The_Capt

We have seen this sort of assessment before and frankly it kinda lands in the “opinion” pile. We have seen no evidence of sustained effective logistical strikes on the UA that are causing operational level disruption. That would be incredibly hard to hide in this day and age. Stuff like a lot of UA equipment out of gas, large ammunition shortfalls etc. We do see things exploding in the RA backfield pretty much daily. We have heard HIMARs are no longer effective, now Storm Shadow is kaput as well. All of this is largely guessing and opinion without any real evidence to back it up. I trust publications like RUSI that outline the shortfalls they are working with up front. They clearly highlight the bias risk and lack of information. Pieces like this do not. They spout off a lot of “facts” with little or zero reference evidence to back it up. And have no caveats to speak of, this is presented as iron clad conclusions. In the end we shall see. If the UA offensive sputters or simply does not shape up at all, well then apparently something has changed. Perhaps Russian AD and AirPower have finally gotten it together enough to freeze this thing up. Or maybe this is all nonsense and we will be talking about the Crimea as a military operation by this Fall.

Ok you can poo poo all you like but you have to admit these look pretty slick when stacked up against the urine-soaked hobo corpse ridden parking options we see here in the finest North American offerings. I mean seriously:

Oh cool, he is now onto nuclear deterrence calculus.

Hey whatever happened to that 70 year old Vietnam vet? The one with the incredible wide set of skills and expertise?

Exactly and outstanding example. And here you are talking about modern MBTs on a training scenario. Sitting in a comfy chair in squeaky slippers it is easy to wonder what in the sweet seven hells is going on when something like this happens. In real life it is so easy to get confused distracted and generally messed up. This is what makes CM work so well, they managed to bottle chaos just enough. And warfare is all about managing chaos.

Wow that is a lot of unsupported opinion coming fast and dressed up like facts. Ok, so the game of states is largely irrelevant and bio terrorism is the one you worry about…got it. Oh and worlds largest energy producer: https://www.eia.gov/international/rankings/world?pa=12&u=0&f=A&v=none&y=01%2F01%2F2021 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_production#:~:text=China is the world's largest,the United States and India. https://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/07/the-worlds-largest-energy-producers.html Oh hey and look who the largest consumer is too: https://www.statista.com/statistics/263455/primary-energy-consumption-of-selected-countries/#:~:text=China is the largest consumer,such as oil and coal. Clearly you have this all figured out. But oddly the US National Security Strategy and Defence Strategies disagree with your position: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Biden-Harris-Administrations-National-Security-Strategy-10.2022.pdf https://www.csis.org/analysis/new-us-national-defense-strategy-2022 I am going to pull on one thread here: “but their bet is we miss their production, and they forget who the most warlike country of all time is.” All war is sacrifice - the west went nuts when we asked its citizens to wear masks, I am not confident out sacrifice calculus is higher than Chinas in an upcoming conflict. Also most warlike country of all time is not the US, it barely makes a blip in history to be honest - although Jimmy Carter and China both agree with you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll The most warlike (a squishy metric) country for scope and scale would likely go to the Mongols. A heated competition between a China power pole is already happening - everyone in the business of security and defence knows this. While your “China and India..meh” strategy is noted, I think I will go my assessment for now.

Oh well that is a relief and here I thought we had challenges. https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2023/04/04/the-de-dollarization-of-world-economy-xi-putin-agreement-saudi-arabias-shift-to-yuan/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-brics-expansion-membership/ And dependencies: https://www.china-briefing.com/news/us-china-trade-in-goods-hits-new-record-in-2022-what-does-it-mean-for-bilateral-ties/ And really glad to hear India is going no where: https://www.forbes.com/sites/williampesek/2023/04/20/china-vs-india-worlds-greatest-gdp-race-heats-up/?sh=3ef6b0ec4411 Militarily everything is also just fine: https://www.rand.org/blog/2021/11/taiwan-is-safe-until-at-least-2027-but-with-one-big.html And China has no friends: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_relations_of_China I guess the big reason they have reason to band together is because they are on the outside and the rules do not work for them. It is a crazy idea but human being do not just sit around and accept their lots in life and leave top dogs in place because reasons or a sky god says so. They challenge and compete. Oh and let’s not get started on the rot in our own houses - we are so “bored” that we are tearing each other apart. In fact this entire war in the Ukraine is a major wake up call on just how distracted we got and how long the wheel was left unattended. We may wake up in time, or we can go back to all those nice safe assumptions and reality tv.

Never said THE sole cause, not once. Most objective research and analysis see it as a major contributing factor in a 50 year program that encompassed a lot of efforts, economic not the least of them. My push back against The Atlantic article is that the authors are suggesting that western military spending and the of the Soviet Union were entirely decoupled. Worse Lebow and Stein have suggested the military arms race lengthened the Cold War and somehow we all could have come to love and hugs decades earlier. Stein is a Canadian and comes from the deep Liberian humanist camp, to the point that political agenda creates a serious seed of doubt in objectivity. The idea that 1) the Cold War was not a military contest and both sides military strategies were operating in glorious isolation and 2) right wing politics and the military industrial complex actually were the root cause of the conflict is utter nonsense and early 90s cloud shovelling. Normally it would be simply hilarious, however it is dangerous motivated reasoning for the problems to our front.

Fair point, like I said it was one major pressure but also not the only major pressure. I do wonder if the USSR could not have reinvented itself much in the same way communist China did? It was a flawed system however clearly when allowed to evolve somewhat can, and does work in a sense. Of course the heart of the thing is current hemorrhaging all over Ukraine so the odds of enlightened evolution look to be slim in hindsight. I do think the other military contribution to the USSRs defeat was containment. Like Nazi Germany the USSR only theoretically “worked” if it was able to continually expand, pulling in more and more resources to feed the corrupt bloated monster. Expansion was key to its survival and that was blunted and compressed a lot by western military affairs in concert with other elements of power. Looking forward, after this war, we are going to have a very sore Russia with less to lose - assuming it survives the landing. China continues to rise while running out of soft/smart/sharp power runway to fuel its expansion, while it also deals with internal frictions and sore spots. There will likely be an acceleration of the Outsiders club in pulling away from the West and pulling in more members. This will not be a repeat of the Cold War but instead be something far more insidious and vicious I suspect. Hard choices are in front of us, this war in Ukraine was the first real one and I am heartened to see we appear to have passed the test, at least so far.

Pretty much exactly. Also for context, Lebow and Stein (the authors of the Atlantic article) have been shoveling this for quite a long time: https://www.amazon.ca/We-All-Lost-Cold-War/dp/069101941X Their underlying post-Cold War euphoria thesis is that the competition somehow prolonged the Cold War, not shortening it. Beyond healthy Reagan and Bush bashing the book takes some leaps of logic and assumptions that do not age well given our current circumstances - the most basic is that autocratic empires built of skulls and ashes won't simply play nice if left alone. The current war in Ukraine is what happens when deterrence fails and it is not pretty. Of course back in 95 a wave of liberal humanism and optimism was sweeping the western world, and in a lot of IR schools it took root and will not die.

An empire does not spend up to 14% (or higher) of GDP on a "shrug/whatever". The USSR had to keep up a front of credible deterrence in many global theatres and there had to be a calculus behind that. Some was no doubt imperial ambition but no small amount was pushing back against NATO encroachment and containment. I disagree the Soviet Union would have "spent the money regardless", there is no credible evidence I have seen that would have been the case - and I have pointed out more then one example where spending was directly linked to competitive capability parity/superiority. Both sides were locked into military industrial complexes, however, that will only push things so far. I think the evidence shows that the both the nuclear arms race and conventional deterrence equations - as extensions of imperial power were both critical to the outcome of the contest. To simple shrug ones shoulders and say "well those crazy Soviets were going to do whatever they were going to do" completely misses the point of the entire Cold War strategy. The Soviet Union, much like Russia today, is spending too much on defence because we were (are) putting pressure on them. I do not buy into the mythical "culture, destiny and sugarplum fairies won the Cold War" when all evidence points to deliberate strategy and a lot of blood and treasure. Both sides definitely drove each other, I can point to entire lines of force development in the US that were 1) very expensive and 2) specifically designed to create overmatch against the Soviets. Back to this war, Russia is going to fail but only if we keep the pressure on. They have a corrupt and rotten system but it needs continual stress to realize its collapse. Some of that is its own weight but humans are really good at improvisation, history is filled with empires that managed to limp along for centuries past the point they made sense. I would need to see a lot more than a couple articles (one from The Atlantic) before I buy into the idea that the Soviet Union military spending was in splendid isolation of western strategy.

Well we know that we were not going to invade but I am not sure they did. If the west was irrelevant then the USSR likely would not have worked so hard or spent so much on threat based capability development. The Cold War within militaries is a narratives of continual, and very expensive, one-upmanship. Just take a look at tank development. If the USSR really did not see western military capability as a threat and was largely a propaganda device, why spend billions on development arcs in the T-72, T-80 and T-90 series? A whole bunch of cheap T-62s could keep the locals in line and a bazillion of them would make the average insular population convinced they were safe. This was a template applied across military forces, from aircraft to ships, to nuclear deterrence. The R&D and development efforts were not going through the motions on either side, they were highly competitive and drove everything from doctrine to intelligence priorities. I am allergic to the “Soviets sucked and would have collapsed if we did nothing” argument because it is not supported by the facts. The Soviet empire was a pretty powerful but flawed beast. The Cold War was not an easy day in history, it took a lot of effort and sacrifice to win. A lesson we should definitely keep in mind for whatever this is in front of us.

I think this position likely decouples too far. This suggests that if the US had dramatically decreased spending the USSR would have stayed “flat” and collapsed anyway. I do not think this is true. Western and Soviet defence spending were linked, however were a component in a larger competition. If one decouples US defence spending from the argument then it is too easy to insert revisionist agendas on current defence spending - eg “well it had nothing to do with the outcome of the Cold War, why are we doing it again with China?” The Soviet system was brittle and flawed from the get go. By forcing it onto an unsustainable trajectory by creating a decades long arms race the West did successfully create pressures that led to an eventual collapse of the system. It took a lot of pressures of which military was a central component. If the West had tapped out and relieved the pressure the Soviet system could have also reduced spending and perhaps survived much longer. The effect of Western defence spending was much larger and longer than any single decade of the Cold War.

To which I would add “…any Russian government based information”

Lord, this is why we can’t have nice things. So right off the bat one has to be really cautious. In this political climate revisionist history cuts both ways. The reality is a lot less cut and dry. I will offer this as a period piece analysis from 1989 - kinda hilarious to see projections of the Soviet Union out to 2000s: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA207965.pdf And then there is this famous meta data site: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/military-expenditure-as-a-share-of-gdp-long?time=earliest..2016&facet=none The reality is that a line of US presidents going back to Truman, along with NATO national leadership “won the Cold War”. How they did it was in a three prong strategy that was not always pretty but it worked - contain, entice and out-compete. So details. Defence spending in the USSR was not flat as much as it was a steady escalation. They were forced onto a competitive trajectory very early on. The problem within the USSR was cost versus income/production. When one looks at the percentage GDP one can see the Soviet Union really was spending far more than it could afford on defence. Why? Because it had to, it had to try and keep up with all of NATO. Now as to “Reagan winning the Cold War”, well not really. The big jump in US defence spending was actually trying to catch back up. In the late 70s/early 80s (the setting of Combat Mission Cold War…it is in the lobby gift shop) US defence spending kinda crashed. Post Vietnam, economic downturns, and that whole OPEC thing played havoc with military spending so when Reagan jumped in the US was really playing catch-up. By the mid 80s the fate of the USSR was sealed, and they knew it. Corruption and misdirection of money, built in inequities and general holes in the communist system lined up with the Afghan War and “plop”. Russia could not have surge spent on defence if it wanted to: https://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/31/world/soviet-military-budget-128-billion-bombshell.html So what? Well the Cold War was a sustained contest that took decades to win and often went to the brink on several occasions. It also is a historical example of how an arms race really assisted in deciding a conflict as part of a broader strategy. A similar strategy with China is problematic because we do not have an iron curtain with China, we have globalization. Anyway…”bad lies and statistics”, “written by the winners” etc etc.

An excellent example is the relationship between Britain and Germany in the lead up with WW1. By all rights: diplomatic, economic and political Germany and Britain should have been allies in WW1; however, the Kaisers very ill advised pursuit of naval parity with Britain led to a costly arms race that shaped relations between these two nations. Arms races can be the spark that trigger conflict moving into a violent collision stage, but “war” is not binary, it is a process on a spectrum. Arms races can be considered preliminary moves or shaping that may or may not lead to open warfare. The counter example is the Cold War where the US effectively won the conflict without direct military collision by forcing their opponent to spend more economy could sustain. Here the arms race was the war. As to the current situation with China, the issue is less arms race and more one of “who is willing to sacrifice?” China is hungry, aggressive and smart (as opposed to Russia who only had the first two). The US is highly divided, entitled and very self absorbed. It is also extremely powerful and rich but whether it can focus that power and will remains the central unanswered question of the early 21st century. I do not think an arms race will doom the US and China into a conflagration, but it definitely is part of the intensification of competition between these two powers. The biggest threat to the West right now is not Chinese arms, it is US apathy versus extremism.

So maybe a dumb question from an outsider but why not curb the powers of the presidency? The US has a lot of checks and balances but maybe not enough. I am sure there are a thousand reasons not to do this but seriously haven’t you guys had enough bad presidents to maybe rethink things a bit? We have two types of pardons in Canada, one is done by the judicial system and the other is a royal pardon by the Governor General - normally ceremonial and rarely used. The PM cannot pardon anyone - a pardon cannot be politicized. The PM also has a lot less executive power - we do not have the executive order system in this country. We have an Order in Council but it is also done be a committee and technically has to go past the GG. In short there are political systems where one person can only do so much damage. The ability of one administration to effectively hijack the democratic system is just a disaster waiting to happen. It would be hilarious except for the whole “empire we all bet on” part.

Well given the Russian track record…but not what I am thinking. GPS and inertial guidance will take care of that bridge, even if they try GPS scramble it. Lasing the bridge via UAS is another option. Once it gets fully in range the UA are going to blow the living hell out of that bridge (again). No they likely can read a map as well as we can and are prepping for ferrying operations to support a defence in the Crimea. The positions they fall back to - already dug, when the UA offensive cracks them like an egg.

Hmm, now why would the RA be conducting water xing drills way back there in the Crimea?

I don’t think the age or capabilities of the platforms are deterministic. They need to hook into the Ukrainian C4ISR and carry the AIM 120, as such they are a threat the RuAF cannot discount. This will reinforce the air denial situation which is about as good as it gets in this war with respect to AirPower. There is already a lot of noise on dogfight capability but in reality Ukraine just needs a missile carrier that can move quickly and go where the ISR network tells it to. This, along with other capability stacks up and keeps Russian air power at stand off, which will be critical in a ground offensive. The F16 is a capable module in a much broader air denial system, so it is good news.

Womble just made my “suspicious list”.

Doesn’t that create an infinitely spiralling acronym? A fractal acronym?

1+2+3+4+5+6+7 = 8. This raid has the hallmarks of strategic shaping, but shaping takes time and effort. Uncertainty has been projected upon Russia, how much and how intensely remains a question. Russian intelligence likely has been aware of this troublesome border region for a long time, people do not suddenly decide to become disenfranchised. But this was an overt attack in broad daylight that is going to create pressures, most of them negative - this raid just undecided the integrity of Russian Ukrainian border, that alone is going to induce a response even if it is below the waterline. War is communication and Ukraine just signalled that it is willing to support back door resistance within Russia, and it was very likely backed, at least indirectly, by western powers - does anyone think we did not know this was in motion? Communication, once received and processed, shapes perception. Perception drives action/reaction. War is also certainty, so communication and certainty are in constant tension with perception in between. And Russia has a lot of back doors.

I think some people on this thread had this listed as a serious risk for about a year now. A Russia in free fall could definitely see Putin lobbing WMDs at his own people. And then someone is going to get their hands on WNDs and start lobbing them at Putin. Before you know it the damn things are swinging everywhere. "Well so long as they stay in Russia, why do we care?" Because they won't.

Of course a single raid is not likely to see major Russia muscle shifts, but is does create a lot of uncertainty in their calculus. A few more, or if this one gets big enough and the RA will definitely have to start thinking and positioning to cover their backdoors. That will draw combat power away from other fronts...and also mess up some static defensive networks - Russian are not so good with the moving thing.