billbindc

All of that plus I'd add that if it is a piece of private work it still is indicative of something. Losing wars loosen the rules in a place like Russia. Players in the influence/oligarch game sense that the folks upstream in the power structure don't have the bandwidth to manage them as intensively...or to punish them for transgressions. Scores are easier to settle 'privately' and useful scapegoats (in this case, the Ukrainian intelligence services) are easy to blame. It is a portent.

Well, well, well…

Ah…traveling as I read and missed it. Thanks.

Is there an assessment out there that looks at gun barrel depletion in relation to ammunition expenditure for the Russian army?

Does he account of the effect on plausible sized C4 charges left opportunistically on ammunition stockpiles?

It’s a matter of record that Biden was pretty stridently for not doing the surge in 2009 and pulling out shortly thereafter. It wasn’t news then because he was very clear with WH staff that he would bury anyone who embarrassed the Obama administration by making his disagreement public. So it’s fair to say he was ready to do it in policy terms and with a son who died at least tangentially from service in the region, he felt it was a moral imperative to do it as well. All of that said, I don’t think the Afghan pullout was done in reaction to Russia’s plans for Ukraine as the withdrawal was in progress well before Putin’s intentions were clear. But…there may be an argument that the one distracted from the other in the sense that the Biden teams was looking well past Afghanistan while the rest of Washington was still caught up in it. That’s my personal take and it will be awhile before the inside story will become publicly available.

Steve, you really need a like button.

Mea culpa.

So now not non compos mentis? Ok then….

Rather than ‘nonsense’, perhaps a more useful way to prove the point would be to note that what the Biden administration is doing very strongly projects very specific policies that are very particular to Biden over his political history…and often very much not what the ‘permanent establishment’ often prefers. Afghanistan is one very salient example but there are others. That simply doesn’t happen in a caretaker administration.

If you actually think that American allies would commit the way they have to supporting Ukraine to the degree they have without the assurance that the US President is fully committed and able then boy do I have some Crimean time shares to sell you. Your first graf repeats the same error you made earlier. Nobody is claiming that they had complete certainty of the invasion because nobody could until one person, Putin, made the final decision and set the Russian armed forces in motion. If you read the Washington Post tic tock on the run up to the invasion, it’s very clear that the Biden administration thought it highly likely and jawboned/planned/armed accordingly. That’s not “suspected something was going to happen”. That’s intelligence gathering, analysis and action. Thus, it wasn’t a case of “fool me once, shame on me”. It was a case of “you fooled me once, now I’m going to fool myself”.

A lot of analysis in the margins comes down to personal inclination. I kept hearing from journalists and others working on Russia variations on “But it would be equivalent to Czar Nick’s decision to go into WWI!”. And that’s a pretty good take I think and it fit their very reasonable world view. Yours was similarly well informed by Putin’s track record. My own inclination is to avoid reading decision makers and be more swayed by what they do and what they commit. I wasn’t totally sure but that approach worked out this time. Let’s hope it’s wrong on Taiwan.

I just finished my beer on Balticka Street and I can tell you…your emotional take fits with everything I’ve seen in Prague this week. Slava, etc.

Situations like this are driven, very directly, by the occupant of the Oval Office for the simple fact that engaging major allies to take on the possibility of a major was is not something another government will take at all seriously unless the principal is clearly behind it. Remember also that Biden is the first POTUS since GHW Bush who came into office with zero delusions about who he was dealing with. Bush Jr saw something in Putin’s eyes, Obama was convinced Russia was not powerful enough to matter and Trump had an obvious affinity for Putin’s methods and manner. Biden had watched things develop for more than 15 years, had witnessed Putin weaponizing own family against him. Is Biden deciding on what HIMARS hit what? Of course not. It’s not his lane. But he is very much in charge of the overall course of the US effort.

I think this gets directly to the reason this time was different. The question that was being asked, correctly, by the Biden administration was “What are they going to do, after all of this political/military/economic investment in the build up if they *don’t* go?”. Neither France or Germany could answer that question in any reasonable way…which should have been the point at which they realized what was happening.

The US didn’t have “proof” because that’s not the way it works. It had strong intelligence from many sources within the Russian military and government pointing in that direction while the shambolic nature of the preparation gave naysayers something to point to if they were so inclined. I get it…the Iraq War was just one of the times where the US pushed something that turned out to be wrong and it is reasonable for other nations to be skeptical. This was not one of those times. The troop deployments were there to see. The statements by the Russian government on where their thinking was vis a vis a continued Ukrainian state were clear. France and Germany simply didn’t want to believe it because they didn’t like what they were hearing. That’s ok too! But the Biden team got it right and deserve every bit of credit for how they prepped the diplomatic ground and provided (and continue to provide) materiel support.

Been in Germany for the last week. Ukraine flags pop up routinely and my anecdotal conversations with folks have routinely featured statements about how they want the German government to do more. “We’re embarrassing” was one representative comment.

"munitions for long range" HIMARS and NASAMS. We'll see but don't be surprised if the UA's range suddenly increases. The US is all in and will stay that way for the foreseeable future.

From reading DefMon3's map, it's pretty clear that Russia can't be sure which bank of the Dnieper the Ukrainian attack will come from...and with interior lines, Ukraine has the luxury of keeping it that way. And for Ukraine, the best case scenario is to pull some of that reserve over to the right bank to cut it off or to double blind them into not sending them over the river at all. The RuA has a lot of unpalatable choices to make right now.

Live by the post-truth hybrid, die by the post-truth hybrid. Putin can't just call it a win because he went against large parts of his own kvost to start this war while very intensely activating the radical nationalists in the process. Parts of the West might fall for a disputed tko but *they* won't. The moderates lost the cosmopolitan world and the radicals didn't get the Russkiy Mir.

I think the logic is to do *something* even if it's miles away from something legitimately strategic. Why? Because Putin's Russia has lived by hybrid war doctrine for so long that they don't quite seem to recognize yet that this war isn't one. So they are banking on simply keeping it going, looking busy and signaling bottomless cruelty in the expectation that that will be enough...with some help from frozen German industries this winter...to break up NATO, get Trump reelected, etc. Forlorn? Certainly. But it fits their world view.

If Ukraine is pulling a Pas de Calais in Kherson, it's certainly not stinting on the misdirection.

Is killing people in general counter terrorism? No. But killing Zawahiri and tying him to the Haqqani network definitively certainly is. But I think more to the point is the reailty that remaining in Afghanistan wasn't particularly useful counter terrorism and would have been a distraction from the far more important conflict in Ukraine.

Appreciate it. Going to be some toasts around this town tonight. And the people who were screaming that the US couldn't do over-the-horizon counter terrorism <cough...Kilcullen...cough...CNN...cough> aren't looking so hot right now.

Worth noting: a significant proportion of the economic pain associated with the Russian invasion of Ukraine is about speculation rather than scarcity.