Wikipedia used to confirm that my favorite proverb is "Amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics," but I guess somebody must have removed it. Nonetheless, it still is my favorite, and it's apparently something that the Russian military should have paid more attention to:
Thread: on why the Russian advance into Ukraine has bogged down—their logistics suck (especially compared to the USA/Allies during the Iraq invasion). https://t.co/SaxkWjOgo0
— Charlie Stross (@cstross) March 12, 2022
There's an awful lot of amateur military analysis on the web these days, and I can't independently vouch for any of this. But it sounds sort of reasonable and fact-based, and the writer isn't a nutball or anything, so I thought I'd pass it along.
The biggest reason to doubt this analysis is that it's just plain hard to believe that the Russian army could have screwed up something so fundamental. "We'll need to manage supply lines a few hundred miles long" is Warfighting 101, after all. If they really have forgotten that, I have to wonder just what else they've forgotten.
POSTSCRIPT: This reminds me more generally that one of the reasons the US military is the best in the world has nothing to do with its size or technological superiority. It's because we fight actual wars every few years. In the past three decades we've been involved in wars of all types and sizes, from Iraq to Somalia to Kosovo to Afghanistan to Iraq again and then to Libya. Now we're getting some practice in massive, modern economic warfare.
Needless to say, this is not a good reason to fight lots of wars. But there's no question that it gives us an advantage that no one else on the planet has.
I just remember reading Philip Greenspun at photo.net back in the old days talking the same thing. He said bad photographer talk about bodies and lenses (this was back in the film days, which bodies made much less difference) and the pros talked tripods. Even in these days when bodies can provide 8(!) stops of IBIS, this is still true.
Support of the forces is all important.
My body is my tripod.
Nick Foles has entered the chat.
Are you a martian?
Just got back from Earth and I can't shake this bloody cough.
🤣
Putin simply believed his own delusion that it was going to be a cakewalk and they'd be greeted as liberators.
Now his only way out is to get it done as fast as possible.
But how? Every option is worse.
https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/preparing-for-defeat/
Ah, yes. From the same prophet who gave us "The End of History." Has he apologized for that one yet?
Well some believed own delusion that Iraq was going be a cakewalk (and greeted with flowers and candies) - but our military still managed to fuel tanks.
OSINT is actually fairly accepted these days...
The biggest reason to doubt this analysis is that it's just plain hard to believe that the Russian army could have screwed up something so fundamental
Perhaps you don't need robust logistics capacity if you're only going to be fighting for five or six days before your enemy surrenders/collapses. That's what Putin was led to believe by the yes-men who do intel for him (who do intel for all dictators).
Exactly
According to a comment on another site, some "wag" said Ukraine would last only "11 minutes". That comment has not aged at all well.
The Russian military aren't exactly novices. They've been fighting on and off all century: in Chechnya, Georgia, the Donbas and Syria. There were reports this morning that the head of Russian intelligence has been arrested. That might be nothing but scapegoating, but it may also mean Putin was badly misled by his own advisers about the likely Ukrainian resistance to the invasion and/or the response of NATO and associated countries.
Interesting. Here's a paragraph from a British newspaper.
"Col Gen Sergei Beseda, head of the foreign intelligence branch of the FSB, the Fifth Service, was arrested alongside his deputy, Anatoly Bolyukh, a tweet from Andrey Soldatov, a well-regarded writer on the Russian security services, said."
It looks to me like the Russian military is reverting to form. They only defeated Napoleon by a scorched-earth war of attrition, after they suckered him to stay in a devastated Moscow too long. Also, they convincingly lost the Russo-Japanese war.
But beyond who wins or loses, I am dismayed by all the men in history who have been used as cannon-fodder. I myself narrowly avoided an opportunity to become cannon-fodder in Vietnam. This planet (maybe the Universe) has never seen anything like the human species.
In terms of “cannon fodder” outside of humans, ants might fit the bill.
Yes, ants, except that they don't have cannons. Or any of the other fiendishly terrifying war toys that human technology has blessed us with.
Chemical weaoons - formic acid, I believe.
The conundrum of working for a delusional psychopath is that if you give an honest assessment of things you are likely to get punished for not being supportive enough of the great genius above you. If you say what he wants to hear then you get punished when reality smacks the madman in the face. Either way you'll suffer the consequences for the madman's foolishness.
I guess the moral of the story is don't work for delusional psychopaths.
“This time is different!”
Small units, restricted actions. This is in fact the first large operation against a semi-peer military since 1945.
And it turns out beating the living tar out of a break away province insurgency or a micro state like Georgia using only limited units, mostly elite, and bombardment doesn't tell you much about capacity to take on an actual opposing army of a largish state.
Here's a thought that's a bit contra. Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
Only if you practice with the intent to find problems and improve will your practice actually improve you.
The US military practices difficult tasks requiring high coordination and expertise and they face up to it when things don't work - both in drill and in the field. The wars you speak of only matter if you learn from them. Learning is only possible if you are willing to accept that what you did wasn't perfect and could be improved on.
Is that what the Russian Army has been doing? Or have they just been firing more and more thermobaric warheads using artillery until there's nobody left to oppose them?
Not really. There were a number of very insightful reports on Afghanistan correctly detailing the issues the military was having but they were happily ignored.
There are certain things they do hone obviously but because even now our politics is more accountable than Russia it doesn't get as bad.
I spent a couple of weeks there in my earlier days many years ago. It was corrupt, dirty, toilets were something awful, couldn't drink the water unless you boiled it (not saying we've always done a great job with water), the only thing that was actually functionally nice was the subway. But then we look pretty bad in some places too.
They weren't stupid but they're incentives weren't necessarily the best either. I can sort of see it and I sort of can't. They can be comically bad at some things and surprisingly brilliant at other times.
I also would expect Russians to support the war. FFS, look at us every time we get in a war. Freedom fries, baby!
Finally, it's weird because the whole thing makes very little sense. Putin is going to get so little out of this it's ridiculous and the costs will be horrific. It's not something I can wrap my head around but then I'm not a dictator. I have a retirement plan.
When human emotions get out of control, sense counts for very little. How else to explain Trump-worship, let alone Putin.
Retirement plans are not very exciting at all. For some, they just don't fill their emotional needs. Boring.
Putin is losing the upper class folks:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/09/europe-russians-leaving/
The Russians have been famously bad with logistics going back to WWII. Ike said the reason why they lost so many people (20 mil) was because they were atrocious with logistics and it hasn’t gotten any better. Russia uses rail for supply lines, but are so short of trucks, they can only supply 90 miles from rail station, so that is why they are bogged down in such a big country. Another fun fact: Russia can only supply via rail in former Warsaw Pact countries because they have different rail splits than the EU, so if Russia ever tried to invade Europe, they could only supply troops for 100 miles. If Russia didn’t have nukes, NATO would have already destroyed every last piece of Russian equipment in Ukraine
Reportedly the most important single implement shipped by lend-lease to the USSR in WW2 was the 2 1/2 ton Studebaker truck--152,000 of them.The Russians had nothing like them; there's probably some still in use there.
BTW, there are reports that among the gear found in captured Russian transport are ceremonial uniforms for the victory parade. They really expected a cakewalk.
The Soviets also used lots of Dodge light trucks in WWII. They liked the Studebaker trucks so well they reverse engineered them and built their own copies.
" there are reports that among the gear found in captured Russian transport are ceremonial uniforms for the victory parade. "
And we believe these? That sounds exactly like the sort of nonsense propaganda specialists love. Makes the enemy sound dumb, makes "us" sound more serious than them; and irrelevant enough to anything that it can't actually be fact checked.
All we know is that Volodomyr Shalkivskyi said this; as far as I can tell we have zero corroborating evidence. He did, however, also say "Russian soldiers going into Ukraine did not have extra ammo or food in their packs" and that's the sort of thing that, if true, you'd assume would have had some impact by now, no?
It is hardly the most outlandish claim made in the course of this war; from the invader, we have claims that the invaded were developing bioweapons, or nuclear weapons, or planning or perhaps already perpetrating mass killings. Surely these assertions are more freighted, and far more deserving of scrutiny, since, if true, they likely constitute violations of international agreements or even war crimes. But here you are, spending three paragraphs on a statement of very little consequence, whether it were to prove true or not. Curious.
Well this is tribalism in a nutshell, isn't it?
Go with the flow, believe everything you're told, don't ask questions.
Kinda amazing how the generation that has spent its entire life ranting about how independent-minded they are, what unique little individuals they are, how educated they are about the mistakes of the past, jumps at the chance to behave like the most fundamentalist of fundamentalists the moment the opportunity arises.
No it's not an unimportant point because it is simultaneously a ludicrous claim, yet one that is immediately adopted, and then aggressively defended. Like basically every religious claim.
How can you make society better if you not only refuse to learn for the past but immediately attack the few who are actually trying to teach you about it?
Say what you like about earlier generations like Silent, Greatest, or even early Boomers -- they may have been every bit as dumb as the current generation, but at least they had the grace not to pretend that they weren't something new and exceptional in human history.
We call this the ad hominem fallacy, Ivan.
"If Russia didn’t have nukes, NATO would have already destroyed every last piece of Russian equipment in Ukraine"
Yes, this here is the only reason NATO is being so careful with their response so far.
Well, tbh, we have been at war pretty much continuously since our inception. If there is one thing Muricans love, it is war.
This comment is pretty close -- uncomfortably close -- to Rand Paul's veneration of January 8, 1835.
So we are slowly coming to the realization that the nation is an empire built with sword, spear, and arrow?
Please forward your replies to the Circular File.
Oh, I don’t know, if you really want to go there, then the nation was built with musket, rifle, and carbine against those armed with arrows and spears.
Point taken. ← heh
Bullshit, they had plenty of rifles. And bows were generally better than guns for a long time (training difference).
The issue was the Columbian exchange. It never would have happened if the accident of nature hadn't killed 97% of the native population with smaller waves later on.
The Columbian Exchange was the transfer of crops, domesticated animals and technologies between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. Once the two regions got in regular touch with each other all of that would have happened even if there had been no pathogens transferred.
Arrow? You gotta contemporize, man.
Don't forget the systemic corruption (here's Politico's take):
https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-military-corruption-quagmire/
Does that mean that Ukraine can mount a counter offensive to cut supply lines? Probably not. As long as Russia does not care about its casualties, they'll keep going.
https://www.vox.com/22961563/putin-russia-ukraine-coup-revolution-invasion
Oddly, the Vox article considers only a coup or popular uprising as a threat to Putin, although changes of government in the USSR/Russia for 70 years have been orderly. Despite power struggles and ousters, Malenkov, Molotov, Bulganin, Khrushchev all were removed by votes of the Central Committee or similar, and died natural deaths. Putin has made the process more cumbersome - I believe his removal would require concurrence of the Duma, the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Court, supermajorities, multiple votes and other obstacles. See Wikipedia for details. But it’s a pretty corrupt system, bribery could be a path …
I'd guess that if any of those organizations tried to oust Putin, there would be a "terrorist" attack on them.
Yes, it’s hard to imagine that he would go quietly. I expect he’d go full Stalin on them.
Most interesting comment on the Stross thread was from a Steve Downey, who cited the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, which kicks in when you need to transport fuel to fuel the fuel transports ….
The last "actual" war we fought was WW II. Everything since has been an instance of Ledeenism. The world has been watching and will not forgive. And today we (and they) see, with blinding clarity, the corollary of Ledeenism: it is unthinkable for us to get into a fight with anybody our own size. I'm honestly surprised that our response to Ukraine has not been to bombard Cuba. No doubt it's been suggested. Trump might have actually done it.
Most of the world would still rather take a chance with us than with Putin.
Check out Kamil Galeev's series of Twitter threads on Russia (@kamilkazani). He may be a tad (!) on the cynical side, but well worth reading for explanations of just how systemic corruption ala the Putinist system can affect a society, economy, bureaucracy, military, etc. It's all about the incentives, it seems. For my own part I'll add that Putinism looks a lot like a current variation of deep-rooted Russian imperial patterns.
Also, Phillips O'Brien, whose thread Stross links to, does strategic studies at St Andrews for a living. Many of the other Ukraine war bloggers who've been paying attention to these logistics problems have similar day jobs. And quite a few of the OSINT observers might as well. What they're all pointing to sure seems real.
Just to add, our logistics problems and Russia's are of different kinds. For us, everything conceivable is expeditionary-- we have to plan how to move enough people, equipment, and supplies across oceans to fight big-scale wars over long periods of time. The Russians are planning land wars with fronts they can reach on the ground (Syria has been an anomaly that's involved small numbers, and in the USSR days they used to send Cubans and others for expeditionary actions).
Our tendency to do wars often, as Kevin points to, is one reason why we focus so much on logistics-- wars are usually pretty public things and screw-ups can get exposed easily, so that's a factor. Our military operations culture, I'd say offhand, is a lot more results-oriented and less corrupt than Russia's (and maybe than our own procurement side). And it gets recognized-- the guy who planned Gulf War I logistics was one of the first to get a medal afterward.
It isn't that our logistics orientation is perfect, it's more that for us it's baked from the start into any thinking about major possible actions and our expeditionary orientation makes that very apparent. The Nazi armies also mostly moved by rail, and they relied a lot on horses. They were planning land operations too.
Yeah, our procurement is near the line of untennably corrupt but it's not there yet.
https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/preparing-for-defeat/
Most hopeful point:
"The invasion has already done huge damage to populists all over the world, who prior to the attack uniformly expressed sympathy for Putin. That includes Matteo Salvini, Jair Bolsonaro, Éric Zemmour, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, and of course Donald Trump. The politics of the war has exposed their openly authoritarian leanings."
Populism is not bad ffs! A bunch of little guys (of all types) unionizing and raising taxes vs wall street! Nativist populism is the problem.
Yet most populist movements are nativist. Are there any true Scotsmen?
sorry about the double post
Tulsi Gabbard, serious thought leader,
https://twitter.com/petestrzok/status/1503019507689918466
That's Sanders Institute fellow Tulsi Gabbard!
I don't understand why she is allowed to be in the US Army Reserves.
The US may have better logistics than anyone else because we spend far more money than anyone else. The companies that make the trucks and other things that are required in supply lines gotta get their share.
Leaked Kremlin Memo to Russian Media: It Is “Essential” to Feature Tucker Carlson,
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/03/exclusive-kremlin-putin-russia-ukraine-war-memo-tucker-carlson-fox/
In the possibly quixotic hope one can shift to the abstract.. How does one go about vetting such leaks? It seems like the sort of thing Mother Jones would eat up with gusto.
Nothing about it contradicts the clearly observable or the long established behavior of Russian government.
It would be surprising if it weren't real.
Like, check this out, Donald Trump's skin color,
https://www.colorhexa.com/ffa500
Is it wrong?
If Russia's goal is territorial expansion, then that map doesn't look so bad for them. Their next step could be declaring victory.
I think we have a banner they could borrow. Mission Complete or something like that.
Putin's flightsuit codpiece will be massive.
Less massive if he's actually lost his testicles.
Has any other UK administration ever been as absurdly disastrous as Boris Johnson's?
No10 has 'no concerns' over Russian-owned firm building Boris Johnson's media studio,
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/no10-no-concerns-over-russian-23726027
I remember hearing a story about the US accepting an ornate wooden plaque from the Soviets that they hung in the embassy in Moscow. Yeah it was full of bugs not the termite kind.
And the entire US embassy in Moscow they'd preposterously let a Moscow firm build for them, which, as I recall, was later described as 'the entire structure was designed as a listening device'.
I remember that one-- the only thing to be done was demolish it and start over, and it cost a bundle and a half. Even then, iirc, we still continued hiring locals for slots like cooking, cleaning, groundskeeping, maybe even clericals. The Russians certainly, and most others probably, would never have done anything like that. If you've ever read Robert Mason's Chickenhawk you'll remember why that can be a bad idea.
Who funded/promoted Brexit?
Well, two major British newspapers are owned by the son of a KGB spy, so there's that,
https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/1499482812889681921
If I recall correctly, the history of edits to given Wikipedia pages can be viewed if one is indeed interested.
With some work, we can find out the screen name of the person we never heard of who removed it.
In the past three decades we've been involved in wars of all types and sizes, from Iraq to Somalia to Kosovo to Afghanistan to Iraq again and then to Libya.
I've heard they hate us for our freedom, but could it be they hate us a little bit for all that war-making training we do?
In the case of Kosovo, absolutely, Mr. Scahill.
Well, Kevin never seems to read the comments, but here's the answer to the question about why the Russian military is so bad. Putin's long term policy was to keep the RF military as weak as possible, because he sees them as a the biggest potential threat to his rule. A decade ago he purged a reformer minister of defense and put in his crony Shoigu, who is rumored to have made huge profits of selling the military's gasoline on the open market.
https://t.co/vmKTIWHpam
Kleptocracy, by any other name, would smell as sweet.
!
Actually about how I imagined it, but, actually quite a bit worse than I imagined it.
We should defeat this army just to rescue it.
Pretty eye-opening article. Tyranny fails, because tyranny makes tyrants dumb.
"Masses support Z cuz they believe they aren't gonna pay a significant price for it. Z-policy works, because it's based on realistic assessment of human intellectual abilities. And vice versa: policies that are based on exaggerated estimation of mass intellect are doomed to fail"
Sounds to me like a race to the bottom.
Back in the early 70's `I few to Moscow on Aeroflot, box lunch. Yes, a sandwich and a banana in a cardboard box. Beautiful well known hotel full of cockroaches. Beautiful classical music concerts empty but for foreigners. Train back from Moscow, the cars were lifted to replace the wheels with a wider gauge for the `'west". All very old women working in the railway stations. At Berlin, they gave out care packages of food to those coming west. GUM was empty of most everything. Huge box of shoes, all the same style and same size. It was truly an experience. Things have definitely changed.
Were you in the train car when it was lifted?
Yes and no photo's at the station or near bridges. A soldier came to get my film and I was fast enough to slip in an unused roll to give to him.
Risking the gulag!
I don't think they failed on the logistics necessarily.
They failed first on their assumptions about how the war would play out. Their logistics was based not on sustaining a weeks- or months-long war, but one of a quick shock and awe that would send the Ukrainian president running. They probably figured if Viktor Yanukovych ran away, surely a neophyte politician -- whose claim to fame is being an actor comedian -- would also duck and run.
US war planners have consistently said that the size of the force that Russia had committed was insufficient to serve as an occupying force. That points to the likelihood that they didn't expect to have to occupy Ukraine at all.
Had the war gone exactly as Putin and his generals thought it'd go, there wouldn't be this Russian logistics nightmare.
I hope the assembled intelligence will comment on the game changing use of Cruise Missiles at the Lviv airport.
If that causes the EU/America to give Ukraine the Patriot System/Iron Dome that would really be a game changer.
Sometimes you have to stand up to the bully.
Good Luck to us all.
Not seeing how a ballistic missile attack near Lviv is a game changer. Russia's been using ballistic missiles all across Ukraine for 2 1/2 weeks. Lviv wasn't a red line. Lviv is physically far to the west with limited roads and hilly terrain that any ground invasion of Lviv would be impractical, especially entering springtime. You'd expect such an attack via ballistic missiles.
It's a tough call as to what might trigger Putin into selectively using tactical nuclear weapons. For some inane reason, a lot of people dismiss the risk of Putin's use of tactical nuclear weapons, perhaps out of mistaken conflation with strategic nuclear weapons.
If ever there was someone willing to take the risk of a global backlash on the use of tactical nuclear weapons -- say, selectively targeting three of Ukraine's largest cities -- Putin would be that person.
That is why the US is very hesitant to give Ukraine game-changing systems that would immediately have an outsized impact on the war. What good is it for Ukraine to suddenly beat back Russia on all fronts only to have Kiev, Lviv, and Odessa nuked?
Way too many people lack the respect for what Biden and his administration have done and continue to do. This is a balancing act that few American presidents have ever had to face.
Cuban Missile Crisis. Both sides rattled nukes.
If Russia wins this and suffers only a few years of economic discomfort, then look to the Chinese to make a move on Taiwan sooner than later.
There is a real risk that the economic consequences would be long-lasting. If the West were to hold out even a few years, it would have to develop alternate energy sources rapidly, and that would make it easier and easier to keep the sanctions in place. The situation has nowhere to go but the Trabi/Yugo route, where Russia can’t produce anything the West would want, so there is no incentive to reopen trade or finance.
Other than Matryoshka, what have you seen on a store shelf that says ‘Made in Russia’?
Pardon me, I overlooked one highly-desirable product from the Soviet bloc in the Cold War era of isolation from the West - the Kalashnikov.
Kaspersky is still on Google Play.
Why?
The US military is terrible at learning from experience. Otherwise it would know by now that occupations end badly if you treat the locals badly and stimulate corruption. It's been good at logistics from the start, not through combat experience. Also the Russians have plenty of experience too.
No, I think the commenters here who think the rot in the Russian invasion of Ukraine comes from the top are right. I wouldn't even be surprised to learn commanders didn't know they were going to invade until it was too late to plan properly.
It's not the military, it's the civilians. Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney & George W. Bush come to mind.
The problem is that sending things like food and medical equipment stimulate corruption. (Look at The Third Man.) That's still not a great argument against sending them.
"Thread: on why the Russian advance into Ukraine has bogged down—their logistics suck"
All subsequent discussion is predicated on this claim: "Russian advance into Ukraine has bogged down", yet is this even true? Define bogged down? Define the gap between Russian expectations (how do you know them?) and reality (how sure are you of what is even happening in Ukraine?)
All I know is that I was promised by Twitter three weeks ago that Russia was being routed, those very same promisers are now apparently worried about the eminent fall of K**v, and while we've heard an awful lot about some minor skirmish or other, I am unaware of a single actual Russian defeat (as in a battle that mattered and was lost, rather than as in some minor firefight).
Enlighten us all. What's the expected (non-bogged down) time to conquer a country these days?
US invasion of Iraq (second time) took about twenty days to capture (in some sense...) Baghdad, and about 40 days till "Mission Accomplished". Without caring about whether either of these were actually achieved, that means 20 days/40 days seems basically an absolute best case scenario
- when you care less about bombing random stuff than Russia is apparently doing
- are fighting a substantially weaker foe, and
- your foe is not being re-armed as rapidly as possible by serious allies
Given these facts, building an immense tower of speculation on "Ukraine hasn't collapsed in 20 days therefore XXX" seems somewhat foolhardy.
Do we have any INDEPENDENT evidence for these sorts of claims (ie bogged down, logistics problems)?
Seriously, you should stop.
Iraq had a far more formidable military than Ukraine, both in personnel count and weaponry.
At the time, it was estimated that Iraq had one of the largest (4th) military forces in the world, at ~990K active duty members, accounting for over 5% of its population (highest rate in the world at the time).
At the time, Iraq had ~800 military aircraft and ~3800 actual tanks, making it, again, top-5 in the world.
Ukraine as it stood before the Russian invasion, wasn't even top-20 in any equipment category except main battle tanks (which counts other weaponry than the standard tank), mostly old Soviet tanks it'd inherited after the USSR broke up.
All told, the 1991 Gulf War resulted in less than 200 US military casualties. What's Russia up to, right now? About 6000 dead. Or you know, maybe take Russia's own word from over a week ago when it said only ~500 Russians were dead.
In recent US wars, the ratio of injured to dead varied between ~ 3:1 and 10:1. With 6000 casualties, Russia most likely has at least 18,000 wounded. That's 24,000 Russian military personnel out of the battlefield. If Russia had amassed 190,000 personnel before the war, then nearly 13% of their force is no longer available to fight.
No wonder Putin is begging others to join the fight for him. This war is unsustainable for Russia.
Attacking a comment that refers to the SECOND Iraq War with a bunch of statements about the FIRST Iraq War is a strange tactic that isn't going to do much to convince me that you're worth using a source to answer the questions I raise.
How certain are you about 6000 Russian casualties? The numbers range from Russian claims (old, ~500 dead, 160 wounded) to America (2500..6000 dead) to Ukraine (12,000 dead).
To put that number in context, the claims for the other side are
dead according to Ukraine 1300, according to the US 2000..4000, according to Russia ~3000.
More revealing, I think, is the context that in the years preceding the invasion we have claims (these are somewhat older, and in less of a hot war situation, so perhaps? more reliable) of
~4,700 dead on the Ukraine side, ~10,000 wounded and
~5,800 on the Russian side, ~13,000 wounded.
Put in that context, the war is (so far at least, not a massive change from the past), a more rapid pace, sure but if the first 6000 deaths didn't discourage either side, why are "we" so convinced the next 6000 will do the job?
A similarly interesting statistic is that in the prior years Ukraine lost about 300 tanks, about the same number Russia is claimed (by Ukraine) so far to have lost.
EVER damn war, from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq we get Americans absolutely convinced that they understand the motivations and goals of the enemy.
Followed by massive chest-beating about "how could we get it so wrong?"
And yet, ZERO learning...
Once again we have 90% of America absolutely certain they understand why Russia and Ukraine each are fighting, and what will be the pain points for each one. Un-freaking-believable. It takes a special kind of stupid to be so convinced about everything even after such a track record.
Yes, I agree, you're full of shit. J/K
FFS, you're going to make me break down your junk? Fine.
The second Iraq War that you're accounting for included occupation. I mean, if you want to compare apples to apples, sure, we can wait another 10 years and talk about where Russia is, militarily, in its failed occupation, though it seems more likely that discussion will never happen as Russia can't even figure out how to feed its own soldiers and fuel its front line equipment. Or maybe you think that 40-mile column was bogged down because it wanted to remain as sitting ducks? Anyway, I actually was referencing the 2nd Gulf War when I cited the 3:1 ratio of wounded to dead.
You'd have to be a moron to think that, after over 500 pieces of military equipment have been destroyed, only 500 Russians were dead and 160 injured. The implausibility of having fewer wounded than dead should have been a red flag for you, or maybe no? Also, that 6000 number is probably good. I mean, Ukraine has an actual list of KIA/POW. I'm sure they've shared a ballpark figure with the US. It was...weird. I mean, names of POWs/KIAs including in some cases their home contact?
That context has no value relative to the number of wounded and is of limited value if you can't reference those values. US DoD said 4000 top estimate Ukrainian dead, 6000 top estimate Russian dead, yet somehow you've halved the gap? Mkay then -- you know better, amirite?
The rapid pace of this war is the number of Russians dying and equipment being lost. Their attrition rate for a supposedly overwhelming attacking force, is unheralded in modern (re: post Vietnam War period). Russia supposedly upgraded its military over the last decade, and yet, their attrition rate of personnel and equipment is quite shocking. Oryx has verified 204 tanks lost, and says that the actual number is probably higher.
Putin told us in the days before he started his war, that he intended to reassemble the USSR and that he believes the world needs a yin and yang. Maybe the world always needs the bifurcation of power, but c'mon, China's a bigger power than Russia and there's no way Russia ever catches up -- that's what Obama's point was when he publicly diminished Russia's power in response to Romney.
Again, Putin said he intended to reassemble the USSR. He's told us that he believes the world needs a yin and yang. As for pain points, I'm pretty sure the Russian pain points are: (a) losing the war and/or (b) debt default. Technically speaking, there is no pain point for Ukraine. It has practically unlimited support from its allies and its application to the EU is already past its first steps.
Peace out.
Wait, how were there Russian casualties before the invasion, when Russia denied having troops in the Donbas? Were these Russian ‘volunteers’? Green men?
I’m not a military planner, so could you explain to me exactly why the plan included moving hundreds of vehicles from the safety of an ally’s territory into hostile territory, then parking them for well over a week along a road? Since everything is going according to plan, according to your boss ….
Whatever is happening, you can be assured that it is happening precisely as the Kremlin in general and Putin in particular planned. How do we know? Because Putin is a brilliant 11-dimensional chess player who always carefully plans for everything (except maybe suing a Harry Potter movie because Dobby the house elf stole Vladi's likeness). The evidence is right there in front of you: a war in Ukraine unfolding exactly how Vlad wanted, presumably.
Plainly, since we can't see inside the inscrutable, level-7 genius intellect of an elderly autocrat, we must assume that _we're_ the ones who are seeing the situation incorrectly.
I fully understand that most people here (vide above comments) care only about the blame game, not the UNDERSTANDING game. For them the explanation "Putin is a bad crazy man" is all they ever want.
For the 1% or so who can think beyond this, I'd recommend the set of threads collected here. The author is the first I have come across who's actually capable of explaining WHY things are playing out as they are, from the limited number of battles we have seen, to the likely motivations and strategies of the various parties:
https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1498377757536968711
While the author (Russian, as far as I can tell) expects a different outcome from Clint Ehrlich,
https://twitter.com/ClintEhrlich
both have the immense advantage that they care more about understanding (and testing their understanding by reporting contradictory data) than they care about following the crowd or virtue signaling.
Clint Ehrlich!
The first tweet on that thread is about how god uses him as his Earthly instrument.
But he's not about virtue signalling!
Well then, you should be impressed with my analysis. From the start I've said that he's an amoral, unethical, kleptocratic autocrat whose primary guiding principle is to operate opportunistically.
I've never suggested he's crazy. "Bad" connotates a Manichean bifurcation of good/evil.
But you see, someone who is amoral and unethical operates outside of such boundaries -- like psychopathy. I mean sure, some people interchangeably refer to such people suffering from psychopathy as "crazy" and "bad", but c'mon, we're beyond simple labels, are we not?
Kamel Galeev writes like a historian, and writes well, but interesting as this background is, it is of limited use; history is not an infallible predictor of the future.
What can be seen happening on the ground is much more significant. Such as: Russia has been unable to capture any Ukrainian city of significant size. Russian ground forces have advanced very little if at all in the last few days. They are resorting to long-range nonprecision weapons to bombard cities, and hitting few targets of military significance, the exception being the cruise missile attack on the training base near Yavoriv. Indiscriminate bombardment of cities is as likely to harden resistance as to demoralize, and does little if anything to degrade the opponent’s fighting capability. Russian forces first attempted to capture the Hostomel airport two weeks ago, and apparently are still trying. The first assault was by helicopter-borne and/or paratroopers. For obvious reasons, these are lightly armed units and cannot be expected to hold an objective for long; the proper way to use them is to gain the element of surprise, then quickly reinforce them with a combined-arms ground force - this obviously did not happen. None of this suggests an operation that is proceeding according to plan.
Lies!
It's 12 dimensions! As everyone should know, there is only one multidimensional chess board and it's a dodecahedron.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/top-putin-ally-says-ukraine-war-has-been-slower-than-expected-2022-03-14/