So someone finally invented a Risk/Monopoly hybrid? Cool.
[quote=“I_Love_Me_Vol.I, post:101, topic:960515, full:true”]
There’s a fallacy here. When the tank gets knocked out - the crew is dead. The Javelin gunner just loads up another missile and moves on to the next target.
I heard an interview with David Frum (Bush speechwriter of “Axis of Evil”) discussing Trump two or more years ago on CBC. He said something I find memorable “People think Trump is playing 3D chess and really he’s just eating the pieces.”
What if Putin is the same? What if while we attribute deep and calculated motivations to him, and he’s just a single-minded thug who’s managed to use his nastiness to come out ahead until now, has only won because he controlled the bigger levers of power? What if he has no intellectual finesse to manage this problem?
That would be an inaccuracy not a fallacy. But in any event, I’m not going to argue the details, which are irrelevant to my point. And you really only add to my point which is that it is not a simple equation of cost of Javelin vs cost of tank.
The reason we generally ascribe(d) more cunning and savvy to Putin is that he at least had a long KGB pedigree, and KGB people are assumed to be smart. Whereas there was little reason to believe that Trump was actually playing 4D chess.
I’ve heard this too - but also some commentator who had encounters with Putin back when he was in the post-Soviet administration of St. Petersburg, I think it was. He did not describe him as a notable person at the time, was surprised when he gained prominence in the Russian government. Also pointed out he was working in the KGB bureaucracy, not in advanced analytical role.
Maybe an apt comparison would be as a (until now) more restrained version of Stalin?
Interesting summary of the military situation:
If the political will remains in Moscow we will see a Russian victory. If they are willing to grind they will eventually win. What they do next is in question. Ukraine has been able to slow the invasion. They have been able to inflict casualties. There is no evidence showing they have the ability to mount any type of offensive. I doubt they have the ability any more. I hope I’m wrong.
I was speaking more about battles on open terrain. Contract drills in armor consist mostly of turning towards contact and attacking. The videos of ambushes I’ve seen have been on roads but with plenty of open area or on large highways. Not exactly urban terrain. In a movement to contact with tanks it’s insane to be doing from a column. But it’s also insane to attack Ukraine during mid season. If we are talking about true urban combat, that has to be an infantry battle. Tanks should only be in support. It’s insane to lead with tanks and armored vehicles with no dismounts in a city. There are plenty of videos from Syria showing what happens when tanks try to fight alone in a city.
Maybe… but a slow victory will hurt Russia more than a rapid defeat would have. They might have already mortally wounded themselves.
There must be some reason the Russians are now entrenching themselves in defensive positions.
From @Maxar satellite surveillance:
“Russian forces are increasingly using earthen revetments (berms) to protect/conceal their armored equipment deployments near Antonov Airport in Hostomel as well as other locations in and near Zdvyzhivka and Berestyanka,”
Yes, that is the question. Can they install a military-backed puppet regime? And then just leave? Highly doubtful. Even if they grind Urkaine down militarily, how do they hold it?
If it cant be maintained without Russian bayonets, it’s not a government at all. Foreign-installed regimes in Afghanistan, whether recently or 150 years ago, didnt last long once the troops left.
that’s mostly owed to the Hollywood trope … James Bond and so on …
I am pretty sure most are just “your regular civil servant - just like Jerry down at the DMV” … pushing tons of paperwork sideways, up and down …
And the ones who are really smart and driven more often than not end up in private companies and make 2-10 times the money … so looking back at a 20+years carreer en a gov. agency quite often simply means “he could not get a job elsewhere”
Just because Russian forces in Ukraine are being tactically defensive (where circumstances dictate and permit) does not mean Ukraine is in a position to be strategically offensive, and counter-invade Russia.
Careful. Remember a “private option” didn’t really exist in Putin’s time. He came up in the Soviet Union, NOT Russia. He resigned during the attempted coup against Gorbachev in 1991.
Putin has a law degree and spent years as an intelligence officer in Germany. He may never have been a genius and it might well be he is loosing the plot at this point, but he certainly wasn’t stupid. He was at the very least clever and ruthless - you don’t rise to the top of a labyrinthine dog-eat-dog political system like Russia’s without at least some smarts.
My prediction is that Russia will win. The Ukrainians are putting up a brave fight and have totally dominated the PR war, but that is in large part simply because Russia don’t care about about PR except internally, and the West is publishing every puff piece Ukraine is putting out, because we are on their side. Everyone knows in theory the first casualty of war is truth, but once a war actually starts everyone forgets that and gobbles up the BS they are fed. For every popular story we are hearing about brave Ukrainians totally pwning the hapless Russkies, there is a hard news story about total destruction of Ukraine’s cities. And we are only three weeks in. Russia is crushing Ukraine and has done so quite quickly.
Within Russia, the dominant story will be that Russia is prevailing easily in its totally justified mission to rescue the people of Ukraine from tyranny and/or claim back from the Evil and Threatening NATO Russia’s historically deserved territory of Ukraine.
Russia won’t win in the sense of a total capitulation. It will just achieve de facto control and probably turn Ukraine into a semi permanent battleground. The West will feed the Ukrainians arms and assistance so that Russia is tied up in assymetrical warfare there indefinitely.
A slow victory will (indeed has) resulted in Russia being an international pariah in the West (we are yet to see China and India take a strong position). It has resulted in sanctions which will hurt ordinary Russians.
None of this will change Russia’s power structure, and Russia’s military might hasn’t been diminished to any significant degree. Indeed on the contrary this war will have increased Russian paranoia, entrenched Russia’s power structure, bolstered their willingness to invest in the military, and will cause many Russians to cleave to their strongman leader, as is usual in a time of threat.
The response of any totalitarian dictatorship to this sort of situation is to dig their heels in, crush internal resistance with even greater ruthlessness, and fight to the bitter end. They cannot do otherwise since the penalty for loss of control in such regimes is literally death for those at the top. There is no such thing as resigning into quiet retirement, or an election where the current regime gets voted out or any of the other “safety fuses” built into functioning democracies. It’s stay in power or die.
Unless Russia moves against a NATO country, the West isn’t going to take any direct military action, either push the Russians out of Ukraine directly or otherwise, because that would start WWIII. The most dangerous animal is a mortally wounded one, and we all know what Russia can use if it gets sufficiently mortally wounded.
Ukraine is fucked for the next few decades at least, sad to say. And if “all” that happens is Ukraine gets pulverised and held under the Russian boot that is the least worst probable outcome. The other potential outcomes are far, far worse.
The Institute for the Study of War in Washington D.C. doesn’t agree with you (and I think you’ll find it difficult to find any military expert anywhere who does):
Campaign Assessment, March 19
Key Takeaways:
- We now assess that the initial Russian campaign to seize Ukraine’s capital and major cities and force regime change has failed;
- Russian forces continue efforts to restore momentum to this culminated campaign, but those efforts will likely also fail;
- Russian troops will continue trying to advance to within effective artillery range of the center of Kyiv, but prospects for their success are unclear;
- The war will likely descend into a phase of bloody stalemate that could last for weeks or months;
- Russia will expand efforts to bombard Ukrainian civilians in order to break Ukrainians’ will to continue fighting (at which the Russians will likely fail);
- The most dangerous current Russian advance is from Kherson north toward Kryvyi Rih in an effort to isolate Zaporizhiya and Dnipro from the west. Russian forces are unlikely to be able to surround or take Kryvyi Rih in the coming days, and may not be able to do so at all without massing much larger forces for the effort than they now have available on that axis;
- The Russians appear to have abandoned plans to attack Odesa at least in the near term.
This is simply not true, and has nothing to do with eating up Ukrainian PR. Russia has barely made any progress at all in the last week, and their speed in the prior two and a half weeks has been very modest in the best of places, and incredibly slow at the worst. If anything, they have been losing steam the longer the war has dragged on. Kherson is the only city they have taken; Mariupol, on the very border of Ukraine and the Donbas ‘republics’ is still holding out after three and a half weeks, and they still haven’t invested either Kiev or Kharkov and have been making extremely slow progress in both cases, with the Ukrainians making local counterattacks slowing what progress there is even further. Kiev is at least somewhat understandable, it is a very large city astride a very wide river, with a decent distance to cover approaching from the east, and the shorter route from the west having to draw logistics through Belarus. It has still been very slow going for the Russians. Much more mind-boggling is that Kharkov, only 20 miles from the Russian border is still not surrounded.
The Russians still don’t have effective control of the air, with the Ukrainian Air Force, small though it is still largely intact and flying, and Ukrainian air defenses unsuppressed. Last week Ukraine was claiming 360-some odd tanks and 1,200 other vehicles destroyed. That’s two entire motor rifle divisions worth of gear, and even counting only 1/4 of that as an uninflated figure is still a lot of armor to be losing in such a short amount of time. There has also been a lot of Russian prisoners taken, indicative of a military with little determination to fight. I was skeptical of the prisoners in the first few days, thinking perhaps it was Ukrainian propaganda fakes, but with the sheer numbers seen it clearly is not. A bit of a sidenote on that - the displaying of prisoners to the media and their being interviewed on the media is a clear violation of the Geneva convention, which isn’t something I’ve heard mentioned much, or well, at all.
Your ideas on on “quite quickly” and mine are different. “It’ll all be over by Xmas and then we can go home” has never been true.
There is a lot of “unclear” and “currently” and "near term’ in that.
War has always been about who can bring the most men and materiel to bear. The issue isn’t how much Russia has lost, it’s how much it can afford to lose. A view I have seen expressed by apparent experts (and which seems right to me) is that Russia thought it would knock Ukraine over easily so it didn’t go in with a great plan or as much men and materiel as it could. But the issue is - will it now regroup and then do so?
Putin and his regime won’t back down IMHO. They could be overthrown internally but I haven’t heard any suggestion that is likely. So they will keep throwing military might at the situation till they prevail.
I wasn’t talking about the sanctions when I said that Russia was hurt badly by their slow advance.
Crush internal resistance with what? They’ve got 70% of their military tied up in Ukraine, and even that 70% isn’t able to accomplish much. What can the 30% that’s left do to dissidents elsewhere?
They can only hold control on the home front for as long as they keep the people buying their lies about what’s happening, but that can’t keep up forever. That huge military they have, that’s effectively imprisoned in stranded, unsupported convoys? Those are sons, brothers, husbands, of people at home. People will find out what’s happening with their loved ones, and most of them will believe them over the Ministry of Truth.
You seem to think that Russia has vast military resources, which for some reason they’re not using. They don’t.
By some estimates they have already committed 70-75% of their available combat troops (as Chronos said), and they can’t withdraw all their troops from other places they need them.
Why do you think they are trying to sign up Syrians to fight in Ukraine? It’s not for fun.
They are critically short of cruise missiles and other missiles, and can’t replace them because they need materials and components they can only get from other countries. They have lost huge numbers of armoured vehicles that would take years to replace. They have lost far more planes and attack helicopters than they can afford to lose.
They are even short of basic things like MREs, because the stocks they should have had were corruptly sold off. They asked to China to send them MREs, for goodness sake! That applies to many other things too. Factories that should have been producing war supplies, didn’t, and the money was instead siphoned off to enrich oligarchs.
The Russian army has turned out to be a Potemkin army, corrupt and rotten through and through.
Even before the war, Russian had an economy smaller than Brazil, Italy, or Canada, and even that was mostly dependant on exporting oil and raw materials. Now they don’t have any economy left worth mentioning.
Russian troops are getting more and more demoralised. But Ukraine has a very high morale, strong determination, hatred for Russia, and a steady stream of high-quality missiles, arms, and military equipment from the west. Russia may be able to bombard cities and kill civilians, but they are being worn down and defeated militarily.
Time is NOT on Russia’s side. Time is on the side of Ukraine.