How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[sburke]

4 minutes ago, Billy Ringo said:

This discussion reminds me of that first economics class.

It reminds me of my first acid trip at a dead show.

[Huba]

36 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Not attainable?  The problem we have is that there are too many and they are often in conflict.  We are living in one right now, we call it Joint - which code for “integrated, empowered and expensive”.  The general theory is simple - if I have that better than an opponent, I will win.  Before that we had Mass (the quality of quantity), and before that we had Offensive Spirit (the bold press of the bayonet).  We have tomes of general theories, we call them doctrine.  It is picking the right one that appears to be the problem. 

Now if we are talking a universal general theory that will stand forever as a universal constant…that one is harder unless you go with very broad definitions - e.g. War is a violent contest of human Will.  Ok, most definitely applies to every war we have ever had…it also applies to a football game.  Nor does it leave much for strategy:. “We must have more Will, and better violence”…um, ok.  

Now the problem is that general theories evolve, they are dynamic.  Further the side that figures that out first has an enormous advantage.

If war is a human-based affair then if we get consensus, it is “true”.  It is when that truth runs into physical reality that things get strange, and physical reality is “true” in the scientific sense.

So we have a subjective human activity that sits on a foundation of objective physical reality, that is the tricky part but does not disqualify the pursuit for deeper or better general theory.

I guess my point is for everyone to take a short break from the OS feeds on this war and reflect on the last 1000 or so pages. Just looking at what happened to the Russians we can 1) confirm the theories we already knew (e.g. understand the war you are in, and be prepared to adapt to a new one), and 2) have seen some bent and possibly broken (e.g. Conventional Mass and Surprise).  We could bolt together all the things we have seen and discussed for the last 6 months into a new general theory of modern warfare, or at least How Not to Fight a Modern War that may only apply to this one, or it may uncover deeper general principles.  

I think that in fact we are (almost) agreeing here, just looking at the matter from a slightly different angle. IMO it could really be boiled down to this one highlighted sentence. Of course pursuit of ever better practical understanding of warfare is worth it - it is both useful, and for so inclined people, most fascinating (I'm out of my depth trying to add to it really, but the discussions here are absolutely A grade). Yet it is not possible to create a unified, general theory of it, from which we could deduce conclusions that wouldn't be faulty to some degree, as we can in science. We started the discussion by looking for fundamental units of measurement -  my point is that IMHO there really isn't one, cause we are talking about human activity here, not the physical objective reality.

Edited July 30, 2022 by Huba

[The_Capt]

2 minutes ago, Huba said:

We started the discussion by looking for fundamental units of measurement, IMHO there really isn't one, cause we are talking about human activity here, not the physical objective reality.

I think we are closer to agreement than not.  

The crux of disagreement is likely here.  We have metrics for other human activity - lots of them.  Demographics, migration, economics, views, likes, consumption, political activity, opinions, a person themselves (race, language, births, deaths, gender, orientation etc) and religion, just to name a few. We assign all sorts of metrics to human activity and interaction.  We create models, some more successful than others.

Given all those units of humanity, what makes the human interaction/activity of war lack a fundamental unit?  What makes it so special that it becomes immeasurable?  I disagree, mainly because it mystifies and obfuscates, when the gravity of the pursuit of war should demand the opposite.

As we have discussed, in fact what started this was a general accepted fundamental unit of a “kill”, employed even in this war.  It is constant in every war, but as I have described it is incomplete.  A kill may be just a representation of a more abstract relationship, like dollar to value. “Loss”, is definitely a fundamental metric of war, no one who has ever engaged in one has ever come out with some loss.  In fact one could say the primary pursuit in war is to “lose less”, or maybe “lose better”. Perhaps the fundamental unit is sacrifice itself as it is directly linked to Will.

No matter, I guess it is on me to figure out, or not, I did bring it up after all.

[alison]

51 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

 Now if we are talking a universal general theory that will stand forever as a universal constant…that one is harder unless you go with very broad definitions - e.g. War is a violent contest of human Will.  Ok, most definitely applies to every war we have ever had…it also applies to a football game.  Nor does it leave much for strategy:. “We must have more Will, and better violence”…um, ok.  

This is a discussion that is very interesting to me, because I consider myself generally nonconfrontational and easygoing, but I also believe that sometimes war is justified. Perhaps my layperson's opinion can provide some insight, at least into how people outside of the scholarship might think about it. Once again, I hope I'm not coming off as ignorant here.

I would define war as the strategy of deliberate and mutual destruction of opposing forces' assets, in order to achieve a declared goal. If there is no material destruction of assets, then it is just diplomacy or manipulation or intimidation. If only one side's assets are being destroyed, then it is vandalism, terrorism or another form of violent crime. If there is no declared goal, then it is just animalistic survival.

So the number of assets being destroyed could be measured as part of a victory condition, but only insofar as it actually moves the needle toward the declared goal. If killing more enemies or blowing up more of their buildings just results in depleting your own resources and not forcing a surrender, rout, or other tangible benefit that is a step toward the goal, then it's not a useful tactic and should not be measured as such.

[Huba]

1 minute ago, The_Capt said:

I think we are closer to agreement than not.  

The crux of disagreement is likely here.  We have metrics for other human activity - lots of them.  Demographics, migration, economics, views, likes, consumption, political activity, opinions, a person themselves (race, language, births, deaths, gender, orientation etc) and religion, just to name a few. We assign all sorts of metrics to human activity and interaction.  We create models, some more successful than others.

Given all those units of humanity, what makes the human interaction/activity of war lack a fundamental unit?  What makes it so special that it becomes immeasurable?  I disagree, mainly because it mystifies and obfuscates, when the gravity of the pursuit of war should demand the opposite.

But it is the other way around - none of the highlighted are a fundamental unit of any particular human activity. We just use them to attain some metrics for some purpose, but that's it. We don't measure "trade", "religion", "politics" with any intricate units of measure - we quantify elements of physical reality (mostly, say faith of a particular person is not it per se, but let's not split hairs), and that helps us understand/ talk about certain human activities. War is not different here, we could measure body count, but as well we can use square footage (if we fight for land) or "glorious deeds" (look at Kadyrov's Tik Tokers). There are trophies/ spoil of war which are easily measured as well.

[dan/california]

18 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

I think we are closer to agreement than not.  

The crux of disagreement is likely here.  We have metrics for other human activity - lots of them.  Demographics, migration, economics, views, likes, consumption, political activity, opinions, a person themselves (race, language, births, deaths, gender, orientation etc) and religion, just to name a few. We assign all sorts of metrics to human activity and interaction.  We create models, some more successful than others.

Given all those units of humanity, what makes the human interaction/activity of war lack a fundamental unit?  What makes it so special that it becomes immeasurable?  I disagree, mainly because it mystifies and obfuscates, when the gravity of the pursuit of war should demand the opposite.

As we have discussed, in fact what started this was a general accepted fundamental unit of a “kill”, employed even in this war.  It is constant in every war, but as I have described it is incomplete.  A kill may be just a representation of a more abstract relationship, like dollar to value. “Loss”, is definitely a fundamental metric of war, no one who has ever engaged in one has ever come out with some loss.  In fact one could say the primary pursuit in war is to “lose less”, or maybe “lose better”. Perhaps the fundamental unit is sacrifice itself as it is directly linked to Will.

No matter, I guess it is on me to figure out, or not, I did bring it up after all.

If you want to think about how hard complicated human activities are to predict, look back at economic projections in 1960. It was not , I mean NOT, generally accepted that Taiwan and South Korea would become wildly prosperous and vital pillars of the world economy. There are elements of both chaos and path dependency that may limit what prediction can do. 

[danfrodo]

deleted, redundant

Edited July 30, 2022 by danfrodo
redundant

[Battlefront.com]

ISW's reporting on the Azov prisoner massacre.  There are hints that one of the reasons for it was, surprise surprise, financial corruption coverup.

Quote

A kinetic event killed and wounded scores of Ukrainian POWs in Russian-occupied Olenivka, Donetsk Oblast, on July 28.[1] Ukraine and Russia are blaming each other for the attack and available visual evidence appears to support the Ukrainian claim more than the Russian, but ISW cannot independently assess the nature of the attack or the party responsible for it at this time. The Russian Defense Ministry asserted that Ukrainian forces deliberately struck the Olenivka pre-trial detention center holding Ukrainian POWs including Azov Regiment servicemen using Western-provided HIMARS, killing at least 40 and wounding 75 POWs.[2] Kremlin-sponsored news outlet “RIA Novosti” published videos of the detention center, which showed fire damage but not the sort of damage that a HIMARS strike would likely have caused.[3] RIA Novosti also released footage of HIMARS missile fragments but provided no evidence that the fragments were recovered at Olenivka.[4] Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) Ambassador to Russia Leonid Miroshnik claimed that Ukrainian forces struck the pre-detention center to eliminate the evidence of Ukrainian surrenders and prevent POWs from speaking out against the Ukrainian government.[5]

The Ukrainian General Staff said that Russian forces conducted the attack as a false flag operation to cover up Russian war crimes, disrupt the supply of Western weapons, discredit Ukrainian forces, and stoke social tensions within Ukrainian society.[6] The Ukrainian General Staff stated that a deliberate explosion occurred near the newly-constructed penal colony, to which Russian forces had transferred Ukrainian POWs a few days earlier. The Ukrainian General Staff also noted that Ukrainian analysis of the damage to the building, intercepted phone conversations between Russian servicemen, the lack of reported shelling in Olenivka, and the absence of casualties among Russian personnel serving at the penal colony all point to a Russian deliberate “terrorist act” as the cause of the incident.[7] The Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) accused Wagner Group head Yevgeny Prigozhin of ordering the “terrorist act” without consulting with the Russian Defense Ministry, to conceal the embezzlement of funds allocated for the maintenance of Ukrainian POWs before an official inspection on September 1.[8] The Ukrainian Office of the General Prosecutor reported that the explosion killed at least 40 and wounded 130 Ukrainian POWs.[9]

ISW is unable to assess the nature of the event or the party responsible for it with any confidence at this time. We will update our assessment as more information becomes available.

 

[Battlefront.com]

5 hours ago, akd said:

This is not the pontoon bridge you are looking for… *waves hand*

 

I don't know what you are implying, but it's so common to see long rectangular riverbanks with sparse vegetation.

Looks like the Russians are trying something new.  Namely, prepare the crossing site first, assemble the bridge elsewhere, then when they're ready to use it they can rush the bridge into place and move stuff across super fast before the Ukrainians blow it up.  Kudos to the Russians for trying something new and different, but this is like driving into a wall at full speed in reverse instead of forward.  Sure, it's a significant change, but is it likely to produce a better result?  Unlikely.

 

[Battlefront.com]

3 hours ago, The_Capt said:

Pretty damn near exactly.  I suspect that there are some fundamental factors that we can employ across wars; however, the weighting (like weighted violence) is different for each war.

One that smart folks have identified with this war is that terrorism, like the plethora of types Russia is employing, doesn't break the will of the victims unless they feel things are pretty much lost already.  In fact, the more the people think they can do something about it, the more the terrorist acts energize them to keep fighting.  This is something that has been pretty consistent from war to war over the last 100 years minimum.  Russia doesn't seem to know or care that what they are doing is energizing not only Ukraine but also the West. 

The videos of heinous torture/murder of Ukrainian POWs in combination with the slaughter of Azov POWs is unlikely to make Ukrainians change their minds about this war other than to make them even more determined to crush Russia.  In the West, it's getting harder and harder for appeasers to put their name on anything even remotely smelling of selling out Ukraine.  It also just made the Biden Admin's chances of acting on Congress' request that Russia be declared a State Sponsor of Terrorism that much harder to ignore.

So, there's one for you

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, Huba said:

But it is the other way around - none of the highlighted are a fundamental unit of any particular human activity. We just use them to attain some metrics for some purpose, but that's it. We don't measure "trade", "religion", "politics" with any intricate units of measure - we quantify elements of physical reality (mostly, say faith of a particular person is not it per se, but let's not split hairs), and that helps us understand/ talk about certain human activities. War is not different here, we could measure body count, but as well we can use square footage (if we fight for land) or "glorious deeds" (look at Kadyrov's Tik Tokers). There are trophies/ spoil of war which are easily measured as well.

I agree this.  And we can see how this fails other aspects of society, such as the economists all drinking Koolaid in the 2000s that the housing sector was handing out.  "You all seem to agree that what goes up must come down, but I'm here to tell you property values are suddenly an exception to the rule!  Drink up!".  We all know how that ended

We saw that with the 2015 US election polling, for example, and that was supposed to be very "scientific".  The polling wasn't even all that wrong in aggregate, but it was wrong enough in key places that the predictions based upon the polling were wrong pretty much across the board.  They were then quite a bit off in 2017, even though they swore they had made proper adjustments to their metrics.

Anyway, the pattern here is that even with long standing metrics agreed to by experts in the field, they often disagree about the results and not infrequently we find the majority gets it wrong.  If NASA had this sort of hit-or-miss experience with its metrics, we'd probably still be trying to get someone on the Moon.  There's clearly a difference between physical sciences and Human sciences.

That said, I don't really disagree with The_Capt that studying and analyzing warfare is distinctly worse than the other disciplines.  It does seem to me that there's far less agreement amongst experts as to what should be looked at, how to qualify what is observed, and how to use it in a meaningful way.  Or perhaps a worse way of looking at it is that the experts do have an overall agreed to set of metrics, it's just that they aren't very well grounded.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

BBC piece on what is going on with occupation in Kherson:

 

[Battlefront.com]

This was mentioned a few pages ago, but I don't remember if this was posted.  It's an investigative report detailing how Russia took Chernobyl without a fighting:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/ukraine-crisis-russia-saboteurs/

[dan/california]

Translation says he was a sergeant in command of Motor Rifle company. Either google is a little off, or Russias war is just going that well. I wonder who is in charge now?

 

[chrisl]

4 hours ago, The_Capt said:

I think we are closer to agreement than not.  

The crux of disagreement is likely here.  We have metrics for other human activity - lots of them.  Demographics, migration, economics, views, likes, consumption, political activity, opinions, a person themselves (race, language, births, deaths, gender, orientation etc) and religion, just to name a few. We assign all sorts of metrics to human activity and interaction.  We create models, some more successful than others.

Given all those units of humanity, what makes the human interaction/activity of war lack a fundamental unit?  What makes it so special that it becomes immeasurable?  I disagree, mainly because it mystifies and obfuscates, when the gravity of the pursuit of war should demand the opposite.

As we have discussed, in fact what started this was a general accepted fundamental unit of a “kill”, employed even in this war.  It is constant in every war, but as I have described it is incomplete.  A kill may be just a representation of a more abstract relationship, like dollar to value. “Loss”, is definitely a fundamental metric of war, no one who has ever engaged in one has ever come out with some loss.  In fact one could say the primary pursuit in war is to “lose less”, or maybe “lose better”. Perhaps the fundamental unit is sacrifice itself as it is directly linked to Will.

No matter, I guess it is on me to figure out, or not, I did bring it up after all.

I don't think it's a problem with computation capability, or even ability to quantify resources.  The problem is quantifying victory conditions in a way that you can say "Nation X is 20% of the way to victory", or "If Nation X gains 3 meters of ground tomorrow, they'll be 0.0001% closer to victory".  In CM it's relatively straightforward to define degrees of victory because there are concrete goals: low own casualties/high opponent casualties, terrain location gains, number of units moved across a goal to represent a breakthrough, capture of items, etc.  And the victory conditions are roughly symmetric, where if Player A has to capture location X, Player B has to deny them that location.

In a real war like the Ukraine conflict there are many things easy to quantify (and easy to measure if you know the right people).  How many vehicles of each type each army has; how many infantry each has; how many logistics resources are needed (and available) to keep them supplied; how soon will X unit run out of supply if cut off; what manufacturing (or external resupply) capability does each side have, and can it keep up with usage/losses.  All that stuff goes into people saying two days after Russia crosses the line "Oh, those guys look like they got far, but they're toast and going to collapse".  But at no point can we quantify how much closer or farther from victory that takes either side.  We can even estimate when Russia will run out of functioning tanks, or outrun their 152 mm shell manufacturing capability, or run out of planes because there's a part only available from the west that fails after N hours of flight, on average.  And more.  And we can use it to predict outcomes of movements.  But none of it provide a quantitative value for how close Russia is to losing, or Ukraine is to winning, or vice versa.  It comes down to non-quantifiable victory conditions and partial victory conditions.

[Aragorn2002]

9 hours ago, JonS said:

Ok, gotcha: It is, except when it isn't. Great insight - thanks!

It's been a pleasure.

Edited July 30, 2022 by Aragorn2002

[Zeleban]

1 hour ago, dan/california said:

Translation says he was a sergeant in command of Motor Rifle company. Either google is a little off, or Russias war is just going that well. I wonder who is in charge now?

 

 

it says that he was a squad leader in a motorized rifle company

[Grigb]

1 hour ago, dan/california said:

Translation says he was a sergeant in command of Motor Rifle company. Either google is a little off, or Russias war is just going that well. I wonder who is in charge now?

 

Google is off - commander of squad in moto rifle company. [UPDATE] Zeleban was first, sorry.

Edited July 30, 2022 by Grigb

[Grigb]

Map time. From Girkin so far nothing. For balance I used UKR MOD morning update + couple of Nats.

  

[Aragorn2002]

28 minutes ago, Grigb said:

Map time. From Girkin so far nothing. For balance I used UKR MOD morning update + couple of Nats.

  

I like it. Good overview.

[Taranis]

"Photojournalist Evgeniy Maloletka flees from a field inflamed by a Russian army bombardment, in the Kharkiv region, July 29, 2022. MSTYSLAV CHERNOV / AP"

[Taranis]

Gazprom announces to stop deliveries to Latvia
The Russian gas company announced in a statement posted on Telegram on Saturday that it had suspended its gas deliveries to Latvia "due to the violation of the gas offtake conditions", without further details. A spokesman for Latvian energy company Latvijas Gaze, however, said on Friday that Latvijas Gaze buys gas from Russia but not Gazprom, declining to name its supplier in the name of business secrecy.

In addition to Latvia, several other European countries have been deprived of Russian gas from Gazprom in recent months: Poland, Bulgaria, Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands.

 

Source : Le Monde

[Aragorn2002]

8 minutes ago, Taranis said:

"Photojournalist Evgeniy Maloletka flees from a field inflamed by a Russian army bombardment, in the Kharkiv region, July 29, 2022. MSTYSLAV CHERNOV / AP"

Great picture! Very symbolic too.

[poesel]

12 hours ago, chrisl said:

It goes back to the business principle of "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it" (or the engineering version "if you can't measure it, you can't control it").  The problem that people too often run into without realizing it is grabbing something that they can measure and managing/controlling around that without regard for whether it's even a proxy for the thing you're trying to control, let alone the thing you're trying to control.  I see it happen plenty of times in engineering situations where people should know better.

That is sot true in oh so many different ways. I should print that out in huge letters and hang it into the office. Nobody would read it, though.

 

11 hours ago, Jammason said:

Why not hand off the FPV to AI and go full slaughterbot. What could possibly go wrong?

That will eventually happen. Maybe it will become one of the horrors that will be banned from warfare in the future. But, like chemical weapons, we will have to see that horror at least once before we react.

 

11 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Seriously though, I don't think computational power or modeling is going to get us any closer to a universal means of measuring how well a war is going. 

Short answer: if _you_ can assess the outcome of a war, a program can or will eventually do it, too (if someone deems it worthy to spend the money and with war, they will).
Why: it is all just processing of information. No magic in the human brain (unfortunately).
The 'when' I don't know, but I guess not more than a few decades.

11 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

In engineering you can crunch a ton of numbers and come up with something like Mean Failure Time, maximum pressure, effective lifetime of service, sheer force, or any number of similar evaluations.  I don't know what the Mean Failure Time was for the power substation that a squirrel got into, ...

You are mixing up statistics with single events. You cannot draw conclusions from a general probability to what is going to happen to a specific element.
If your hard disk has an MTBF of 5 years, it does not mean that exactly that hard drive in your PC will die after 5 years. It could also mean that _none_ of that batch of hard disks die at the 5 years mark.

11 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

So let's say you come up with a complex formula that runs on all of the world's computers in order to evaluate how a war is going. 

...

Universally accurate results?  No.  Therefore, it will fail to achieve the universal measurement concept we're discussing.

Again, this is about probabilities. Here on this forum, we are quite sure that Ukraine will win this war (whatever winning actually is), but only few (of a more enthusiastically and less mathematical inclined) will put a 100% on it.
Probabilities can also be accurate.

The 'universal' part is more difficult. Any formula/AI will have the same problem as any expert to understand, what kind of war is fought here. And to adjust to the realities of it.
If adjusting is easier for humans or programs, I don't dare to answer.

[Aragorn2002]

11 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Well, even the way you are defining killing isn't all that useful.  In fact, most studies of warfare find it's more useful to wound the enemy instead of killing because a dead soldier gets put in the ground, a wounded one requires all kinds of attention (evacuation, treatment, rehabilitation, etc.).

Therefore, while I agree with you that killing as many Russian soldiers as possible as quickly as possible is good for Ukraine, it's not necessarily the most important way to success.  I'd be really, really pleased with Kherson if it wound up being 500 KIA, 1500 WIA, and 8,000 POW.  Way better than 10,000 KIA from my perspective.

Steve

With killing as many as possible, I'm not talking about executing wounded or unwounded POW. I'm talking about aiming your operations at reducing the enemy manpower and the enemy ability to field enough units to continue the war. This has been very effective so far for the Ukrainians. That is of course not as simple as it sounds, but against an enemy like Russia, which is bombarding and slaughtering civilians, torturing and apparently also massacring POW as well as commiting numerous other warcrimes, the payback factor is completly justified.

The problem with WIA is that they can recover and return to the fight. But you can't always chose whether your actions will kill or wound a man of course. The problem with POW is that they sooner or later will return to their homeland, share their experiences, boast about their actions, inspire others and in the case of Russia, no doubt will be part of the next invading army.

 

Edited July 30, 2022 by Aragorn2002