How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Battlefront.com]

36 minutes ago, fireship4 said:

Iwill give you my grimdark take: the regime may be at risk by loosing a small war, which cannot justify full mobilisation of the economy and great sacrifice of the people (enough to get them to turn on their masters as the least worst option).

So perhaps they will turn it into a big war, which justifies full mobilisation and full totalitarianism, and which they can safely loose, or hold to a stalemate, or until China divides their opponent's attention further.

I think it's pretty clear that Putin's almost pathological resistance to putting Russia on a full war footing is evidence that he doesn't think it would work.  Or at the very least it is the option to try only after all other options have proved failures.  So I don't think this is a viable alternative to what is happening now.

I also don't see Russia having the resources to keep its economy and war going at the same same time.  It's probably incapable of doing either for much longer.  As I've said since the war started, time is not on Russia's side.  The more Russia's strategy relies upon time, the less likely it will succeed.  Waiting for Xi to make a move is unlikely viable.

Steve

[The_MonkeyKing]

I say sounds good but pretty cost inefficient. Finnish XA-185 cost about 0.5million and Stryker costs about 4.5million. Is it 10x more effective?

Better would be to get single type more cost efficient vehigle. But maybe there is none avaivable and USA feels like spending it, is all good.

[MikeyD]

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

What realistic options do people think Russia could pursue to achieve a better outcome

The first thought that came to mind is they should declare victory, claim they achieved whatever the 'political' goals were for the war (just make something up), then pack their bags and go home. That's basically how most stalemated wars eventually end. Sometimes the process takes 8-10 years to reach that point, but that's only for countries with the financial wherewithal to sustain the effort for so long.

[Maquisard manqué]

34 minutes ago, The_MonkeyKing said:

I say sounds good but pretty cost inefficient. Finnish XA-185 cost about 0.5million and Stryker costs about 4.5million. Is it 10x more effective?

Better would be to get single type more cost efficient vehigle. But maybe there is none avaivable and USA feels like spending it, is all good.

But the US has the Strikers in stock and wants to get rid of them… perfect opportunity. Another maintenance headache for Ukraine though, unless the vehicle platform has any commonality with anything else given already.

[kraze]

12 minutes ago, MikeyD said:

The first thought that came to mind is they should declare victory, claim they achieved whatever the 'political' goals were for the war (just make something up), then pack their bags and go home. That's basically how most stalemated wars eventually end. Sometimes the process takes 8-10 years to reach that point, but that's only for countries with the financial wherewithal to sustain the effort for so long.

That wouldn't work. To a common russian victory is only when Ukraine is no more.

They went into this war declaring that they will occupy whole Ukraine in 3 days - how exactly losing the war and leaving all territories including Crimea can be considered "victory" by a common russian, on which putin's dictatorship (and life) depends?

[chrisl]

1 hour ago, fireship4 said:

Hasn't that boat already sailed?  I get the impression the West is decoupling from China as a manufacturing centre, and that the current order of globalisation is changing.  Perhaps war can be averted, but I wonder if the West will continue with Farostpolitik in either case - some have come to see it as selling rope to their hangman.

It's pretty far from sailed, and there's a long way to go before the amount of trade with the top western partners is down to where trade with Russia is.  There are increasing restrictions on export of the highest technologies to China, but the market for midrange and lower stuff (in both directions) that China can do without western help isn't going to go away any time soon.  Americans love cheap stuff.

[The_MonkeyKing]

33 minutes ago, Maquisard manqué said:

But the US has the Strikers in stock and wants to get rid of them… perfect opportunity. Another maintenance headache for Ukraine though, unless the vehicle platform has any commonality with anything else given already.

Might even solve the maintainance headaches. If USA commits to supply the Stryker as main APC of the UKR military. Then the "zoo" of other APC:s would do to territorial units ext. where they hopefully have enough time for headaches

[Offshoot]

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

I also don't see Russia having the resources to keep its economy and war going at the same same time.  It's probably incapable of doing either for much longer.

On the topic, new Perun

 

[fireship4]

8 hours ago, fireship4 said:

Without wishing to begin a discussion outside the topic

Failed successfully.

I grow tired, however... the meat of your first link:

Quote

 

So why do humans not plan better, when the lethal effects of hurricanes are so well known, when the political and economic consequences of such storms are unarguably so dire?

One reason might lie in the way the perception centers of our brains are structured. The fact is, we seem to spend at least as much time and effort looking for patterns we recognize as we do scanning for the unexpected and new. It seems the visual cortex of monkeys, for example, uses bandwidths of around 60 Hz to collect information; at the same time, it orders the brain to look for previously recognized shapes on frequencies of 10 to 20 Hz, according to research by Charles Gilbert of Rockefeller University. The same type of informational trade-off applies to the human auditory system, and almost certainly to the other senses as well.

Another reason for our reluctance to plan long-term has to do with “hyperbolic discounting,” a truism of behavioral economics associated in particular with psychologist George Ainslie. What researchers found was that humans consistently will tend to opt for immediate rewards instead of rewards down the pike, even if the later rewards are greater. For example, when offered $50 now instead of $100 in a month, most people will choose the fifty bucks. If you translate this syndrome into hurricane planning, we prefer buying flashlight batteries the next time we see a TV warning about a hurricane threatening our area with power cuts, versus investing money in levees and flood-control infrastructure that might well prevent the destruction of our house, and even our own death, five or ten years hence.

 

contains in its second paragraph a claim regarding information collection bandwidth in monkeys, which is not present in the link it provides, and means nothing on the face of it, since my 802.11 is only 40Hz or so and I can fit the entirety of the internet down it.  Indeed the reference itself says:

Quote

The emerging evidence suggests that any cortical area is an adaptive processor. Rather than performing a fixed and stereotyped operation on input coming from the retina, it makes different calculations according to the immediate sensory and behavioral context. This moment-by-moment functional switching is likely mediated by an interaction between feedback connections from higher- to lower-order cortical areas and intrinsic cortical circuits. The role of top-down influences is then to set the cortex in a specific working mode according to behavioral requirements that are updated dynamically. In effect, these ideas reverse the central dogma of sensory processing, with a flow of information from higher- to lower-order cortical areas playing a role equal in importance to the feedforward pathways. The construction of a subjective percept involves making the best sense of sensory inputs based on a set of hypotheses or constraints derived by prior knowledge and contextual influences.

Which is a little more interesting and nuanced.  In any case, the claim, together with the second paragraph (are we biologically incapable of denying $50 now instead of $100 in a month?  How is it determined that $100 in a month is better for the subjects, since biology seems to deny such a possibility, indeed how can the researchers even write the paragraph without the pen falling from their hand in a rush to the cash machine), mean precisely nothing when it comes to the conjecture 'humans are biologically tailored towards short term thinking' - even if they are right they are wrong. 

Human biology is good for running for a long time, throwing things at stuff, manipulating small objects, and being programmable with culture.

2 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

I also suggest going to any public budget hearing in your local municipality if you want to see classic short term thinking at work.  Oh, and if you paid any attention to the housing market crash, you'd know that long term thinking wasn't in the minds of either borrowers or lenders.  Maybe you heard of Bernie Madoff?  Not many long term thinkers in his portfolio.

~Edited: Co-ordination problems are not biological problems, they are born in part from our models of the world and the technology at hand, including those of communication and economic systems. Edited~

2 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Long term planning is just not our species' forte.

It is a forte that we possess alone in the known universe.

To get to my general point on the subject - whether or not we are anecdotally prone to a behaviour in one situation or another is beside the point.  Human beings create explanatory knowledge which they can then use to change their behaviour.  We extend our mental machinery with things like pencils and keyboards, hard drives and paper.  We can conjecture things, and hold them to logic, by which they proceed, not by biological rules, but by their own attributes, to imagined consequences.  Whatever biological cages and predispositions we have, it seems to me we are ultimately free to escape them, to the extent that we are able to tie our behaviour to ideas about reality, and those aren't made out of neurons.

I shall not appraise your other links, "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence": I apply a similar axiom when Google searches are used in place of arguments, placing the burden of disproof on the receiver of wisdom.

-Totalitarian and Authoritarian Government-

2 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Ah, now this is on topic There are examples of totalitarian regimes seeming to do well because they can ignore/suppress short term interests and focus long term.  But they also plan poorly for the future, which is why they fail so quickly relative to other forms of government.

Take Russia for example.  Putin provided Russians with enough bobbles and bling to convince them that their lives were getting better to allow the regime to rob their people blind.  For decades Russia was able to pull this off in part because it thought long term about regime survival.  However, it did not plan well for the day when all that theft would ruin the economy and/or Putin's eventual death.  As both of these things became more apparent and closer at hand, what did the Putin regime do?  This war.  I'd suggest this is a good example of bad long term planning, not good.

Most Western democracies, even with their poor long term planning, are doing better and have lasted longer than Russia's regime.  Which calls into question how good Russia's long term planning is

Government that brooks no alternative and no opposition is not necessarily bad at planning for the future, I disagree with you on that.  They can be more consistent, and with the knowledge that they are secure, plan far into the future.

In the case of Russia, 'ruining the economy' is somewhat subjective if you believe all your mates deserve a bunch of money and everyone else can eat a rock, or that might makes right, or that you are the real inheritors of Greek tradition because Catherine the Great captured Crimea...

The strength of the modern democracies is in good part to do with error-correction, and placing the levers for that in the hands of those they affect.  They are open to ideas which can change them fundamentally, ideas like human rights, property rights, etc. etc.  Their specific incarnations can be better or worse of course, the best of them can be updated without too much trouble...

Unlike CM

Edited January 10, 2023 by fireship4

[Holien]

1 hour ago, chrisl said:

It's pretty far from sailed, and there's a long way to go before the amount of trade with the top western partners is down to where trade with Russia is.  There are increasing restrictions on export of the highest technologies to China, but the market for midrange and lower stuff (in both directions) that China can do without western help isn't going to go away any time soon.  Americans love cheap stuff.

Corrected for you...

Everyone loves cheap stuff...

Trade with China will continue on that basis as long as China is open to trade at cheap prices...

Edited January 10, 2023 by Holien

[kevinkin]

" In effect, these ideas reverse the central dogma of sensory processing, with a flow of information from higher- to lower-order cortical areas playing a role equal in importance to the feedforward pathways. The construction of a subjective percept involves making the best sense of sensory inputs based on a set of hypotheses or constraints derived by prior knowledge and contextual influences."

When it comes to gestalt learning, the whole is greater than all of its parts. So gestalt thinkers see the whole picture as more important than the individual pieces or components. Instead of learning one part at a time, they learn in chunks called gestalts. As a result, they also learn language in chunks. https://www.albert.io/blog/gestalt-principles-ap-psychology-crash-course/

Idea is not new. Lab methods to detect it at the biochemical level are. I always new LC/MS would go everywhere. 

On long term planning: "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush". Grandma's brevity is to be commended. 

[Huba]

There's still a lot of noise regarding the exact situation in Soledar, but it looks like UA has repulsed the orcs and is in control of most of the city, including the salt mine in industrial district.

[Butschi]

6 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

What realistic options do people think Russia could pursue

"What do you think we should do?"

"End the war, you fools."

 

[Billy Ringo]

Financial Times recent article on Xi/China's policy towards Russia, per another poster on another board they are pivoting towards Europe and away from Russia with the realization that Russia is losing this war.  And, they don't trust Putin.  I don't have access to the article and don't feel it's right to simply cut/paste another person's very good summary of the article.  But, the following is the link if you have access to the FT.

https://www.ft.com/content/e592033b-9e34-4e3d-ae53-17fa34c16009

 

[The_Capt]

6 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

I also don't see Russia having the resources to keep its economy and war going at the same same time.  It's probably incapable of doing either for much longer.  As I've said since the war started, time is not on Russia's side.  The more Russia's strategy relies upon time, the less likely it will succeed.  Waiting for Xi to make a move is unlikely viable.

You mean there is fractured misalignment between Ends and Means?  Kind of sounds like broken/non-existent strategy to me.  In the end a “bad” strategy that guarantees failure may be worse than no strategy at all.  The first is programming defeat, the second at least leaves glimmers of reactive hope.

For Russia I see no design here.  They are off their map.  Flailing may be the best move they have left.

[Bulletpoint]

7 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

OK, here's an intellectual game we've not played in a while!  What realistic options do people think Russia could pursue to achieve a better outcome than what it is doing now?  Keep in mind that regime preservation is the ultimate goal, so any strategic shift that puts the regime more at risk is not likely viable.

Steve

 

If regime preservation is the ultimate goal, then:

Invest everything in producing basic weapons and equipment for as many conscripts as possible.

Throw everything at capturing the "republics".

Once (if) taken, declare unilateral victory. Mission accomplished.

 

Ukraine would of course not accept this, and would continue the war.

Seen from the West, the Ukraine war would simply continue.

Seen from the East, the "First Ukraine War" would end with a Russian victory, and then the Second Ukraine War would begin. This would fit well with the existing narrative about "brave Russians defending against western aggression".

 

If Putin then loses the territory gained in the first stage of the war, it might be more survivable, politically.

Firstly winning a war (that was never intended to be a war, but "a succesful and heroic special military operation to protect the Russian minority"), and then losing a war ("that the other guys forced upon you and you could never win because they ganged up on you") is more acceptable than just getting completely crushed and humiliated in a war of aggression that you were the one to launch.

 

This might leave the Russian regime able to keep control for many years even as Russia would hobble onwards completely crippled economically. But there are several examples of completely incompetent but repressive regimes that manage to hold on despite heavy sanctions and poor economy.

China might help Russia out with some of the practicalities of living under sanctions. In exchange for various economic/political favours. In essence, Russia would become a kind of vassal state of China. But not officially, and the regime would survive.

 

Common people might grumble and complain, but that would not be anything new in Russia, and neither would controlling what can be taught and said about the war.

As in the old Soviet joke: “The future is certain; it is only the past that is unpredictable”.

 

[Beleg85]

1 hour ago, Huba said:

There's still a lot of noise regarding the exact situation in Soledar, but it looks like UA has repulsed the orcs and is in control of most of the city, including the salt mine in industrial district.

A lot of accounts with souces on the ground have contradictory info. Ukrainians dogedly hold Krasna Hola and Westen Soledar including (still) part of Salt Mine complex, while Pidhorodne is contested. Counterattacks reportedly throw off Russians from supply road.

Lossess on UA side are to be "huge", while Russian even worse. It's always difficult to read Prigozhin, but he seems the urge to publicly explain situation:

https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1612763293281619969

Edited January 10, 2023 by Beleg85

[billbindc]

6 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

I think it's pretty clear that Putin's almost pathological resistance to putting Russia on a full war footing is evidence that he doesn't think it would work.  Or at the very least it is the option to try only after all other options have proved failures.  So I don't think this is a viable alternative to what is happening now.

I also don't see Russia having the resources to keep its economy and war going at the same same time.  It's probably incapable of doing either for much longer.  As I've said since the war started, time is not on Russia's side.  The more Russia's strategy relies upon time, the less likely it will succeed.  Waiting for Xi to make a move is unlikely viable.

Steve

The reality is that Xi has already made his move and it was to downgrade the wolf warrior diplomats and make the managed competition acolyte/former ambassador to the US Qin Gang, the foreign minister. China is reorienting from a policy of confronting everyone to attempting a version of Ost politic with Europe and moderate detente with the US. It's an enormous change, a complete revision from pre-Ukraine invasion plans and one more nail to hammer into the orientalist idea that China culturally has a predilection/special skill for long range planning.

 

 

 

[holoween]

6 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

OK, here's an intellectual game we've not played in a while!  What realistic options do people think Russia could pursue to achieve a better outcome than what it is doing now?  Keep in mind that regime preservation is the ultimate goal, so any strategic shift that puts the regime more at risk is not likely viable.

Steve

For the regime to survive the end of the war it needs a peace that can be spun into a victory somehow.

Ukraine is unwilling to give any concessions. So what could convice ukraine to concede.

Only by becoming imagined or actually unable to achieve their goals through further fighting.

this could happen through

- Running out of suppliess if the west stopps supporting them which is outside of russian control

- Running out of manpower which they arent close to

- Battlefield success shifting in favour of the russians

The only part that russia can affect and arguably the one with the most room for improvement is the performance of their army. There the focus should be finding and training competent leaders and getting rid of bad ones as quickly as possible, establishing a lessons learned flow from the frontlines and using both to properly train their new recruits and create competent units with them.

It might also be best practice to only reinforce good existing units and otherwise create fresh ones where bad practices can be eliminated from the start.

[Zeleban]

Shocking footage of the night assault on Russian trenches. Attention is drawn to the control of the assault group from the quadrocopter. They corrected the throws of grenades into the trenches. Also amazing is the fact that a person can survive a grenade explosion close to them (VOGs are much more deadly)  GRAPHIC CONTENT.

(Unfortunately the commented version was removed before I could post it here, so I'm releasing the uncommented version.)

Edited January 10, 2023 by Zeleban

[billbindc]

1 hour ago, Butschi said:

"What do you think we should do?"

"End the war, you fools."

 

The problem with this eminently pragmatic suggestion is the same for Putin as it was for Hitler.

He's gone way beyond the pale with his war in Ukraine. Russia could stop fighting tomorrow and the sanctions would remain  until reparations and withdrawals have been made. Ukraine would and be seen as justified in continuing to take back territory. Domestically, Russia is a regime that rules by fear and violence. That means that, especially in the elites, there are a lot of folks who have axes to grind and the means to vie for power or take revenge if only enough of them decide to do so at once. What would be a very likely catalyst for that unity? The reaction to a losing war of choice that has destroyed their wealth, their lifestyle and their futures. 

So...what do you do if you are an older man who has trouble admitting error and no particularly appetizing choices? You grind it out, you subject all of your decisions to the demands of keeping domestic control and you hope that you somehow get lucky. It's been said that in a political and military sense Hitler was a degenerate gambler. Putin took the same path and now he's come to similar dilemma because depending on luck is an extremely stupid way to run a country. 

 

[Beleg85]

3 minutes ago, billbindc said:

So...what do you do if you are an older man who has trouble admitting error and no particularly appetizing choices? You grind it out, you subject all of your decisions to the demands of keeping domestic control and you hope that you somehow get lucky. It's been said that in a political and military sense Hitler was a degenerate gambler. Putin took the same path and now he's come to similar dilemma because depending on luck is an extremely stupid way to run a country. 

Putin has extra psychological cushion in the form of WMD, which probably gives him extra thick layer of (false) self confidence. Don't want to start another arguments on atomics, as the topic was discussed ad nauseam, but fact is all calculations about RU strategy or lacks of thereof, should take this fact into consideration.

[Rokko]

12 minutes ago, Zeleban said:

Shocking footage of the night assault on Russian trenches. Attention is drawn to the control of the assault group from the quadrocopter. They corrected the throws of grenades into the trenches. Also amazing is the fact that a person can survive a grenade explosion close to them (VOGs are much more deadly)  GRAPHIC CONTENT.

This reminded me of another video, where two UKR soldiers can be seen clearing some busted trenches assisted by a drone for observation. One of them eventually goes down when a Russian throws 3 grenades at once out of his foxhole because they got too close. Back at the time I thought that it would probably make sense to practice drone-corrected hand grenade throwing for soldiers expected to clear trenches. It looks like they did that here to some extent?

Also, I wonder if hand grenades might have to the beefed up in size given the abundance and apparent effectiveness of body armor, although I dont know to which extent this is possible without becoming impractical for throwing/carrying.

[Zeleban]

10 minutes ago, Rokko said:

It looks like they did that here to some extent?

Yes, in the original version of the video, you could hear their commander correcting their actions, counting the number of Russians in the trench, telling them where to throw a grenade.

I think increasing the grenade does not make sense. After all, even despite the fact that a person survived after a grenade explosion, he was still put out of action and could not continue active resistance. Increasing the size of the grenade will make it heavier and the throw range will decrease.

[Zeleban]

It is a known fact that RGD-5 grenades have a much worse fragmentation and high-explosive action than F-1 grenades from the Second World War, despite the fact that RGD-5 contains 90 grams of explosives, and F-1 only 60 grams. The thing is that the thick body of the F-1 is made of cast iron, which is well fragmented into fragments approximately equal in mass and shape (it is for this reason that artillery shells are made of cast iron), while the thin body of the RGD-5 is made of steel. It breaks up into fragments of various shapes and masses. Too large fragments have a low flight range. Too small fragments have a weak stopping effect. There are too few fragments of the optimal shape.

RGO / RGN grenades are also actively used, they have an improved fragmentation action and an impact fuse that instantly works when it hits an obstacle and does not give the victim a chance to take cover. But they have a fuse that is complex in design. The body of the fuse is made of poor quality plastic, which loses strength and cracks over time. Therefore, these grenades have a high misfire rate.