billbindc

Tooze is acceptable.

There are whole layers of the process of weapon systems delivery that are happening below the surface not least navigating the differing stances of NATO countries, procurement, domestic American politics, logistics, capability and the negotiated behavior of China in avoiding any wholesale materiel support to Russia from that quarter. In addition, the United States had to make on-the-fly assessments of likely Russian reactions during a hot war. As you pointed out, we really don't know what was happening...but one thing you can be sure of is that close calls btw NATO and Russia happened for more often in the first year of the war than is currently public. If Musk were part of or even attempting to approach the issue in that way, he would deserve some leeway. But we know that's not what happened. We know that he took a call from the Russian Ambassador to the US, listened to a line of propaganda clearly designed to foil Ukrainian operations he was already supporting with Starlink and chose to aid the Russians in that effort. He has told three different versions of the story just this week.

It's not a mist of suspicions....Musk has quite clearly demonstrated that he will take his own interests into account before any national interest. He has actively promoted the idea that Ukraine should surrender territory to Russia and that Taiwan should submit to the PRC. Elon Musk is *not* our friend.

It is nice to see us getting back to the precise grog-ness this forum excels in. Well done.

Joining you on this. It's like arguing with a bot.

There are plenty of lengthy posts on this very board covering that very topic. Do your own research. I'm not your assistant.

The "proof" of that is everything they did in the lead up to the war that you seem completely uninterested in learning anything about and the string of non sequiturs you've appended above makes that entirely obvious.

Fully endorse this. The claim the Biden administration somehow blinked is, let's be entirely clear, idiotic. It played every card it could play within the political/military/strategic restraints that it could in order to avert the invasion. That the Russians decided to go va banc is on them, not on everyone who tried to stop it.

I was wondering this exact thing. If Ukraine simply maintains a grinding bite and hold offense, how much does the weather really affect the pace?

My understanding is that higher production doesn't begin until 2025 (for Lockheed anyway).

There is far too little attention paid to the interplay between Chinese actions and US aid to Ukraine. In this particular case, I suspect that the shoe that dropped was North Korean aid to Russia. Kim quite literally exists at the courtesy of China. He can't do his banking or feed his country without the acquiescence of Beijing. In the last week it has become clear that Xi has agreed to let him send arms to Russia. The US was holding back ATACMS in order to have a card to play to stop that sort of thing from happening. Now that China has decided to allow it, the US is letting them go.

I call it Tuberville-ism.

As usual, William Gibson saw this coming a long time ago: "They sent a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT. He didn't see it coming. The last he saw of India was the pink stucco facade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel."

The one simple trick to understanding Musk is that he will do whatever he perceives to be in his self interest. Obviously, letting Ukraine use Starlink endeared him to the US government...upon whose contracts several of his companies depend. But he also has large Tesla manufacturing interests in China and that government was expressing strong concerns about Western aid to Ukraine at that time. Much of his wealth is tied to Tesla and it wouldn't take more than a Russian interlocutor mentioning Putin's conversations with Xi to put a deep chill into him. The situation now, as I understand it, is that the USG locked him in contractually to avoid this sort of thing reoccurring but I would imagine the scrutiny of who at Starlink knows what about Ukrainian operations and who they may then be talking to will be going into overdrive. Musk's wealth is a pretty big vessel but in the end, the USA is the world's biggest glacier. He avoids running against it or he sinks.

It would be idiotic to bash any country on this. The US threw it's weight in early and now the EU is stepping up. It's *great* news that Europe is leaning in this hard and will be understood to be quite bad news in Moscow.

Visual data plus total loss on tanks that were pulled from the field plus wear and tear is going to look a lot more like the Ukraine number than the Oryx number. Perhaps higher.

Stream of semi-consciousness...

I like and respect Alperovitch but I would be very wary of single reason explanations of this sort. For instance, it's fairly obvious that Prigozhin's ability to defend himself from the vengeance of Shoigu, etc (even if were pretending Putin wouldn't attempt it himself) was dependent on money and power that Wagner's continued, profitable existence provided. The struggle over those assets was a factor but only in the sense that they wanted to deprive Prigozhin of that resource so that he couldn't threaten them again. To call it simply a business dispute is like calling a potential war involving Taiwan a fight over computer chips. Here, Alperovitch is missing the forest for the trees.

In 1994, Sergei Yushenkov was telling people in the diplomatic community that Russia was entering what he called its "Weimar" period. He was subsequently assassinated for, inter alia, investigating the apartment bombings that solidified Putin's power and preparing to run in 2003's national elections with the Liberal Party. All of this is to say that Russia had an opportunity and a choice that was squandered/made two decades ago. The machine will run until it breaks...whether that's in Melitopol or Tartu.

The oldest and newest question in foreign policy: how does one deal with a late Ottoman nuclear power?

When you look at the conditions and imperatives even a Russian 'win' at this point would entail, breaking themselves on this rock looks inevitable. Moscow would have successfully and painfully executed an anschluss only to buy themselves an Afghanistan and a political milieu demanding more of the same against....NATO.

I know him too. Great guy.

There are clearly deconfliction channels open as per below and leaders like Modi and Erdogan act as channels too. Most of the premise of the argument being directed at you are risibly bad. https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3330335/readout-of-secretary-of-defense-lloyd-j-austin-iiis-phone-call-with-russian-min/#:~:text=Pat Ryder%3A,airspace over the Black Sea.

There is no credible devil’s advocate position. As you note, Russia simply will not negotiate in good faith. Offering to come to the table now simply weakens support for arming Ukraine now and moves any starting point of future negotiations in Russia’s favor. It’s also an entirely false position to claim that Russia must be defeated root and branch in order for the war to effectively end. Kim Il Sung wasn’t rooted out of a bunker in Pyongyang and that war, despite strong support from Russia and China, ended in an armed peace. A stalemate on something close to Ukrainian terms is a pretty likely option at this point and it will come when Russia has exhausted its ability to continue.

Yeah...Luttvak is one of those guys who vultures off of whatever the latest natsec grift there is and manages to be taken seriously by far too many people who should know better. A Valdai specimen, par excellence.