The_Capt

1. The author is an intel guy, which should make one’s skin crawl a bit, and these guys have a somewhat “different” view of the world at some pretty fundamental levels. 2. He is not wrong, but he is also not right either. Military the question on the table is one of culmination. Has the UA culminated? Has the RA culminated. These are the driving factors of the ongoing negotiation space of this war. 3. Unlike the environment this guy has been operating for his entire career, military power is dominant within context of this conflict. So somewhat slimy back door “good enough” deals are not how the game is played. Things are more stark than that. All war is personal on a massive scale and this one is very personal to both Ukrainians and Russians. So half measures are getting harder and harder to pitch. 4. There will need to be a hard “friendship” conversation in the future but it is not the right time. Why? Because if it happened now both sides would be left with wondering “what if” which will lead directly to the next war, one way or the other. A clearer end state likely needs to be established. It is obvious that the UA is not done yet. The list of equipment being pulled in is looking very offensive-y (assault engineering). So they are looking to keep going. 5. Russia is still getting weaker not stronger, Ukraine is going the other way. The argument that “Ukraine is as strong as it is going to get” does not track. Until the UA and western support culminates the actual negotiation strength remains in the wind. 6. The only thing about this guy’s narrative that makes sense and he does not say is to try and engineer are soft defeat for Russia in order to avoid worse. Again, I am not sure we are there yet - Russian infamous resilience may work for us on that one - or that it may not even be possible given the political situation. 7. The hard friendship discussion will center around Donbas I suspect, maybe Crimea. But it will happen after culmination, not before it.

Pro: At least we seem to be agreeing that Russian defeat is the strategic objective. And we have the escalation advantage here. Con. Beyond the somewhat challenging scenario in manufacturing Chinese attribution for airstrikes in the Russian west, blabbing the plan all over Texas is sub-optimal.

Well they really, really wanted that trench. A whole lot going wrong for the Russian assaulters, not to mention some pretty basic errors and missing pieces (e.g. No fire base I could see - did not “win the fire fight”, bunched up on the advance - which went bad when mortars came in, no indirect fire support of their own, no AFV or Armor support, likely little to no ISR support, big losses and not much to show for it). This little action looks like it could represent the entire Russian Winter offensive.

The man is a saint in my country now. Well most of it. https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/u-s-president-joe-biden-says-he-likes-canadian-teams-except-the-leafs-1.6328028

So when I talk about stuff that is not going to be replaced.....

One thing that is becoming increasingly clear to me over the course of this war is just how decentralized Russia really is, at least culturally. Any nation is a collection of "us and them" but things like egregious casualty asymmetry by internal region highlight that there are parts of Russia that really could care less about each other, beyond some weird "We are us because if we were not everyone would kill us" narratives. I have no doubt that if Russia was invaded that tac nukes and chemical WMDs would be on the table; however, strategic nuclear use is a big step. I think Moscow would be will to trade rural border regions for negotiation space if it came to that - likely why a lot of their nuclear infrastructure is still central or at sea. This would be akin to a conventional invasion of Canada, sure the US would get in the game but I do not believe for a second that they would start lobbing ICBMs right away. WW3 is likely a slow-then-fast conflagration. The true strategic nuclear exchange threshold is likely pretty high, but it is also a slippery slope as the closer to it we get the easier it is to talk oneself into it. That all said, it is one helluva high stakes game everyone is playing here.

Meow.

Or maybe a bit more to it? https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/russia-s-security-chief-blasts-west-dangles-nuclear-threats-1.6325742 The deep problem with nuclear deterrence is that it only works between rational actors. So before we go all "here is how it is going to happen boiiii!" We probably need a good idea of just how rational Russia is or is not. We have been around this tree a few times and are not going to answer it here but I am pretty sure the current US Administration is all over this question. It is too easy to shout from the cheap seats and score political points (the author in this peice appears to be doing just that), it is another to be in the chair and having to deal with the daily realities.

Maybe South Korea? To be honest there are a lot more bad examples - post WWI Germany, same for Russia after 1917. We have a bushel of failures in Africa. Maybe Israel too...kinda...depending who you ask.

Add to this a complete lack of any reasonable evidence that Russia would have somehow left Ukraine alone had the West not allowed Eastern European nations into the organization. A lot of people have brought up the Budapest Memo as evidence the West left Ukraine hanging, but the violation of that agreement by Russia, first in 2014 and now is clear evidence that Russia was never going to "let sleeping dogs lie" if we had kept our hands off. I argue we likely saved more lives by pulling in Estonia and Latvia (among others). The only reason to frame this discussion as somehow a result of Western aggression is to try and justify Russian motivations, and the OP has a history of doing exactly that in a somewhat ham-handed anti-US/western narrative. Putin is a genocidal monster who is waging an illegal war well outside the bounds of the LOAC. Any righteous casus belli Russia may have had (and it didn't) prior to this war flew out the window at Bucha and the extremely long list of illegal warfare Russia has waged - to the point the ICC has indicted a sitting head of state. So even if we except this bizarro logic, it is irrelevant to any future analysis, beyond informing us that a strategy of appeasement 1) won't work and 2) We probably should have worked harder to contain Russia, not less because it is pretty clear their military, at least, is operating on a medieval warfare framework. I would also say that whatever box we put Russia into after this is over needs to be airtight, at least until Russia as a nation can demonstrate that it is ready to join the rest of civilization. Post-war I am extremely worried as the viable strategic option space that sees Russia as a functioning nation heading back towards some sort of rational normalization is getting smaller and smaller. Our ability to create a soft landing for Russia that it will not simply try to exploit is also getting harder and harder to see. Dumping the whole thing on China's doorstep is not a bad idea but re-containment of Russia will have to be on the menu, right along with regime change. Trying to engineer a nation is extremely hard, but that is what this is looking more and more what is going to be required in order to secure Ukraine and ensure Russia does not completely fly apart and make everything worse.

Monuments or recycled. I do not know if there are any left in stocks awaiting final disposal; however, getting those operational at this point would likely cost more than purchasing new ones. Capability wise, the Russians are going back in time, Ukraine is going forward.

S'ok, keep my loose for the real stuff when it comes a long. I expect the balloon will go up soon, so we will have a lot to talk about then.

They are investing political capital and risk. Seriously, what are they teaching these days. China swinging support for Russia could very well cost them a lot in the end. It might shake fence sitters to act (of which my own nation is member), it may create more unity and resolve in the west to actually stand up and do something. Beyond that, they are risking dependence on all that cheap oil, which is all pointing westward right now, so the infrastructure bill is not going to be small to get it all going east...let's start with that. Then say they get their hands on that sweet dino-juice and start to expand on that energy...it is still under the feet of a highly unstable nation with an epic insecurity complex. I am not sure what they teach in university these days but the reality is that nothing is for free. China is going to have to invest heavily in propping Russia up and it extends well beyond this war. Frankly making Russia their problem is a great idea for the west but I am not sure it is going to stick. Uh, I dunno...gas prices maybe. https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220404-merkel-defends-2008-decision-to-block-ukraine-from-nato https://www.thestar.com/politics/2022/04/09/mackay-recalls-the-french-german-nato-no-to-ukraine-that-zelenskyy-denounced.html?rf I am not dodging the question, I am supremely bored by it. It is the same finger pointing and dithering that got us here in the first place. You have just conducted one of those drive bys I was talking about earlier - "Here is what a poll said (no link or sources) and here is what I think, so there". Now as to dodging questions, why don't you answer this one: what possible proof do you have that Russia would have played by the rules and not invaded Ukraine, or anywhere in Eastern Europe for that matter? What indication from going all the way back to 2008 did Russia give that would indicate they could be a trustworthy player in this game and would operate in good faith. I call BS. The Germans and French were not blocking Ukraine "for the peace of all mankind", they were worried about the fact they we literally neck deep in Russian energy dependency (there is that investment risk thing again) and were more likely worried about the impact pulling Ukraine into NATO would have on that, than any high handed morale "let's not start a war" nonsense. (Did not age well, man did they read this one wrong - but numbers do not lie) https://energytransition.org/2014/03/closer-look-at-german-energy-dependence-on-russia/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-eus-energy-dependency/ So if you want to do revisionist history and try and say "Germany and France opted for peace, and not gas, back in '08, and 14 and in pre-invasion 22" well over you to actually use an internet search engine and prove it.

Wait for it...Cuba! The long held cry of the first year poli-sci student. "But what if Russia pulled Cuba into a collective defence treaty?!" Or Mexico? Or Canada. What if Canada suddenly joined the Russian Federation of Happy Happy Nations Who Totally Do Not Have A Gun To Their Heads? Would not the US go into a rage and invade? To be honest, probably not. Why because even though the US has played fast and loose with the rules on occasion, they know they cannot totally throw them out or risk the entire scheme. What they would do is cut off trade and bankrupt us over a weekend, but that is what big-boy powers do, they employ legal mechanisms to punish and keep in line. They do not roll in and invade (oh and here we will go with Grenada and Panama - sure a rogue narco-dictator and coup by a military junta (the OECS also signed off on that one) interventions are the same as Ukraine, not apples to hand grenades at all.) Like in 03 in Iraq, the US bent the rules and maybe even broke them. To put them in the same legal house as what is happening in Ukraine is just dumb. Putin tried for a weak R2P, and then started hammering baby hospitals - he is not even in the same league...and this was after we let him get away with Georgia and Crimea. If Russia and Putin were so smart - and here I will ask forgiveness of Ukrainian members in advance as offering too much on "how Russia could have won this thing" is a little insensitive in the middle of a war, but so is trying to excuse the Russian invasion by blaming it on the West...and by extension Ukraine itself - they would have engineered an internal crisis in Ukraine (again) and then used that as an excuse to intervene. But that flat-faced a@@hat did not even have the decency to do that. He played "we are only on exercise" for months and then went "f#ck it, its Tuesday". So here we are again with the "its all your fault" faction somehow linking the actions of free, stable and independent nations with varying degrees of democratic process to somehow "making" Russia do this horrible war. It does not match history, nor does it make any sense in terms of how this war actually started. I re-iterate, there was no crisis. It was not like Ukraine was in Brussels with pen in hand hovering over the NATO parchment. There were no Nazis, or black bio-weapon sites, nor elite conspiracies or alien brain slugs controlling in the background. We had a dictator pushing 70, looking for domestic power shoring exercise who thought he could totally get away with it, and then let his cronies convince him of what he wanted to hear. The West had sat back fat, dumb and happily buying his gas and turning blind eyes, until we didn't - Putin thought Ukraine would be Czechoslovakia and what he got was Poland....that is about it. No appeasement would have worked, there is zero evidence of this. In fact Crimea demonstrates the exact opposite. But hey, it is another Tuesday so let's hear the anti-US crowd roll out something new for change....

An irrational and highly unstable geopolitical partner they have to invest more in to prevent from completely falling apart or dragging them into a major war than they can ever expect to get out of? Or how about a completely fractured former superpower with 6000 loose nukes at their back door? Oh goody, it was getting quiet in here…US bashing day. Yes, please tell us again how this was all the US’s fault for allowing former eastern bloc countries entry into a free and transparent collective defence treaty? And after those independent and sovereign nations had, of their own free will, decided it was in their best interest to join said collective defence organization. Or why they would want to join said organization in the first place? Or perhaps a thesis on how the world would be a much better place if we have left them in the cold and trusted Putin to not do this exact same thing in Estonia, Latvia etc? I mean the guy looks pretty trustworthy based on his performance in this war, right? Oh that’s right, like a good domestic abuser argument we made him do this. And if we had only shrank back and stayed out of it the power hungry dictator would have surely been a ok. Here is a counter thesis and question - how many Ukrainians would be alive today if we had pulled them into NATO in 2013? “Oh but look at how unstable and corrupt they were?”…Turkey. “Oh but it would have made Russia mad and our gas prices go up”…whoops.

Don’t have an acronym but I had NCOs back in the day who would have described as an operation “that looks like a dog humping a football”.

Chinas problem is that it is likely going to have to fight the next Cold/Tepid/Warm War shackled to a corpse. It is trying to figure out what that looks like in a way where they get what they need to challenge the west but don’t let Russia drag them down with them. And we didn’t have to do anything, Putin put this mess in motion all on his lonesome.

He (and you) have landed on another spin on this thing - military culture. Western militaries are always fighting for funding. They are in competition with the rest of social spending, national security and each other. So they carved out military domains as kinda fence lines between the services. A domain, as the name suggest is "territory under stewardship of", other definitions have been floated but we always come back to that. For the longest time "joint" really meant air-land-sea. Then technology forced the services to accept space and cyber. The problem was that these areas were to complex (and expensive) for any one service to take one, so we cut up the operating environment to accommodate...let the games begin again. Cyber, was the way to cover off "information" but it really isn't. It is the hardware and software to sustain, deny and attack information infrastructure. Information is currently an "environment" which is code for nobody owns it but everyone claims it, right next to human (the closest we got to a Human Domain was in SOF and PsyOps, but it was always a poor third son). So now Information is everywhere. Intelligence claims to own it but Int is another thing we have torn apart - everyone has intelligence mechanisms, and they often do not talk to each other. Ultimately it gets dumped on a commander who has about a hundred people all over the place working it. For example, if you want to talk about weaponizing information to effect, you are going to get Cyber, Joint Int, Service Int, PsyOps, Strat Comms and Legal - and that is before you get into other government space. This is what JADC2 is supposed to solve and dump a lot on AI, but we will see. Rumour has it the UA has already bolted an integrated info sharing system that is able to create pictures faster-better. Finally, names matter. "Picture-centric" is not going to fly in military circles, sounds too pre-school. Cognitive-centric is a term being tossed around.

And here we get to the shortfalls of former conventional military thinking. In fact most militaries are starting to turn on this idea of information being an enabler and seeing at as part of an over all effects system So first off ISR is not simply "seeing", it can have a direct on the battlefield by "being seen, seeing". An entire op can be blown if surprise is blown, so the idea that ISR or information are somehow helpless to affect is incorrect, and frankly really narrows down options that do not need to be. Next ISR/Information lean into inductive effects - a lot of conventional military do not get the power of these things as they have a long history of breaking in order to get stuff done. Unconventional forces like SOF totally get it, they have an entire field of special warfare dedicated to the concept ("by, with and through"). Finally, as the RA is demonstrating very aptly, on the modern battlefield, having a lot of stuff without the information to make it competitive is in fact a liability not an asset. They are a complete system - without one or the other one is on a down slope to defeat. If given a choice I would rather have perfect information than perfect physical weapons with little or no information. With perfect information supremacy I can get my opponent to shoot at each other or drive them into the ocean with their hands at the wheel. This was the situation within COIN. Our opponents had information superiority in all the places it matter, namely the people. They were pounding us in that space and had very few weapons to essentially demonstrate they could make life miserable and that we had not won, and never would. The reality, and my over point is that it is all information even the explodey parts. It is the volume or mass of that information (and here we cannot forget quality) that should get the attention, not the numbers of artillery pieces.

This is a re-push of a chart that was floating around here and elsewhere back last summer. Not sure who actually did it but remembering the usage rates being reported in places like ISW it looks pretty accurate. I believe these are for the Eastern Front - the Western Front did not really spark up until 1944 (after Jun 1940 of course). It looks pretty Soviet versus Germans-centric. What is stark is just how little shooting the UA did, but this matches the reported extreme precision the UA guns have demonstrated largely due to having eyes directly on the target.

Well there will be three people missing from that next iteration - me and two MPs chasing me.

And So projection and application of force is communication. And so is projection and application of information. Force can be applied either directly or indirectly - and here we get into the sweet spots of each. Kinetic Effect (Conductive) - the direct application of energy in order to force change upon a system. Non-Kinetic Effect (Inductive) - indirect application of energy in order to induce a system to change itself. So horse heads definitely communicate directly - here is what we can do to you. But having the mob boss wake up to his horse cutting off its own head (lets put opposable thumbs to the side for a moment) also sends a very powerful message - we can do this to get you to do this to yourself. One is swinging the blade (effect) to send a message, the other is a message to create effect (whatever pushes a suicidal horse over the edge - think Alma from the Ring). This is why I do not think one can cleanly separate the two into supported and supporting roles. They trade off continually. In operational planning exercises I always ask students - "Ok, what are you trying to communicate to the enemy in all this?" And "what are they saying back?" Unless one is waging a war of total extermination (eg nuclear) where one is really only communicating with oneself. This is what made apocalyptical groups like ISIL so impossible - there was no communicating with them, nor negotiation as they were following an eschatological doctrine where their will was derived by a supreme being. So we wiped them out, and will continue to. We had no need to negotiate, we just eradicated. We negotiated with sub-groups who were not apocalyptics, or convinced a few to go other ways.

So we are talking conventional peer (or near peer) warfare in this context. How well it translates into unconventional conflict is a very big question. One of the big issues we had in Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan is that our entire ISR enterprise was built for this war and not those ones. So we brought ISR designed to find an opponents center of gravity and tried to apply it to a COIN setting where centers of gravity are totally different. ISIL also found out the hard way that if you fight in the manner we are built for, it is bad. Now if we meet someone who fights like Ukraine, more distributed, hybrid and unconventionally, we could face similar challenges as we had against the Taliban. The UA is a far more conventional force than the TB but I can see how future conflict may drive opponents deeper into the unconventional space because they have observed what happens in an fully illuminated fight. On our end, we need to learn to fight in that entirely illuminated battlefield, first step will be to take a hard look at our structures, which were built and designed in WW2. What we take from this conflict as anomaly and what is trend is probably the biggest unknown of this war.

Ok, now we are getting somewhere. So what you are describing is a modern operational system (or components thereof). Add in logistics, force protection/preservation, mobility and then institutional functions and we are starting to see the entire picture. My only problem with "information as force multiplier" is that it boxes it in. Information supports physical effects. The reality is that the two are far more symbiotic. Physical effects create information and in some cases are only conducted to gather information (e.g. spec fire). The two concepts drive each other. Better physical systems are a force multiplier for information - I can move, see and "cause" better than an opponent. To my mind - and here we are at "all war is communication", physical effects/violence are simply ("milbits") of information themselves. The act of warfare is knowing mare than an enemy and taking away their ability to be able to "know'. As we see far too often, and trust me a tactical wargaming community is not alone in this, physical capability as the primary "way" of warfare, when in fact it is just another "means". The primary way is information based via violent communication because warfare is all about human will. Will is build on cognitive and conative frameworks housing...wait for it...information (well, knowledge really but why quibble). So in many ways those mortars are force multiplying information superiority as much as it is going the other way.

Not at all. We are talking information architecture to support all that mass, not simply the quality of troops involved. At Severodonetsk, we saw the RA far "outshoot" the UA but it still took more loses. This famous graphic - not sure as to accuracy but it matches the moon scaping the RA did last summer. Some took this as bad news and that the UA was being far overgunned, but if you look at the effects that much lower UA tonnage was able to deliver we begin to see the realities of information and precision. Raw combat power matters much less than refined combat power. A large part of refined combat power is information and in many ways it has a mass of its own as both a resource and effect. The UA has never "shot more" is has "shot better" and to do that you need to be able to collect, process and employ information at much higher rates - compare a modern MBT information infrastructure to a WW2 tank and you can see what mean. In fact one could argue that with enough information advantage one could defeat a modern MBT with a WW2 tank - knowing exactly what the MBT could see, where its weak points are, ability to hit it exactly on that spot etc.