How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[TheVulture]

Still confusing info on the state of the Ivan Khurs. There was a video of Telegram yesterday supposedly of it returning to port unharmed, and one this morning on twitter of it allegedly in Sevastopol. As the comments in the thread note however, the weather is totally overcast, while todays whether satellite pictures over Crimea show completely clear skies around Sevastopol (at least at 15:00). Looking back at cloud movement over the last 3 hours, I'd guesstimate that it is possible that Sevastopol was overcast until around 09:00-10:00 (local time), so possibly this is from early morning?

 

Edited May 26, 2023 by TheVulture

[Tux]

10 hours ago, sburke said:

Head of Russian private army Wagner says his forces are handing control of Bakhmut to Moscow (yahoo.com)

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — The head of the Russian private military contractor Wagner claimed Thursday that his forces have started pulling out of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine and handing over control to the Russian military, days after he said Wagner troops had captured the ruined city.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, a convicted criminal and Wagner’s millionaire owner with longtime links to Russian President Vladimir Putin, said in a video published on Telegram that the handover would be completed by June 1. Russia's Defense Ministry didn't confirm this and it wasn't possible independently to verify whether Wagner’s pullout from the bombed-out city has begun after a nine-month battle that killed tens of thousands of people. Prigozhin said his troops would now rest in camps, repair equipment and await further orders.

Ukraine’s deputy defense minister, Hanna Maliar, said Thursday that regular Russian troops had replaced Wagner units in the suburbs but that Wagner fighters remained inside the city. Ukrainian forces maintain a foothold in the southwestern outskirts, she said.

This strikes me as giving a depressingly literal new definition to the idea of a “hospital pass”.

 

However is the most interesting thing about this how loudly they’re telling us all about it?  Exhausted frontline units are routinely rotated out of the line; is all the fuss about this particular instance:

a)  to set up a trap (or give the impression of doing so to encourage UA caution and thus buy time to complete the operation)?

b)  to prepare the ground for scapegoating the Russian Army/ reinforcing Wagner’s reputation once they inevitably (perhaps even in Putin/Prigozhin’s mind) lose Bakhmut to the UA?

c)  just more Russian noises from a noisy Russian trying to stay front and centre of things in the minds of his fellow Russians?

 

I think my money’s on the most mundane (c) but b looks interesting, too. 

[riptides]

55 minutes ago, Hister said:

Story is hiding behind a paywall. What is the gist of it?

Draftee trooper 

No training

Sent to front

Unit (sounded like 12-30 people) basically wiped out, trooper captured and let go.

[billbindc]

17 minutes ago, Tux said:

This strikes me as giving a depressingly literal new definition to the idea of a “hospital pass”.

 

However is the most interesting thing about this how loudly they’re telling us all about it?  Exhausted frontline units are routinely rotated out of the line; is all the fuss about this particular instance:

a)  to set up a trap (or give the impression of doing so to encourage UA caution and thus buy time to complete the operation)?

b)  to prepare the ground for scapegoating the Russian Army/ reinforcing Wagner’s reputation once they inevitably (perhaps even in Putin/Prigozhin’s mind) lose Bakhmut to the UA?

c)  just more Russian noises from a noisy Russian trying to stay front and centre of things in the minds of his fellow Russians?

 

I think my money’s on the most mundane (c) but b looks interesting, too. 

b and c are simply two sides of the same coin.

[Ultradave]

15 hours ago, kevinkin said:

I think Carter also deserves credit. In their old age, members of the Reagan administration acknowledged this. Projects that were in pure research moved into serious development. If I recall, the M1, modernized Tomahawks, and HARMs fall into that category. Another reason was the science and engineering in the US developed consumer and aspirational (Apollo) products that better served the economy. I remember being told never to trust a paper coming out of the USSR. The results could not be replicated. They did have good scientists and engineers, but the US had many more and they were far less affected by the state. Feeding from this is the the net revenue from refining oil into value added petrochemical products. For example polymers and structural plastics. So while the US was a net importer of oil for years, the chemical business produced more revenue down stream than the USSR could even dream. The US made money off of oil anyway. The US economy was less sensitive to fluctuations in oil prices despite all the hand wringing. So it's not so much about the price of oil as it is being dependent on it. Maybe one in the same. 

This is true. Almost everything that Reagan is credited with the so-called Reagan military buildup, was started in the Carter administration, a lot of it under the direction of Bill Perry who was then UnderSecDef for R&D. He realized the US needed quality over quantity, and Carter realized the military needed a drastic rebuilding after being wrung out by Vietnam. As a young officer then I appreciated the 2 huge pay raises that Carter gave us. In 6 months I got something like a 13% and then an 8% pay raise, plus I went over 2, and got promoted to 1LT. Man, I was rich suddenly after having lived on $600/mo for 2 years!

Reagan had the good sense to continue all those programs and buy them.

As a sidelight, if you want some good reading, William Perry's book "My Journey at the Nuclear Brink" details a good bit of this and also his later time as SecDef and even later, and current, efforts at nuclear disarmament/arms reduction. It's interesting reading and if you can find any videos of interviews with him, he's great in person. Soft spoken, brilliant, and by all accounts a really nice guy. He and former Sen. Sam Nunn on a panel discussion together is a treat (seen in person). Two men who do not need a single note card to hold forth at length and detail about anything to do with defense, nuclear weapons, deterrence, and arms control treaties and actions. 

Quick search and there are several interviews here:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=william+perry+secretary+of+defense

Dave

[womble]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

Well we know that we were not going to invade but I am not sure they did.

They had some seriously high level penetration of western society and establishments. If they mistrusted the intentions of the West, since they can change, a sober assessment of actual capabilities would have told them that the conventional forces of the West could at no point pose a credible threat to the territorial integrity of the USSR. If the Politburo didn't know, it was because they didn't want to. Beyond that, who's to know what insecurities drove them to what they did?

They would have spent too much on "defense", for whatever reasons. If the West hadn't kept up, maybe the old "drive to the atlantic" ambition would have reawoken. Maybe it wouldn't, and the USSR didn't have any aggressive territorial ambitions to the west. I'm not saying the USSR developments drove those of NATO, at least not in any one-sided way; they definitely ratcheted off each other

2 hours ago, The_Capt said:

I am allergic to the “Soviets sucked and would have collapsed if we did nothing” argument

I'm not making that argument, just that the western input to the military aspects of competition weren't as important as the other economic and cultural inputs. Russia would have spent "too much" on military endeavours for whatever reasons (pride, paranoia, aggression etc), whether "we" kept pushing the technical envelope or not.

[MSBoxer]

I don't think the west was a threat to the USSR or the Eastern Bloc.  The threat was to the expansion of their sphere of influence and territorial expansion.  Afghanistan in the eighties is a prime example.  In other words, the threat was not to their continued existence, but a threat to their ambitions.

[Jiggathebauce]

12 minutes ago, MSBoxer said:

I don't think the west was a threat to the USSR or the Eastern Bloc.  The threat was to the expansion of their sphere of influence and territorial expansion.  Afghanistan in the eighties is a prime example.  In other words, the threat was not to their continued existence, but a threat to their ambitions.

This sentiment that the west wasn't a threat to the USSR is only true if we conveniently ignore periods such as during the red scare of the 1950s, when a large bloc of politicians in the US was actively in favor of confrontation with the Soviets.  The likes of Truman and JFK were castigated by this faction for being too soft on communism, the implication being that anything short of trying to start world war 3 was too soft.  Highly recommend seasons 2 and 3 of the podcast Blowback for more detail.

[The_Capt]

3 hours ago, womble said:

They would have spent too much on "defense", for whatever reasons. If the West hadn't kept up, maybe the old "drive to the atlantic" ambition would have reawoken. Maybe it wouldn't, and the USSR didn't have any aggressive territorial ambitions to the west. I'm not saying the USSR developments drove those of NATO, at least not in any one-sided way; they definitely ratcheted off each other

I'm not making that argument, just that the western input to the military aspects of competition weren't as important as the other economic and cultural inputs. Russia would have spent "too much" on military endeavours for whatever reasons (pride, paranoia, aggression etc), whether "we" kept pushing the technical envelope or not.

An empire does not spend up to 14% (or higher) of GDP on a "shrug/whatever".  The USSR had to keep up a front of credible deterrence in many global theatres and there had to be a calculus behind that.  Some was no doubt imperial ambition but no small amount was pushing back against NATO encroachment and containment.  I disagree the Soviet Union would have "spent the money regardless", there is no credible evidence I have seen that would have been the case - and I have pointed out more then one example where spending was directly linked to competitive capability parity/superiority.  Both sides were locked into military industrial complexes, however, that will only push things so far.

I think the evidence shows that the both the nuclear arms race and conventional deterrence equations - as extensions of imperial power were both critical to the outcome of the contest.  To simple shrug ones shoulders and say "well those crazy Soviets were going to do whatever they were going to do" completely misses the point of the entire Cold War strategy.  The Soviet Union, much like Russia today, is spending too much on defence because we were (are) putting pressure on them.  I do not buy into the mythical "culture, destiny and sugarplum fairies won the Cold War" when all evidence points to deliberate strategy and a lot of blood and treasure.  Both sides definitely drove each other, I can point to entire lines of force development in the US that were 1) very expensive and 2) specifically designed to create overmatch against the Soviets.

Back to this war, Russia is going to fail but only if we keep the pressure on.  They have a corrupt and rotten system but it needs continual stress to realize its collapse.  Some of that is its own weight but humans are really good at improvisation, history is filled with empires that managed to limp along for centuries past the point they made sense.  I would need to see a lot more than a couple articles (one from The Atlantic) before I buy into the idea that the Soviet Union military spending was in splendid isolation of western strategy.

Edited May 26, 2023 by The_Capt

[Centurian52]

17 hours ago, kevinkin said:

However, the case has been forwarded the increase in spending may have pushed the USSR over the edge faster than the command economy could alone.  

I think his point was that there was no increase in spending. US spending increased, but there was no increase in Soviet spending. And then The_Capt added that they couldn't have increased spending even if they wanted to. Their spending was already as high as it was because they had to compete with all of NATO throughout the entire Cold War. It was already at unsustainable levels and there was no way it was getting any higher when you factor in the other problems they were having.

I think the gist I got from their two posts combined was that NATO defense spending outcompeting the Soviets was a big part of why the Soviets collapsed. But it wasn't specifically the US/Reagan, and it wasn't specifically in the 80s.

[Astrophel]

We look at the numbers with western eyes.  In our world numbers are audited, corruption is much less of a factor, and when you spend money you tend to get value for money.  I suspect russians never really looked seriously at the absolute numbers but convinced themselves of the superiority of russian science and the consistent military investments which are widely believed, still in russia, to drive innovation.

The USSR collapsed primarily because a critical mass of decision makers realised the emperor was wearing no clothes.  The same thing is likely to happen with Putin's regime.  Russia is unable to walk the talk.

[dan/california]

1 hour ago, Jiggathebauce said:

This sentiment that the west wasn't a threat to the USSR is only true if we conveniently ignore periods such as during the red scare of the 1950s, when a large bloc of politicians in the US was actively in favor of confrontation with the Soviets.  The likes of Truman and JFK were castigated by this faction for being too soft on communism, the implication being that anything short of trying to start world war 3 was too soft.  Highly recommend seasons 2 and 3 of the podcast Blowback for more detail.

Apologies if I am misreading you, but you seem to imply that the Soviet Union did not deserve the opposition it got. A Soviet conquest of Western Europe would have looked exactly like the nightmare Russia has inflicted on the parts of Ukraine it has managed to overrun. The only differences would have been in the flavor of propaganda. And nightmare is really too kind of a description. 

You can argue the details of strategy and tactics endlessly, and it is good we didn't blow up the planet. But but never ending horror descended on every square meter of territory the Soviets conquered. Putin has steadfastly set out to remind us of what that looked like. They needed to be opposed at every turn.

Edited May 26, 2023 by dan/california

[kimbosbread]

10 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Yesterday's ISW report shows more strife within Russian power circles over what to do about Priggy:

This is an excellent way to control Prig's ability to speak... fire or arrest anybody that interviews him.

The relief-in-place op to swap Wagner for MoD forces is underway with, apparently, some amount of DPR forces in the mix.  It will be interesting to see what happens in the coming days as it does seem to be a good time for Ukraine to hit the newly deployed forces.

The rest of the report wasn't all that noteworthy. 

Steve

So should the west be giving ol Priggy a platform to speak on then? Or is Putin’s leash tight enough that he wouldn’t give an interview to say FT (or whatever reputable newspaper Russians read)?

[Centurian52]

18 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Looking at this I wonder how Russia hits anything it aims at with dumb bombs.  This was ideal circumstances... good weather, flat open terrain, VERY obvious target that could be spotted many miles away, and yet both of Russia's most advanced bombers missed their targets by a wide margin.

Steve

Having played the occasional flight sim (with extra hud assistance turned off) I wonder how anyone ever hit anything with unguided bombs

[The_Capt]

3 hours ago, Centurian52 said:

I think the gist I got from their two posts combined was that NATO defense spending outcompeting the Soviets was a big part of why the Soviets collapsed. But it wasn't specifically the US/Reagan, and it wasn't specifically in the 80s.

Pretty much exactly.  Also for context, Lebow and Stein (the authors of the Atlantic article) have been shoveling this for quite a long time:

https://www.amazon.ca/We-All-Lost-Cold-War/dp/069101941X

Their underlying post-Cold War euphoria thesis is that the competition somehow prolonged the Cold War, not shortening it.  Beyond healthy Reagan and Bush bashing the book takes some leaps of logic and assumptions that do not age well given our current circumstances - the most basic is that autocratic empires built of skulls and ashes won't simply play nice if left alone.  The current war in Ukraine is what happens when deterrence fails and it is not pretty.  Of course back in 95 a wave of liberal humanism and optimism was sweeping the western world, and in a lot of IR schools it took root and will not die.

[Jiggathebauce]

24 minutes ago, dan/california said:

Apologies if I am misreading you, but you seem to imply that the Soviet Union did not deserve the opposition it got. A Soviet conquest of Western Europe would have looked exactly like the nightmare Russia has inflicted on the parts of Ukraine it has managed to overrun. The only differences would have been in the flavor of propaganda. And nightmare is really to kind of a description. 

You can argue the details of strategy and tactics endlessly, and it is good we didn't blow up the planet. But but never ending horror descended on every square meter of territory the Soviets conquered. Putin has steadfastly set out to remind us of what that looked like. They needed to be opposed at every turn.

I appreciate that you allowed for the possibility of misreading. as someone who travels in Trotskyist circles, I'm not implying that the USSR was the idyllic workers paradise being unfairly assailed- I'm implying that a large group of western leaders particularly during the early 1950s and 1960s were so lacking in political imagination that they saw no alternative to apocalyptic, civilization ending war and actively wanted to initiate it in their lifetime. Wether they waged it against an authoritarian, degenerated, state-capitalist bureaucracy or an exemplary workers state was  entirely besides the point to people like McCarthy and General MacArthur. I am glad they didn't get their war.

Edited May 26, 2023 by Jiggathebauce

[kimbosbread]

45 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Back to this war, Russia is going to fail but only if we keep the pressure on.  They have a corrupt and rotten system but it needs continual stress to realize its collapse.  Some of that is its own weight but humans are really good at improvisation, history is filled with empires that managed to limp along for centuries past the point they made sense.  I would need to see a lot more than a couple articles (one from The Atlantic) before I buy into the idea that the Soviet Union military spending was in splendid isolation of western strategy.

I would argue that the conflict could be frozen and it would just drag out Russia’s econmic collapse as their rail neytwork and thus ability to hold on to republics fails. The number of reported partisan actions against signaling boxes is pretty high (https://old.reddit.com/r/FreedomofRussia/comments/13qgg3y/may_has_seen_a_real_spike_in_partisan_attacks/), plus one can imagine the bearing shortage has wiped out a decent amount of their rolling stock. Without rail how will the hold onto the east?

Obviously the plane situation isn’t great either- no spare parts, no maintenance on the jetliners. And it’s not like Comac is doing great right now and can just be a drop in replacement.

The gas/oil situation isn’t as bad, but they need to cap wells or burn off the excess. And all the equipment is getting worn down without replacements.

[Centurian52]

17 hours ago, acrashb said:

I wanted to stay out of this, but here we go.

On the first part:

Numerous studies (no, I can't produce them, but someone better than me with google / waybackmachine may find the first one I am aware of done by the Pew Research Center) show proportional and related systems to have materially more waste and corruption.  The "why" seems to be that fringe parties - which proliferate in proportional systems - swing the balance of power and leverage this.  Also, in proportional one need not have "big tent" parties, so fringe and lunatic fringe and single-issue parties end up with representation.  And no, the 11% of people who believe Elvis is still alive don't deserve independent representation.

Also, first-past-the-post systems have greater longevity of the polity (fewer revolutions) and less overall political violence.  
For more: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/why-first-past-the-post-isnt-to-be-abandoned-lightly
If the US extirpates gerrymandering (which encourages extreme candidates) and somehow manages to reduce the grotesque amount of money in elections without impairing freedom of expression, it will have better results.
 

On the second, it will never happen.  People have a natural tendency to band together to protect their shared interests (e.g., trade unions), and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.

Most likely I'll go back to lurking and enjoying the interesting discussions popping up as the Ukrainian counter-offensive warms up.

Point taken.

It figures the post that I put the least thought into, with the position that I was least committed to, based on youtube videos I saw years ago, would be the one to get the most replies (recently). I should be more careful going forward.

Edited May 26, 2023 by Centurian52

[Kinophile]

 

[Seminole]

1 hour ago, Centurian52 said:

I think the gist I got from their two posts combined was that NATO defense spending outcompeting the Soviets was a big part of why the Soviets collapsed. But it wasn't specifically the US/Reagan, and it wasn't specifically in the 80s.

I think the internal factor that Gorbachev wasn’t as bloodthirsty as predecessors had more to do with the collapse of the USSR than any external factor.  
I suspect a Stalin, Kim, or Saddam would have kept the rotten edifice going irrespective whatever value they concocted for their military expenditures as a portion of the concocted value of their total economic output.  
 

[dan/california]

49 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Pretty much exactly.  Also for context, Lebow and Stein (the authors of the Atlantic article) have been shoveling this for quite a long time:

https://www.amazon.ca/We-All-Lost-Cold-War/dp/069101941X

Their underlying post-Cold War euphoria thesis is that the competition somehow prolonged the Cold War, not shortening it.  Beyond healthy Reagan and Bush bashing the book takes some leaps of logic and assumptions that do not age well given our current circumstances - the most basic is that autocratic empires built of skulls and ashes won't simply play nice if left alone.  The current war in Ukraine is what happens when deterrence fails and it is not pretty.  Of course back in 95 a wave of liberal humanism and optimism was sweeping the western world, and in a lot of IR schools it took root and will not die.

Quote

 

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/the-war-in-ukraine-was-provoked-and-why-that-matters-if-we-want-peace

 

Jeffery Sachs has had attack of this very nonsense. And in a just world it would end his career. I also heard him spouting about how wasteful defense spending is on a podcast this week. He just doesn't get that Xi or Putin would send him and anyone remotely like him to a comp to starve to death. The man, and a lot of people like him, just are not operating in the real world.

[Centurian52]

16 hours ago, Pelican Pal said:

Sherman tank losses were high, for example, but being a crewmen in one was anything but suicidal. So you need to look past equipment losses into crew losses.

This brings up a couple points that I think are relevant to this war (strictly about tanks, I'm sorry I reopened the  A-10 discussion, I made that post before reading that Steve had closed further discussion about the A-10).

1st. Not just Shermans, but tanks of all kinds on all sides were lost in very large numbers in WW2. Large numbers of tanks being knocked out just seems to be a feature of any war that involves large number of tanks. That's one reason why I haven't bought into the latest "the tank is obsolete!" craze (my T-64s shredding about half a dozen BMP-2s in the last CMBS scenario I played is another (full admission that that was enabled by my infantry having already ambushed and destroyed the Russian T-72s)).

2nd. Crew survivability vs platform survivability. Now that Ukraine is operating large numbers of western tanks, we will soon see images of large numbers of destroyed western tanks. That is inevitable. Equipment get destroyed in war. But, except for the Leopard 1, all of those tanks have much better crew survivability than the Soviet-type tanks that the Ukrainians have been using until now (even the Leopard 1 will be no worse than Ukraine's old tanks in terms of crew survivability). After this offensive is over, there will be a lot of tank crew who will have gained valuable experience, and who will still be alive to use and pass on that experience for the next offensive.

[Kinophile]

The cold war discussion is interesting and all. Wouldn't it be just great if BFC had released a game set in exactly that millieu AND had made a forum available for in-depth  discussion of both the game and the times? 

I've the perfect name!  A little on the nose but,  drum roll please! 

Combat Mission: Cold War

Right?  right!? 

Ohhh,  if only,  if only... 

 

 

But  wait a doggone second...what's this!? 

Edited May 26, 2023 by Kinophile

[billbindc]

26 minutes ago, Seminole said:

I think the internal factor that Gorbachev wasn’t as bloodthirsty as predecessors had more to do with the collapse of the USSR than any external factor.  
I suspect a Stalin, Kim, or Saddam would have kept the rotten edifice going irrespective whatever value they concocted for their military expenditures as a portion of the concocted value of their total economic output.  
 

It is simply not true that Gorbachev eschewed violence. It was that when he tried using it, the effects didn't stick. Gorbachev's Russia wasn't Stalin's Russia in the same way that Putin's isn't either...and also why he has chosen another path than Stalinist repression.

https://www.rferl.org/a/gorbachev-legacy-crackdowns-inaction-empire-intact/32014336.html

[Beleg85]

Mushroom over Mariupol, something hit badly in Azovstal. Exposiona are reported in several other places along the frontline.