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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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/

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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.

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founding

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.

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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.

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The troubling question I ask myself is why wouldn't Russia use a tactical nuclear weapon against Ukraine?

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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.

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