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And if we think of economics in terms of decision space, democracies being a bit slower than autocracies has some active advantages. Japan's economy had very little slack in 1941, and consequently when the action war revealed that many of their economic priorities were misaligned with their strategy, they couldn't easily retool. Same story in Germany. But the United States had enormous slack and could therefore invest heavily in what combat revealed to be good strategic priorities. The war in Ukraine has revealed that we had lots of bad ideas about strategy and procurement. That offers the west the opportunity to retool towards things that will matter strategically. We need to take that opportunity, though.

I really like this. I'd add that in the debate between the sequentialists and cumulativists, it looks like the balance has shifted way towards the cumulativists. If there's going to a way to solve for offense in the current environment, it's going to be the cumulative degradation of the opponent's strategic option space faster than it can regenerate.

Except with a nuclear exchange (probably?).

A sloppy way of talking. Fair enough. The war plans adopted by the respective navies reflected a contest between battle lines as the culmination of the war effort and shaped treaty obligations, cheating on those treaties, naval procurement, and doctrine. You're kind of making my argument for me. Let's look at the major naval engagements of the pacific campaign comparing battleship strength and outcome: Coral Sea - 0 IJN battleships, 0 USN battleships. Complicated outcome. Midway - 5 IJN battleships, 0 USN battleships. Decisive USN victory. Eastern Solomons - 2 IJN battleships, 1 USN battleship. USN victory. Santa Cruz - 4 IJN battleships, 1 USN battleship. Complicated outcome. Philippine Sea - 5 IJN battleships, 7 USN battleships. Decisive USN victory. Off Samar - 4 IJN battleships, 0 USN battleships. Decisive USN victory. Surigao Strait - 2 IJN battleships, 6 USN battleships. Decisive USN victory. (Night action, no carriers present.) The USN only had battleships superiority twice. Once at the Philippine sea, where battleships provided only AA support (and not too much of that; the CAP mauled the IJN air wings). And again at Surigao, where Oldendorf crossed the T of an already badly outmatched and outmoded Japanese fleet. Again, we could compare the AA protection of USN various ships: Cleveland Class ('42) - 6 x 5" - 12 x Bofors - 20 x Oerlikon Cleveland Class ('44) - 6 x 5" - 28 (!) x Bofors - 10 x Oerlikon Atlanta Class - 6 x 5" - 16 x Before - 12 x Oerlikon Colorado Class ('42) - 8 x 5" - 16 x Bofors - 32 x Oerlikon Colorado Class ('45) - 8 x 5" - 40 (!) x Bofors - 36 x Oerlikon Iowa Class - 20 x 5" (!) - 80 (!) x Bofors - 49 x Oerlikon Well maybe. There's not a need anymore for a ship that can send a minivan sized explosive shell 30 miles downrange. The capabilities of the battleships got disintegrated even during wartime. We kept the ships around because we had more fuel oil than we needed, and hey, why not? The war was hilariously lopsided by that point anyway. It turned out that the main capability of the battleship didn't supply much combat power, and the other capabilities of the battleship could be distributed to other (cheaper) ships. I see something similar happening with the tank. Before the ISR revolution, the only way to apply direct fire to hardened targets was to armor your direct fire platform and have it drive into visual range. That capability is now disintegrated. There are lots of ways to apply "direct" fire to a hardened target from outside visual range. And those are getting cheaper and more capable. So the other capabilities of the tank will get disintegrated too. We may still have something called a "tank", but its doctrine, design, and procurement will be totally different, just like the battleship.

I think the battleship analogy here is on point. Prior to 1941 both the IJN and USN thought that the main contest would be a slugging match between their battle lines somewhere near the Philippines. And naval architecture bore that out. Ships were designed around their large main armament to combat peers. But an asymmetrical threat arose in the form of torpedo boats. Their torpedos could outrange the battleship main batteries, and their launch platforms were cheap and nimble. So battleships got wartime passive -- torpedo bulges -- and active -- secondary batteries -- protection upgrades. It turns out that neither of those really works all that well, so smaller more agile ships called torpedo boat destroyers were added to the fleet to provide standoff screening from that threat. Submarines provided a similar asymmetrical threat, and the only solution for them was a screening force. No upgrade to the battleship could deal with that threat. But then a second asymmetrical threat arose in the form of carrier launched aircraft. They outranged the battleship main batteries by a factor of something like 10x and were comparatively dirt cheap. So again, passive and active wartime upgrades. Better armor on superstructures, more torpedo bulges. Replacement of secondary batteries with dedicated radar controlled AA batteries (5", 40mm, 20mm, .50 cal). By this point, everyone realized that a BB on BB engagement was suicidal because you couldn't get a battleship force to a battle without it being whittled down to a nub by longer range fires, so battleships role transitioned to being a sponge for kamikaze aircraft (which got through both the upgraded active and passive defenses alarmingly much). Their role on the battlefield was to distract and absorb enemy fire away from more valuable targets. That's a big shift in three years. Of course, battleships are expensive, so that duty was again pushed down to smaller more nimble ships that acted as radar pickets. So you see an evolution: role drives design -> can't deal with asymmetric threat environment -> ad hoc upgrades -> protection transitions to screening force -> role changes in ad hoc way -> new (unrecognizable) design to reflect new role. Happened to battleships. Has happened to tanks once. Will happen to tanks again.

So, I've been thinking about mines and weather. How do pressure triggered mines react to mud? Physics wise, it seems like being in mud would make them harder to trigger? And do mines float in mud? When the weather turns, are there doing to be millions of mines sunk a meter into the ground come winter? What happens then? Presumably a mine detonation with a meter of earth between you and the mine is better than a detonation without?

How has rolling stock held up in the war so far? I was reading the U.S. Army 1944 instructions on converting a boxcar to carry 500lb bombs and it struck me that a hit from even a small FPV drone would be absolutely catastrophic. How are both sides moving ammunition trains without losing them?

Question asked out of total ignorance - since the helicopters seem to be flying very very low, what would rapidly retargeted 155mm airbursts do to them? Would they be able to range to 10km past the line of contact? Would good coordination with a Caesar or PzH2k battery deny helicopters the relevant airspace?

Dick Black was a Virginia State senator from Loudon and Prince William counties, which are not particularly rural and politically moderate. He retired in 2020 and now focuses his attention on giving unflattering foreign policy interviews in Russian and Iranian media and arguing that students should not be called by their preferred pronouns in Loudon county schools. Seems to be a real nutbar.

I don't understand blowing up the dam now, unless they thought it was now or never? It seems like blowing it now buys the Russians some operational annoyance having to evacuate Kherson for a week, and possibly a week's worth of operational delay for a potential crossing. Unless the AFU was mid-stream (literally) and has maintained good opsec on that? If the AFU isn't launching an amphibious crossing, keep your dam powder dry for when they are. What am I missing?

Step 1: Undecided the enemy's defensive theory as a denial of service attack agains his decision making apparatus.

I guess he's too young to remember the buildup for Overlord.

The Fleet in Being moves to deep strike.

It really seems like Russia has decided to speed run the Japanese strategy in the Pacific, and that the Ukranians have learned well from the American counter-strategy. The Russian strategy at Bakhmut mirrors the Japanese in the Solomons (a brutal attritional campaign for territory that was of very limited strategic value once the idea of a blitz was off the table), and the Ukranians, like the Americans, held on while simultaneously developing a second fighting force off the line. The recent actions perhaps portend something like the Battle of the Philippine Sea, where the results of American corrosive warfare (both in the Solomons and the underwater blockade) became obvious for the first time. In particular, the battle revealed the different first derivatives of pilot training and quality. It also revealed the effects of American ISR dominance, which increased the second derivative of the difference in pilot training and quality. That battle collapsed the Japanese perception of their own option space, as it revealed the inability of their naval air arm to effect any strategic results. As the Americans realized this, the Big Gray Ball was free to maneuver strategically and force the sort of hard choices about dislocation on the Japanese that the Ukranians seem to be forcing on the Russians.

On the one hand, this isn't super surprising. The US spends an arm and a leg maintaining up to date maps, and even then infrequently used ones can go a long time between refreshes. I once worked on a map update project where the most recent ones were from the 1960s. It's faster and easier now that there's abundant good open source mapping, but still time consuming and expensive. That said, we did that map refresh because we thought we might have to intervene in a year or two in a particular country. The idea that you'd intentionally invade a country with thirty year old maps reveals a focus (like the IJN) on the cult of the shiny object, and not on the boring but essential things that make an army work.

I wonder what platform the Ukranians will launch (are launching?) the Storm Shadow from? Have they adapted it to their Soviet platforms like the HARM?

This is a really fascinating idea. There are different kinds of losing as well: - Popular Destruction: the winning power exterminates the losing power's people entirely (common in the ancient world, less so today). - Cultural Destruction: the winning power destroys or remakes the losing power's culture (USA -> Japan) - State Collapse: the winning power dissolves the state of the losing power (Allies -> Germany) - Regime Change: the winning power replaces the government of the losing power (USA -> Iraq, round 2) - Military Defeat: the winning power demolishes the military of the losing power (USA -> Iraq, round 1) Each side is attempting to impose one or more losses on the other side, and each side negotiates what sort of losses are acceptable for itself. For example, the Romans often targeted their adversaries with a regime change. Local elites will be replaced with Roman elites, or local elites will swear allegiance to Roman elites, leaving all the substrata more or less intact. If an adversary proved faithless in that, the Romans rapidly ratcheted up to imposing a cultural or popular loss. For this conflict, the Russians have projected a wild variety of strategic aims, at times indicating that they want to impose a regime on the Ukranians, but also communicating that they want to impose either a cultural or popular loss. Conversely, Ukraine has to aim for more than just imposing a military loss (which they've either achieved, or are close to achieving), threading a fine line between the collapse of the Russian government and the collapse of the Russian state. The Russians ought to be aiming to contain the loss to the level of a military defeat, but their own rhetoric is making that harder to do, as they've couched Ukranian/NATO objectives as state collapse, popular and cultural destruction.

About two thousand pages ago I suggested that the best analogical comparison to the Russians was the Japanese. The Russians really do appear to be emulating the Japanese playbook, which puts us somewhere after Pearl Harbor (the failed attempt to decapitate Ukraine and win in three days), the Solomons campaign (analogical to the attritional summer Bakhmut offensive), after the beginning of Cartwheel and the push up the Marianas (the one-two punch of the Ukrainian fall offensives), and around the time of the battle of the Philippine Sea, when the declining quality of Japanese aviators really began to tell (perhaps Vulhedar and that failed river crossing). The Russians even appear to be attempting gyokusai-like assaults in the Donbas. To me the open question is how to convince the Russians to abandon a war that they've already lost. It took firebombing, nuclear weapons, and the undersea blockade to get the Japanese leadership there, and that almost resulted in a civil war. How does the west communicate to the Russians that they've lost without similar loss of life?

Yikes. In order for that to be anywhere in the neighborhood of a good idea you'd have to be very confident in your procedures for not accidentally lobbing a missile with a warhead still attached. Nothing I've seen suggests that the Russia armed forces should be confident in that particular way.

I wonder whether our staff colleges teach the Odyssey, which is all about informational warfare?

So, my thesis is that the Russians are trying for a speed run of Japan's WWII strategy right now. Phase 1 was a replay of Pearl Harbor but aimed at Kiev - an attempt at a decisive victory that hinged on the opponent giving up. Phase 2 was the incremental march in the Donbas; a grinding attritional campaign that mirrors the fight in the Solomons. Phase 3 was the loss of strategic initiative and transition to static defense against an adversary who can attack on two axes; the Hollandia campaign and the Marianas campaign. All throughout, the quality of Japanese equipment and training faded while the quality of the USN improved. Japanese strategic thinking ossified to a policy of inflicting suffering while dying. If we think of war as communication, it took the annihilation of the IJN, the undersea blockade, the firebombings *and* two nuclear weapons to break through to the one person we had to communicate our resolve to. When Hirohito decided for surrender, the war ended (though this was a close run thing). I think what no one has identified in Ukraine yet is how to communicate to the Russian equivalent of Hirohito that our resolve is such that the war should end on terms unfavorable to the Russians. We also aren't sure that there is a decision maker in Russia who could end the war. If Putin signaled surrender, would it stick? The Ukrainians don't have signaling tools equivalent to what the Allies had either, which is tricky.

I wonder what the captured equipment recycling system is like? For thinks like a modern BMP-3 taken intact, I imagine it makes it back to the front quickly. And there are workshops refitting other captured equipment in western Ukraine and Poland, right? Does NATO already have copies of all the Russian equipment, or would they want to "borrow" things like the EWAR vehicle for a bit before returning it to Ukranian service?

These maps are really helpful understanding what's going on. Thanks for making them.

Oh definitely - the carrier is worth the protection if you can armor the deck without reducing the size of the air wing or making the ship unstable. But if you had to choose an armored deck or 20 more Hellcats, I know which Spruance would choose.

The difference I see is that we had one 3rd/5th Fleet, and the Japanese had a small number of immovable logistical nodes. While the chain is analogically similar (in some ways), to me the question is whether it can scale down. Like, you can build a 10GW nuclear plant to power a country. Can you build one to power a car? No. You can build that protective chain for a fleet of a hundred ships. Can you build it for a group of thirty tanks? I'm not sure?