Burja is right about some things but wrong on the key military facts. He actually hedges where he's wrong, but he doesn't connect the dots back to really re-examine his priors and see that he's wrong.
He says that Russia never planned for this to be a quick war. Then he hedges and says they hoped for it, but they never would have invaded with so much of their military strength (at this point they've effectively committed it all) if this was meant to be a "quick, surgical strike" to decapitate the Ukrainian regime.
The problem with this is that military requirements (what strength is needed to accomplish a goal) aren't absolute. They're relative. The best way to win is to commit overwhelming force. Traditionally, you want to have at least a 3:1 advantage in attacking. The Russians, even with committing effectively ALL of their forces, they didn't have this. Their invasion force actually had less than 1 attacker per defender.
We can speculate why the Russians thought it was OK to do this, but most answers seem to reduce to "we think our forces are awe-inspiringly good" and "we think the Ukrainians won't actually fight us".
Anyway, the point is that if the Russians were planning for this to be a long grind, especially with their military doctrine (which is heavy on tanks and even moreso on artillery), they'd have had to preemptively call up hundreds of thousands of reserves, mobilize and re-train them, and do a lot more stockpiling and production of equipment than they actually did.
Burja says, "they spend a lot of time building up forces", and in the abstract that's true. They spent months training and positioning their forces for what they believed would be a quick campaign. But relative to the military requirements you would want in place if you expected a longer war, no. They simply did not do this.
Further, Burja is correct about his criticisms of the Russian invasion. It is a "typical" armored invasion and they are underperforming and their logistics are bad. What he doesn't seem to connect, though, is that unlike in past situations, the long-term factors are working against the Russians. Principally, these are:
1. They have not fully mobilized, and contrary to, say, World War II, the pool of reserves, both in terms of manpower and equipment is much smaller and take much more time to bring to bear. Successfully armored advances require overwhelming resource advantages that they simply don't have.
2. Barja remarks on the problems with armored invasions, but he doesn't much note that technological advance has greatly improved defensive capabilities. Arnold, above you note that this war depends much more on knowledge than past wars. You're wrong about stuff like Twitter, but you're right in the sense that, if you compare this war to say, the German armored invasion of Poland in 1939, the Russians are linear successors to the German tactics and strategy. On the other hand, the Ukrainians are a non-linear jump ahead of the Poles. Their troops are literate, they have continuous lines of communication, and probably most importantly, accurate targeting and anti-tank weaponry that simply didn't exist at all in 1939. In 1939, tanks and armored warfare was an innovation that beat massed but immobile and inflexible infantry and artillery. In 2022, armored warfare is over 80 years old, and infantry and artillery has become more mobile, flexible, and capable.
To make a simple comparison, a squad of infantry in 1939 had no practical way of stopping a tank. In 2022, they can go hunt them down with ATGMs.
When you put this all together, Borja's doing pretty much what most people do. He's starting to acknowledge mistakes, but he's still resisting going back and seeing how badly they undercut his basic predictions. In this case, he's wrong because:
1. Russia did plan for this to be over quickly
2. Russia therefore doesn't have the staying power to keep going indefinitely.
3. Not previously stated, but even amongst a totalitarian state the kind of fully mobilization that Russia would need to do is something that's politically very difficult. This is why Russia can't (and clearly didn't) expect to be able to fully mobilize in the first place, and why, now that their front-line forces are largely exhausted, they're pathetically casting about for Syrians and Africans rather than mobilizing Russians.
Good post. One thing to note too as a big difference between 1939 and 2022 is that WWII still saw movement by carts, wagons and horses. Most of eastern Europe was not motorized the way the US was, and no where near where we are today. Mobility of supplies and troops is greatly increased, and in a way that I think benefits the defender/guerilla more than the attacker. The window for an attacker to overwhelm a positions before defenders can react and reinforce is now much smaller, while guerillas can "shoot and scoot" much more effectively. Combined with high levels of information and communication, this increased speed makes it much easier to defend where you need to via light screens and rapidly responding reserves.
My suspicion is that Putin expected Ukrain to go something like Iraq, where a modern military just steam rolled a largely unmotivated defending force. I expect the error was partially around how skilled and effective the Russian army vs the US army was, and how serious the Ukrainians were going to be about defending their government.
1. Putin lost the Ukraine war on November 5, 2012. Guy Fawkes Day, as it happens, 407 years after the gunpowder treason and plot.
It was on that day that he fired Serdyukov as Defense Minister and replaced him with Shoygu, who is still in the position doing a heckuva job, and not in prison. Yet.
Serdyukov was responsible for fixing and modernizing the Russian military and rooting out rampant corruption after its completely, embarrassingly bad performance in the Georgian war in 2008 which revealed deep and widespread institutional weaknesses to include most equipment being not just unready but in a genuinely decrepit state. By all accounts, he was doing a good job. Too good. Can't do stuff like that in Russia and avoid making too many genuinely scary enemies, who, apparently, let Putin know that either Serdyukov goes, or he does. And then the reforms mostly stopped outside a few high profile areas. But no one quite knew by how much or what the consequences would be. Until now.
2. The Russians were obviously thinking that it would be a "15 Days to Slow the Spread!" operation. Just like with the pandemic, it didn't turn out that way.
3. The Russians messed up on a few fronts, so to speak, but in particular it seems clear that they did not anticipate Ukraine would receive as much help as it has been getting, able to rely on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of western intel capability and every arms depot from Lublin to Los Angeles.
Maybe the thought this wouldn't happen because other countries would be intimidated or wouldn't care, or because Russian forces would be able to close off external supply lines and topple the regime so quickly that it wouldn't matter.
That being said, it's worth keeping in mind that the Russians can still 'win'. It's just that doing so is going to cost much, much more in money, equipment, time, and blood than they hoped, and in the end, what really will they have gained in a resentful and emptied captive nation?
I'm mildly supportive so I'll agree that credit is due but:
1. It's largely offset by the absolute failure to engage in serious, full-court-press diplomacy to prevent the war in the first place. At this point, the likely outcome, like most wars, is that everyone loses. Everyone would have been better off if we sat both sides down and had a Come to Jesus with them.
Russia, this isn't going to be the cakewalk you think. And Ukraine, you have no real hope of getting back Crimea. Neither of you are making good faith attempts to live up to the agreements you made. You both think you have more to gain by war, and you're both wrong.
Maybe that wouldn't have worked, but as one of the people who was actually saying a couple months ago that war was probably going to happen, the lack of a serious effort to prevent it is a tragedy. And definitely no serious effort was made by the US. That's on Biden.
2. To a degree, I think the crazy talk from people like Romney (and Hillary... who was thankfully ignored and must have been told to shut up within minutes of opening her mouth) is simply him seeing it as more important to pimp for the defense establishment than anything else. Biden, on the other hand, actually has to, you know, be the President. I commend him for stepping up, but I think were Romney in his position, he'd probably do the same.
That being said, the fact that Romney is A-OK with throwing gas on this fire when he's not in charge is yet another on the ever growing list of reasons I regret voting for him.
Every conversation begins with the words “As a gay person” or “As a Latinx” because group experiences are taken to be incommensurable.
That connected with me concretely.
It also helps explain why what follows those words never seems to make an impact on me. When a speaker introduces an attempt to persuade with a disclaimer of my ability to understand, I simply turn off. If I can’t understand, why burn the brain-calories trying? The words alienate me from the communication that follows.
I realize that those words may mean that the persuasive attempt is not aimed at me, but is instead intended (for example) to rally members of the same group.
I see very little written about the impacts of technological evolution on the viability of war. Economic progress now depends upon science and innovation and little upon "resources". The whole definition of real resources for the future have become human capital (knowledge and innovation) and energy with all other so called "resources" becoming available with energy and innovation.
In the past wars could obtain resources and be profitable for the aggressors, but that is no longer true as noted by the observation of no profitable wars of conquest for the last half a century. Even Israel would dump the West Bank, like it did Gaza, if the political leaders in the West Bank actually wanted peace.
You capture people and you put a gun to their heads and can make them plow that field, but you can't make them invent the next generation of i-phones. With energy and knowledge with very little land you can make a Singapore or Hong Kong.
With smart weapons the military advantage is shifting to the defense that always has more local information for the very dumb so called smart weapons. Point at a tank locally for a few seconds and the weapon goes and kills the tank.
These shifts make war a serious mistake by ego driven leaders who don't or can't understand that the world now depends upon science and technology and not upon their "strong leadership". The leadership question is now just a management question of how to get the maximum innovative performance from an organization and force isn't the answer.
This is something I’m thinking about too, but I’m not quite as optimistic as you.
Making a Hong Kong is hard because there aren’t many of them and the Chinese seem to have done a good job of taking it over, although not through a traditional invasion.
Beyond that, I think that while economic progress requires innovation, economic power requires numbers. I think this is how the Russians looked at Ukraine. If you take seriously the idea that Russia is basically a fascist country (controlled and run through a cooperation of monopolies into a de facto oligarchy) then Ukraine would have been a captive market for them. The reason the war started in the first place was they were losing their grip on it.
The Ukraine war can be seen as an attempt to maintain control over a large market. Essentially a rent seeking war.
Monopolies evolve towards self-interested institutions that don't innovate, if that innovation would harm the interest of any members of that institutions. True monopolies with no competition have no reason to innovate.
The only reason so-called capitalism sometimes works is that real competitive institutions can fail (bankruptcy). Real competition and innovation create failures.
Note that almost all government institutions are monopolies and become bureaucratically frozen and have no need or desire to truly innovate. We only have one CDC and it was shown to be incompetent in handling SARS-CoV-2 virus and even spread false information that masks don't protect the user. Note that N-95 masks were used by real workers to protect themselves from small particles by design specification and the Doctors using them had a very low infection rate with huge exposures.
Both too big to fail and government monopoly institutions will evolve in a non-innovation direction. IBM and US Steel who owned the world of my youth evolved over my lifetime into bloated incompetent institutions which were forced to change and die, while the CDC and FDA just expanded their staffs.
As anyone done an in depth economic consideration of Wokeism as a function of the particular labor markets in which it's endemic (looking especially at academia!)?
Academic markets are basically textbook examples of tournament theory where very marginal differences in ability (the average research and teaching output of the average professor is pretty standardized) still lead to dramatic differences in pay (with a few professors getting tenured lifetime employment and an ocean of others scraping by as adjuncts, staff members, and various other menial roles). Tournament theory seems well supported by the literature (at least was back when I was studying such things) and gives a straightforward explanation for why the Woke exist. They exist in a labor market where the difference between success and failure is a razor's edge that's likely drowned out by random factors and where the success of any other participant is a failure to you (so that participants are encouraged to be selfish, collude, cheat, and continuously undercut each other).
That is, tournament theory provides a straightforward explanation of why 1) the Woke are continually trying to bring down winners and prop themselves up as replacements and 2) are continually eating their own.
I was influenced by the article below. Based on the article, a tactical nuclear weapon seemed like a far more fierce version of the weapons Russia is already using against Ukrainian bases and cities. That's what had me worried since it seems like the momentum is continued escalation of attacks.
Notice Mauroni doesn't describe the specific military circumstances in which use of a tactical nuclear bomb would make sense and why those circumstances are likely to occur. He merely recites some hypothetical possibilities.
Pictures of the 2S7s are kind of scare-mongering. The Russians aren't going to put a nuke shell in a regular Ural and truck it around a hot battlefield. They've lost over 1K vehicles in a few weeks! They aren't going to risk losing a nuke to a high-probability event! They would put it on a missile, or *maybe* a fighter-bomber if they had to, but even that's unlikely given that Ukraine air defenses are still operational.
Now, technically Malka's have a high enough caliber to shoot the smallest tactical nukes, but their presence on the battlefield doesn't signal that intention at all. Instead it's just classic doctrine for positioning extra-heavy artillery in safe rear positions from which they can fire on demand on any targets that pop up in a huge area (max range is nearly 30 miles!) and which don't have the range to hit back. For what it's worth, reports suggest that special 2S7 shells with rocket-assist or precision guidable capability aren't working very reliably for the Russians. Even if they brought them along, are they gonna trust the tac nuke rounds after that? No way.
I hope you're right. I'm a layperson not familiar with the weaponry. But more destruction generally seems to fit in with the way Russia is waging this war.
I think the Russians did expect a quick victory. However, they didn't commit overwhelming force to the operation, and this was done, I think, mostly to limit the numbers of casualties on both sides- that is the effect of the modern media world. Having lost the propaganda war regardless of their initial hesitancy at using brutal tactics, they will start using such tactics to avoid losing and to regain the intiative on the ground. The next few weeks will be a dangerous time for the world- more dangerous than at any time in my life. So far the US government has refrained from direct involvement on the ground or in the air, but I think that might change if it ever looks like Russia is gaining a position that might look like winning in the end.
I think this war ends in one of two ways- the Russians take Kiev and/or the Black Sea coast, and then declares operations at a end, or Putin is deposed by his own cabal of elites. However, even the second option might not mean an end to the war, but only a change in tactics by whoever ends up in the position of leader.
Wow, thank you for the link to the Samo Burja interview. Refreshingly rational and fact-based. It is sad that the West is so misled by the "end of history" illusion.
Even putting issues of international escalation and entry into a potentially nuclear war aside, on a purely practical level, they wouldn't use them because tactical nukes wouldn't do the Russians any good.
Tactical nukes would not advance any of their pressing military objectives, especially since the Russians are playing offense. Those weapons are useful when strategically important masses of enemy forces are concentrated in the open on land or on sea, or to destroy extremely hardened targets like bunkers or underground facilities, or very large targets, like entire ports or naval base docks.
Furthermore, even in those circumstances, one would only do this when one is under existential pressure and cannot feasibly accomplish those objectives quickly with alternative destructive means, and the first word any Russian General said as a baby was Aртиллерия.
In contrast, Ukrainian forces are dispersed and/or in urban areas, and any few assets they have with those previously mentioned characteristics are low priority for the Russians.
If anything, it's the Ukrainians, being on the defense, and having been given intelligence of the precise locations and disposition of Russian forces, who - if the situations were reversed and they had the nukes and the Russians didn't - would be most tempted to use small nukes, precisely because they would get enormous bang for the buck, as it were. This was the old scenario if there was another attempt to mass multiple nukeless Arab armies against nuclear Israel, but things have changed a lot since then.
The Russian land forces were extremely concentrated when crossing the border, and they remain highly concentrated, especially the Main body trying to encircle Kiev to the west. The Russian Naval ships and landing crafts just off the coast are also quite concentrated, and while they may be able to defend against a typical torpedo or other coastal defenses there is nothing they can do against a well placed tactical nuke.
Also, an amphibious assault is by nature a concentrated operation as you are trying to land your Marines all at the same time, while the defense is trying to force you into a narrow zone. But if you try that against someone with tactical nukes, you will lose everything in one shot.
I wonder if killing Zelenskyy would be reason enough to drop one tactical nuke in the middle of Kyiv. Or perhaps not “reason” enough. Perhaps just “emotion” enough.
Surely no one more than Donald Trump did more to make Ukraine vulnerable to Russian aggression plus those willing to ignore Putin's peccadillos --Crimea, assignations, Syria -- becasue he was right to jail Pussy Riot. Identity politics trumps everything.
Burja is right about some things but wrong on the key military facts. He actually hedges where he's wrong, but he doesn't connect the dots back to really re-examine his priors and see that he's wrong.
He says that Russia never planned for this to be a quick war. Then he hedges and says they hoped for it, but they never would have invaded with so much of their military strength (at this point they've effectively committed it all) if this was meant to be a "quick, surgical strike" to decapitate the Ukrainian regime.
The problem with this is that military requirements (what strength is needed to accomplish a goal) aren't absolute. They're relative. The best way to win is to commit overwhelming force. Traditionally, you want to have at least a 3:1 advantage in attacking. The Russians, even with committing effectively ALL of their forces, they didn't have this. Their invasion force actually had less than 1 attacker per defender.
We can speculate why the Russians thought it was OK to do this, but most answers seem to reduce to "we think our forces are awe-inspiringly good" and "we think the Ukrainians won't actually fight us".
Anyway, the point is that if the Russians were planning for this to be a long grind, especially with their military doctrine (which is heavy on tanks and even moreso on artillery), they'd have had to preemptively call up hundreds of thousands of reserves, mobilize and re-train them, and do a lot more stockpiling and production of equipment than they actually did.
Burja says, "they spend a lot of time building up forces", and in the abstract that's true. They spent months training and positioning their forces for what they believed would be a quick campaign. But relative to the military requirements you would want in place if you expected a longer war, no. They simply did not do this.
Further, Burja is correct about his criticisms of the Russian invasion. It is a "typical" armored invasion and they are underperforming and their logistics are bad. What he doesn't seem to connect, though, is that unlike in past situations, the long-term factors are working against the Russians. Principally, these are:
1. They have not fully mobilized, and contrary to, say, World War II, the pool of reserves, both in terms of manpower and equipment is much smaller and take much more time to bring to bear. Successfully armored advances require overwhelming resource advantages that they simply don't have.
2. Barja remarks on the problems with armored invasions, but he doesn't much note that technological advance has greatly improved defensive capabilities. Arnold, above you note that this war depends much more on knowledge than past wars. You're wrong about stuff like Twitter, but you're right in the sense that, if you compare this war to say, the German armored invasion of Poland in 1939, the Russians are linear successors to the German tactics and strategy. On the other hand, the Ukrainians are a non-linear jump ahead of the Poles. Their troops are literate, they have continuous lines of communication, and probably most importantly, accurate targeting and anti-tank weaponry that simply didn't exist at all in 1939. In 1939, tanks and armored warfare was an innovation that beat massed but immobile and inflexible infantry and artillery. In 2022, armored warfare is over 80 years old, and infantry and artillery has become more mobile, flexible, and capable.
To make a simple comparison, a squad of infantry in 1939 had no practical way of stopping a tank. In 2022, they can go hunt them down with ATGMs.
When you put this all together, Borja's doing pretty much what most people do. He's starting to acknowledge mistakes, but he's still resisting going back and seeing how badly they undercut his basic predictions. In this case, he's wrong because:
1. Russia did plan for this to be over quickly
2. Russia therefore doesn't have the staying power to keep going indefinitely.
3. Not previously stated, but even amongst a totalitarian state the kind of fully mobilization that Russia would need to do is something that's politically very difficult. This is why Russia can't (and clearly didn't) expect to be able to fully mobilize in the first place, and why, now that their front-line forces are largely exhausted, they're pathetically casting about for Syrians and Africans rather than mobilizing Russians.
Good post. One thing to note too as a big difference between 1939 and 2022 is that WWII still saw movement by carts, wagons and horses. Most of eastern Europe was not motorized the way the US was, and no where near where we are today. Mobility of supplies and troops is greatly increased, and in a way that I think benefits the defender/guerilla more than the attacker. The window for an attacker to overwhelm a positions before defenders can react and reinforce is now much smaller, while guerillas can "shoot and scoot" much more effectively. Combined with high levels of information and communication, this increased speed makes it much easier to defend where you need to via light screens and rapidly responding reserves.
My suspicion is that Putin expected Ukrain to go something like Iraq, where a modern military just steam rolled a largely unmotivated defending force. I expect the error was partially around how skilled and effective the Russian army vs the US army was, and how serious the Ukrainians were going to be about defending their government.
1. Putin lost the Ukraine war on November 5, 2012. Guy Fawkes Day, as it happens, 407 years after the gunpowder treason and plot.
It was on that day that he fired Serdyukov as Defense Minister and replaced him with Shoygu, who is still in the position doing a heckuva job, and not in prison. Yet.
Serdyukov was responsible for fixing and modernizing the Russian military and rooting out rampant corruption after its completely, embarrassingly bad performance in the Georgian war in 2008 which revealed deep and widespread institutional weaknesses to include most equipment being not just unready but in a genuinely decrepit state. By all accounts, he was doing a good job. Too good. Can't do stuff like that in Russia and avoid making too many genuinely scary enemies, who, apparently, let Putin know that either Serdyukov goes, or he does. And then the reforms mostly stopped outside a few high profile areas. But no one quite knew by how much or what the consequences would be. Until now.
2. The Russians were obviously thinking that it would be a "15 Days to Slow the Spread!" operation. Just like with the pandemic, it didn't turn out that way.
3. The Russians messed up on a few fronts, so to speak, but in particular it seems clear that they did not anticipate Ukraine would receive as much help as it has been getting, able to rely on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of western intel capability and every arms depot from Lublin to Los Angeles.
Maybe the thought this wouldn't happen because other countries would be intimidated or wouldn't care, or because Russian forces would be able to close off external supply lines and topple the regime so quickly that it wouldn't matter.
That being said, it's worth keeping in mind that the Russians can still 'win'. It's just that doing so is going to cost much, much more in money, equipment, time, and blood than they hoped, and in the end, what really will they have gained in a resentful and emptied captive nation?
I'm mildly supportive so I'll agree that credit is due but:
1. It's largely offset by the absolute failure to engage in serious, full-court-press diplomacy to prevent the war in the first place. At this point, the likely outcome, like most wars, is that everyone loses. Everyone would have been better off if we sat both sides down and had a Come to Jesus with them.
Russia, this isn't going to be the cakewalk you think. And Ukraine, you have no real hope of getting back Crimea. Neither of you are making good faith attempts to live up to the agreements you made. You both think you have more to gain by war, and you're both wrong.
Maybe that wouldn't have worked, but as one of the people who was actually saying a couple months ago that war was probably going to happen, the lack of a serious effort to prevent it is a tragedy. And definitely no serious effort was made by the US. That's on Biden.
2. To a degree, I think the crazy talk from people like Romney (and Hillary... who was thankfully ignored and must have been told to shut up within minutes of opening her mouth) is simply him seeing it as more important to pimp for the defense establishment than anything else. Biden, on the other hand, actually has to, you know, be the President. I commend him for stepping up, but I think were Romney in his position, he'd probably do the same.
That being said, the fact that Romney is A-OK with throwing gas on this fire when he's not in charge is yet another on the ever growing list of reasons I regret voting for him.
I liked this sentence from Gurri:
Every conversation begins with the words “As a gay person” or “As a Latinx” because group experiences are taken to be incommensurable.
That connected with me concretely.
It also helps explain why what follows those words never seems to make an impact on me. When a speaker introduces an attempt to persuade with a disclaimer of my ability to understand, I simply turn off. If I can’t understand, why burn the brain-calories trying? The words alienate me from the communication that follows.
I realize that those words may mean that the persuasive attempt is not aimed at me, but is instead intended (for example) to rally members of the same group.
I see very little written about the impacts of technological evolution on the viability of war. Economic progress now depends upon science and innovation and little upon "resources". The whole definition of real resources for the future have become human capital (knowledge and innovation) and energy with all other so called "resources" becoming available with energy and innovation.
In the past wars could obtain resources and be profitable for the aggressors, but that is no longer true as noted by the observation of no profitable wars of conquest for the last half a century. Even Israel would dump the West Bank, like it did Gaza, if the political leaders in the West Bank actually wanted peace.
You capture people and you put a gun to their heads and can make them plow that field, but you can't make them invent the next generation of i-phones. With energy and knowledge with very little land you can make a Singapore or Hong Kong.
With smart weapons the military advantage is shifting to the defense that always has more local information for the very dumb so called smart weapons. Point at a tank locally for a few seconds and the weapon goes and kills the tank.
These shifts make war a serious mistake by ego driven leaders who don't or can't understand that the world now depends upon science and technology and not upon their "strong leadership". The leadership question is now just a management question of how to get the maximum innovative performance from an organization and force isn't the answer.
This is something I’m thinking about too, but I’m not quite as optimistic as you.
Making a Hong Kong is hard because there aren’t many of them and the Chinese seem to have done a good job of taking it over, although not through a traditional invasion.
Beyond that, I think that while economic progress requires innovation, economic power requires numbers. I think this is how the Russians looked at Ukraine. If you take seriously the idea that Russia is basically a fascist country (controlled and run through a cooperation of monopolies into a de facto oligarchy) then Ukraine would have been a captive market for them. The reason the war started in the first place was they were losing their grip on it.
The Ukraine war can be seen as an attempt to maintain control over a large market. Essentially a rent seeking war.
Monopolies evolve towards self-interested institutions that don't innovate, if that innovation would harm the interest of any members of that institutions. True monopolies with no competition have no reason to innovate.
The only reason so-called capitalism sometimes works is that real competitive institutions can fail (bankruptcy). Real competition and innovation create failures.
Note that almost all government institutions are monopolies and become bureaucratically frozen and have no need or desire to truly innovate. We only have one CDC and it was shown to be incompetent in handling SARS-CoV-2 virus and even spread false information that masks don't protect the user. Note that N-95 masks were used by real workers to protect themselves from small particles by design specification and the Doctors using them had a very low infection rate with huge exposures.
Both too big to fail and government monopoly institutions will evolve in a non-innovation direction. IBM and US Steel who owned the world of my youth evolved over my lifetime into bloated incompetent institutions which were forced to change and die, while the CDC and FDA just expanded their staffs.
As anyone done an in depth economic consideration of Wokeism as a function of the particular labor markets in which it's endemic (looking especially at academia!)?
Academic markets are basically textbook examples of tournament theory where very marginal differences in ability (the average research and teaching output of the average professor is pretty standardized) still lead to dramatic differences in pay (with a few professors getting tenured lifetime employment and an ocean of others scraping by as adjuncts, staff members, and various other menial roles). Tournament theory seems well supported by the literature (at least was back when I was studying such things) and gives a straightforward explanation for why the Woke exist. They exist in a labor market where the difference between success and failure is a razor's edge that's likely drowned out by random factors and where the success of any other participant is a failure to you (so that participants are encouraged to be selfish, collude, cheat, and continuously undercut each other).
That is, tournament theory provides a straightforward explanation of why 1) the Woke are continually trying to bring down winners and prop themselves up as replacements and 2) are continually eating their own.
I was influenced by the article below. Based on the article, a tactical nuclear weapon seemed like a far more fierce version of the weapons Russia is already using against Ukrainian bases and cities. That's what had me worried since it seems like the momentum is continued escalation of attacks.
https://mwi.usma.edu/would-russia-use-a-tactical-nuclear-weapon-in-ukraine/
Notice Mauroni doesn't describe the specific military circumstances in which use of a tactical nuclear bomb would make sense and why those circumstances are likely to occur. He merely recites some hypothetical possibilities.
Pictures of the 2S7s are kind of scare-mongering. The Russians aren't going to put a nuke shell in a regular Ural and truck it around a hot battlefield. They've lost over 1K vehicles in a few weeks! They aren't going to risk losing a nuke to a high-probability event! They would put it on a missile, or *maybe* a fighter-bomber if they had to, but even that's unlikely given that Ukraine air defenses are still operational.
Now, technically Malka's have a high enough caliber to shoot the smallest tactical nukes, but their presence on the battlefield doesn't signal that intention at all. Instead it's just classic doctrine for positioning extra-heavy artillery in safe rear positions from which they can fire on demand on any targets that pop up in a huge area (max range is nearly 30 miles!) and which don't have the range to hit back. For what it's worth, reports suggest that special 2S7 shells with rocket-assist or precision guidable capability aren't working very reliably for the Russians. Even if they brought them along, are they gonna trust the tac nuke rounds after that? No way.
I hope you're right. I'm a layperson not familiar with the weaponry. But more destruction generally seems to fit in with the way Russia is waging this war.
I think the Russians did expect a quick victory. However, they didn't commit overwhelming force to the operation, and this was done, I think, mostly to limit the numbers of casualties on both sides- that is the effect of the modern media world. Having lost the propaganda war regardless of their initial hesitancy at using brutal tactics, they will start using such tactics to avoid losing and to regain the intiative on the ground. The next few weeks will be a dangerous time for the world- more dangerous than at any time in my life. So far the US government has refrained from direct involvement on the ground or in the air, but I think that might change if it ever looks like Russia is gaining a position that might look like winning in the end.
I think this war ends in one of two ways- the Russians take Kiev and/or the Black Sea coast, and then declares operations at a end, or Putin is deposed by his own cabal of elites. However, even the second option might not mean an end to the war, but only a change in tactics by whoever ends up in the position of leader.
Samo Burja doubles down on unintended consequences of sanctions against Russia:
1) City Journal article (17 March 2022):
https://www.city-journal.org/will-western-sanctions-accelerate-russian-realignment
2) Wide-ranging "big questions" video interview by Freddie Sayer at UnHerd (36 minutes):
https://unherd.com/thepost/samo-burja-sanctions-will-divide-civilisation/
Many fresh observations and conjectures.
Wow, thank you for the link to the Samo Burja interview. Refreshingly rational and fact-based. It is sad that the West is so misled by the "end of history" illusion.
The troubling question I ask myself is why wouldn't Russia use a tactical nuclear weapon against Ukraine?
Even putting issues of international escalation and entry into a potentially nuclear war aside, on a purely practical level, they wouldn't use them because tactical nukes wouldn't do the Russians any good.
Tactical nukes would not advance any of their pressing military objectives, especially since the Russians are playing offense. Those weapons are useful when strategically important masses of enemy forces are concentrated in the open on land or on sea, or to destroy extremely hardened targets like bunkers or underground facilities, or very large targets, like entire ports or naval base docks.
Furthermore, even in those circumstances, one would only do this when one is under existential pressure and cannot feasibly accomplish those objectives quickly with alternative destructive means, and the first word any Russian General said as a baby was Aртиллерия.
In contrast, Ukrainian forces are dispersed and/or in urban areas, and any few assets they have with those previously mentioned characteristics are low priority for the Russians.
If anything, it's the Ukrainians, being on the defense, and having been given intelligence of the precise locations and disposition of Russian forces, who - if the situations were reversed and they had the nukes and the Russians didn't - would be most tempted to use small nukes, precisely because they would get enormous bang for the buck, as it were. This was the old scenario if there was another attempt to mass multiple nukeless Arab armies against nuclear Israel, but things have changed a lot since then.
The Russian land forces were extremely concentrated when crossing the border, and they remain highly concentrated, especially the Main body trying to encircle Kiev to the west. The Russian Naval ships and landing crafts just off the coast are also quite concentrated, and while they may be able to defend against a typical torpedo or other coastal defenses there is nothing they can do against a well placed tactical nuke.
Also, an amphibious assault is by nature a concentrated operation as you are trying to land your Marines all at the same time, while the defense is trying to force you into a narrow zone. But if you try that against someone with tactical nukes, you will lose everything in one shot.
I wonder if killing Zelenskyy would be reason enough to drop one tactical nuke in the middle of Kyiv. Or perhaps not “reason” enough. Perhaps just “emotion” enough.
Surely no one more than Donald Trump did more to make Ukraine vulnerable to Russian aggression plus those willing to ignore Putin's peccadillos --Crimea, assignations, Syria -- becasue he was right to jail Pussy Riot. Identity politics trumps everything.