The Ukraine War

Would cyber-warfare count?

DB2

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Just curious, does anyone think that if we let Putin march in and take control of the Ukraine, that he would stop there?

IMNSHO, I think supplying Ukraine with arms is actually our cheapest alternative. Financially and in terms of American lives.

Sometimes the best alternative is the least worst one.

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With Russia having a veto on the Security Council, it is not really an effective tool for anyone.

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The majority of countries in the UN are Muslim. The UN is not a US creature. Hasn’t been for a long time now. It is just a set of channels for discussions.

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Report on CNN turns out the Germans are in total going to give Ukraine 14 Leopard tanks now but a total of 300 tanks after training Ukrainians how to use them.

Plus the Germans are now allowing other NATO members to also supply their Leopard tanks to Ukraine. Meaning perhaps many more tanks than 300 will be going to Ukraine.

The Ukrainians are overjoyed.

Frankly I think the lower US number of tanks and the timing may also be a budget issue. The money earmarked for Ukraine may need to go in several directions. I can see the US later saying we sent planes instead. Or something like that. The US actions today gave cover to Germany.

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I like Zeihan and actually watched that video the day before yesterday. However, I can armchair general as well as he can. We can make an educated guess at how Western analysts think the war will go by looking at the announced aid packages. In the latest package was tons of air defense of all types, including two more Patriot systems. It is also believed the Russians are running low on cruise and ballistic missiles. For example, some missiles are ballasted without warheads. Attacks on economic infrastructure will become harder in the coming months. It also makes Russian air attacks more difficult.

Besides the tanks the package included hundreds of infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers, which are needed to support a tank breakthrough. FWIW, Bradleys destroyed more Iraqi tanks than the Abrams did.

Most analysts think the Russians want to expand the size of their military by about 200,000 soldiers, something like that. That is a very large number. But we know from the last mobilization Russia has a hard time equipping and training new recruits. And as Zeihen points out, Russia is short on trucks, which means it will be hard transporting and supplying those troops. So I’m skeptical a big surge like they appear to be planning will be especially effective, especially against modern western armor. The last surge yielded only a few square kilometers of territory. This appear to be a last ditch operation.

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Zeihan is letting me down here.

The Ukrainians started with 900k men and women who really want to take up arms. If the arms were available all of them would fight. There has been possibly 100k Ukrainians lost but that is not all military. There are younger folks coming of age.

With NATO help how many of those 900k will be armed and trained in Poland for fighting in the spring?

I think the Russians will either be matched in numbers or out numbered.

Russian moral seems rightfully suicidal as opposed to homicidal. The Russians have no clue why to fight. The losses are going to be brutal and all of them know it.

If 200k raw recruits are thrown in perhaps most of 200k body bags will be needed.

I have zero sympathy but I am not happy about it.

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Kind of let me down too. Since the war started Ukraine has been able to constitute new forces larger than the Russian have been able to do, and the Ukrainian MOD has said several times they have enough soldiers. So I think Ukraine is anticipating a different type of war than Zeihan is. Presumably, we and our allied partners are thinking the same way.

I don’t really believe the casualty estimates from either side, but there is enough anecdotal evidence to suggest the Russians are getting mauled. They still have an numbers and artillery advantage, but the last aid package included lots more artillery as well.

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Russian mobilizations

This fall, Russia has called up 300,000.

According to Shoigu, 300,000 reservists were planned to be mobilized,[64] called from a pool of 25 million “potential fighters.”

Last week Russia called up another 700,000.

The muted mobilization was reported by Russian independent outlet Volya last week, citing sources in the Russian military’s General Staff.

“The Ministry of Defense needs to recruit about 700,000 more people for the war by February,” the outlet reported, adding, “[O]fficials, politicians and generals will publicly assert that there is no mobilization.”

The Ukrainians have had at least 3 mobilizations. But no numbers were available. I suppose another mobilization will occur as the Russians are mobilizing more.

The Russians have slightly more than 3 times the population of the Ukraine with similar demographics. Ukraine must avoid a war of attrition at all costs.

The US believes that is exactly the type of war Zelensky is fighting. That some land is not strategically worth fighting over. But it is a morale issue/messaging issue to the Ukrainian people for Zelensky. A WW2 German leader hampered his generals by not allowing them to pull back to utilize terrain for better defensive positions. The worst instance of that policy was a loss of a German army in Stalingrad.

The Americans want Zelensky to “focus instead on a style of mechanized maneuver warfare that uses rapid, unanticipated movements against Russia, sources familiar with their discussion said.”

the senior Western official said, Bakhmut “matters because the Russians have made it matter — probably more than the terrain does.” A US military official also expressed skepticism that Ukraine will abandon Bakhmut — not because of its battlefield value, but because its strategic messaging value is so important.

On Monday, a senior US military official told reporters that Russia has “rushed in” tens of thousands of “ill-equipped, ill-trained” replacement troops across the front line over the last several months, including to Bakhmut, amid the losses suffered. Despite the large numbers, the new troops have not changed the dynamic of the fight, the official said.

But Ukraine is also suffering enormous casualties in the battle and expending tremendous amounts of artillery ammunition daily – a style of fighting that the US does not believe is sustainable. In terms of sheer volume, Russia still has more artillery ammunition and manpower, with the paramilitary organization Wagner Group using thousands of convicts to “throw bodies” at the battle, the Western intelligence official said.

“A major Ukrainian breakthrough in Zaporizhzhia would seriously challenge the viability of Russia’s ‘land-bridge’ linking Russia’s Rostov region and Crimea,” the UK Ministry of Defense reported in its regular intelligence update earlier this month.
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A push south could sever the land bridge to the Crimea cutting all supply to that region. The Kherson bridges have already been destroyed to prevent rail supply.

The Russian army is relying on civilian trucks to supply Crimea. I would think isolating Crimea would be a great morale builder.

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Keep in mind there is a Shiny faction that is leveraging the “'murica first” narrative to advocate for cutting off funds for Ukraine and letting Putin have it.

Steve

Somehow the Pentagon can shove money around easily enough to find an unanticipated $10B to build a wall at the Mexico border but can’t find money to ship tanks to Ukraine? I don’t think so. I think it’s mostly not wanted to get sucked into a foreign war, even or especially through the back door. FDR wrestled with this sort of problem in 1940 before coming up with Lend/Lease. It was difficult to give enough aid, but not so much as to provoke a war for which the US was woefully unprepared.

[My iPad hates this site, so I’m unable to scroll up to quote, but… someone upthread talked about tactics so…]

My guess is that the best guess is to look at Russian historical tactics and Russian thinking in general. Like US in Vietnam, like Russian and the US in Afghanistan [excepting the first couple months] we have massed armies ready to duke it out.

Ukraine is big enough to last, maybe not big enough to win the “all our tanks against all your tanks” kind of tactics. I’d say it’ll be “modified hit-and-run” with tank battles but not great battlefields full of them. Exhaust the Russians, which will be difficult given State control of their media, but even already there are signs that the population isn’t believing the “quick win” propaganda anymore, and the reservist call-ups are deeply unpopular.

Changing Putin’s mind is probably a non-starter, but maybe he dies or gets replaced, if Ukraine can last that long they will ultimately win.

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I think plenty of Russians can see what is happening on Telegram. For a long while, I do not know if it is still the case, Telegram has been available on the internet. Both Russia and Ukraine use it to spread the war news etc…read propaganda…It is encrypted. Russia can not see who sees the Ukrainian news. Russia was leaving it up because they were using it as well.

Did you try the bar at the right?

It’s possible, but doesn’t seem likely. I mean it hasn’t grown much, or at all, over 40 years.

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The defense budget has grown tremendously over 40 years. Your chart compares it against GDP, but is that really the right measure? Shouldn’t we be comparing to “what it takes to do the job”?

Which, of course, begs the question; “What is the job”? Is it to protect oil tankers coming down the Straits of Hormuz? Is it keeping 40 (old style) military bases in Germany?

I’d submit that the job has changed. Cyber warfare is a real threat, it’s clear that Russia is playing that game here and abroad to destabilize democracies. Are there other things we as a country should be doing more of, and fewer things like “foot soldiers” in Australia?

Could we do an equivalent job with 90% of what we spend today? 80%? 75%

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True as a % of GDP. GDP continues to grow at a faster pace than defense spending but not entitlement spending.
And as a percent of the US budget as Healthcare continues to grow:


And as a percent of the US budget as Healthcare spending continues to grow faster than GDP growth. Ultimately entitlement spending will take the entire US budget barring a congressional fix.
1992 Social Security: 20.6%. Healthcare:12.1% Defense 21.9% Non-discretionary spending: 16.7%
2022 Social Security: 34.1% Healthcare: 27.6% Defense 11.3% Non-discretionary spending: 11.6%

But in dollar amounts the Defense budget keeps increasing:
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/military-spending-defense-budget
1992-325 billion 2020-778 billion

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Ok, so instead of 3.8% of GDP, say only 3% of GDP. How much of a difference would that make? To you? To the folks that say we spend too much on defense? Etc?

I agree completely. But Russia is heavyhanded and “gross” in these games they play. China, on the other hand, is much more subtle and are playing the long game. Having been around so much longer, they have much more patience than the USA (a veritable baby nation-wise) or Russia. Besides, Russia may soon be gone as a world power, that’s part of the purpose of the current war in Ukraine. Unfortunately, it may take a real war with China to dissolve the UN and form a new world body without a random pi$$ant nuclear state like Russia having any real power in said body.

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I do not agree with any part of that.

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Interesting development:

one has to wonder why the State Department saw fit to plant a story in the most obvious manner possible, by granting an interview with Anthony Blinken to one of the spooks’ favorite whispers, David Ignatius of the Washington Post (full text can be found here) . Not only was there no news trigger for the chat, but the interview’s premise was peculiar: talking about the endgame of the war and the US post war policy for Ukraine seems might peculiar since no resolution for the conflict is in sight.

And the interview itself was odd. Blinken did make a major concession to reality in acknowledging that Ukraine would not be able to retake Crimea any time soon. He expects the US to continue to arm Ukraine without having a treaty. Yet no where does the article suggest how the war might end, let alone mention the “n” word, negotiate.

One theory is that this article is intended to start managing down expectations in the US and Ukraine by conceding that Crimea is a lost cause.

One guess is that Blinken cleared his throat to undercut the more or less contemporaneously-released RAND paper, Avoiding a Long War, embedded at the end of this post. I strongly urge you to read it in full. It contains a remarkable number of reality-challenged statements about Russian performance and politics. And what is particularly disconcerting is that the piece reads as if those are RAND’s conclusions, as opposed to the authors having to navigate a difficult terrain of misperceptions.

Any speculations?

It takes two to tango. None of Putin’s wars have ended with a negotiated peace. Do we think this time is different? I have no idea what Putin’s end game is but I imagine he won’t even consider negotiating until after the rumored offensive.

Unrelated, I saw this at the bottom of the article regarding the Abrams:

It does have some other shortcomings.

Unlike all modern Russian/Ukrainian tanks, it has no autoloader……

……so Ukrainian loaders would have to be selected (strength required) and trained, to load, fast, even while the tank is moving.

No autoloader is a feature, not a bug. As our own @tim443 pointed out (hope he is doing well), it requires four people to replace a track. Russian tanks have a crew of three. Ukraine has captured a huge number Russian tanks because apparently the crew was unable to repair them. A crew of four also provides for better situational awareness. Additionally, the autoloader is fed from a carousel in the crew compartment. If the ammo is hit, the whole thing cooks off vaporizing the crew and tossing the turret in the air. The Abrams stores ammo in a separate compartment with blast panels. The Abrams probably isn’t the right tank for Ukraine, but it is vastly better than anything the Russians have, and it isn’t close.

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