How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Seminole]

11 minutes ago, billbindc said:

It is simply not true that Gorbachev eschewed violence.

Saying someone isn’t as bloodthirsty as Stalin is still on the other side of the spectrum from someone that eschews violence.  
 

Plenty of Stalinist states plug along, to his credit Gorbachev isn’t a Stalinist, but that’s the secret ingredient to keep a communist state operating.  See: North Korea

[Centurian52]

2 hours ago, womble said:

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?

The Soviets did have significant intelligence capabilities. But let's be careful not to attribute them with superpowers. Both sides had very capable intelligence, and very capable counterintelligence. Both sides knew a lot about the other, but neither side knew everything about the other.

They definitely knew a lot about our capabilities. They probably knew that, through most of the Cold War, they were probably strong enough to fend off a NATO invasion. But if they were strong enough to withstand a NATO invasion, it was because they had been spending enough on defense to maintain a military which was a match for NATO.

More importantly, in order to know whether or not they need to maintain a military that is strong enough to withstand a NATO invasion, they would have needed to assess more than just NATO capabilities. They would have needed to assess NATO intentions. They may have had an intelligence apparatus that could give them a pretty accurate picture of NATO capabilities. But intentions are far more difficult to assess than capabilities.

Which gets back to The_Capt's point. We knew that we had no intention of ever invading them. But did they?

[billbindc]

36 minutes ago, Seminole said:

Saying someone isn’t as bloodthirsty as Stalin is still on the other side of the spectrum from someone that eschews violence.  
 

Plenty of Stalinist states plug along, to his credit Gorbachev isn’t a Stalinist, but that’s the secret ingredient to keep a communist state operating.  See: North Korea

North Korea of any era isn’t Russia of 1990 or today and Stalinist states don’t happen because there happens to be Stalinist sitting around. They happen because a lot of structural factors exist that make them possible. Putin would happily run that sort of state if he could right now and certainly possesses the ruthlessness to do it. Why hasn’t he? Because it wouldn’t work now and already didn’t by Gorbachev’s era.

Edited May 26, 2023 by billbindc

[Harmon Rabb]

A Ceremony for a new gunboat entering service with the Ukrainian Navy.

Oh and it appears reports of General Zaluzhnyi's death, have been greatly exaggerated (by pro-Kremlin trolls on Twitter).

Edited May 26, 2023 by Harmon Rabb

[Elmar Bijlsma]

20 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

Those  bombs weren't dumb. They were retarded.

 

My bad upbringing made me do this.

[mosuri]

Not sure if this has been truly put into use or if someone is just having a laugh -- I can't imagine this lasting for a moment in a battlefield infested with drones, guiding artillery or kamikaze ones. Even if it has a more dakka vibe to it...

 

[NamEndedAllen]

9 hours ago, The_Capt said:

I think this position likely decouples too far.  This suggests that if the US had dramatically decreased spending the USSR would have stayed “flat” and collapsed anyway.  I do not think this is true.  Western and Soviet defence spending were linked, however were a component in a larger competition.  If one decouples US defence spending from the argument then it is too easy to insert revisionist agendas on current defence spending - eg “well it had nothing to do with the outcome of the Cold War, why are we doing it again with China?”

The Soviet system was brittle and flawed from the get go.  By forcing it onto an unsustainable trajectory by creating a decades long arms race the West did successfully create pressures that led to an eventual collapse of the system.  It took a lot of pressures of which military was a central component.  If the West had tapped out and relieved the pressure the Soviet system could have also reduced spending and perhaps survived much longer.  The effect of Western defence spending was much larger and longer than any single decade of the Cold War.

That’s an interesting thought experiment or alternate history proposal. Would less arms spending by the Soviets have saved them? Put another way, was the Soviet Union a stable, healthy, going concern apart from its swollen defense budget?  In a word, no.

The entire edifice was rotten. Examples include “Collectivization” of agriculture, destroying their ability to even *feed* themselves. The oil price collapse, a tremendous shock to an artificially propped up financial house of cards. Chernobyl. Afghanistan. Glasnost. Lithuanian independence. East Berliners knocking down the Wall. Even with a somewhat less extreme defense budget, with failures across the board, unrelated to just budget levels. The utter corruption at every level sapped nearly every Soviet enterprise. You might look to any other primitive command economies riven by corrupt dictatorships for comparisons. Perhaps the most that could be said is that your scenario would have delayed but not prevented the breakup of the Soviet Union. Often left unsaid is the artificial nature of the USSR itself, the inherent difficulty of keeping the lid on the great number of wildly varying “republics” and peoples tied together however unwillingly.
To be clear, no one is disputing that defense spending took a toll on the Soviet economy.  Ultimately, the judgement of history nowadays is that the Soviet Union’s collapse was due to a number of causes not limited to arms race spending. Or more simply, they made too many losing economic and social bets.

Edited May 26, 2023 by NamEndedAllen

[NamEndedAllen]

4 hours ago, The_Capt said:

.  I would need to see a lot more than a couple articles

An unbiased search of the literature about the USSR economic collapse is not displaying your assertion that military spending, arms race was THE fundamental cause of its collapse. Most every reference shows what everyone here has been saying. A host of severe problems, failures, events, and inherent weaknesses were together fatal. There is a tremendous historical literature and research on this. But the subject is getting too far off topic, so I’ll stop with just some non Atlantic (?) references.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/coldwar/soviet_end_01.shtml

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/10-reasons-for-the-collapse-of-the-soviet-union.html
https://www.rbth.com/history/330630-how-soviet-economy-work
https://www.britannica.com/story/why-did-the-soviet-union-collapse

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/021716/why-ussr-collapsed-economically.asp

 

 

[Centurian52]

I have a couple of questions about Ukrainian Leopard 1s.

1. Can they take ERA or is the spaced armor too thin? I can imagine ERA being a bit counterproductive if it just ends up blowing massive holes in the spaced armor.

2. When the Ukrainians inevitably cover these things in ERA regardless of the answer to #1, what should we call the resulting Leopard 1 variant? Would it be the Leopard 1A5U (similar to how the Polish are calling their local variant of the K2 the K2PL)? Or would it be the Leopard 1A5V (following the 1980s Soviet naming convention of adding a V to a tank's designation when it is given kontakt-1 ERA)?

[The_Capt]

32 minutes ago, NamEndedAllen said:

That’s an interesting thought experiment or alternate history proposal. Would less arms spending by the Soviets have saved them? Put another way, was the Soviet Union a stable, healthy, going concern apart from its swollen defense budget?  In a word, no.

The entire edifice was rotten. Examples include “Collectivization” of agriculture, destroying their ability to even *feed* themselves. The oil price collapse, a tremendous shock to an artificially propped up financial house of cards. Chernobyl. Afghanistan. Glasnost. Lithuanian independence. East Berliners knocking down the Wall. Even with a somewhat less extreme defense budget, with failures across the board, unrelated to just budget levels. The utter corruption at every level sapped nearly every Soviet enterprise. You might look to any other primitive command economies riven by corrupt dictatorships for comparisons. Perhaps the most that could be said is that your scenario would have delayed but not prevented the breakup of the Soviet Union. Often left unsaid is the artificial nature of the USSR itself, the inherent difficulty of keeping the lid on the great number of wildly varying “republics” and peoples tied together however unwillingly.
To be clear, no one is disputing that defense spending took a toll on the Soviet economy.  Ultimately, the judgement of history nowadays is that the Soviet Union’s collapse was due to a number of causes not limited to arms race spending. Or more simply, they made too many losing economic and social bets.

Fair point, like I said it was one major pressure but also not the only major pressure. I do wonder if the USSR could not have reinvented itself much in the same way communist China did?  It was a flawed system however clearly when allowed to evolve somewhat can, and does work in a sense.  Of course the heart of the thing is current hemorrhaging all over Ukraine so the odds of enlightened evolution look to be slim in hindsight.

I do think the other military contribution to the USSRs defeat was containment.  Like Nazi Germany the USSR only theoretically “worked” if it was able to continually expand, pulling in more and more resources to feed the corrupt bloated monster.  Expansion was key to its survival and that was blunted and compressed a lot by western military affairs in concert with other elements of power.   

Looking forward, after this war, we are going to have a very sore Russia with less to lose - assuming it survives the landing.  China continues to rise while running out of soft/smart/sharp power runway to fuel its expansion, while it also deals with internal frictions and sore spots.  There will likely be an acceleration of the Outsiders club in pulling away from the West and pulling in more members.  This will not be a repeat of the Cold War but instead be something far more insidious and vicious I suspect.  Hard choices are in front of us, this war in Ukraine was the first real one and I am heartened to see we appear to have passed the test, at least so far.

[NamEndedAllen]

1 minute ago, The_Capt said:

Fair point, like I said it was one major pressure but also not the only major pressure. I do wonder if the USSR could not have reinvented itself much in the same way communist China did?  It was a flawed system however clearly when allowed to evolve somewhat can, and does work in a sense.  Of course the heart of the thing is current hemorrhaging all over Ukraine so the odds of enlightened evolution look to be slim in hindsight.

I do think the other military contribution to the USSRs defeat was containment.  Like Nazi Germany the USSR only theoretically “worked” if it was able to continually expand, pulling in more and more resources to feed the corrupt bloated monster.  Expansion was key to its survival and that was blunted and compressed a lot by western military affairs in concert with other elements of power.   

Looking forward, after this war, we are going to have a very sore Russia with less to lose - assuming it survives the landing.  China continues to rise while running out of soft/smart/sharp power runway to fuel its expansion, while it also deals with internal frictions and sore spots.  There will likely be an acceleration of the Outsiders club in pulling away from the West and pulling in more members.  This will not be a repeat of the Cold War but instead be something far more insidious and vicious I suspect.  Hard choices are in front of us, this war in Ukraine was the first real one and I am heartened to see we appear to have passed the test, at least so far.

Good conversation, and thanks for sticking with the back and forth. I agree with much of your points. We end up at the same collapse “peak”, perhaps by different but not really contradictory routes. Your point about the entire mindset caused by the military competition with the West and how that contributed to distort everything else in one way or another makes a lot of sense. 

[The_Capt]

17 minutes ago, NamEndedAllen said:

An unbiased search of the literature about the USSR economic collapse is not displaying your assertion that military spending, arms race was THE fundamental cause of its collapse. Most every reference shows what everyone here has been saying. A host of severe problems, failures, events, and inherent weaknesses were together fatal. There is a tremendous historical literature and research on this. But the subject is getting too far off topic, so I’ll stop with just some non Atlantic (?) references.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/coldwar/soviet_end_01.shtml

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/10-reasons-for-the-collapse-of-the-soviet-union.html
https://www.rbth.com/history/330630-how-soviet-economy-work
https://www.britannica.com/story/why-did-the-soviet-union-collapse

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/021716/why-ussr-collapsed-economically.asp

 

 

Never said THE sole cause, not once.  Most objective research and analysis see it as a major contributing factor in a 50 year program that encompassed a lot of efforts, economic not the least of them.

My push back against The Atlantic article is that the authors are suggesting that western military spending and the of the Soviet Union were entirely decoupled.  Worse Lebow and Stein have suggested the military arms race lengthened the Cold War and somehow we all could have come to love and hugs decades earlier.  Stein is a Canadian and comes from the deep Liberian humanist camp, to the point that political agenda creates a serious seed of doubt in objectivity.

The idea that 1) the Cold War was not a military contest and both sides military strategies were operating in glorious isolation and 2) right wing politics and the military industrial complex actually were the root cause of the conflict is utter nonsense and early 90s cloud shovelling.  Normally it would be simply hilarious, however it is dangerous motivated reasoning for the problems to our front.

Edited May 26, 2023 by The_Capt

[kimbosbread]

21 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Looking forward, after this war, we are going to have a very sore Russia with less to lose - assuming it survives the landing.  China continues to rise while running out of soft/smart/sharp power runway to fuel its expansion, while it also deals with internal frictions and sore spots.  There will likely be an acceleration of the Outsiders club in pulling away from the West and pulling in more members.  This will not be a repeat of the Cold War but instead be something far more insidious and vicious I suspect.  Hard choices are in front of us, this war in Ukraine was the first real one and I am heartened to see we appear to have passed the test, at least so far.

Russia will be completely broken and will likely break into several different countries, unless they retreat right now and go full North Korea. North Korea is Putin’s best case, and I suspect Russia’s elites know that. Without rail infrastructure for movement of goods and military, and a broken military, I don’t think they could win a conflict against a resurgent Chechnya for example, especially not with some random donations of weaponry from the outside.

China has no friends, and is a huge net importer of food and fuel. Their demographic cliff is here; the US advantage in space + air will only grow. If Xi doesn’t invade Taiwan within the decade, he’ll have no chance whatsoever. If he does, he’ll face a ruinous war. If he doesn’t, well, there are serious structural problems.

India isn’t in the worst spot, apart from running out water and having Pakistan and Bangladesh imploding next to them. However, what do the West or China need India for? It’s not a critical producer of anything besides generic medication. It’s not a huge market for luxury goods that France would collapse without. And they hate China.

So who is this outsiders club anyway? What is their motive for banding together?

Meanwhile, the US, being so bored with the world and lack of competition engages in wokeness and facism and inventing new awesome **** like chatgpt and giant space rockets to pass the time until someone gives a reason to actually care. Maybe we’ll go build a space elevator?

EDIT: To add Europe, the continent wide retirement home that has good R&D but doesn’t produce new industries. ASML, wait, that’s just licensed tech from the US that they were the lowest bidder on. Eastern Europe I’d be more bullish on but the birth rates are horrific.

Edited May 26, 2023 by kimbosbread

[Beleg85]

UA gave warning about Russian provocations in Zaporizhian nuclear plant, just in case.

 

Edited May 26, 2023 by Beleg85

[The_Capt]

2 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:

Russia will be completely broken and will likely break into several different countries, unless they retreat right now and go full North Korea. North Korea is Putin’s best case, and I suspect Russia’s elites know that. Without rail infrastructure for movement of goods and military, and a broken military, I don’t think they could win a conflict against a resurgent Chechnya for example, especially not with some random donations of weaponry from the outside.

China has no friends, and is a huge net importer of food and fuel. Their demographic cliff is here; the US advantage in space + air will only grow. If Xi doesn’t invade Taiwan within the decade, he’ll have no chance whatsoever. If he does, he’ll face a ruinous war. If he doesn’t, well, there are serious structural problems.

India isn’t in the worst spot, apart from running out water and having Pakistan and Bangladesh imploding next to them. However, what do the West or China need India for? It’s not a critical producer of anything besides generic medication. It’s not a huge market for luxury goods that France would collapse without. And they hate China.

So who is this outsiders club anyway? What is their motive for banding together?

Meanwhile, the US, being so bored with the world and lack of competition engages in wokeness and facism and inventing new awesome **** like chatgpt and giant space rockets to pass the time until someone gives a reason to actually care. Maybe we’ll go build a space elevator?

Oh well that is a relief and here I thought we had challenges.

https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2023/04/04/the-de-dollarization-of-world-economy-xi-putin-agreement-saudi-arabias-shift-to-yuan/

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-brics-expansion-membership/

And dependencies:

https://www.china-briefing.com/news/us-china-trade-in-goods-hits-new-record-in-2022-what-does-it-mean-for-bilateral-ties/

And really glad to hear India is going  no where:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/williampesek/2023/04/20/china-vs-india-worlds-greatest-gdp-race-heats-up/?sh=3ef6b0ec4411

Militarily everything is also just fine:

https://www.rand.org/blog/2021/11/taiwan-is-safe-until-at-least-2027-but-with-one-big.html

And China has no friends:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_relations_of_China

I guess the big reason they have reason to band together is because they are on the outside and the rules do not work for them.  It is a crazy idea but human being do not just sit around and accept their lots in life and leave top dogs in place because reasons or a sky god says so.  They challenge and compete.

Oh and let’s not get started on the rot in our own houses - we are so “bored” that we are tearing each other apart.  In fact this entire war in the Ukraine is a major wake up call on just how distracted we got and how long the wheel was left unattended.  We may wake up in time, or we can go back to all those nice safe assumptions and reality tv.

[Vet 0369]

On 5/25/2023 at 3:52 PM, DesertFox said:

Flurschadengeschwader...

 

 

Nah, they missed on purpose because the Russian Government, being headed by Humanitarians, ordered them to miss so they wouldn’t endanger innocent non-combatants.

Edited May 26, 2023 by Vet 0369
Spelling error.

[Artkin]

I can't even see what's being targeted in the video. Are we sure they missed?

[Seminole]

2 hours ago, billbindc said:

North Korea of any era isn’t Russia of 1990 or today and

Indeed, policies like glasnost and perestroika aren Stalinist, and they’ll bring your communist state to an end because it requires near total compulsion/compliance.  

2 hours ago, billbindc said:

Stalinist states don’t happen because there happens to be Stalinist sitting around.

Agreed, my point was they don’t last without a Stalinist at the helm.  And more specifically the guy at the helm of a Stalinist state has more to do with whether it persists than just about any step an external power can or would take short of 2003 regime change style invasion.  

2 hours ago, billbindc said:

Putin would happily run that sort of state if he could right now and certainly possesses the ruthlessness to do it. Why hasn’t he? Because it wouldn’t work now and already didn’t by Gorbachev’s era.

Didn’t work under Gorbachev’s policies. Saddam and Kim navigated that era just fine. 

[Vet 0369]

23 hours ago, Centurian52 said:

The downside of being the first modern democracy is that you don't get to learn from the example of other modern democracies. We've made a lot of improvements in the last 250 years. But the underlying structure is still based off of 18th century political science. Credit to the founders, it was the best political science available in the 18th century. But it is astounding how far political science has come since then.

Think of it like the difference between an old tank that has been heavily upgraded, and a tank that's a new design from the ground up. The US government is basically an M60A3 TTS (lots of impressive improvements bolted onto a fundamentally old hull). While something like the modern German government (designed from scratch in the aftermath of WW2 based on the best mid-20th century political science) is basically an M1 Abrams.

The U.S. Founding Fathers were intellectually advanced enough to include a provision that any part of the U.S. Constitution could be “amended” by agreement, I believe 3/4ths of the states (I.e. the People) voting in the affirmative to accept the Amendment.

IMHO, that was extraordinarily visionary of the Framers.

[Centurian52]

1 minute ago, Vet 0369 said:

The U.S. Founding Fathers were intellectually advanced enough to include a provision that any part of the U.S. Constitution could be “amended” by agreement, I believe 3/4ths of the states (I.e. the People) voting in the affirmative to accept the Amendment.

IMHO, that was extraordinarily visionary of the Framers.

I never said they weren't intellectually advanced. Didn't I say that they modelled our government on the best political science available in their era? They were very intelligent individuals.

[NamEndedAllen]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

Never said THE sole cause, not once.  Most objective research and analysis see it as a major contributing factor in a 50 year program that encompassed a lot of efforts, economic not the least of them.

As I said, we do largely agree. The disconnect may be the implication of how fundamental military spending was. If you weren’t meaning to assert this, my and possibly other pushbacks’ misunderstanding.

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

are suggesting that western military spending and the of the Soviet Union were entirely decoupled.

No one here suggested that, apart perhaps from my opinion in response to your thought experiment - that even with a “normal” degree of arms spending, the internal and often bizarre and/or cruel ideological rather than fact and market based economic and “governance” (autocratic , dictatorial) the USSR was a house of cards. Always one or two crises away from disintegration. 
 

BTW, I don’t think anyone is relying on a single Atlantic article for the discussion. It was a good one that’s run its course, raising some good points. Complex, huge society of disparate societies, filled with contradictions and bad decisions. No one single cause of longterm failure necessary. On that, I believe we all agree.
Thanks again.

[Vet 0369]

5 hours ago, Centurian52 said:

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

Training! Lots and lots and lots of actual training.

[FancyCat]

 

 

[FancyCat]

 

[Centurian52]

12 minutes ago, Vet 0369 said:

Training! Lots and lots and lots of actual training.

Training certainly helps. There is certainly no doubt that my accuracy would have been better if I put as many hours into flight sims as I have into Combat Mission. But from what I've read and heard (and I think either Military History Visualized or Military Aviation History made a video on bomber accuracy in WW2) my experience in the flights sims gave me more or less the right impression. And that impression was that, in an era before PGMs, bombing is something you do to areas, not to specific points. When a WW2 bomber was described as accurate, that probably meant that it could reliably get its bombs to land inside a football stadium, not that it could snipe tanks.