The_Capt

Excellent reply - better than some staff college students I know. I would add that is also puts additional strain on the entire Russian military enterprise as they now have to worry about replacing what they have lost (they still have eyes on the bigger global game). And last but not least, it may give a level of freedom of manoeuvre for Ukrainian forces on the sea. Even modest raiding and SOF capabilities could drive the RA nuts and pushing their naval capabilities back is nothing but good news. My personal hope would be an amphib operation but I do not think that is under the tree for this year. Back to a central thesis, this creates Ukrainian options while taking options away from Russia…and that is how wars are won.

When the pandemic started I was tasked with a team to go off and do a quick and dirty study of the impact trends of pandemics across history and then translate that into potential risks coming out of COVID. We took about three months and I read more about pandemics than I ever wanted to know. In the end we came up with a long list of repeated observable trends and then translated them into modern context. The one thing I pulled from that experience is that every pandemic is the same, and every pandemic is unique. They all follow similar impact patterns and trends, yet they all were unique in the context of the event and what followed was highly shaped by their context. To my mind wars are exactly the same. They are all the same, and they are all unique at the same time. So while universal metrics exist they miss the context of the war in the time it happens and context matters very much. So if you want to measure the impact of a war…study the damn war in detail and in context.

That does not send encouraging signals.

Illustrates my point perfectly. I personally think Pinker is selling cool aid and using selective statistic to try and flavour. Considering the potential long term impacts of this war, I do not think a "well at least it isn't WW2" line of thinking is really all that helpful. The scope and scale of its impact are not directly related to body counts or any single metric.

You and Pinker are kinda making my point. Right so we firmly establish that this current war is indeed not A World War because it falls under a certain (arbitrary) scale on a single metric of loss of life. So what? Do we feel better? Do we have a better frame or lens through which to look at this war? How does that offer one wit of anything valuable to the analysis? And by fixating we are missing the larger picture: sure this isn't a World War (and no one has jumped in with legal of diplomatic definitions) - but it is a Global one. It is having global effects on security and collective defence, food security, human security, nuclear warfare deterence and the role of the UN and global order to name a few. This war will very likely change the cultures of Ukraine and Russia in ways we cannot even see yet. It is shifting power dynamics in a region which again has global repurcutions. Within the information space this war has gone global with open source and information warfare happening everywhere (even here). In reality, I am not entirely sure if a war can be truly "small" anymore; however, this one definitely is not. So beyond drawing arbitrary lines on narrow metrics todays fixation, like a lot of them in this vein, completely misses the point.

Ya kinda do and just demonstrated it. If one focuses solely on scale = body count then it is far too easy to miss other factors such as unconventional vs conventional. I strongly disagree with the entire position that one can ignore other dimensions/concepts and focus on single factors. It is like trying to dissect a symphony by counting the number of notes. One can focus on the melody lines of an set of instruments but it has do be done in context of the whole. So, yes the entirely of the concept does need to be taken into account in any discussion. This does not preclude focused concept development but it must be re-integrated into the whole. This is the entire foundation of joint warfare (i.e. no domain can be taken isolation), or mulit-domain (whatever they call it these days). So when discussing scale and hanging it solely on in-war body counts one risks doing exactly that.

My largest issue with his entire argument was reducing war to statistical deaths. War is violent but on many levels and more often the psychological scars on an entire society can leave impacts far beyond body counts. Vietnam had an enormous impact on the US collective psyche well out of proportion of deaths compared to WW2…and then we have Blackhawk Down. Pinker misses the relativity of war on a micro-social and then how that can spread to macro. So his entire thesis - we are getting more peaceful is not only statistically weak when looking on a broad scale, it also misses the trees for the forest on a smaller scale. There is an entire slice in the social and political sciences that bought into the idea that war was a disease we could be cured of a temporary phenomenon that sprung from upscaling civilization. In reality mankind has been violent with each other from pretty much Day 1. It is an impulse that is baked into us and will be very hard to remove, if ever. In the end Hobbes and Rousseau continue to wrestle for our souls…when in reality I think they were both right and wrong. We are creatures who have always lived on the margin. Suspended between order and chaos, thriving and self destruction. This war is no exception. It is the most wasteful and useless war in a long time. Russia was not running out of X. Ukraine was not an imminent threat to Russian survival (at least not that we can figure). This war hardly even counts as “policy by other means”, it is too personal and irrational to make that much sense. We just lived through a Great Peace and now it looks like it is over. Hard military power as a means of diplomacy is back on the table. Irrational and personal causes of war are back (they never really went anywhere) and we are leaning back to Rule of the Gun on a global scale. Or maybe that is just how it looks on a Tuesday.

So is a Solar System war = Deaths in the hundreds of millions? I never really found these weird metrics useful to be honest. Deaths are part of war but there are a lot of other dimensions: duration, scope, scale and impact/imprint. One could argue that the war between Christianity and Islam has been going on at some level since the First Crusade. At the end of the day a war is a large as the collision of certainties that is driving it. Those certainties can be measure in #s of people, however, they can also be measured in how deeply embedded a certainty is within a people. War is a deeply human expression and as such trying to pin down hard metrics is very hard and in some cases counter-productive: “oh this is a small war”, well which thousands of people died…how did they die, why did they die? These are far more important factors in conflict management than raw body counts. Even historically, a vicious small war can tell us more than a long drawn out slog. Finally all wars are huge for those fighting them. So even if one is in a “small war” the cultural impact can be significant and imprint it leaves on a society significant. Not to beat up on Pinker but war is never simple or reducible - like any other collective human expression it is a non-linear soup of emotion and memory.

Is it just me or has the Russian Navy been taking a lot of hits lately. Maybe the whole ground war was a distraction and the maritime war was the offensive?

Lebensraum, well that is a golden oldie. Good old fashion greed and conquest. Well at least they are telling the truth now and not trying to dress it up as anti-Nazi, anti-NATO, anti-whatever…it is a pure and simple land grab.

Getting rumours in mainstream here: https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/ukraine-fires-6-deputy-defence-ministers-as-heavy-fighting-continues-in-the-east-1.6565898 Pretty cold if true. Corruption can become a cultural norm in governments and very hard to root out.

There is always room for giant robots, no matter how absurd they would be as a warfighting platform.

RUSI is a gold mine of analysis for this war: https://rusi.org/news-and-comment/in-the-news/why-russias-cyberwarfare-has-failed-ukraine-remains-threat-uk https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/all-quiet-cyber-front-explaining-russias-limited-cyber-effects https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/promises-and-consequences-intelligence-contest-cyberspace Punchline - cyber is still happening but it is really something we need to relook at because it really did not have the overall effects we expected. Carnegie Endowment has some interesting stuff too. https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/12/12/cyber-operations-in-ukraine-russia-s-unmet-expectations-pub-88607 https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/12/16/russia-s-wartime-cyber-operations-in-ukraine-military-impacts-influences-and-implications-pub-88657 Quick scan and there seems to be a lot of apologist-ism occurring over cyber as well.

This really makes no sense. If a “tank” is simply the most lethal vehicle then right now an infantryman with an ATGM or artillery with PGM are “tanks”. A tank provides a combination of three things: survivability, lethality and mobility. They are all uniquely high but come at a high cost to produce and sustain in the field. The core issue is that Survivability is pretty much in tatters in this war. Tanks are highly visible and are being hunted into extinction. Too many things can see and kill them or their support system to easily. Mobility - see 1) minefields and 2) denial of the tank by long range systems that can see them and kill the at greater ranges than the tank can respond. Lack of tank freedom of mobility is a freakin hallmark of this war. Lethality - maybe the only thing the old girl has left but it is being replaced by precision artillery, missiles and UAS. Dress is up however one likes. Apologize for no air superiority all day long. Blame the Ukrainians and Russians for “not being combined armsie enough.” That equation up there is not going to suddenly swing back in favour of heavy expensive metal moving forward. We may even see a major armour breakout in this war but that won’t validate their existence, it will be a swan song. Finally from a strategic perspective other factors come into play but the biggest one is that tanks are just too damn heavy…blame gravity. They are hard to move and mount. They are very costly to support. Problem now is that an opponent can move and mount the denial system for the tank much faster than we can mount and move heavy forces. So What? Every time we deploy the armoured fist somewhere, cheap and many lethal systems to counter it will have been there for weeks. And the technology behind those system is going to be an extremely high priority because they can deny what is the core of our current western military ground force …they watched the Gulf War and Iraq 03 on tv same way we did. So add it all up. Tactical, Operational and Strategic - the whole thing does not look good for the entire heavy system. Lighter, faster, cheaper, deadlier and unmanned is a wave of change that no one is going to be able to stand in front of. In my opinion we are watching the re-definition of “combined arms” unfold in front of us daily in Ukraine. The re-design of what combat power means and warfare itself is going to be fundamentally changed.

Dude, c’mon. We know what tanks were for but nothing in this war aligns with our current doctrine. Armour has largely been relegated to a fire support role, and noted as no small amount of “indirect fire support”. The internet is filled with invest “tank-people” explaining and complaining right now but I have yet to hear a single coherent theory as to why armour has not worked as it should in this war. In fact there is a long list of stuff that has not worked as it should in this war - airpower, cyber, and engineering are also on that list.

Well modern day cavalry is looking a lot like UAS. Everyone is getting all hot and bothered as to armour and whether this war is an anomaly or a preview. All the while no one really takes about fundamental shifts. The next war NATO fight in will be fundamentally different than what we planned for before. It will likely have elements of this war but evolution of technology is happening very fast. What we do know: C4ISR has changed the game. Battlefields are entirely illuminated and surprise is pretty much dead. So is heavy hot mass, at least as far as being able to hide it. This is not an opinion…it is physics. Unmanned has changed the game. Combining with ISR, unmanned systems are going to spread and expand in scope as quickly as they are able. No military on earth after this war is going to try and go in without unmanned support. Precision, reach and lethality. Closely linked to the first two, the over the horizon capability of small (read hard to find) and deadly systems are going no where but upward. Ok, so what? Well the other shoe to drop is Shield. What can we do to better protect the force from these new realities? This is going to happen, definitely in the short term. We have far too much sunk cost in our existing systems to simply drop them and run. Shield will buy time to pivot. The challenge will be the fact that technology does not really help us here. The ability to put little brains on things that can be taught to target is just too far ahead of any viable counters right now…and it is getting worse. This war is no where near Spanish Civil War in impact. That war did see modern AirPower come out of the closet and we drew a lot of wrong (and some right) conclusions. The shifts being observed in this war are far more dramatic. Further they are all pretty much extensions of previous trend we saw in other wars. That all said, there are a lot of unknowns. For example, next wars might be even faster. If someone can achieve ISR, unmanned and PGM superiority they will be able to cut through an opponent very quickly - neither side has been able to achieve that trifecta yet in this war. AI has not made a full entry yet. A lot of what we are seeing in this war is last generation. Some of these systems are already being replaced. So, I agree, the next war NATO fights will not look exactly like Ukraine - it will probably be crazier and even further from what we recognize.

I wouldn’t say that. However, they probably have a better sense of what works and what doesn’t right now as they have been a lot more up close and personal than we have. I have seen too many posts and threads of “well why are they not just doing X” while completely ignoring the environment they are in. The UA, and even the RA have been learning and evolving with this war often while the west sits on the sidelines and critiques. I am also interested in why they succeed or fail. However, my starting position is not “Western doctrine equals success” as I think we have move to far away from fundamentals that underpinned that doctrine.

So basically older capabilities took a long time to die? And yet they still died. I know the myths of Agincourt but in the end cheap mass won out that entire argument. And kept winning it right through to about WW2. The fact that cavalry held on by fingernails in WW1 is not proof that they somehow were still a viable arm of manoeuvre. In fact the narrowing of cavalry over the centuries could be what we are seeing in armour in much quicker time. Firing line formations died at the Civil War, and yet militaries held onto them (and their ridiculous bayonets) for decades (we already argued this on that other thread). One can “whatabout” it all one wants but military capabilities clearly have a failing trajectory. There are elements of cost, effectiveness, utility and decisiveness at play in that calculus. Large armoured cavalry as an example. Its decisive role began to fade, arguably, in the Middle Ages. Its utility was definitely compressed by the 19th century and by early 20th century they had been relegated to logistical support and flank security. By mid 20th they were pretty much only logistical and after that ceremonial. You can trace any obsolete capability along similar tracks. They take time to die…but they do die. Cost effectiveness is a significant factor and cheap that can kill or deny expensive is on the right track to render it obsolete. However, it is not the only factor at play. Tanks look to me like they are in the beginnings of a death spiral, particularly if we are talking long term attritional warfare. They take too long to produce, and cost too much for what they are able to deliver right now. As Steve notes, they are also being supplanted by a lot of other things that are a lot cheaper to manufacture. ”Well infantry are easy to kill and have not gone obsolete”. Well 1) they are a lot cheaper than armour, 2) they are actually really hard to kill. They may be soft squishy humans but they are like sand and get into everything. Hard to find and fix, and extremely replaceable. 3) They are also nearly impossible to fully deny..see sand, and 4) they have not been supplanted, in fact they have been dramatically augmented with modern UAS and ATGMs. Tanks on the other hand are really expensive, getting more so just trying to keep them alive. East to spot…big lump of hot metal and ceramic. Easy to deny. Hard to replace at scale. And now they are being supplanted. However, like a lot of military capabilities they will take some time to die. On could argue that have been dying since the 80s but I am not so sure. This war has definitely not been good news for amour or mech and everyone knows it. In fact it has not been good news for manoeuvre warfare itself. Now modern militaries have a couple choices: adapt or hang onto legacy capability for “reasons”. We are really good at that last one.

Gawd, I hate all economist. A quick internet search and one can get the full spectrum of “Russian economy is doin fine” to “It is collapsing right now.” I guess the thing I worry about in all this is where are people getting the data from? Objective numbers on the Russian economy appear hard to find. The rest are supplied by Russia. For example, how much is Russia spending on this war a la GDP? Well that number is not going to come from an outside audit. It is going to come from Russian sources. And Russian sources are notoriously full of crap. If I was in Russian leadership I would want nothing more than to project an ability to outlast Heaven and Hell themselves in this war. We can get objective reality data - exchange rate of ruble, imports and exports. But any internal metrics are going to be heavily skewed by Russian information ops. The economic end of this war is like everything else as far as I can tell…we will know when it happens.

Well yes, and no. Cheap bowmen rendered very expensive knights obsolete. Not sure the cost of muskets versus pikemen. A single machine gun has to be cheaper than a squadron of cavalry. The question is less “can it be killed” and more “how much value does it render before it dies”. The cost equation is one factor. In warfare things become obsolete for what appears to be at least two main reasons: - Denial. The capability advantages of the thing are denied to the point it becomes a liability - see Battleships v Carriers. - Replacement. The capability advantages of a thing are replaced by a capability that is not denied - see Battleships v Carriers. The modern tank is currently being operationally compressed…significantly. It has become very apparent that one can wage Defence and Denial without tanks at all. The big question is, “can one wage Offence?” The modern tank is definitely seeing Denial in Ukraine, however, as an offensive weapon we are not seeing a replacement, yet. I personally do not think the tank is entirely dead but it utility is definitely on a one way trip. The role of the tank is becoming much narrower - currently a rapid, well protected indirect fire system. And this is bigger than tanks. We are not seeing a lot of IFV/AFV success either. We do still see them in infantry support roles, however, they are also blunted. The entire mechanized portfolio is currently getting compressed into a capability with a much narrower role. So where do we go from here? It is weird how in times of disruption in warfare we always seem to fall back on basics. In this war it has been infantry and indirect fires (including UAS etc). These are two capabilities that still work. Both sides appear to be wrestling with the fact that the other elements of mechanized combined arms are not working - armour/mech and engineering. The modern battlefield also appears to be denying two major principles of war - concentration of force, and surprise. This is not small. I suspect UGVs and some sort of Shield capabilities will be combined to break the deadlock, and get Offensive manoeuvre via mobility back on the menu. We are far too deeply invested not to try and buy our way out. My sense though is that others are too deeply invested in taking away the cornerstones of the western way of ground warfare. So in the end the tank will become obsolete because there is a lot of incentive to make it go away. Then the race to master whatever comes next will be on.

Oh let it rain combined arms fratricidal impulse. I get your point entirely. I think what the OP was pointing to was the fact that the realities of this war could be seen as a forcing function to relook at some of these “secondary” design considerations. Artillery is very likely another big winner - the effect on armoured vehicles alone needs a serious overhaul. Better or more sophisticated fire planning is also a “must”. So rather than turn on each other let’s crush the hopes and dreams of the armoured corp because the tank is clearly best employed as a museum piece!

Ok, I read this twice and honestly cannot understand you position here. Of course Russia “did this to themselves”….so what? If we take a binary approach to victory conditions as you describe - total defeat of either side is the only outcome for either side. Then this war will likely never end. Russia is not going to be able to achieve military victory by your definitions. Ukraine is not going to be able to totally defeat Russian ability to keep this war going in order to keep Ukraine out of western hands. Even if Ukraine takes back every lost inch and digs in at the border, Russia can keep attacking and lobbing shells and missiles into Ukraine for decades. And we have not even begun to discuss subversive activities. By your opinion this will mean EU and NATO will “never let Ukraine in”, under those conditions…so at least one Russian strategic aim is nearly unavoidable. So the only other option in your framework is for Russia to stop being Russia - it is built in. Every time we discuss this the absolutist crowd does a lot of hand waving and “well it won’t be that bad”-ism. However, the task of causing a total Russian collapse is in itself a very long and risky commitment that we would essentially be trying to conduct via proxy. We may get “lucky” and Russia breaks itself to pieces softly but more likely Putin will drag this out and point to “bad ol NATO” as a reason to stay in power. So what is the plan. “Support Ukraine”…ok, got it. “Russia Bad”…again, zero argument. What are we doing beyond that? Zero War = Ukraine in NATO, means Zero Russia in this framework you have cooked up. I argue we still have options and off-ramps as this thing progresses. We are not the only war in human history without them. This does not mean capitulation or surrender, but it also does not mean an endless conflict either. Best case, Russia backs off and self-removes the main driver of this nonsense, Putin and his power structure. They then put in a bunch of jerks we can live with who are willing to back off or be bought off. Then we try to pull Ukraine into some sort of security mechanism. This is not easy, very hard in fact, with a lot of points of failure. But compared to “Ukraine must engineer the total defeat of the Russian state and then good things will happen”…it is looking like a much better strategy.

This happens every time anyone even suggests adding an extra bridge let alone more realistic obstacle game play - “Ya but now we may as well call it Combat Engineering Mission!!! “ I have a modern contemporary war in Europe that say “yes, if you want a realistic modern wargame then obstacles need to be an integral design consideration.” Adding in realistic minefield breaching ops is hardly “throwing down” on battlefield minutiae. But yes, let’s scrub all that inconvenient reality so we can go back to playing “Smash Tank Go Boom”.

A reason for this is that computer sims cannot be argued with. They roll the dice and something happens. If an expert has context that may shape that outcome and the computer does not have it programmed in, it is hard to get it rolled in during the wargame itself. It really depends what one is doing. If you are doing a staff wargame to explore COAs/Options Bil’s table top systems is definitely the way to go. An e-table to make that easier is always nice. If you are doing training, sims can be very valuable in compressing time and space while getting students to exercise the skills they will need. It also gives them a feedback loop to hone skills. The trick is ensuring the sim does not teach the wrong lessons or build in dependence that won’t be there in reality. If you are doing Operational Research then a very high resolution simulation may be invaluable, but these tend to be much narrower in scope. So if you want to know what a certain new system is doing to do to your larger organization for example, a simulation can be very effective.

Good points but I disagree here. First off, this falls into the "Russian total defeat" trap. By this criteria, Ukraine will never be allowed to join NATO/EU without a total defeat of the entire Russian state. By setting this as a condition we actually incentivize Russia to keep an open wound in Ukraine as a counter to their being pulled into the western sphere. Russian force of arms could "unsettle territorial issues" indefinitely even if they do suffer major battlefield defeats. Second, NATO is not that binary. We left Greece and Turkey in after that little tussle down in Cyprus. We pulled Finland into NATO in months after people went on about how it will take years. There is a whole lotta "NATO will never" going on, which has been challenged quite a bit as a result of this war.