billbindc

An energy independent China is a very long way away. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/chinas-changing-oil-strategy-and-its-foreign-policy-implications/

Some key foundational truths to consider: 1. Nobody ever honestly thought Afghanistan was a vital interest. 2. Everybody sees peace in Europe as a vital interest. 3. Nobody believes that Russia will stick to any peace deal that it is in any shape to challenge. 4. Everybody sees what happens in Ukraine as linked to what China believes it can do in re to Taiwan. I am quite sure there will be unhappiness this winter in Europe. I'm sure that attention will wax and wane. But Putin made the cardinal mistake of creating a situation in which the geopolitical incentives and penalties are entirely obvious and inescapable to his enemies. Worse, a successful Ukrainian effort is possible if only Poland and the US give it wholehearted support. So, I get the pessimism and I don't disagree with the stressors you identify but none of them counterbalance the need to stop Russia now or make sure China doesn't use the precedent later.

Language is a *very* slippery stand in for political identity: https://euromaidanpress.com/2022/03/29/absolute-majority-supports-ukrainian-being-the-only-state-language-in-ukraine-poll/

KFOR is already established. Serbia is going to get spanked hard if it tries to invade Kosovo and Russia isn’t going to be able to do much about it.

What I have learned from very deep dives into self driving AI is that human beings are insanely good at pattern recognition. I am pretty sure that cars, war and everything else that is not a closed system will remain human dominant for a long time to come.

Getting into my professional lane here...and actually, "self driving" AI isn't really safer. There's a big bias in the numbers where if the driver intervenes to try and stop an AI created accident, they often report the accident as driver initiated. Tesla is egregiously guilty of this. While that may seem off topic, it gets at how profoundly difficult these sorts of problems are. As an engineer once described it to me...it's not so hard to get to 85% effectiveness but every percentage toward real self driving on un-geofenced roads after that becomes exponentially harder and without near perfection, it's simply not going to fly socially or economically. I strongly suspect any attempt to "quantify war" would face a similarly steep gradient with the similar issue that failure has huge real world consequences.

Add to this that there many good reasons for Zelensky to downplay the likelihood of invasion, not least the Ukrainian economy and the fairly large contingent in the West at that point prepared to believe that Russia was being provoked.

The bridge situation is quite interesting given that reports are that only one bridge across the Inhulets is fully functioning. If that all bears out then the right bank of Dnieper in the Kherson front has been effectively isolated and bisected.

A salutary correction to the idea that Russia is winning the economic war of attrition: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4167193

Precisely. Tolkien wrote an allegory about power, not war.

I'm pretty certain at this point that a significant block (in addition to reticence among conscripts) to mobilization is that Russia simply can't organize the equipping and arming of a larger mobilization. While it's clear that their capacity to train is nominal at best, I don't think that would stop the apparat from producing something like the numbers that are being demanded from the center if it were possible gather up some muzhiks, jam them into a uniform and hand them a gun.

The way I think to look at it is that Russia under Putin isn’t working through the steps of some grand plan. That’s a mythology that the West projects on to him that he’s more than happy to promote. Instead, this Russian government is lurching through these crises trying pretty much anything that seems like it might be useful at the moment. A case in point is the grain deal followed by bombing Odessa the next day. It’s senseless and counterproductive but given that nothing is working, the system is to try anything and everything.

4. Maybe Russia is having a hard time keep the gas flowing because sanctions are hurting their ability to maintain their energy industry output while they really, really need the money. That would explain the seeming schizophrenia of their behavior. They want to sell the gas, are having hard time maintaining the flow and don't want to admit it.

Don't Pions need *14* crewmen? How does this work in an army that's can't fill the ranks?

"Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command reported on July 24 that Ukrainian forces are firing on Russian transport facilities in Kherson Oblast to impede maneuverability and logistics support. This activity is consistent with support to an active counteroffensive or conditions-setting for an upcoming counteroffensive." Fog eating snow? https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-july-24

Cheryl Rofer and others have pointed out that the Russian nuclear arsenal uses plutonium that is not as pure as we use. That means that the 'pits' (i.e. the fusion part of the bombs) need to be remanufactured on a regular basis and that's a process that the USG can see occurring. In other words, there's plenty of evidence to suggest that those maintenance programs have been ticking over regularly since 1991. Does that conform with your observations?

I don’t know nearly enough about @panzermartin to call him either a fascist or a bolshevik. I’m saying accurately that he’s using the same cynical and ahistorical arguments they did in order to justify their atrocities. Is that uncomfortable? Well, I suppose I hope it is.

That isn’t anything more than a way for a political class or party to deny complicity in or responsibility for atrocity. It wasn’t any more persuasive when it was said by Die Sturmer in 1939 than when it is said by Jacobin in 2022. Arthur Koestler wrote a little book about it.

"This country was forced to fight a war nobody wanted" is about as persuasive as Hitler's claims that the German people had to fight to avoid "racial annihilation". This was a war of choice by ambitious old men running a kleptocracy who don't want to be known as broken old men who used to run a kleptocracy.

Precisely. NATO retains escalation dominance if Russia decides to go for a bigger war...which is probably the primary reason it has not.

My take is based on the idea that Russia might use nukes to in some sense 'win' in Ukraine...whether that's to force capitulation or retain conquered ground. I think in either case my point stands. I think it's vanishingly unlikely that Ukraine will attempt to attack into Russia and that the US would constrain that possibility completely so the home defense scenario of nuclear use won't come into play here.

The attractions of attaining nuclear capability are complicated but put very simply, it safeguards you from a large conventional attack. A US response to the Russian use of a nuke would vary depending on how one was used. A demonstration explosion somewhere? Probably only a diplomatic offensive to pare away Russia's last remaining sort-of-friends. A mass casualty strike on a Ukrainian city or a series of tactical strikes to destroy a Ukrainian Army? Then you could expect a conventional no fly/shoot down zone and the particular obliteration of whatever Russian unit was deemed responsible. Essentially, NATO can respond with overwhelming force conventionally to anything short of a theater nuclear launch and that's what it would do.

Unused nukes are stabilizing because it's not worth it for adversaries to risk provoking their use. Using them has the opposite effect of constraining opponents because they were exercising escalation discipline and you went nuclear anyway.

Actually, that last bit isn't really true. The best and most efficient use of a nuclear capability is to make it impossible for any other country to contemplate attacking you. We can see that right now in that Russia is able to fight with the sure knowledge that 250,000 Finns aren't going to surge over the border and overwhelm Saint Petersburg and Moscow. If Russia uses a nuke, even 'tactically', it has dramatically raised the stakes and costs for the states they are in conflict with and thus the cost/benefit analysis of escalation and direct retaliation.

Here's the problem with tactical nukes: Say you nuke Kharkiv...and the Ukrainians still say "**** you, sovoks" and keep fighting. You've just become the first nation to use nukes since WWII in a war of aggression. Your not-entirely-unfriendly trade partners India and China have been "no first use" states for half a century. There's every likelihood they will abandon you politically and end trading with you. The EU/US now have no compunction about a complete trade embargo if not an actual blockade and will ramp up conventional aid through the already high roof. For all of this you get a city you can't use and some local tactical gains. There's no calculation that makes it worthwhile if you don't believe the terror alone will get everyone to stop fighting you.