The_Capt

"Boys only want love if it's torture!" (last one for today, promise)

Immature?! Meow. How about a highly satirical theory that 1) attempts to lighten the mood of a pretty brutal war, and 2) highlights the total absurdity of what actually happened, or appeared to happen during the whole Putin-Prig drama. The events were so bizarre that we are reduced to Taylor Swift in trying to explain the levels of dysfunction within the Russian power hierarchy. It is ludicrous but also probably the best theory I can come up with for that whole insane chapter.

Hey man don’t knock it. I personally think that Prigy is at the lake house trying on different beard and wig combos until Vlad makes weekend getaways. Now it is truly a forbidden love that must be kept away from the world, spiced with a hint of danger. It will be fun for awhile but it is doomed. Prig will get bored and Putin will eventually have to let him go…likely into the lake with a cinder block to keep him warm. But for now:

Don’t sully a wonderful thing. No we are not there yet but ISW dropped its daily: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-september-10-2023 Interesting comment here: ”Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Head Kyrylo Budanov stated on September 10 that Ukrainian forces will continue counteroffensive operations into late 2023.[4] Cold and wet weather will affect but not halt active combat, as it has done in the first 18 months of the war. Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley stated on September 10 that Ukrainian forces probably have 30 to 45 days of “fighting weather” left.[5] Seasonal heavy rains and heavy mud in late autumn will slow ground movements for both sides, and low temperatures impose a variety of logistics challenges. The start of such seasonal weather is variable, however.[6] While weather considerations will affect Ukrainian counteroffensive operations, they will not impose a definite end to them. A hard freeze occurs throughout Ukraine in the winter that makes the ground more conducive to mechanized maneuver warfare, and Ukrainian officials expressed routine interest in exploiting these weather conditions in winter 2022–2023.[7]” I was wondering at this last winter - what are the UA winter warfare capabilities? A winter breakout offensive once the ground freezes would be awesome. The RA likely struggles the most in the cold due to logistical strain so the opportunity could be there but there are definitely challenges. We assumed the offensive would pause with the weather but maybe the UA has other plans?

I have never gone from disliking to outright love so quickly in my entire life.

Just keeps giving. Seriously, we should do a podcast. You definitely won buddy. Hey, what do you think about climate change?

See what I mean…adorable.

So this is what you got? I teach “young warriors” and have led dozens in combat while you likely sat at home and yelled at the tv - you are no vet I can tell that from your first post. Let’s stop the BS and call this what it really is - political platforming. Your position is not all that difficult to read, pretty transparent. Basically everything the current US presidential administration is doing is “wrong”. “Right” is whatever “our guy would do as opposite”. So President Biden is pursuing a deliberate incremental strategy to compress Russia, so your position is “more firepower” and “hard staring”. Or you jump on the “this war is stupid, we must negotiate”. Basically anything President Biden is doing is “wrong” and anything they are not doing is “right”. That has been the sum total of your contributions to this entire discussing since you showed up (oh, and some bizarre social commentary on women and social justice for good measure). That is it. One long “very stable strategic genius” diatribe anchored on a single viewpoint. If President Biden declared the US was going to “end this thing in 4 weeks” you would be here yelling that “this was the dumbest thing ever” and probably quote my points as why. You know it is ok. You are just another in a very long line of segments of the population that surrender their own agency in the face of uncertainty. We invented the Church which has lasted over 2000 years on exactly that principle. Agency and independent thought is to embrace uncertainty and most people really don’t want to do this, it is scary. Problem is you wandered onto the wrong forum. This place has been home to a lot of independent thought since before this war started. We have pursued the facts as we can find them and then conduct collective analysis and synthesis to try and establish a clear picture of what is happening. No one here has surrendered independent thought to a political position. We all have opinions, I for one think President Biden’s administration has done very well in managing this crisis. Not perfect but considering we are well off the strategic map here, they have done as well as reasonably possible. I am not an American, I do not participate in your political process so I do not share your baggage. I cannot fix you or even try to change your mind, you clearly have it all figured out. But you are not going to find friends here. Your missionary work on this forum is a waste of time. But it is ok. With this last, I promote you to Hot Thread “crazy guy”. It is a honorary position that has been vacant since John Kettler left us (rest in peace John). You can go on and on but we all know it is for entertainment purposes only. I am even going to un-ignore you because I am going to be first to rub your unruly mop of hair and just smile at your incorrigible rapscallion ways. Your are a stump thumping looney kevinkin, but you are our looney. Try not to get banned because then we will have to find another.

I am a veteran of two wars and have likely forgotten more about war and warfare than you based on your contributions to this thread. I see that you are taking a “self-imposed” vacation and will come back “when proven right”. Well problem with that is that you have never really taken a clear position on anything. At one moment you talk about “diplomacy and negotiation” the next “4 weeks to victory”. You have not demonstrated any real research or citations in your contributions nor any level of recognizable expertise on the subject matter. My, and other attempts, to explain are “too complicated” so you dismiss them. Then when I sit down and actually try to unpack your position and why your assumptions are flawed, I get insults and name calling. No facts. No counter analysis. Just “be quiet”. So when you come back (and I am sure you will), what exactly constitutes you “being proven right”? Have the courage to take a position and clearly define it and stop these politically motivated drive-bys. The way you have ambiguously framed your position does not allow for you to be wrong. If the war is still going on you can declare “I told you we should have negotiated/stated/invaded”. If the war ends, you can claim it is because the US finally did whatever you were saying all along. So I am calling you out. Clearly give us three strategic “must dos” in order for this war to end. Clear and measurable strategic actions the US and West must carry out in your deeply informed opinion. Don’t weasel around it or try to build in wiggle room. Here let me show you how it is done: 1. Commitment to win the war. The US/West must continue to own the escalation ladder in this war. They must continue steady, predictable and clear pressure on Russia through programmed support to Ukraine. This commitment must be unambiguous and apolitical, we are in it until this is done. No back doors or side deals. No renormalization until Russia is out of Ukraine completely. This is a slow steady path with no sudden movement as we thread a needle between uncontrolled escalation and stagnation/freezing conflict. This is a long war of attrition and must be navigated as one…it will go slow until the RA collapses militarily or there is a major political shift in Russia. Either way direct confrontation between US/West must be avoided at all costs - no hard fast win. Further, victory must be clear and unambiguous as well. No soft-wins for Russia just to end this. Russian defeat must be clear. 2. Commitment to win post-war. Reconstruction and post conflict defence and security mechanisms are a must. No grey areas or open clauses. We commit to rebuild Ukraine and pull it into a real security alliance that will guarantee long term security and investment. 3. Engineer Russian negotiations with its own defeat. Russia cannot become a failed state, yet it requires regime change. That is very tricky to manage at the best of times. A path to renormalization must be developed but it cannot ignore the egregious warcrimes and violations Russia has committed. This will lead Russia out of being pulled entirely into a Chinese power sphere and provide some multipolar power manoeuvre room. There you go. I am on record with my position and advice. Now if the US goes in hard next week and Russia withdraws with its tail between its legs I will be proven wrong. If we can suddenly negotiate an end to this war that makes everyone happy, I was also wrong. So what have you got?

I think you missed the main thrust of my entire post. Fantasy frameworks happen all the time. Putin did it in Ukraine and rational people in the West did it for COVID. In both cases reality did not care on wit when it came crashing on either. People invent all sorts of frameworks is my central point. Religion is one of the biggest ever invented. People may laugh at you in one room but in the one down the hall they will celebrate you, which one do people tend to stay in?

I have largely ignored you because it is pretty clear that you are not in fact interested in actually learning anything on this forum. However, in reality this is an honest question that some lurkers may also be asking. Why can’t the US, or NATO or an alliance in between “win this war in 4 weeks and just end this brutal war?” Don’t need an essay really: - Put the nuclear escalation to the side for arguments sake but we will come back to it. - A US direct incursion into Ukraine or this war is going to drive a massive amount of support into Putin’s arms, to the point he might actually get full mobilization support. A fully mobilized and galvanized Russia is a scary beast particularly since they will likely be heavily backed by both China and Iran as they will see the entire expansion of the war as a chance to defeat the US by proxy. So now the US has four weeks to push Russia out of Ukraine, could they do it? Probably? Would it end the war…no way. It would likely expand it as Russia gears up for a serious fight because now it has reason to have one. The totality of your position is that you are in fact pointing madly at a “limited war” but your solution is “more limited war”…oh wait maybe you are not talking about a limited war. - ok, to defeat Russia, truly defeat them, it means not simply driving them out of Ukraine. It means total defeat of Russia as a nation. The destruction of Russian Will to fight. This means going into Russia itself and removing its ability to generate that Will. So we are talking invasion, defeat in detail and occupation…of Russia. The military force the US would need to do that is well outside the US military current envelope, we are talking millions of troops. Let’s pretend Russia can be occupied, it is a big country (look at a map). You now need to hold it until you can install a friendly government…and remember you brought up total war. So the US and most of NATO would now need conscription to sustain a force that large…you feeling strong? - “But we will stop at the border”, sure and Russia will now simply reload and incite as much violence and discontent in Ukraine…now filled with US troops. What possible negotiated end-state is there where Russia can still function while massing for WW3? No, you cannot give Russia time to reload…that would be really dumb. So now you would need to contain Russia…in the 21st century…with China on one of its borders…and Iran. That is a massive problem. The state sponsored terrorism issues alone will be intense. Again, this is limited measures that won’t “end” anything but risk a lot worse. - Back to occupation, the risk of a resistance from hell is incredibly high. See the many lengthy posts on that issue. Very angry and well supported by various powers an occupied Russia could make Iraq look like a weekend outing. Oh wait, there is more, - Russia might fly apart while you are trying to occupy it. Not known for its shining unity, occupation could see Russia itself fly apart and the the US is trying to manage a civil war…and a possible insurgency. - Ok, now the obvious one…WMDs. Let’s pretend that Russia won’t use them on good old “Merican” boys as they counter attack into Ukraine and encroach on the Russian border. They sure as hell will if the US invades Russian soil, which we have to now. And even if they don’t there is no way in this universe we can guarantee we can secure them all. Now we may have lose WMDs of many flavours lose in this mess. To put it more simply and in words with as few syllables as I can: To defeat Russia and end this war in 4 weeks the US would need to break Russia. To break Russia is to engage in a major war, possibly global. It would break the UN, it would shatter NATO because I can think of at least a dozen nations that would get off that train quickly. Economically it would break the system as we are talking markets staring down the barrel of nuclear Armageddon. Anything short of that is just more limited war with even slimmer margins than we are already on. So when you declare that “the US could end this thing in 4 weeks” all you are doing is loudly announcing just how much you do not understand. If you honestly want to learn, maybe stop typing and start reading more.

In my opinion Putin made the same fatal error many in the US (and this board, at times) are making: seeing and hearing only what they want to, not what is actually there. Putin grossly oversimplified the problem of a major invasion of Ukraine. He and his cronies built a framework of weak and dangerous assumptions, willed them into facts, and refused to consider any facts that did not fit the house of certainty they had constructed. Problem is we are seeing the same weakness in strategic thinking/ understanding within our own populations and some political players are simply exploiting that. The real danger is when that flawed framework hits reality, which does not care about human fictions no matter how hard we may believe them. We saw it during COVID, we see it in Ukraine - flawed strategy colliding with reality.

Fully concur on this point. In fact the more dangerous course of action was to simply ink blot out from areas Russia already controlled. Use a combination of hybrid forces and subversive warfare to just start taking bites in small escalations. We likely would have talked ourselves out of doing much as long as there was deniability. Small steady pushes instead of a big grand show was a far better strategy. But Putin was clearly looking for a grand gesture of Russian dominance and went for the bold hairy chested gesture…whoops. Now we are talking about significantly larger footprints in the Baltics, and if Ukraine does get into NATO it will be ridiculously armed with NATO troops and formations. By screwing this up so badly Putin just gave permission for NATO to expand dramatically into Eastern Europe.

No it wasn’t and I don’t think you need to. It is a stupid narrative proposed either by opportunists or fools. The time for “staring” was between 2014 and 2022 and we failed on that at every turn across the entire political spectrum. The reasons were pretty simple - you can’t just stare, you have to be ready to back it up, and no one in the US or entire western world was going to do that for Ukraine. The costs were simply too high on too many levels. This entire post-crisis “tough guy” narrative is a pretty oblivious ploy to try and pin the blame for this war on one side or another. We all watched Russia doing dirty in the region and basically did nothing…in some cases we made it worse. ”But air power!” Ok dingus, how much do you think positioning that amount of AirPower in the region would have cost? Air power is not a magic wand, it is a massive military capability one has to surge, stage and keep at readiness levels, costing billions to do so over the timescales the “staring” would have occurred. The bill for massive overmatch of the Russian air forces would have been (and frankly still is) very high. Let alone if we really had to do it, and completely ignore escalation risks. Same people would be quacking about “ridiculous government spending in Ukraine” that is would have taken to actually set up “staring” - unless it was their guy in charge, which is a whole other problem. One is not an expert “strategist” because you can regurgitate some spin-lines dreamt up by a political ad agency. You are fool being played because it is so much easier to let someone else do all that hard thinking and make this whole complicated world so simple. And before anyone weighs on on left or right…both sides do it so let’s just not get into that. Best thing you can do for yourself is get a library card, read a lot of history and a wide range of political sciences/military affairs. Do the hard work for yourself.

Why do they all cut their own hair in that country? Did they outlaw hairstylists?

And yet not entirely surprising. To sustain national infrastructure, let alone a war footing situation, you need: people, money and information. These are the things that keep infrastructure working and energy moving to feed that infrastructure. Russia has been hemorrhaging the first two and was pretty poor on the third one to begin with. This may be isolated or could be a growing trend, but Russia does not have one critical strategic resource that Ukraine does…western wallets.

So this. I would also add that they will get smaller and evolve sub-species of loitering munitions. Right now we mount ISR or guns on them (mortars are going to happen). We saw a small unmanned water craft hit enemy ships and that was on a big ol flat ocean. UGV loitering munitions can be very small and hide out in the bushes. When they swarm large vehicle formations all sorts of hell will happen. And then someone is going to figure out how to build one of these systems that can dig itself in and go silent/hibernate until it needs to wake up and attack. Combine this with the systems Steve highlights above, plus some sexy air droppable single shot indirect fire systems that fire freakin self-loitering UAS and we have…wait for it…Denial. A lot of freakin Denial. Massive potential for friction that make the Russian minefield belts look quaint - and for giggles, good old fashion landmines are not going anywhere. And that, is just the stuff we can come up with. Hand these little monsters to a bunch of teenagers and see what really happens. Toss in more UAS over all this and we basically have an unmanned cloud. Anyone who tries to “manoeuvre” the old fashion way into that, even with traditional air superiority - because as I have said we do not know what air superiority in the UAS altitude bands (0-2000 feet) even looks like - and they are going to start looking a lot like the RA mess. If I were China, I would be investing like mad into this space. In fact any enemies/competitors of the west are likely going to go heavily into this? Why? Because you don’t need a trillion dollar military industrial complex to do this - entry costs are much lower. And the opportunity to level the playing field against the US and West is the golden ring everyone who does not like us (and there is a long list) has been reaching for for decades. The technology is advancing very fast, the costs are dropping and there is a massive incentive to do it.

Well we already saw that in this war. Russia was supposed to take Kyiv in a few days and occupy half the country in a couple weeks. Best case scenarios had Ukraine holding out a little longer and then staging a wicked insurgency that we would be supporting. That was a lot of western expertise and metrics feeding those estimates. Mainstream military thinking took months to realize that this war was very different and that they were very wrong. I personally listened to a retired 3 - star declare last summer that “there was no way Ukraine could achieve a military victory.” By any realistic metrics that has already happened. Unless the RA walks out of a phone booth and manages to retake all the ground the lost since Apr 22, they have completely failed to achieve anything that looks like military strategic success. They essentially blew themselves up taking on a tiny relative power, humiliated their own military on the global stage, destroyed their ready force and currently hold something like 7 addition percent of Ukraine beyond what they already held, most of it blasted empty fields. The only thing they can point to as a success is the strategic corridor jointing Crimea to Donbas and it is currently under assault by an opponent that wasn’t supposed to exist right now. Yes folks it is possible to be “more wrong” and western military thinking before this war proved it. Why? Because our basic metrics and assumptions were way off. Everyone ran to “well no one expected the RA to suck so bad,” Well yes and no. They do suck but it became apparent very quick that mass wasn’t working. Manoeuvre wasn’t working. Combined arms as we knew it wasn’t working. Mechanized wasn’t working. Air power wasn’t working. Russia sucks but the UA does not and even they are challenged in these areas right now. But by all means let’s simply shrug our shoulders and go “well that was interesting, now we were talking about buying more tanks,” after this is all over.

It does and we can definitely see and hit, but so can China. Been researching Chinese military and close air support is 70kms stand off. I am not as to “stealth” never really been tested but for stand off fights it will likely work. So we are likely talking a change in what air superiority means. It is actually missile or deep strike superiority. Our biggest problem in the west is that we are addicted to big steel, all the services. In raw tonnage we are extremely heavy and concentrated…and expansive. If we run into an opponent who has gone “everywhere, all at once and cheap” the economics could quickly swing against us. It is all about cost. The price of our way of warfare looks to be priced out because we kept on the big steel train. Like Dreadnoughts our entire military concepts are all about big sharp mass. Again, I am not worried about an opponent who has been fighting like Russia, I am worried about one who fights like Ukraine. And none of stand off or missiles solve for small distributed and portable systems that all can kill heavy. I mean jury is still out but evidence is mounting that the fabric of warfare is shifting. Ukraine would be an anomaly if not for the trend lines extending backward. Our supply lines are extremely vulnerable, minefields kill our stuff just as easily as anyone else’s. I can see an opponent with similar C4ISR and systems grinding us to a halt just like we have seen in this war. So What? Well we simply are not built for a high intensity protracted conflict. We are not set up for a war of Denial/Attrition, we have always assumed that problem away. So what is the solution? Go light, go cheap, go smart, go long and go lots. Shift to a war of Attrition footing within industry and military strategy. Denial is the new Decisive. Drop your tools, shed the weight and get ready for a crazy ride.

There is one massive flaw in this logic..well maybe two. First is that SEAD and DEAD will work in modern context. Western SEAD is designed specifically to take out IADS, big complex systems built in layers. What we are seeing in Ukraine are highly distributed systems with more weight being carried by what we considered “point AD”. Problem with “point” is that it becomes “area” if you have enough of them and can link them together. We already see MANPADs capable of reaching up to 20000 plus feet, what happens when someone sticks a bunch of those on a UAS? Let me be very clear…western “superiority” as we we know it may be dead as of this war. The things we are seeing are on a very long trend going back to The Gulf War so this is not some flash in the pan phenomena, it is a building pressure wave. Second flaw…guns will keep doing all the killing. Guns are highly effective but they are big and have a very large logistical footprint. The trend appears to be more and more loitering munitions and very long range systems be they rockets and/or unmanned. Cheap, low footprint is the trend. Finally the primary driver for corrosive warfare and Denial primacy does not appear to be weapon systems or capacity, it is C4ISR. Our western forces have enormous logistical footprints that can be seen from space. An opponent that can find them first and then hit them via any number of methods is going to be able stop us cold. So what? The entry cost to fight a peer opponent has gone up dramatically. Stand-off and denial technology has gone into overdrive because (surprise, surprise) adversaries want to blunt western advantage. I am not convinced we have solved for any of this. I know we are working on it but old faiths die the hardest. UAS have nothing on UGV and that shoe will likely drop very soon. Western powers need to solve for Unmanned, C4ISR and Precision Defence very quickly. We won’t be learning Mandarin, we will be looking very long high intensity wars that our societies are incredibly poorly prepared for.

ISIL bought civilian drones on Ali Baba and loaded them up with cluster munitions and mustard gas. Partner forces started taking hits from that. And then they started using them as ISR platforms for mortars. Western and Iraqi forces (Kurds too) did not have a counter. So while we owned the sky above 2000 feet we were buck naked to observation and taking hits from below 2000 feet. All of it was precursor to this war. I can recall a commander basically declaring “we just lost air superiority below 2000 feet” and it was barely a blip as the RCAF merrily kept arguing for F-35 - shoulder shrugging “drones, not our problem”. Needless to say there was a scramble to field C-UAS tech, we never fully solved it back then - not going to discuss state now in detail but it is fair to say no western military has the problem entirely solved and fully unmanned AI is going to make it a lot worse, can’t cut the link between operator and machine if there isn’t one. Good news was ISIL could only get their hands on so many and we basically just killed them all at Mosul. They are still out there but all fractured into the Syrian sh#tshow. Then there was Nagorno-Karabakh, which really start to fry some minds. And unmanned is just getting started. Once UGVs come into play en masse warfare will be an entirely new ballgame. As usual we got it wrong. Cyber kinda got locked up and blunted but unmanned broke warfare…it is always the one you don’t spend billions on. If I could list the big changes driving this: - C4ISR. The UA are already fielding an ersatz JADC2 (entirely networked) system without spending billions. The rest of the western architecture means we are talking an entirely illuminated battle space. - Unmanned, see above. - Precision at range. Ridiculous hit-kill to ammo ratios. This is in land and in the air. What used to take large heavy systems (eg TOW) is now being done with man portable. Artillery is madness in how can be swung and put on targets. The RA sucks but even they are demonstrating they can do it…why? Because even though their ISR is crappy and C2 is constipated they can still see and react faster than they are supposed to. Pull these all together and you appear to have a wicked combination that is pushing Denial into battlefield primacy. This basically means the cost to do anything goes up dramatically. The counter appears to be Corrosive Warfare but even it may hit a limit, that is what I am looking out for. If the UA cannot break this Denial dynamic then we could be looking at a WW1 situation where nothing will really be able to happen until one side breaks the code first….or runs out of gas - pure Attritional Warfare. I for one, think the jury is still out. But that training post to my eyes is just another in a long line of indicators that “something just ain’t right”.

Heh, well I think they are smart enough, question is, are they imaginative enough? Free mass basic training is absolutely a key advantage compared to what Russia has but that post was concerning as it appears we have divergence on what the “basics” are in this war. We had all sorts of reason to believe NATO training would be superior…we tell ourselves this all the time. And don’t get me wrong is definitely has quality, it may be more a question of alignment. Not putting troops in a heavy UAS and arty environment is a key error, and one we could solve pretty damn quick. And some stuff like how to operate donated western vehicles are pretty much proprietary on our end. I can only hope the feedback loop is working and we have already adapted.

I honestly think that air superiority/supremacy is the Achilles tendon of the entire western way of warfare. You take it away at any altitude and our whole system become vulnerable. We need to start thinking about fighting in mutually denied environments. A big hint was when we lost air superiority to ISIL (freakin ISIL!) below 2000 feet in around 2016. We kind of wrote it off as an anomaly and more of an annoyance as opposed to a signal of trends and that was a major mistake. We know our opponents are already working on fully autonomous, which makes EW against them damn hard. We have a lot of guns but these are small birds, everywhere. We had better start thinking about denied and parity environments, which is something we have not thought of in over 30 years. That and simple lethality of ground systems. Air superiority will do deep battle on formations and units. But 2 guys in a treeline with a system that can hit and kill at 4+ kms at 80-90 percent is just nuts. At this point I am less worried about gaps and more worried about blind spots in western military thinking. That post highlights some of them at a ground level.

On the training post: a lot of what is in that story rings true. The issue, which we have pointed out here before, is that western troops have no frame of reference for this war. The more I hear descriptions of company operations in this war, the more they sound like a SOF action as far as C4ISR goes. A GF Comd does pretty much what they are describing as a Company Comds role in this war - pulls back and manages the engagement from a pan C4ISR node. Conventional military experience does not do this. Tactical commanders get more feeds but pretty much fill the same roles as they did 30-40 years ago. The Battalion TOC has changed a lot but the mass use of UAS for ISR is still not at the forefront. The offensive focus also rings true. I got into an argument a long while back on modern war and the offensive doctrine of most western militaries. A lot of doctrine was built during the Cold War and then adapted to the insurgency wars we fought over the last 30 years. The few times we went conventional, the opponent was so overmatched that we kind of confirmed a false positive - offensive primacy. This war is showing the holes in that theory. This is a war of Denial - drones and artillery. That takes a fundamentally different training approach. We all “yay’ed” when western troops began training support, and we still add a lot of value in some skill areas. However, we may very well be teaching bad lessons. For example, that well documented and broadcasted failed minefield breach back in Jun. To my eyes it was a textbook western mechanized breach. It looks like it got stopped by enemy UAS, a couple helicopters, a few ATGM teams and some pretty tepid artillery. Our minefield breaching doctrine has not been refreshed since the Cold War and it ran headlong into 2023 reality. Our impulse is to declare “well the UA is doing it wrong,”. Of course this assumes we actually know how to do it right in the first place. I can only hope the AAR process is firmly in place and is capturing these observations. However, in most cases the AAR guys are cut from the same corporate cloth as the training delivery guys so there are going to be biases to overcome. We likely need to adapt the training significantly. SOF may need to take over infantry tactics training because the reality is closer to their environment than our conventional experience. However, SOF are pretty low density. Conventional can focus on equipment (eg “night driving”), it still does this better than anyone else. I have brought up the point on this war being as much about competitive learning as much as about actual warfare before. The UA learns very fast, Russians slower…but they do learn. The question is, “how fast are western militaries learning?” They are part of this war too, they make up a significant portion of the Ukrainian force generation stream. As such they should be in a direct feedback loop from the front line. We need to be learning at a better pace than the Russians - “EOD is taboo” (likely because we have framed them as exclusively a COIN thing). This will mean breaking out of our own boxes, which is a damned hard thing to do at the best of times. In reality we should be getting then UA to train us on how to train them.

Ah my robot of the "deep state" (insert sarcastic and friendly smirking looking emoji here), I am a strong believer that "speed matters". A long slow fading of Russia is very different than a sudden snap. Human collectives can endure a lot so long as they are eased into it. A sudden shock can create very different effects. I think for right now the option where Russia enters into a sort of state-palliative care is a given and we are embracing the oldest strategy known to mankind: hope.