billbindc

I was making this point in a discussion elsewhere yesterday: Russian masses of dumb arty being fired out of increasingly worn out tubes is an incredibly inefficient way to project combat power and getting more inefficient by the round. Ukrainian HIMARS/155 with American ISR is an incredibly efficient way to project combat power and is getting even more efficient by attacking the supply and command structure of the Russian Army. It is a different war without those systems.

My assessment would be that Putin's travel overseas and/or the preparation for it gave them a better look in some way. Erdogan certainly isn't our buddy but the Turks would certainly share that kind of information with the US.

MI6 head said the same thing at Aspen today. I'd take it tot he bank.

The simplest reason is that a damaged bridge can still be retreated across by the RA if it leaves its heavy equipment behind while a resupply forward across that bridge becomes quite difficult. Could be for an imminent action or simply very efficient battlefield shaping.

Notable this morning that there are only about 7 large commercial cargo ships in the estuary and anchorage near Kherson. It doesn't look like Russia has any large dedicated seaborne resupply in action and now that's probably an increasingly dangerous proposition.

Yes. The historical preface to the events of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.

If you have not read The Comanche Empire by Pekka Hämäläinen, I cannot recommend it enough.

In order to refrain from a partisan bun fight, let's just say that most of them vote that way even when the larger GOP caucus is supportive of a natsec bill. It's mostly driven by the political considerations of their niche.

To give you a sense of the actual politics in the US vs the media take du jour, the related House vote for Finland and Sweden joining NATO:

What is the state of supply for Ukrainian citizens on the West bank of the river if the Kherson bridges are blown? I would imagine it is already bad and would be a lot worse if there are weeks between that event and a successful Ukrainian offensive. There are political considerations to be met here that go beyond the immediate military benefit.

What's weird about the current wave of concern trolling on Ukraine support is that there's little actual political debate about it. It's not really an issue for anyone except the extremes on the margins of either party and not a single serious candidate that I know of is emphasizing the issue significantly in their campaign. I'm sure there's somebody but it's just not a hot issue. If I had to guess, this is more of an media dynamic. Not much has been happening that is going to generate high clicks and so editors start to look around for another angle on the story. Folks like Ratigan and Zacharia latch onto that to pump their relevance. You can see above where I posted the counter reaction already coming from Fiona Hill and others pushing back.

Everyone talks about the 1917 Spring Offensive as Brezinski does, but I wonder if what we are seeing will be more like the Kaisershlacht in the West in 1918. This Russian Army is not quite the shambles of the Czarist one of 1917 and it is more in the situation of the Germany in 1918. The enemy is getting stronger, trade sanctions are quickly going to wreck the ability to fight on the home front and what qualitative advantages its armed forces enjoyed earlier in the war are being overtaken by the technology and training being brought to bear against it. So, it has been attempting to militarily force a cessation of hostilities through an offensive that is doing little but consuming combat power for no real gain. Is the end similar? Maybe. But it gets there in a different way with other options for the post war situation.

There's been a drum beat of "time is running out for us" language out of Fareed Zacharia, and others in US media. This clearly activated Fiona Hill and others to respond and it's a message folks on this forum will understand completely: https://nadinbrzezinski.medium.com/logistics-collapse-945984f5d48e https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/07/14/putin-russia-war-fiona-hill-future-west-nato/

Automation of moving vehicles that must do complicated tasks is never simple or straightforward, part bajillion: https://breakingdefense.com/2022/07/exclusive-air-force-scraps-b-21-drone-wingman-concept/

This simply isn't true. Full and true self driving outside of a geofenced environment is far off. And then of course there are the problems associated with security, weather, chance accident or flat tire that cannot be dealt with easily without a driver in the vehicle. That's why you still have a pilot on an airliner. To sum up, Wired Magazine is a pretty great fanzine for Tesla but don't rely on it for real world analysis.

Exactly. And if you look at the behavior and culture of the Soviet security elites, *that* is a long running tendency. Operation RYaN under Andropov, the Great Terror, etc were all driven by the conspiratorial culture at the core of Russian elites that took power in 1917. When it is in the ascendant, you can't argue with it. You simply have to defeat it.

Yes and Putin's clique badly miscalculated that the pull out from Afghanistan would severely limit American willingness to get involved in Ukraine. A pretty classic error of the poorer player at the poker table misunderstanding the motivations and limits of a far richer one.

My understanding is that the US gov't was aware of Russian invasion plans at the latest in April of 2021.

Yes. This was started because Putin saw the situation as existential to the Russian state and as Steve notes above, now for Putin personally, it is as well. He can't lose and expect to survive. Patrushev and the inner circle might not either. And because of their blinkered mindset, it's an existential fight for Ukraine and NATO too. Even if there is a peace treaty tomorrow, this will remain unfinished business until the Russian side has been completely defeated. Happy Friday?

Parking garages a bad place to put an ammo dump you say? Well, the Russian Army has a solution!

I think Putin's been pulling the trigger for a long time in line with a fairly traditional KGB methodology. He attacked when he believed he was strong enough to do so and subverted/suborned when he could not or if that approach seemed to be more efficient. As to why now...I think it's pretty clear at this point that a state that is afraid to engage in a general mobilization during a big and so far popular shooting war is a state that doesn't think it's very securely holding the reins of power. Russia's panic over the various color revolutions on its periphery also points in the same direction. So, why now? Because they thought they could and in their paranoia they thought they didn't have much choice.

Seriously, this is a dog's breakfast for China. NATO is entirely united. Taiwan has come to realize that invasion is far more than theoretical and a successful defense is quite possible. The entire US military establishment is reorienting to peer on peer warfare at a far faster pace than the Pentagon could have dreamed of (they got an extra $58 billion for projects they didn't ask for in the current budget). China's Asian opponents are solidifying into a quasi-Nato-ish alliance and any possibility of Russia forcefully distracting the US from Taiwan's defense has evaporated. And all of this has happened 4-5 years before China might have been capable of pulling it off in an unchanged environment. Now...not so much: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-state-dept-approves-potential-sale-air-defense-support-taiwan-pentagon-2022-04-05/

"Washington and its NATO partners more and more often resort in international relations to the policy of blackmail and crude pressure. They try to impudently force their will on other countries and nations. Imperialist bigwigs put forward adventurist doctrines of either a "limited" nuclear war or a war with the use of only conventional, non-nuclear weapons." Great Putin quote, right? Actually...that's from Yuri Andropov in the early 1980's. It's tempting to look at Russian history in long form or at the numbers but that often leads to pretty tendentious ideas about "national character' (don't get me started on the supposed Chinese penchant for long term planning). I would argue it's better to look at the formative experiences of the current political elite in Russia. For the most part they were part of the nomenklatura and security services at a time of rapidly declining Russian power and were led by profoundly paranoid people like Andropov. This was intertwined with an approach to the economic underpinnings of national power that vies with the Khmer Rouge and China's Great Leap Forward for hapless ineptitude. *That* is the school they learned statecraft in. If you want to find 'reasons' you need look no further than the fact that Putin and his clique simply didn't see any other options...going as far back as the early 2000's when a pivot to modernity and out of the paranoid security state model would have been a fairly obvious transition.

I would argue that monarchy and communism *were* much more powerful than Putin's vague blood and soil and siloviki ideology and they weren't enough either. WWI Russia collapsed and WWII Russia had the spectre of national annihilation Ukraine faces today. If Russia keeps it together it won't be driven by anything other than political/social inertia and that's a hell of a thing to base a dictatorship in a war on.

Dictatorships are far more dependent on apathy and disinterest than they are on enthusiasm. As above.