When technology changes history can't repeat and the lessons of history can become dangerous illusions.
When agriculture was invented you could obtain more power and wealth by stealing land from your neighbor and hiring lawyers to make it legal. When industry was invented you could still steal resources like mines, factories, and wealth and still use slave labor to build rockets like Hitler did. The source of the wealth and value was in the physical resources.
With our new scientific revolution where human knowledge is growing at about 10%/yr (number of scientific articles) and this increasing knowledge is reducing the whole concept of resources down into only energy and human "knowledge and creativity" being sources of value, things become more difficult to steal. When all what are commonly called "resources" become fungible (no steel, use fiberglass; no oil, use solar; no ammonia, use air, water and energy; no fisheries use water and energy to Hydrogen to single cell protein to fish food to fish; etc), the real source of value becomes between peoples ears.
Note that there hasn't been a profitable war of conquest in the last half a century. Most of the value in the stock market is no longer "book value" but has become this intangible stuff between peoples ears. All GM factories and resources have less value that what is between the ears of Tesla workers. Conquest not longer economically works and historical analogies are no longer as valid.
Putin still believes he can capture the value in peoples heads, but the more he destroys the more the true value of the people becomes unavailable. He has the illusion that capturing the body and the factory means capturing the mind and that isn't always true. The value he want between peoples ears will just go back to the old communist workers who "just pretend to work while the government pretends to pay them" and the economy rots.
Also note that the USSR was effective against Germany because the USA supplied half of their war material. Russian capacity to produce their own war material at scale over time is an open question. This is reason #1,000 why keeping China on the sidelines is so important.
First Covid and now Ukraine. Both challenges reveal a serious failure in America's culture. The flaw is the American elite are unable to tolerate an open conversation of the issues and the tradeoffs of different responses.
The American intolerance for uncertainty and the arrogance of its elite have brought and will bring the country great trouble.
We saw the social, economic and health harms that resulted from the US going to war against a virus that couldn't be stopped. We know that expanding the war in Ukraine will bring elevated death and misery to the people of Ukraine and all who get directly involved in the fighting.
And yet the drums of war are pounded. That is fine if we accept we don't really mean it. But what happens when the people buy their own propaganda?
So here is a question that will not be asked or discussed by America's elite: What difference does it make to the people of Ukraine who governs Ukraine? If it is true that the country is equally divided between European and Russian sentiment, what is the best way to reconcile the conflict?
Sure, Putin is horrible for waging war to settle the contention. But is the "West" clean in how it has interfered in Ukraine and pushed for a Ukrainian government that acts in its interests?
I think from a military perspective, comparisons WWII with todays Russian adventure in Ukraine is tenuous at best.
But if you are going to reflect on and draw comparisons with WWII, you need to start in 1914 and WWI, and for Russia/Ukraine start in 1990.
After the defeat of Germany, the allies were triumphalist, treating Germany very shabbily, as an inferior - just as the US and the West did to Russia after the fall of the USSR. The West plundered Russia sending in its ‘carpet baggers’ rather than help build a stable economy. The Treaty of Versailles allowed France to annex the Rhineland Palatinate until 1934 as a demilitarised zone and to ensure reparations were paid. Annexing territory as a demilitarised zone is permitted for some but not others (hint: Russia).
Germany had funded its war with debt, the Kaiser gambling that he could repay the debt from plunder of resources from conquered Countries, particularly France. War reparations left Germany unable to service or repay the debt, or pay for the workings of the State so it printed money which resulted in hyperinflation. Germans lost everything as the currency became worthless, just as Russians did - many lost a lifetime’s savings - as their currency became worthless.
So a straight line can be drawn from the defeat of Germany to the rise of Hitler, enabled by the resent, shame, impoverishment, shoddy treatment at the hands of the victors. And so you can draw a parallel line from the fall of the USSR to events today in Ukraine.
The Western powers bear responsibility for WWII and invasion of Ukraine. Saying that is no more giving support or justifying Hitler as it is Putin. Just pointing out contributory negligence.
Next interesting fact. Britain and France declared war on Germany in 1939, not the other way round, yet Germany had neither invaded nor threatened either Country. Poland was no strategic importance to UK & France and as for treaty obligations, we had those with Czechoslovakia but in the name of expedience, ignored them. So Poland was just an excuse. The WMD, as it were, of the day.
Hitler wasn’t content to stop with the Sudetenland? Of course not! Nothing to do with liberating ethnic Germans. Hitler’s interests were always Russia and its oil and other resources. Czechoslovakia was just testing the water for a response with a plausible excuse for invasion. Look at a map. Czechoslovakia was just opening the door to a route through Poland and onward to Russia. So that is no comparison with Russia/Ukraine.
Hitler’s military were fuelled by Pervitin a super-stimulant which let them fight for days without sleep. It had inevitable side effects. The British and French were still stuck in WWI fighting static battles, and had no response to mechanised warfare… Blitzkrieg.
Did the Allies win the war or did the Germans lose it? An historic overview tends to make one ask, when we see all the blunders and misadventure on the Allied side, how on Earth did the Allies win?
But Hitler was the Allies best weapon. He countermanded his generals many times, the results being catastrophic and often letting the Allies off the hook. So…
The Soviet Union collapsed of its own accord, and no indemnities were imposed on it. What was the west supposed to do, step in and force the newly independent countries to rejoin the Russian Empire to prop up its self-image? Moreover, I doubt foreign investment can be blamed for Russia's poor economic performance. Russia's economic failures in the 90s were primarily its own doing, and also why so many of its neighbors preferred integrating with western Europe to being in Russia's 'sphere of influence.'
This far into the war, my anecdotal experience is that knowledge of World War II is somewhat more likely to lead to shallow thinking about Russian and Ukraine.
It's no different than economics; think of a the kind of "love at first sight" kids who immediately take to economics. They learn the basic concepts and think they can solve all the world's problems by applying them. But they get tripped up because they have no experience and refinement in their analysis skills. So they take a basic concept and apply it to a situation that looks superficially analogous.
That's what casual historians are doing when they fit historical templates on current events. If we do it superficially, and say Russia = Nazi Germany and Putin = Hitler because there are obvious comparisons to be made, we're not necessarily going to get to very educational conclusions.
Just like one who just finished Econ 101 might have an inflated idea of how much he can know by applying supply and demand, someone who knows more about history and sees its value might be more prone to overestimating how much one can get out of historical parallels.
There's value there, but there's like, a "midwit" sweet spot where a little knowledge might be worse than no knowledge at all.
Mar 25, 2022·edited Mar 25, 2022Liked by Arnold Kling
Knowledge of WWII (or any history) is useful in that it allows one to understand the range of possibilities that may not otherwise be obvious. So it is useful. You’re right, though, that most people use (misuse) history to make cheap predictions: X is analogous to Y, therefore Z will occur.
One of the best books I read in the last year or two was “The Sacred and the Vile” by Eric Larsen about the London Blitz. It captures the sense of uncertainty that people must have felt at the time about the ability of the UK to withstand the German attacks. Similarly, in our current situation, it’s useful to remember that our ability to understand the present and predict the future is poor.
I feel like WWI might be more instructive here: a “small” war cascading into a very big war because of a sense that war is easy and can be brought to a decisive conclusion quickly. Also, the impact of alliances and defense pacts that serve to draw an ever-greater number of players into the conflict is something to watch out for here.
I also wonder to what extent we’re seeing a transition in the technology of war, which was also something that played out in WWI as tanks and planes and machine guns changed the tactics and character of war. Here, it seems, although it’s hard to know, that portable relatively cheap weapons have become incredibly powerful (Stingers, drones), and mitigate some of the traditional measures of power (tanks, armored vehicles, superior aircraft).
Anyway, the one thing I think we can takeaway from history is that we can’t predict how this will play out.
I'd note also that the Russian role in combat was decisive in defeating Germany. We tend to focus on Normandy, the British on Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, all crucial, but Russia is estimated to have been responsible for about 75% of all German battle deaths over the course of the entire war, despite fighting for only about 70% of the time the war was ongoing.
I think the media believes the Russians are as sensitive to the body bag count as the USA, leading commentators to declare early victory for Ukraine because of Russian casualties.
And for the Ukrainian regime this is an existential fight, and get can at least theoretically draw upon a reserve of manpower that dealing with would require full mobilization for the Russians.
There is also asymmetry of losses in such a situation. Training men to operate complex systems is hard and takes a long time, as coordinating huge combined-arms undertakings competently is extremely complicated and difficult. People ready to play key highly specialized roles in such a system are *not* fungible with some random able-bodied military-aged male plus a few weeks of boot camp. When you take a peasant-soldier loss, you have lots more peasants where that came from. When you take a modern losses the time horizon for reconstitution is after the war, and so the losses are effectively absolute hits to a much smaller population of specialists. That's like if we lose an aircraft carrier in a war today, there is no way we can build and man a replacement in time to matter.
In this way the question of whether many fatalities is morally or psychologically acceptable to a society or its regime leadership is secondary or even irrelevant when compared to the impact on the capability of a modern invasion force to accomplish its military objectives, or even, once you lose enough critical people and elements, to keep itself alive.
On the other hand, if you have very rich friends in the anti-tank guided missiles business, it is *much* easier and quicker for the defender to turn its own military aged males into thousands of small light infantry anti-armor ambush teams, and even potentially feasible to replace your losses during the course of hostilities.
At any rate, there's been a lot of water under the bridge since WWII, so it's hard to extrapolate, and lives are now held much more precious in most places, especially since there are many fewer sons. During the American Civil War both sides accepted per capita losses that would be unimaginable today, something on the order of one thousand Iraqs. Americans definitely aren't like that anymore.
They didn't really have a choice back then, it was a war for survival. In contrast, Russia only lost ~15k soldiers in Afghanistan and were unwilling to stick it out after that. Russia has already lost almost that many in Ukraine in just one month.
Both were created by having government monopoly bureaucrats managing the details of agricultural production. It turns out that farming is more complex than bureaucrats can manage. It does make a difference which side of a field gets planted first. That is why even Tyson Foods doesn't grow it own chickens but contracts farmers, with skin in the game, to actually grow the live chickens. A bureaucrat won't get up at 2 AM when a pump goes out and a farmer will.
Another historical example could be the Russo-Japanese war with major Japanese victories being a shock to everyone. Not without reason, it was only 36 years into Meiji restoration: that's how astoundingly quick they went from swords and samurai (abolished 1876) to modern world class power able to triumph over a major European empire. It was a devastating blow to Russian prestige which also proved highly internally destabilizing in the face of increasingly organized and threatening political opposition to the Tsar regime and Russia was quickly plunged into disarray. The defeat was a major contributor to the Revolution of 1905 which Lenin himself called, "The Great Dress Rehearsal", and insisted that without which the, "victory of the October Revolution in 1917 would have been impossible." While he defeated that early revolution, Nicholas II stopped short of crushing the revolutionaries altogether and instead introduced liberalizing measures and treated future Bolsheviks with kid gloves in a way that did not get repaid in kind a decade later.
The Soviet Union regime those Bolsheviks created was likewise not long for the world after it retreated humiliated and demoralized from its experience in Afghanistan.
The west must make up its mind when it wants to confront the issue of nuclear weapons around the world. Now seems as good a time as ever with more countries with unfavorable views of the west developing nukes waiting any longer makes no sense. We should lead NATO's army into the Ukraine as the deliver weapons and fighter jets. We should inform Russia that we intend to move up to existing front lines of skirmishes everywhere in the Ukraine. NATO forces with the Ukrainian army will start taking back territory and give Russian troops the ability to leave the Ukraine. Once Russia is out real talks of trust and verify will begin the process of destroying nukes all around the world unilaterally with the goal of banning their existence. As these talks progress economic cooperation will begin to raise the standard of living for populations around the world from the bottom up. If Russia pushes the button so be it. If the world is not ready to strive for peace now the chances nukes will be used in some fashion by some other player goes up. There is never a good time to do this but it must be faced at some point in human history. War is obsolete, we do not want to say the same for humans. One last point. The next weapon of mass destruction will most likely be worse than nukes and easier to build. Say no to war and yes to building economic equality. Both trust but verify and improving economic conditions are tangible verifiable things we can be adjudicated and vastly improve our chances of survival as a species.
Would the world be a better place if prime-age adults would know basics of history? This seems implausible because (a) most people wouldn't exercise cognitive humility in applying historical knowledge to current affairs, (b) a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and (c) expert historians disagree among themselves about any 'lessons of the past' in relation to any specific current crisis.
Re: "For someone like me, born less than a decade after the second World War, it made sense to read a lot of its history. But I wish that younger people at least knew some of the basics."
Samo Burja, a worthy analyst of the Russia-Ukraine war, knows history, but rarely draws comparisons to World War II (or other historical events). Instead, he mainly probes the logic of the situation, capabilities, technologies, demographics, social psychology, institutions, qualitative game theory.
(He shares Arnold Kling's view of the unintended consequences of economic sanctions against Russia.)
Here is a link to Samo Burja's latest podcast interview about the war (23 March 2022):
The interview conveys (a) Burja's framework and (b) how he updates his beliefs in light of new evidence.
Having studied modern European history. I ask myself: How might I criticize Burja's analysis of the Russia-Ukraine war, in light of what I know of World War II? I got nothin'. This is hardly surprising, given Burja's wide knowledge of history. Perhaps knowledge of history is useful in a general way, rather than via specific historical references, comparisons, or analogies.
I agree with the points that it's good for people to read more WW II history and to remember Hitler when they consider Putin. The analogy of Hitler's Polish invasion with Putin's Ukraine invasion is a bit off.
The Germans invaded Poland on September 1 and by the 12th they had reached Warsaw & the Vistula River. They controlled the western half of Poland. I'm not sure the Russians have much control of large areas of the Ukraine, yet, a month in.
The German operation was well-planned and the German army was the most effective fighting force in World War II as Israeli military historian, Mart Van Creveld showed in his book, "Fighting Power." The German army's power was the result of a strong cadre of non-com officers, i.e., sergeants that were empowered to act independently.
The Russian has no such cadre of non-coms. Their doctrine doesn't stress independent action. That's why their generals are so far forward and getting killed.
The Russians have terrible logistics, which is dependent on railroads. That's why it's been hard to penetrate very far. And then there's the MUD. Anyone who has read much about WW II's Russian fighting should remember that the first thing that stopped Hitler's panzers was the autumn mud. If the Russians had planned a little better, they might have gone sooner when the ground was still frozen. That's when they had their first successful counteroffensive in WW II.
Re: "Russia likely has agents throughout Ukraine, and they may play a decisive role in the war."
Compare Robin Hanson:
"I now update to seeing Russia as surprisingly weak. [... .] Key problem must be Putin thought he had better internal spies at low military levels than he did. We usually think of orgs having spies in rival orgs, but in fact most important spies are within your own org. Rulers everywhere should ask now how good are their internal spies." (24 March 2022)
I would be more hesitant to draw conclusions about potential Russian military strength in a normal campaign since it now seems clear that the highest level of Russian leadership made a critical error in thinking it could keep the real intent so secret within a tight inner circle that even commanders of major units did not actually believe they were going to pursue an Iraq War-style full scale invasion of the whole country with an eye toward regime change, and neither planned nor coordinated with each other to even a fraction of the degree necessary for such an effort. This was certainly 'successful' as a deception and surprise since even well-informed and intelligent Ukrainians with their actual lives and families on the line did not act like they believed a full invasion would happen even in the face of warnings from US intelligence. But the cost of that 'success' was that it also worked on Russia's own forces.
If there is a lesson to be drawn from all this it is that this level of inner circle secrecy is simply not compatible with effectiveness at these kinds of missions, and one must be able to expand ones circle of trust or find alternative ways to communicate and delegate across that trust boundary in order to enable subordinates to contribute to the overall execution. This is especially the case with regard to ensuring readiness, synchronization, adherence to doctrine, and providing feedback about potential problems that are hard to foresee unless the problem can be assessed and tackled on a small scale by well-informed specialists who are practiced at working together as a team and empowered to make their own decisions about it, or at least with the expectation that their analysis and recommendations will carry influential weight with those who do make decisions. Intense secrecy, deception by misinformation, and surprise were all critical elements of the DDay invasion, but planning started over a year before, and everyone involved knew for sure they were actually going to go ahead with it.
One would think that Saddam's successful deception of his own generals about "who" had access to the nukes would have been a warning against internal deception.
As described in this Austrian briefing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4I07aRlPcQ), Belarus and Russia are preparing to cut off the land supply lines from the western edge of Belarus on down south. This would put an end to the notion that the "Ukrainian resistance" (in a country that is renowned for being mostly an enormous steppe) can be supplied indefinitely by NATO. That puts US/NATO in the position of either attacking Belarus to pre-empt the attack, or just acquiescing and pretending.
There's a split between the wildly pro-war diplomatic corps and the military in the US. If there's a WW2 analogy, it's the US of the present : UK of the late 1930s. The UK was overwhelmed when its commitments to colonies and allies were tested and defeated in quick succession in multiple theaters. In this situation, though, there is no US to our UK -- our main industrial supplier and international creditor is... China. One of the main reasons why the US dropped European neutrality was just Hitler being stupid and declaring war on the US. Otherwise the US might have just focused on Japan while letting the UK and USSR bleed out, which nearly happened anyway.
True, the USA provided only limited help to the UK in 1941, but we were not at war with Germany (or Japan) until December of that year, and maintaining the figleaf of announced neutrality required some restraint. Meanwhile, the isolationist lobby and public opinion were serious constraints on F.D. Roosevelt's freedom of action. The Holocaust Museum has a telling timeline of changing public opinion from 1939 through 1941: https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/americans-and-the-holocaust/us-public-opinion-world-war-II-1939-1941
The Germans used lots of horses throughout the war, and not just for supply trains - they also moved a lot of their artillery with them. If you see pictures of the aftermath of the Falaise Pocket battles in August 1944, after the Allies broke out of Normandy, you will see plenty of horses among the dead.
When technology changes history can't repeat and the lessons of history can become dangerous illusions.
When agriculture was invented you could obtain more power and wealth by stealing land from your neighbor and hiring lawyers to make it legal. When industry was invented you could still steal resources like mines, factories, and wealth and still use slave labor to build rockets like Hitler did. The source of the wealth and value was in the physical resources.
With our new scientific revolution where human knowledge is growing at about 10%/yr (number of scientific articles) and this increasing knowledge is reducing the whole concept of resources down into only energy and human "knowledge and creativity" being sources of value, things become more difficult to steal. When all what are commonly called "resources" become fungible (no steel, use fiberglass; no oil, use solar; no ammonia, use air, water and energy; no fisheries use water and energy to Hydrogen to single cell protein to fish food to fish; etc), the real source of value becomes between peoples ears.
Note that there hasn't been a profitable war of conquest in the last half a century. Most of the value in the stock market is no longer "book value" but has become this intangible stuff between peoples ears. All GM factories and resources have less value that what is between the ears of Tesla workers. Conquest not longer economically works and historical analogies are no longer as valid.
Putin still believes he can capture the value in peoples heads, but the more he destroys the more the true value of the people becomes unavailable. He has the illusion that capturing the body and the factory means capturing the mind and that isn't always true. The value he want between peoples ears will just go back to the old communist workers who "just pretend to work while the government pretends to pay them" and the economy rots.
Also note that the USSR was effective against Germany because the USA supplied half of their war material. Russian capacity to produce their own war material at scale over time is an open question. This is reason #1,000 why keeping China on the sidelines is so important.
First Covid and now Ukraine. Both challenges reveal a serious failure in America's culture. The flaw is the American elite are unable to tolerate an open conversation of the issues and the tradeoffs of different responses.
The American intolerance for uncertainty and the arrogance of its elite have brought and will bring the country great trouble.
We saw the social, economic and health harms that resulted from the US going to war against a virus that couldn't be stopped. We know that expanding the war in Ukraine will bring elevated death and misery to the people of Ukraine and all who get directly involved in the fighting.
And yet the drums of war are pounded. That is fine if we accept we don't really mean it. But what happens when the people buy their own propaganda?
So here is a question that will not be asked or discussed by America's elite: What difference does it make to the people of Ukraine who governs Ukraine? If it is true that the country is equally divided between European and Russian sentiment, what is the best way to reconcile the conflict?
Sure, Putin is horrible for waging war to settle the contention. But is the "West" clean in how it has interfered in Ukraine and pushed for a Ukrainian government that acts in its interests?
Most normal folk prefer to be ruled by "one of us", rather than "one of them".
Also true in America.
I think from a military perspective, comparisons WWII with todays Russian adventure in Ukraine is tenuous at best.
But if you are going to reflect on and draw comparisons with WWII, you need to start in 1914 and WWI, and for Russia/Ukraine start in 1990.
After the defeat of Germany, the allies were triumphalist, treating Germany very shabbily, as an inferior - just as the US and the West did to Russia after the fall of the USSR. The West plundered Russia sending in its ‘carpet baggers’ rather than help build a stable economy. The Treaty of Versailles allowed France to annex the Rhineland Palatinate until 1934 as a demilitarised zone and to ensure reparations were paid. Annexing territory as a demilitarised zone is permitted for some but not others (hint: Russia).
Germany had funded its war with debt, the Kaiser gambling that he could repay the debt from plunder of resources from conquered Countries, particularly France. War reparations left Germany unable to service or repay the debt, or pay for the workings of the State so it printed money which resulted in hyperinflation. Germans lost everything as the currency became worthless, just as Russians did - many lost a lifetime’s savings - as their currency became worthless.
So a straight line can be drawn from the defeat of Germany to the rise of Hitler, enabled by the resent, shame, impoverishment, shoddy treatment at the hands of the victors. And so you can draw a parallel line from the fall of the USSR to events today in Ukraine.
The Western powers bear responsibility for WWII and invasion of Ukraine. Saying that is no more giving support or justifying Hitler as it is Putin. Just pointing out contributory negligence.
Next interesting fact. Britain and France declared war on Germany in 1939, not the other way round, yet Germany had neither invaded nor threatened either Country. Poland was no strategic importance to UK & France and as for treaty obligations, we had those with Czechoslovakia but in the name of expedience, ignored them. So Poland was just an excuse. The WMD, as it were, of the day.
Hitler wasn’t content to stop with the Sudetenland? Of course not! Nothing to do with liberating ethnic Germans. Hitler’s interests were always Russia and its oil and other resources. Czechoslovakia was just testing the water for a response with a plausible excuse for invasion. Look at a map. Czechoslovakia was just opening the door to a route through Poland and onward to Russia. So that is no comparison with Russia/Ukraine.
Hitler’s military were fuelled by Pervitin a super-stimulant which let them fight for days without sleep. It had inevitable side effects. The British and French were still stuck in WWI fighting static battles, and had no response to mechanised warfare… Blitzkrieg.
Did the Allies win the war or did the Germans lose it? An historic overview tends to make one ask, when we see all the blunders and misadventure on the Allied side, how on Earth did the Allies win?
But Hitler was the Allies best weapon. He countermanded his generals many times, the results being catastrophic and often letting the Allies off the hook. So…
The Soviet Union collapsed of its own accord, and no indemnities were imposed on it. What was the west supposed to do, step in and force the newly independent countries to rejoin the Russian Empire to prop up its self-image? Moreover, I doubt foreign investment can be blamed for Russia's poor economic performance. Russia's economic failures in the 90s were primarily its own doing, and also why so many of its neighbors preferred integrating with western Europe to being in Russia's 'sphere of influence.'
This far into the war, my anecdotal experience is that knowledge of World War II is somewhat more likely to lead to shallow thinking about Russian and Ukraine.
It's no different than economics; think of a the kind of "love at first sight" kids who immediately take to economics. They learn the basic concepts and think they can solve all the world's problems by applying them. But they get tripped up because they have no experience and refinement in their analysis skills. So they take a basic concept and apply it to a situation that looks superficially analogous.
That's what casual historians are doing when they fit historical templates on current events. If we do it superficially, and say Russia = Nazi Germany and Putin = Hitler because there are obvious comparisons to be made, we're not necessarily going to get to very educational conclusions.
Just like one who just finished Econ 101 might have an inflated idea of how much he can know by applying supply and demand, someone who knows more about history and sees its value might be more prone to overestimating how much one can get out of historical parallels.
There's value there, but there's like, a "midwit" sweet spot where a little knowledge might be worse than no knowledge at all.
Knowledge of WWII (or any history) is useful in that it allows one to understand the range of possibilities that may not otherwise be obvious. So it is useful. You’re right, though, that most people use (misuse) history to make cheap predictions: X is analogous to Y, therefore Z will occur.
One of the best books I read in the last year or two was “The Sacred and the Vile” by Eric Larsen about the London Blitz. It captures the sense of uncertainty that people must have felt at the time about the ability of the UK to withstand the German attacks. Similarly, in our current situation, it’s useful to remember that our ability to understand the present and predict the future is poor.
I feel like WWI might be more instructive here: a “small” war cascading into a very big war because of a sense that war is easy and can be brought to a decisive conclusion quickly. Also, the impact of alliances and defense pacts that serve to draw an ever-greater number of players into the conflict is something to watch out for here.
I also wonder to what extent we’re seeing a transition in the technology of war, which was also something that played out in WWI as tanks and planes and machine guns changed the tactics and character of war. Here, it seems, although it’s hard to know, that portable relatively cheap weapons have become incredibly powerful (Stingers, drones), and mitigate some of the traditional measures of power (tanks, armored vehicles, superior aircraft).
Anyway, the one thing I think we can takeaway from history is that we can’t predict how this will play out.
I'd note also that the Russian role in combat was decisive in defeating Germany. We tend to focus on Normandy, the British on Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, all crucial, but Russia is estimated to have been responsible for about 75% of all German battle deaths over the course of the entire war, despite fighting for only about 70% of the time the war was ongoing.
And lost 20 million doing it.
I think the media believes the Russians are as sensitive to the body bag count as the USA, leading commentators to declare early victory for Ukraine because of Russian casualties.
Don’t bank on it.
Same goes for the Ukrainians though, right?
And for the Ukrainian regime this is an existential fight, and get can at least theoretically draw upon a reserve of manpower that dealing with would require full mobilization for the Russians.
There is also asymmetry of losses in such a situation. Training men to operate complex systems is hard and takes a long time, as coordinating huge combined-arms undertakings competently is extremely complicated and difficult. People ready to play key highly specialized roles in such a system are *not* fungible with some random able-bodied military-aged male plus a few weeks of boot camp. When you take a peasant-soldier loss, you have lots more peasants where that came from. When you take a modern losses the time horizon for reconstitution is after the war, and so the losses are effectively absolute hits to a much smaller population of specialists. That's like if we lose an aircraft carrier in a war today, there is no way we can build and man a replacement in time to matter.
In this way the question of whether many fatalities is morally or psychologically acceptable to a society or its regime leadership is secondary or even irrelevant when compared to the impact on the capability of a modern invasion force to accomplish its military objectives, or even, once you lose enough critical people and elements, to keep itself alive.
On the other hand, if you have very rich friends in the anti-tank guided missiles business, it is *much* easier and quicker for the defender to turn its own military aged males into thousands of small light infantry anti-armor ambush teams, and even potentially feasible to replace your losses during the course of hostilities.
At any rate, there's been a lot of water under the bridge since WWII, so it's hard to extrapolate, and lives are now held much more precious in most places, especially since there are many fewer sons. During the American Civil War both sides accepted per capita losses that would be unimaginable today, something on the order of one thousand Iraqs. Americans definitely aren't like that anymore.
They didn't really have a choice back then, it was a war for survival. In contrast, Russia only lost ~15k soldiers in Afghanistan and were unwilling to stick it out after that. Russia has already lost almost that many in Ukraine in just one month.
That's an excellent point. As well, I believe the two worst famines in history were the 1930's Russian famine and the 1960s Chinese famine.
Both were created by having government monopoly bureaucrats managing the details of agricultural production. It turns out that farming is more complex than bureaucrats can manage. It does make a difference which side of a field gets planted first. That is why even Tyson Foods doesn't grow it own chickens but contracts farmers, with skin in the game, to actually grow the live chickens. A bureaucrat won't get up at 2 AM when a pump goes out and a farmer will.
Another historical example could be the Russo-Japanese war with major Japanese victories being a shock to everyone. Not without reason, it was only 36 years into Meiji restoration: that's how astoundingly quick they went from swords and samurai (abolished 1876) to modern world class power able to triumph over a major European empire. It was a devastating blow to Russian prestige which also proved highly internally destabilizing in the face of increasingly organized and threatening political opposition to the Tsar regime and Russia was quickly plunged into disarray. The defeat was a major contributor to the Revolution of 1905 which Lenin himself called, "The Great Dress Rehearsal", and insisted that without which the, "victory of the October Revolution in 1917 would have been impossible." While he defeated that early revolution, Nicholas II stopped short of crushing the revolutionaries altogether and instead introduced liberalizing measures and treated future Bolsheviks with kid gloves in a way that did not get repaid in kind a decade later.
The Soviet Union regime those Bolsheviks created was likewise not long for the world after it retreated humiliated and demoralized from its experience in Afghanistan.
So, have a nice day?
The west must make up its mind when it wants to confront the issue of nuclear weapons around the world. Now seems as good a time as ever with more countries with unfavorable views of the west developing nukes waiting any longer makes no sense. We should lead NATO's army into the Ukraine as the deliver weapons and fighter jets. We should inform Russia that we intend to move up to existing front lines of skirmishes everywhere in the Ukraine. NATO forces with the Ukrainian army will start taking back territory and give Russian troops the ability to leave the Ukraine. Once Russia is out real talks of trust and verify will begin the process of destroying nukes all around the world unilaterally with the goal of banning their existence. As these talks progress economic cooperation will begin to raise the standard of living for populations around the world from the bottom up. If Russia pushes the button so be it. If the world is not ready to strive for peace now the chances nukes will be used in some fashion by some other player goes up. There is never a good time to do this but it must be faced at some point in human history. War is obsolete, we do not want to say the same for humans. One last point. The next weapon of mass destruction will most likely be worse than nukes and easier to build. Say no to war and yes to building economic equality. Both trust but verify and improving economic conditions are tangible verifiable things we can be adjudicated and vastly improve our chances of survival as a species.
Would the world be a better place if prime-age adults would know basics of history? This seems implausible because (a) most people wouldn't exercise cognitive humility in applying historical knowledge to current affairs, (b) a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and (c) expert historians disagree among themselves about any 'lessons of the past' in relation to any specific current crisis.
Re: "For someone like me, born less than a decade after the second World War, it made sense to read a lot of its history. But I wish that younger people at least knew some of the basics."
Samo Burja, a worthy analyst of the Russia-Ukraine war, knows history, but rarely draws comparisons to World War II (or other historical events). Instead, he mainly probes the logic of the situation, capabilities, technologies, demographics, social psychology, institutions, qualitative game theory.
(He shares Arnold Kling's view of the unintended consequences of economic sanctions against Russia.)
Here is a link to Samo Burja's latest podcast interview about the war (23 March 2022):
https://www.jimruttshow.com/currents-samo-burja-3/
Transcript: https://jimruttshow.blubrry.net/the-jim-rutt-show-transcripts/transcript-of-currents-059-samo-burja-on-ru-ukr-23-mar-2022/
The interview conveys (a) Burja's framework and (b) how he updates his beliefs in light of new evidence.
Having studied modern European history. I ask myself: How might I criticize Burja's analysis of the Russia-Ukraine war, in light of what I know of World War II? I got nothin'. This is hardly surprising, given Burja's wide knowledge of history. Perhaps knowledge of history is useful in a general way, rather than via specific historical references, comparisons, or analogies.
I agree with the points that it's good for people to read more WW II history and to remember Hitler when they consider Putin. The analogy of Hitler's Polish invasion with Putin's Ukraine invasion is a bit off.
The Germans invaded Poland on September 1 and by the 12th they had reached Warsaw & the Vistula River. They controlled the western half of Poland. I'm not sure the Russians have much control of large areas of the Ukraine, yet, a month in.
The German operation was well-planned and the German army was the most effective fighting force in World War II as Israeli military historian, Mart Van Creveld showed in his book, "Fighting Power." The German army's power was the result of a strong cadre of non-com officers, i.e., sergeants that were empowered to act independently.
The Russian has no such cadre of non-coms. Their doctrine doesn't stress independent action. That's why their generals are so far forward and getting killed.
The Russians have terrible logistics, which is dependent on railroads. That's why it's been hard to penetrate very far. And then there's the MUD. Anyone who has read much about WW II's Russian fighting should remember that the first thing that stopped Hitler's panzers was the autumn mud. If the Russians had planned a little better, they might have gone sooner when the ground was still frozen. That's when they had their first successful counteroffensive in WW II.
Only yesterday I read about Ukrainian defenses blowing up bridges and dams.
Dams.
Floods.
Mud.
I'd guess you hadn't read that, since you don't mention it. Few pundits are talking about effective Ukrainian defense strategy & tactics.
A mistake.
Re: "Russia likely has agents throughout Ukraine, and they may play a decisive role in the war."
Compare Robin Hanson:
"I now update to seeing Russia as surprisingly weak. [... .] Key problem must be Putin thought he had better internal spies at low military levels than he did. We usually think of orgs having spies in rival orgs, but in fact most important spies are within your own org. Rulers everywhere should ask now how good are their internal spies." (24 March 2022)
https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1507044709364948993
I would be more hesitant to draw conclusions about potential Russian military strength in a normal campaign since it now seems clear that the highest level of Russian leadership made a critical error in thinking it could keep the real intent so secret within a tight inner circle that even commanders of major units did not actually believe they were going to pursue an Iraq War-style full scale invasion of the whole country with an eye toward regime change, and neither planned nor coordinated with each other to even a fraction of the degree necessary for such an effort. This was certainly 'successful' as a deception and surprise since even well-informed and intelligent Ukrainians with their actual lives and families on the line did not act like they believed a full invasion would happen even in the face of warnings from US intelligence. But the cost of that 'success' was that it also worked on Russia's own forces.
If there is a lesson to be drawn from all this it is that this level of inner circle secrecy is simply not compatible with effectiveness at these kinds of missions, and one must be able to expand ones circle of trust or find alternative ways to communicate and delegate across that trust boundary in order to enable subordinates to contribute to the overall execution. This is especially the case with regard to ensuring readiness, synchronization, adherence to doctrine, and providing feedback about potential problems that are hard to foresee unless the problem can be assessed and tackled on a small scale by well-informed specialists who are practiced at working together as a team and empowered to make their own decisions about it, or at least with the expectation that their analysis and recommendations will carry influential weight with those who do make decisions. Intense secrecy, deception by misinformation, and surprise were all critical elements of the DDay invasion, but planning started over a year before, and everyone involved knew for sure they were actually going to go ahead with it.
One would think that Saddam's successful deception of his own generals about "who" had access to the nukes would have been a warning against internal deception.
As described in this Austrian briefing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4I07aRlPcQ), Belarus and Russia are preparing to cut off the land supply lines from the western edge of Belarus on down south. This would put an end to the notion that the "Ukrainian resistance" (in a country that is renowned for being mostly an enormous steppe) can be supplied indefinitely by NATO. That puts US/NATO in the position of either attacking Belarus to pre-empt the attack, or just acquiescing and pretending.
There's a split between the wildly pro-war diplomatic corps and the military in the US. If there's a WW2 analogy, it's the US of the present : UK of the late 1930s. The UK was overwhelmed when its commitments to colonies and allies were tested and defeated in quick succession in multiple theaters. In this situation, though, there is no US to our UK -- our main industrial supplier and international creditor is... China. One of the main reasons why the US dropped European neutrality was just Hitler being stupid and declaring war on the US. Otherwise the US might have just focused on Japan while letting the UK and USSR bleed out, which nearly happened anyway.
True, the USA provided only limited help to the UK in 1941, but we were not at war with Germany (or Japan) until December of that year, and maintaining the figleaf of announced neutrality required some restraint. Meanwhile, the isolationist lobby and public opinion were serious constraints on F.D. Roosevelt's freedom of action. The Holocaust Museum has a telling timeline of changing public opinion from 1939 through 1941: https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/americans-and-the-holocaust/us-public-opinion-world-war-II-1939-1941
The Germans used lots of horses throughout the war, and not just for supply trains - they also moved a lot of their artillery with them. If you see pictures of the aftermath of the Falaise Pocket battles in August 1944, after the Allies broke out of Normandy, you will see plenty of horses among the dead.