G.I. Joe

I'm troubled by this, and here is why....
As an ordinary (non-professional class) Ukrainian man under 35, choosing between:
1. your patriotic duty to enlist as an frontline combat soldier in an increasingly (?) lethal conflict of unknown duration and
2. fleeing to the EU (or elsewhere), where you might start near bottom economically but keep your life and limbs, and over time may well live better than you would back in even a post-ceasefire Ukrainian armed camp / 'okrajina' ( borderlands) -- also, your more patriotic relatives will forgive you in time if you send money home.
... how many are choosing 'b' these days?
For 1916 poilus, landser and Tommies, there was no realistic 'b'.
Tatarigami....
 
 

I'm glad you qualified that.  He was kinda in the same position as Yamamoto.

That is a very good analogy.  McClellan was a brilliant force generation general.  He built a modern army out of a tiny start up.  That was an enormous task with many critical systems essentially beginning from nothing - logistics, C4ISR, training and doctrine.  He was in fact exactly what the Union needed at the beginning of the war.  But when it came time to fight, he was sub par and dangerous.  The political level had to replace him and find the right general for the right time: Grant.
Grant would have been a disaster in the first half of the war.  He would have fought like Lee and likely broken the north.  Lee was arguably the wrong general for the South too.  Aggressive to a fault. Slavish adherence to the offensive.  He took an incredibly motivated military and basically broke it without achieving victory.  Now a strong argument can be made that he knew he was up against the clock and was essentially trying to destroy the Union before they inevitably grew too strong but there are holes in this.  However, the Confederacy never solved for stuff like logistics or C4ISR over the same period - that is a major strategic shortfall.
Regardless, generals are very often terrible in a moment other than their own.  Most of the wartime generals of WW2 would have been horrible in small dirty wars.  Good generals in low intensity or peacetime often fail in wartime.  The trick is to put the right general in the chair at the right time. I do not know what the dynamic is with the UA but clearly the politically level has decided they need someone else for what comes next…we will have to see if they are right.

Oh c’mon, that is selective analysis to the point of deliberately ignoring parts of that war to fit a narrative.  Why did  all those Central Powers “crumble”.  It wasn’t decisive offensive action, we know that much.  WW1 was largely a positional war of attrition on multiple fronts.  Both sides tried operational offensives and suffered horrendous losses.  The bulk of the overall effects delivered in that war were defensive and attritional, particularly by the allies after about 1917.  Of course there were final offensives once the Germans collapsed but these were coup de grace after they Germans had essentially buckled under the weight of loses.  In fact the naval blockade, a largely defensive action in Sea Control, led to strategic pressures that ultimately broke Germany.
The fact that one finishes with offensive action does not negate the massive effects the defensive actions had in the course of any war.  Hell in this war Kharkiv and Kyiv were only possible after the RA had been decisively defensively defeated.  The fact that the UA drove through the RA at the end of all that is not a “see told ya, offensive” moment.
Poor man’s victory - BS.  History of warfare is filled with counter examples.  In fact Exhaustion is one of the major strategies of warfare since freakin Sun Tzu.  The Cold War was one massive monument to defensive containment actions.  We did not even finish that one with an operational offensive.  That binary framework did not serve is the past and it definitely does not serve in this war.  Ukraine may very well win this war by simply not losing.  Their “consolation” is remaining an independent nation free to chart their own destiny.
”That dog won’t hunt!”  Would be the English saying.

Zaluzhny actually admitted that he didn't deliver when in his Economist interview he called it his own personal mistake that he underestimated Russia's ability to regenerate force and resist the Ukrainian offensive this summer. With the fate of the nation at stake, I think it's pretty clearly Zelensky's role to decide if Zaluzhny should stay on the job and the latter making public statements about what should be done in opposition to the administration he serves isn't making that any easier. What politics there is *should* be in Zelensky's corner. Zaluzhny...like MacArthur as mentioned above...is inserting himself into that arena and will have only himself to blame if that gets him fired. 
Note: I say all of the above while liking and respecting Zaluzhny but generals don't get to call the shots in the kind of government I want to support. 
 

This just popped up.  Haven't read the details yet.
 

I have to agree with Billdc 100%. For the most part, politians should set the limits, and then get the hell out of the way and let the military minds guide and control the battle. As I see it, most of the issues I saw during the Vietnam Conflict, a strictly political conflict, were caused by the politicians butting in and controlling the military. Before that, the most public incident was during the Korean Conflict and involved MacArthur publicly challenging Truman, and was removed from command because of it.
The Zalushny sounds almost identical to MacArthur in that he is publicly challenging his Commander in Chief. I expect it will have the same result if he doesn’t back off.

There are several layers to it. In crude terms, it's that Zalushny has a different vision going forward for how to fight the war that includes, inter alia, very large mobilization and an emphasis on drone warfare. He also feels quite comfortable talking outside the chain of command and in public to attempt to make his vision of the war apply going forward. Zelensky has what could be described as a more political take on the war but really it seems like the biggest issue is that he believes that the civilian primacy over the Ukrainian commander should be complete. It should not be a competition, whatever tensions may exist within the relationship and Zaluzhny has to some degree made it one...even if with pretty good intentions. 
I tend to agree with Zalushny's assessment in military terms but I think in the long run Zelensky has the right of it. If Ukraine is really going to reject the "Eurasian" model Putin sells than it has to fully buy into elected, civilian control of the security services writ large.
My 2 hryvnia. 
 

Getting into part of what I do for a living here and actually, the job driverless car sensors and software must handle is literally the opposite of an autonomous suicide drone. The former must navigate every highly complex driven environment and avoid hitting anything. An autonomous suicide drone can be geofenced and must just hit the likeliest right thing most of the time. It's an order of magnitude easier. 

True, problem is context.  Machines do not understand situational context.  Example, we clipped a guy in Afghanistan for holding a cellphone in the wrong place for too long.  That took human judgement to make righteous because we understood context.  Personally, my hardest moment was not shooting a guy, and I made that snap judgement based on the look in his eyes and bunch of non-verbal queues (which turned out to be a very good thing).  
Machines are not set up for that.  Is that guy digging a hole for an IED or water - a bunch of factors roll into determining which is which.  Machines are not there yet. 

"A whale is a shark built to Admiralty specifications."
-Old Royal Navy saying.

"A whale is a shark built to Admiralty specifications."
-Old Royal Navy saying.

"A whale is a shark built to Admiralty specifications."
-Old Royal Navy saying.

"A whale is a shark built to Admiralty specifications."
-Old Royal Navy saying.

The worry is that once western defence companies get involved, and NATO procurement tendencies, you're going to see the $1000 drone made in a shed in Ukraine with an RPG warhead strapped on be replaced with a custom-built state of the art $20,000 drone that does the same job maybe 5% better.

Ironically, the US tactical & operational solution to the Pacific assaults was mass - massed fires and massed infantry. 
The strategic solution seems like it was to out-tech the Japanese at a rapid rate of increment. The gigantic, expansive and (relatively) efficient R&D base allowed the US to develop and implement steadily better Op/Tac solutions at an exponentially increasing rate - but the Japanese R&D base was limited by materials, culture and politics. So going from near parity in tech to a large cumulative op/tech advantage became inevitable - with the ultimate strategic advantage detonating over Hiroshima.
Japan by contrast lagged the US early and consistently, further exacerbating the difference in pace and depth of their respective R/D/I cycles. The death of the Japanese Navy (and its Naval Air Force) as an ocean going force was a direct result of this technological race.
Innovate the fastest or die.
WRT to Ukraine, it has a very innovative, lively and imaginative R&D culture, lead by a relatively democratic government, coupled with an extremely motivated workforce. With sufficient support they could probably outpace Russia in several important areas. They already heave, but the scale isn't there yet.
Russia, to me, has a comparatively less actively innovative and more sluggish cycle, burdened with inefficient political process and heavy corruption but it does have enormous scaling potential and state direction can really push hard in certain areas giving heavy advantages (eg air, manpower).
I suspect that until Ukraine can accelerate past Russia's RDI cycle it will never really win/be safe. It'll just achieve an unstable state, vulnerable to external shocks and imbalances. To some extant it appears to be in that framing already.
The true power of the EU is always economic. If/when UKR can properly tap that power and expand on it will when it becomes truly secure. Work like Rheinmetall setting up plants in Ukraine is a good signifier but its the research area that really needs to be developed, modernised and expanded. UKR drone progression and their Amazing Adventures in AD show just how goddamn fast and hard they can work.
To circle back to the Pacific - the early assault failures lead to rapid development and implementation of solutions (both technical & organizational) in time for the next island. Each assault iterated on the previous until by the end the US could contemplate invading Japan proper, a truly insane proposition. But they thought they could do it and I personally feel they would have eventually, bloodily, "won". 
Ukraine could potentially outstrip Russia in the RDI cycle, but its still pretty far off. When it does I think we'll see a gradual climb then a sudden and drastic shift to offensive primacy.
TBH, that's when the truly scary **** is going to start happening...

That's a great point. It took, for example, 40-odd years to unpack and deconstruct "blitzkreig" from a mythically wondrous imagined doctrine to its actual reality as a marketting elevator pitch. And, frankly, 40 years after that epiphany there are still plenty of folks who continue to prefer the marketting take.
One concern I have about analysis of this war is availability bias: drone feeds are new and exciting and ubiquitous, but are they representative? I wonder if we give drone's effectiveness too much weight due simply the the large supply of feed videos.

Bias…exactly.  Something is definitely happening, that much I can feel in my bones…exactly what remains kinda opaque.  What do we actually “know?”  Well:
- Mass does not seem to work like it used to.  ISR appears to be having a disproportionate effect on mass.  This is not just drone feeds but AARs and deeper reporting.  Weird densities, weird groupings and sometimes just bizarre packaging.  These all point to some serious pressures on military mass but the exact mechanisms remain largely unknown.
- C4ISR, first war in human history with these levels of C4ISR.  This effecting a lot more than just mass.  How deep this rabbit hole goes remains unclear.
- Artillery is still doing the majority of the killing.  We also know that “precision” appears to be making artillery more effective in rounds per effect (but that is still not proven), but both sides are still using an ungodly amount of fires, as demonstrated by ammo strain.
- Heavy is in trouble.  I think we have seen enough indicators that heavy forces are struggling. Enough reports of tanks and mech being held back or blunted have surfaced to call that one.  But is this forever, or just a temporary condition?
- Unmanned is definitely a thing and is accelerating.  But at this point I am still not sure how much is strike, and how much is ISR.  If we see some sort of data on just how much damage drones are actually doing in comparison to artillery it would help immensely.
- Corrosive warfare (or something like it) is a thing, but we still do not know its full parameters, assumptions, constraints and restraints.  We have seen it happen more than once but “why” it happened is still a bit of a mystery.  Was it projected friction, or was it simply Russian over-extension?
- Denial.  Definitely on the board, particularly in the air.  Some pretty good analysis on this out there.
- Deep Strike.  Appears to be a new form of manoeuvre.  Formerly it has been used to shape and set preconditions but en masse it appears as though it can directly create results, not simply enable them.
I am probably missing something but you will note most of these are only partially visible.  We have seen some possible indicators but no one has been able to pull up the entire UA summer offensive and show that 90% of the time they were using micro-groupings because if they massed above company level they were spotted and hit 82% of the time.  Nor can we see that UAS have outstripped casualties caused by direct fires and artillery by 23%.  All we really see by this point are shadows and hints.
So while I have working theories, they are pretty fluid.  I am getting firmer on some aspects… but watch that will be when things shift again and they are totally blown out of the water.  There was no way the RA was supposed to withstand the Summer offensive.  They were a shattered force that had bled all over Bakhmut at WW1 loss levels…but here we are.
Anyway…strap in, this ride ain’t over yet.

I tell my students that militaries only really do three things:
- We carry out policy.
- We provide sound military advice to policy.
- We guarantee the policy making framework.
If you are doing anything else in uniform, you are heading towards a mutiny or coup. 
What we tend to forget is that #2 is absolutely critical to the integrity of the entire scheme.  And frankly we fail at it far too often. 

Isn't it great that we live in a time where third-person plural possessive can spark social controversy?  

Or a smart opponent who has been watching SOP of the base for long enough to work out the security flaws.
Or some one on the base passing information to the wrong people.
I would love to blame Russia for everything but this one seems a bit of a stretch.
For sure Iran, China, North Korea and Russia will be learning off one another but how quickly and what lessons are passed on is open to discussion. 
It would be a gold mine of intelligence if the west could spy on those WhatsApp discussions...

Or Crazy Ivan's....

If the reporting that the lethal drone attack on Tower 22 is correct then the Shahed followed in an American surveillance drone in order to evade detection and interception. That was either blind dumb luck or lessons being learnt by the Russians are being passed on to Iranian client militias in the ME. 
I'm not a big believer in luck. 

I think the “ramping up strategy” is probably going as fast as it possibly can.  One cannot simply dump weapons and equipment on a nation and voila they have a modern military ready for complex offensive operations on a battlefield we can barely recognize anymore.  DPICM would not have made a real difference as there was still a limit to how many guns the UA could effectively field.  After Kharkiv the limiting factor was likely UA logistics and an ability to support deep exploitation.  Followed by force ready units to actually be the force to do it.
It is too easy to point fingers and cry “bad strategy” without being to see all the elements in tension.  There is western capacity, which is limited based on about 30 years of defence spending and policy - there are limits to how much we can give and then still support.  Then there is Ukrainians ability to effectively absorb.  Building these complex systems takes a lot of moving parts and skills that the UA had in limited numbers.  How long does it take to train logisticians and maintenance?  Technical trades?  Engineers?  Gunners that know how to employ DPICM effectively - it is not simply “point towards enemy”.  Sure, the US could have sent a thousand M1s; they would be parked in Poland right now with no spare parts or a Ukrainian ability to maintain and fuel them.
War is not CM.  In game players see the last 60 mins of a massive system that takes years to build, months to field and weeks/days to get into the action.  Right now we are seeing ammunition shortfalls but these are political or the simple fact that manufacturing has to catch up with demand.
Kerch bridge - so now we can talk about the next level, options.  First off the Ukrainians do have the capability to hit that bridge.  The Storm Shadow system has the reach (the thing can hit that bridge from freakin Kharkiv) and punch (it has twice the warhead weight compared to ATACMs).  But Ukraine does not seem interested in hitting that bridge, again.  Why?  Well my guess is that the bridge really is not critical right now.  Other than an annoyance, Ukraine does not have an ability to exploit the pressure dropping that bridge would provide - it offers no options to justify the risk/cost.  It may feel good but there is a lot of other stuff Ukraine can use that weapon system to hit.  Ukraine does seem to be comfortably ramping up the strikes into Russia and Crimea - a submarine hurts a lot more than a bridge right now.  They are clearly using a different payoff calculation.
Right now we are in the position that the best we can do is likely sustain Ukrainian defence and denial.  Offence will be sporadic deep strikes and have to wait until something gives.  The RA may buckle.  Massed unmanned is looking promising.  Maybe a combination of systems.  As to the rest…well we have to wait and see.

I think it goes beyond political correctness, which was really an exercise in re-labeling and taking into account multidimensional sensitivities.  This is something else.  My working theory is that it is following patterns seen after every major pandemic - a re-evaluation on a broad and deep social scale.  During the pandemic social value paradoxes were laid bare and felt just about everywhere.  Grocery store clerks became front line critical staff while CEOs were stuffed into Zoom boxes with the rest of us - is an example. 
That exposure laid bare all sorts of "hey wait a minutes" that coalesced together incredibly fast.  After the Black Death there was a massive social renegotiation as labour realized that is value had fundamentally changed.  1918 (plus WW1) gender and class value shifted dramatically.
So here we are again as what determines "value" is shifting under our feet.  History shows it can be a pretty bumpy ride but then things settle down and we adapt to new social frameworks.