they positioned subversive elements in Crimea and Donbas for years. The basic game plan was Infiltrate-Divide/Exacerbate-Subvert-Proxy-Legitimate, they had end states/outcome aligned with method and means. They understood thresholds and deterrence and employed them very well. It took long games and careful planning and prepositioning. They were working with poor assumptions but they had alternate plans and were deliberate. A lot of this as a result of the first disaster in Chechnya. Then in this war they threw out the playbook, tossed some dice that rolled a natural 1, and now are scrambling in a strategic vacuum. They are now at the back end of a Fernando Vidal strategy: "War with Ukraine is like a game of chess..."

We have covered a lot of this upon this thread over the last 10 months. Your point is valid and one I have also raised - beware the echo chamber. That said, we have been here before. Last summer we heard how Russia had shifted the war to its strengths and the UA was being ground down daily at Severodonetsk. This grinding never really ended in the Donbas, we just got distracted by the UA retaking an area larger than Ireland from the Russian high water mark. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian-occupied_territories_of_Ukraine My main logic for skepticism at a Russian effective offensive is fairly simple - The Russian military is broken in ways it cannot fix in the timescale of this war, even if the war lasts a few years. Unless they have done a really good job at hiding it, the RA was at a high water mark in Feb and it has been all down hill from there. ”So why hasn’t UA won yet?” Well the kind of have, they were supposed to lose in the first 72 hours but the not only held but have pushed back hard. Further Russia has essentially lost this war if one looks at their likely genuine strategic objectives, in many ways they made things worse for themselves and nothing is going to likely change that. Basically Ukraine is in the process of winning - by how much? That is a good question. Russia has lost - by how much? Another good question. My best guess is that Russian will make some show this winter-spring, and it will fail - for reasons we have written pages on, but not the least of which is that conventional mass as we know it does not work in this war. Dumb, blind conventional mass is likely going to work even worse. The UA will also conduct an offensive, where and when is unknown. I have some hunches but we will know it when we see it. The Bradley’s and Marders you mention are an indication in themselves. They are offensive manoeuvre equipment. Which tells me the West and Ukraine have been planning and talking about a breakout battle somewhere on a timeline. Regardless, like the latest missile offensive, Russia will make a lot of noise and hurt good people for no reasons this Spring but they will very likely get nowhere. Ukraine will kick in a door somewhere and we will see how far they get. This is not about “the good guys winning” it is about the military that is learning and adapting the fastest to how this war is unfolding, and that military is Ukrainian.

Disagree. What I think you describe is a Russian strategy of exhaustion without a clear path on how to accomplish it. It has Ends, but no Ways. For example, how does Russian plan to win a war of exhaustion against the West? The primary proven method is to let us get bored and slip support away. Then why work cross purposes to this and commit warcrimes at a strategic scale? A complete lack of a coherent military strategy that links political strategy to military activity is also a noted shortfall. Putin has not fully mobilized Russian industry or its people - likely because he cannot- so that now the UA is accelerating past them militarily on the ground. So Russian Means do not match up. A strategy is not simply saying “we want to do this”. There needs to be a foundational theory underneath it, and as far as I can tell beyond “keeping Putin in power one more day” Russia does not have a unifying theory in this war. They have about a half dozen unlinked ones flying out there : terrorize population until they quit, exterminate population until they quit, weird IO stuff to somehow convince the West that it is hopeless cause, freeze the conflict, attack Bakhmut!/take the Donbas, Anx everything, rattle nuclear sabre to make West back off and/or whatever pops into Putin’s head on a given day. Of all of that, some points to an exhaustion strategy, others extermination, and still others annihilation - they are all over the place. If we assign Russia a strategy right now it is Spaghetti throwing, toss it all up on the wall and see what sticks.

That is not a strategy, it is wishing. The best definition of a strategy I have heard is “a theory of success”. What you have there is an envisioned end-state, and not a very good one. This war could end right now and in the long term it will cost more than Russia has gained. Russia will be a pariah for years and living under sanctions for a generation. It’s economy is going nowhere but down and towards out. Russia invaded one of its best customers and alienated the rest of Europe. What was the plan for that? How is this going to make Putin’s position more secure with the elites? Will the cling to the captain that ran the ship aground? A good strategy cannot solve for part of the problem, it must solve for the whole thing. A strategy provides a framework in which effort aligns with outcomes. It provides a vision and a certainty to marshal collective will. It solves the problems it creates before they happen. It aligns position and power, Ends, Ways and Means, narrative and demonstration. A strategy defines and delineates. And finally a strategy is a sentient thing, it is self aware and adapts while still retaining its identity. I mean if someone has some inside knowledge here please speak up. Best I have heard was this entire war was aimed at avoiding a looming Russian identity crisis. It is of course creating one. Beyond that I cannot see the game here, to the point I am convinced that those in power in Russia cannot either. The failure of the initial plan is generating its own strategy - keep throwing things at the problem and hope. And make sure that when the music stops it is somebody else’s fault.

Well they are in a war. This brings up another aspect - misalignment. If the whole point of this war was a demonstration or some sort of political power shoring, then it has failed miserably. It has failed because the military strategy failed, and it failed because the entire venture was misaligned from top to bottom. There were options to demonstrate power or land grab or even advance the pulling in of Ukraine incrementally as they had done in 2014. They chose none of these. They instead went with a pretty long odds gamble and then seemed surprised when it went badly. If someone can explain the political calculus with the elite to me that somehow makes the military strategy make sense I would honestly be interested in hearing it. A military strategy of “we don’t know what to do so we will just keep doing something” is not going to lead to any political solution. A political strategy of “we are strong” should not rest on an incredible risk to demonstrate the exact opposite. Finally, what was the crisis? Were the elites going to take out Putin unless he took Ukraine. Is there an elite faction whose loyalty rests on the state of Ukraine. Russia has a big Near Abroad, it could have flexed in a lot of places in a lot of ways. The political Ends do not align with the military strategies Ways and Means.

This is what confounds me - what is the Russian game plan here? We have had debates at the tactical and operational levels of warfare, and to me the jury is still out on just how much was Russia sucking and how much was warfare evolving away from them, largely driven by the UA. However at the strategic and political level the Russian prosecution of this war has simply been baffling. Ok, so you had a weak plan going in. The entire thing hinged on Ukraine collapsing and the West staying out of the whole thing. Ok so they did not red team this thing and had no Plan B at the start line; not the first time in history of a great power doing this and won’t be the last. So they made lemonade out of gasoline and blood and shifted the narrative to “liberate the Donbas” for all Russian-kind. Little unspecific but at least it looked like an exit strategy. And then the proceeded to pull out of the Northern offensives, “we were only feinting at your capital”, classic strategy. But then they proceed to try and hold onto everything else along almost 1000kms of frontage…like seriously W.T.F? The RA runs out of gas in the Donbas, the UA takes back an embarrassing amount of territory…and the answer is “take the Donbas!” They then execute a bunch of disconnected missile campaigns while crap keeps blowing up in their backfield and keep attacking - now in what is starting to look like human wave assaults - and their strategy is “mobilize some more and keep going!” While on the political level the plan was to Annex a bunch of stuff only to lose it, and then “attack the Donbas!” No other axis to draw away the UA, looks like they may have tried to get something on up in Belarus but it failed. “Just keep running up that hill!” No possible exit plan for renormalization with the West because every warcrime just keeps pushing that boat further over the horizon. And now more conscripts, lobbing the bottom of the missile fleet all over the place, and “Attack the Donbas”. Seriously if someone had written a novel before the war with the Russians doing what they are actually doing they would have been laughed out of the room. The longer this war goes on it is becoming clear that there is no Russian strategy. No master plan or deep thinking. Just reacting day to day all up and down the chain of command all the way to the top.

I think your Predicto is having a decimal problem by a couple positions. My point is that if the bar is low for the Russians than it is clearly also low for mainstream experts. Saying something like "the latest Russian strategic missile campaign is ONE OF THE most effective and dangerous" is weasel wording and essentially useless in assessment of the progress of the war. This is not about predicting outcomes it is about assessing something that already happened or is currently happening. Here I am in @NamEndedAllen's camp, when one is assessing events as they unfold, one does need to employ stronger metrics than "One of the most...probably." I mean I do not expect exact percentages here either but before a pundit tosses out that statement they should probably prove it somewhat and define what they mean by "dangerous and effective". In a few posts we have established that the rail infra is running normally. Ukrainian morale appears high, with no signs of pressuring the Ukrainian government to sue for peace. Recruitment and force generation seem to escalating. If there are some behind the curtain indicators or evidence, let's hear it. I agree that everything is not going to happen in a day but if cracks are forming then where are they? And here I do not mean you or any posters on this board but the people doing podcasts and selling this in the first place.

That is a lot of dots to connect and a lot of points of failure. Having seen Russian behaviour so far I also would not put them in same the strategic campaign camp as the RN or USN - those campaigns had obvious immediate effects that led to longer term outcomes. One could count the Japanese ships sunk, one could see the resources shortages in Germany by simply counting what did not make it through the blockade. Strategic campaigns are not an act of faith. I guess my point is that if one is going to make the link between Russian missile strikes and some larger “dangerous and effective” strategic campaign in a podcast, one has to provide proof of indicators that it is indeed happening. This is the 21st century, nothing stays hidden or secret for long. There should have been reports of people dying in dark hospitals, Ukrainian arms industry disruptions etc. And then there is a lack of any operational linkages. While the RN was blockading Germany, the British and French Armies were grinding on the German Army in a series of incredibly expensive operations. So Russia is hammering at the Ukrainian electric grid and attacking Bakhmut? While mobilizing a bunch of cannon fodder, and as far as we can tell UA force generation is accelerating? I may even buy the argument in a relative sense , accept the part back in Feb where the RA had 5 operational axis of invasion the penetrated up to 200kms into Ukraine, and had 12:1 force advantage on the outskirts of Kyiv while the UA was scrambling to defend along a front the size of the US-Canada border. The current Russia missile campaign is more focused than whatever they were doing before but it is likely too little, too late. Without military operations on the ground to reinforce whatever pressures they are trying for, it is actually a waste of resources. Further, I still argue they are shooting at the wrong targets. From a “let’s make those weak Ukrainian yokels turn on their government by taking away the magic of electricity” the Russian strategy makes sense. From a “let’s erode their ability to kick us up and down the battlefield” it makes a lot less sense. An example: hey Ukrainian folks @Haiduk and @Zeleban how is the Ukrainian rail system doing? Have the recent strikes cause major disruptions or delays? Have there been any highways or major bridges cut, particularly coming in from the West? As to AD, have we seen any evidence that the Russian AF is able to achieve a competitive air situation anywhere? And finally the real reason that this missile campaign was likely the dumbest thing Russia has done in some time - western escalation. Ukraine now has Patriots and a laundry list of western equipment coming in that is starting to look like Desert Shield. I do not know what the Russian master plan here is but they do not have three of four years to slowly erode anything. No, I personally think the latest missile campaign was to show Putin and the Russian people that after suffering two operational defeats last fall that Russia can do something, anything. It is not “dangerous and effective”, it is desperate.

If you look in the manual I laid out the operational level for the Soviet campaign, so you can see how the whole thing would have played out. As to DLC, we have some good stuff planned and we hope you guys will enjoy it.

We know they have been concentrating on electrical infrastructure. Have we had any reports on strikes on Ukrainian arms industry? Any evidence of that effect being felt on the front lines? Reports of arms and ammo shortages? Every video I see of the UA shows them better kitted out than most NATO nations, Koffman et al - ie “the experts” did not say “we probably guess”, they said it was the most “effective and dangerous” thing the Russians have done in this war without a shred of proof as far as I can tell. We also know that western equipment and support is flowing into the country, and based on that shellacking they gave that troop depot, ISR still works. My point is that people throw these things around without any evidence. The UA did a long range strike campaign and people saw the RA react, they pulled out of Kherson. We saw a bunch of Russian missiles, likely the nearing the bottom of their supply and what have we actually seen? Dangerous and effective means outcomes. What outcomes have we seen as a result of the RA missile campaign?

Destabilize their entire country and risk having that instability spread into its near abroad. Well there is that and playing nuclear chicken with the US.

This one I challenge. How exactly? It has definitely made people’s lives harder but what military or political objectives has it achieved? Is Ukrainian morale about to collapse? Has it hindered or damaged the UAs warfighting capability? Has it slowed or stopped the flow of western support to the UA? Has it set operational conditions in any sector for the RA to take back the offensive initiative? Has it dislocated or disrupted a planned UA offensive? What has this infrastructure campaign actually achieved? And based on numbers being thrown around it maybe Russia’s last. If Russia had concentrated all its operational and strategic strike on electricity, communications and transportation in the first month of the war, specifically targeting the UAs ability to operationally project and sustain - that is effective and dangerous. Instead they have been wasting thousands of missiles on terror strikes, and now they finally land on electricity but it is too late and too disconnected. There opponent has already hardened and dug in both physically and mentally. This last campaign still lacks any linkages to military objectives as far as I can tell, and it is at cost the RA will be unable to recover from. It is stuff like this that really makes me wonder where some of these guys are coming from.

So I suggest that humans at war are a 3rd order chaotic system. Harari posed that there are 1st and 2nd order chaotic systems: 1st order are built on a lattice of non-linear variables which all have a possibility effect at a macro level - eg the weather. 2nd order are 1st order chaotic systems that can react to predictions, they are self aware - eg economics. I put forward that humans at war are another order of chaos beyond 2nd in that in warfare we can and will react to imagined stimuli before they actually occur. We remember future. In this the input (stimuli) variables are not only non-linear, self-aware and adaptive, generation is also done in the virtual space of human imagination. So this goes beyond being able to predict how an opponent will react to a prediction, it is being able to predict with accuracy how an opponent will generate and react to internal predictions and then react again to when those self-generated predictions collide with reality. In CM playing against a human, we do this all the time. Bil H knows The_Capt always overreaches so he is going to react to that stimulus before The_Capt even hits the start button. But Bil H knows The_Capt knows he knows and will factor that into this battle as well. The_Capt meanwhile thinks “Ah this time I will overreach, Bil will never expect it because I always do it! Ah crap!!” So trying to build a Predicto2000tm to take into account all that and sustain any level of accuracy is impossible right now. Instead we rely on subjective assessment based on how well the assessor understands the opponent. “Getting inside their heads” is not just a cute term, it is literally what we are trying to do. Once we do that analysts are then looking for behavioural cues that verify or shift their framework of the opponents framework, and they are doing this constantly. This goes beyond “what are they doing?” It goes into “what are they thinking? And “what do they think we are thinking?” Here things like cultural boxes and background on doctrine and training are important as it gives some lines of the box your opponent is within. Finally, behavioural analytics are getting better at predicting what a single person will do based on historical data. Cambridge Analytica and the OCEAN model and all that. But we are not talking one person, we are talking thousands to millions of people reacting to what each other is doing and thinking while trying not to get killed. Anyone of which may have a real impact on outcomes - the sniper who decided not to kill Washington at Brandywine or all of Harry Turtledove. That problem set is way outside the abilities of artificial intelligence or machine learning or whatever. Human analysts are not able to do it with high levels of accuracy but they are the best we have and highly trained/experienced ones can create advantage. I suspect if we ever develop a computer able to conduct accurate hi resolution predictive analytics in warfare, we will have already broken economics, democracy and dating, at which point war as we understand it may not even matter as we will have to redesign the entire human social enterprise.

Excellent responses - to add to Question 3. So in the Soviet campaign you are facing off against 11 ACR and the 3rd Armd Division. By 1982 we do know the early M1s (105 mm) where in Germany in small numbers in those frontline units - give or take months. In the campaign they appear in two battles both toward the back end in what would have been US counter-moves. This reflects that the M1s would have been held in Reserve and only used in extremis. The majority of US armor is the M60A3, which is a pretty nasty beast on its own. Anyway hope that helps. The issue with the T64 is also that the TacAI in the game always fire at the centre of mass on enemy tanks. For the T64 that is pretty much the area on both the glacis or turret one does not want to try to target. When playing the Soviets it does give advantage, we will get it nerfed at some point. When playing the US try and offset. Glad you enjoyed the campaign.

You guys keep crushing these. Outstanding.

I think one strategic aim must be that Russia does not gain one extra acre of Ukraine as a result of this war. So pre-Feb 24 lines are critical as a minimum. The reason for this is that Russia cannot be seen to gain/liberate/denazify/whatever-the-f@ck-they-are-going-on-about at all as a result of an illegal war. There was zero coherent or accepted self-defensive reason given for this war, which was pretty surprising. The standard play is to blow something up in Russia and then stage manage the cause back to Ukraine, call "terrorism" and invade declaring right to self defence. Putin and his gang were either too lazy or too far up their own asses to even make that effort. They went from "field exercise" to "right to protect from nazis" in a few weeks without bothering to cook up some sham evidence - hell a few old ladies weeping in the DNR after a "Ukrainian missile strike supported by NATO"? How hard is it to do that?! Russia basically declared rights of prima nocta on a nation that had been pretty much minding its own business and rolled in without even trying to make a case. So this war is about as illegal as they get, I am talking Saddam Hussein illegal. This was, and is, a big "F@ck you" to the international order, signaling that we are sliding back to Rule of the Gun. This sets up every nation with a grudge and weapons to basically do whatever it wants, which will drive a lot of regional and bilateral alliances in reaction, and that is pretty much how WW1 started - but now with nukes! So Russia cannot gain from this war. It cannot think it gained from this war. And it cannot walk away thinking it was "ok" in anyway. The punishment must be severe, not only to serve a level of justice, but to act as a deterrence to the next clown show that decides that just because they think they have a modern military does not mean they have full license to use it. This is why I suspect the only way out of this is regime change in Russia itself (I will assess as HI probability - HI consequence). We will never be able to renormalize with the current one, nor will it accept a zero-gain outcome. The short term negotiation space is within the post 2014 territories to my eyes, but again this will ultimately be a pretty deeply debated and discussed issue both within Ukraine and amongst its partners. And frankly that negotiation space is not even needed until the UA runs out of gas...and frankly I assess that as super-duper "LO" in the near future, quite the opposite. We are starting to see western ground offensive equipment getting pushed in. I have concerns over this which I have expressed before, but I suspect they could be indicators of advancing the timeline. If the UA can integrate western equipped and trained units - so complete capability packages - that are designed for manoeuvre warfare, they are likely seeing opportunity to employ them this spring or summer. I suspect we will see UA shaping operations to continue to corrode the RA and then maybe - and tank lovers will finally get their Xmas present late - we might see actual breakthrough battles, my money being on Melitopol. E.G. I seriously doubt those 50 Bradleys are going to be penny packetted as glorified battle wagons for light infantry infiltration. So What? Well we are nowhere near Ukraine needed to concede or vie for peace on Russia terms. This conflict is nowhere near frozen yet.

Dear gawd, if you take away the MacGuffin popular fiction will implode!

Your faith in the intelligence community and scenario analysis is actually refreshing - lotta people in my line of work beat up on these guys because of their poor track record and rigid approaches. I think this is unfair and loses a lot of babies with the bath water. It is like the old adage “no plan survives contact”, which often becomes a rallying cry to “not overthink” which turns into “well let’s just not think”, which is dangerous. Everyone misses the next part of that adage “time spent on planning is priceless”. To my mind the value of scenario creation and assessment is not its predictive value. We rarely get it right, and even more rarely act on it. BFC created a scenario for a possible war in Ukraine set in 2017 that involved NATO full intervention. On the surface utter fiction and they got it completely wrong…silly BFC. But in thinking about that fictional scenario (and playing the game) a lot of people could have been better prepared for this war when it happened in 2022 as it has. The value is in the exercise of creating deep understanding of all the variables and moving bits of a future problem, not assigning percentages and word metrics. I have been deeply in force planning and development in my career, stuff upon which billions of dollars was riding, and we never got the future right on any given scenario. What we did do is get clarity on the trends/patterns that drive those scenarios and pinning capability development on those is never a bad idea. I for one would be interested to see what the NIE, or whoever, is saying about what happens after this war ends. I really do not care what percentages of certainty or uncertainty are, however, I would really like to know how they arrived at them. “How we learn something” is not based on how well our predictions turned out - this is sentient adaptive non-linear systems largely constructed on self generated fiction, bounded within linear systems (macro-physics), sitting on quantum mechanics - we are not going to solve for that anytime soon. It is based on how we analyzed and assessed the scenario in the first place - the value is in the conduct of the exercise, not the result/output. Now the really hard part is what to do with all this and here we often get into pure human intuition and instinct - we spent millennia developing it, it kept us alive far longer than we ever should have made it, and it still relies on the most complex computer processor in existence. Decision space and decision advantage are at the heart of everything we do. We can have a zillion scenarios and predictions but it all comes down to “what are we going to do about it?” In my experience the trick is about positioning for advantage. Where do we park ourselves to be best prepared to react? And here we can take all the help we can get.

I really would not say this part in any bar back home…low blow. We did just win the juniors, so there is that.

I think we can get to a level of predictive analytical support that creates advantage. But the human brain is really the only thing that can understand another human brain in context of human interactions, of which warfare is just one. So pairing of man and machine will be important but any giant computer that spits out the answer is going to be very far off, if possible at all. It is why it is called an art of war.

The problem here is that you do not know what you are asking for, but you seem very sure that you do. You ask for specific metric language on assessments (percentages or word bubbles) on the outcome of this war, or we are somehow “weak”. I am telling you that no such assessment exist in any meaningful way. This is like trying to predict the weather in 3 months in detail. We know it will be Spring in the northern hemisphere and we have almanacs based on historical trends but that is about it. We will know better at the end of March what the weather is doing, until then we really have very broad assessments. Glad you found some int academics that seem agree with you and would love to somehow reduce warfare down to nice clean percentages - shocking. A lot of these articles are out of date and come from the 00’s when we had become enamoured by EBO and RMA. Back then we were convinced we could “maths” our way through warfare and spent a lot of money trying to do it. Then Iraq and Afghanistan happened. You want contemporary thinking on the subject go read https://books.google.com.ec/books?id=29JyEAAAQBAJ&source=gbs_book_other_versions_r&cad=4 We might actually get to predictive analytics one day, a lot of debate on this. We in the military have been burned before so there is skepticism but advances in computing may make it possible in the future. If anyone is throwing around percentages now, they are literally making it up. How do you assign probability to human behaviour in conflict on this scale? We do not even have the theories or data processing we would need to start tackling this in any meaningful way. I am not sure we will ever be able to do fully accurate predictive analytics, it is the shining city in military and intelligence circles as these authors you have pulled note. You sure are not going to find it on the internet to somehow inform you on this war. Deep in the bowels of places like Cambridge Analytica and Palinteer maybe and I don’t trust them either. The problem is due to the chaotic nature of warfare you need to model all behaviour in order to have any hope of accuracy. Right now Low-Medium-High is as best we can do and I would not even go that far on some points. Of course there are many methods to conduct this work - Capability Based, Assumptions Based, and Effects Based to name a few, but none have really replaced a roomful of human beings rolling all the factors around and going “boss, looks like it will go this way…maybe”. Finally, predictive assessments like this are a trap in themselves. If we believe them, then we make excuses for readjust resources etc. This crap get all sorts of attention when someone wants to risk manage for budgetary and political reasons but they do not really reflect reality. The reality is that “knowing is impossible so double down on reacting”, which is expensive and inefficient - and bureaucrats hate inefficiency. You keep searching the internet and see and you can find. One of my side jobs is teaching warfare and operational planning at a joint staff college, so I am going to go with that. My advice is that anyone spouting “percentages” or detailed predictions doesn’t know what they are talking about. No one on open source has the level of data visibility to make hi resolution predictions. And even those that do have access to the data are smart enough to know that the best they can do is Low- Med-Hi while assessing the consequences in line with likelihood - you know, just like ISW does it. We can take broad swings, and have, they will be vague until they are not. For example we called the Fall offensive before it happened and were also correct on the fall of Kherson before Xmas - Kharkiv was a surprise. We have taken plenty of very wide estimates based on open source data we have - but that somehow means we are “weak” in strategic assessments according to you? Here is a crazy idea, how about we just try and keep abreast of what is happening right now. That is tall enough order. We can speculate and provide “best guesses” and frankly they are likely amongst the best you are going to find for free. But just to keep you happy - There is a HI probability that Russia has lost this war, and a HI probability that Ukraine will achieve a level of victory we can live with. The consequences of these two likelihoods is significant. You can print that off and put it on your fridge now.

Absolutely. All war is sacrifice. I use that term deliberately and it does not mean to simply be willing to "give something up". Sacrifice actually means "to make holy" or "sacred". This is a point Clausewitz completely missed. War is extremely personal as we literally sacrifice people for something bigger. The real question is just how much we believe in that "bigger" thing. This is more than "cost", it is the fundamental changes that happen at both macro and micro cultural levels as a result of any war. Ukraine is sacrificing - making holy costs - in defence of their ability to be free to chose their own future. Russia is sacrificing - making unholy costs - in defence of some false vision/narrative being sold to them by a kleptocrate and his cronies to stay in power. Sacrifice negotiates with Certainty, now whose certainty is more righteous? No society can withstand endless sacrifice without breaking. However, when I see Ukrainian boys holding wooden rifles better than a lot of western soldiers, I can only see a society that has a pretty deep cultural zeitgeist right now - killing Russians. The Ukraine that went into this war, will not be the one that comes out. Russia and Putin have likely created a regional power pole in all this that will change the face of Eastern Europe, just to add to the bafflingly bad strategic outcomes they constructed in all this. However, after all that we are back to "when does it end?" Well I think that is directly tied to the point when the Sacrifice gets close enough to the Certainty. Kherson was painful. There will be other operations that are just as painful. Hell we may see a Ukrainian defeat before this is all over. But to my mind, the average Russian's ability to "change the channel" is waning everyday - e.g. a lot of the middle-class Russian's left. And the Russian Sacrifice-to-Certainty equation is very different then Ukraine's - time is not on Russia's side. This war will end when Ukraine and the West have won enough, and Russia has lost enough. A lot of people post that "this war will end when Putin decides", or "it will end when Ukraine decides" - this is incorrect. A war is a living breathing entity, it carries its own weight and influence. History is filled with wars that should have stopped but didn't. Or ones where the job was not finished but stopped anyway. Wars have stopped on executive decision. They have stopped on broader public decision. They have also stopped because of weather events and eclipses. In the end this war will end when it makes sense to end it. The "making sense" part is the hardest thing to determine as it is filled with relative rationality, emotion, power, culture, relationships and human failings/strengths.

This is just how backwards the Russian way of war is, they literally are trying to live a Steven Segal movie as doctrine. Oryx shows: 533 captured Russian tanks, 255 AFVs, 547 IFVs and enough HVT hardware to make any professional weep. But hey they got a single Barret .50 cal. Meanwhile the UA developed a new integrated ISR system that we will likely be buying after this war. At this point the RA and UA are not even the same species of military.

Now that is a solid point. Russia is going to be challenged to stay below a threshold of response because this war has lowered that threshold itself. Anytime anything happens in Ukraine it is going to be Russia behind it. Elsewhere in the world we are going to be a lot less likely to let things slide as Russian support will become potentially toxic and other activities may come under a more focused response. I say “maybe” (as opposed to detailed weighted percentages) because we in the West are like teenagers in that “it really is all about us” and what that “is” is moves around pretty fast.