h/t WRSA
Ukraine And Russia - It Is A Math Problem
So math explains why Russia will win in Ukraine?
Uh huh, riiiiiiiiiiiiight. That's totes easy.
So, on what day did (will) that occur?
It wasn't on Day Three.
Or Thirty.
Or Day One Hundred and Thirty.
We're pushing Day 200, and they're nowhere close.
Day 300??
Day 400??
Day 600???
How many brigades (and rubles) can Russia burn through before they have a replacement problem? Did they maybe blow through that point last April?
While you're up, whip out your Whizbang War Calculator, and calculate some victories for me:
Now do the math for the Soviet Union vs. Afghanistan in 1979, and show us mathematically how that worked, and why the Soviet Union was bound to win.
The math can't be wrong, can it?
Then do U.S. vs. Afghanistan in 2003.
Then do Iraq vs. the U.S. in 1990.
Then do U.S. vs. North Vietnam in 1965.
Stop me if you've heard this one.
Then show the class your foolproof calculations for Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia vs. Israel. Any of the last five times up to bat, 1948-1973, inclusive.
Try Germany vs. Russia, 1941.
Try Napoleon vs. Russia, 1812.
England vs. the Colonials, 1776.
Then do Spanish Armada vs. England, 1588.
Leonidas vs. Xerxes, 480 B.C.
David vs. the Philistines, ca. 1100 BC.
Gideon vs. Midian, ca. 1200 B.C.
Show all work.
We'll be waiting over here while you face plant, again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again.
For the brighter students, plug in Napoleon's maxim:
"In war, the moral is to the physical as three is to one."
Wars aren't won on accounting ledgers.
A couple of other military maxims for the brighter lot:
"The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong."
"When you achieve victory, be sure to tell the enemy."
Anybody telling you otherwise is either an idiot, or picking your pocket.
Next question.
Morale, not moral, kinda changes the meaning.
ReplyDeleteSlow but steady wins the race, which the Russians have been doing since the beginning.
ReplyDeleteNot one square meter of Russian territory is occupied by Ukraine, Zelensky is simply getting richer from the West's paniced shoveling of funds into the conflict.
Meanwhile, the EU faces a cold winter without Russian natural gas.
General Winter is on the move west this time, he's not staying in Russia. While Joey Softserve screams at the clouds and his puppet masters flail about trying to keep hold of the reins of power, not admitting that those reins are getting thinner and thinner by the day.
If it's a matter of who is more moral, the Ukies are even more doomed.
ReplyDeleteAnd what is your definition of "winning" for Russia Aesop?
ReplyDeleteGiven it's a proxy war between the USA and Russia with side bit actors.
Would Russia be declared the "Winner" if the US Dollar is dethroned as the Petro-Dollar, and thus everything in America costs at least three times what we pay today? No cheap clothing or electronics again.
Would they "Win" if civil war inside America turns us into a still smoking 3rdworld country with no functional electric grid (HELLO N Korea) and starvation in our streets?
Since it seems to be a very important thing to you, what is YOUR Definition, Aesop?
So, I ask, once more:
ReplyDeleteWhy has WRSA become such a total blithering retard?
The ONE possible explanation I've come up with that doesn't involve senile dementia is that he's been pressured by the feds to become an informant and is deliberately antagonizing his (former) audience and replacing them with mouth-breathing dumbasses in order to protect the genuine patriots. Leaving aside the near-daily links to the Saker or his echo Martyanov, CA has repeatedly linked to that sonar21 guy, who openly talks about prior employment as a fed. You know what they say in Russia? "There are no former KGB agents." What's the difference between the FBI and the KGB? Knowing all this, why would CA deliberately link to guys like that?
... yeah, it's a nice story, but I'm not that paranoid (yet). (Remember, FBI conspiracy is Peter Strzok and Ray Epps. They are not that competent.)
Senile dementia it is.
Also worth noting: Ukraine RIGHT NOW is making battlefield advances all along the front line. They captured a lieutenant colonel near Kharkiv today.
ReplyDeleteAll these people insisting that Russia is absolutely gonna win no matter what, they knows what they knows and don't bug 'em with facts, it's just an echo of the "Trump is still totally in control you guys" qtardery from 6 months after Biden's inauguration.
I don't know how these people breathe without assistance and reminders.
@JimR,
ReplyDeleteThe problem with "morale" is that's not what Bonaparte said. Arguably, what he meant, but a quote either is one, or isn't.
As for "slow but steady", at the current rate of advance, Russia will triumph--in about 30 years.
Ukraine isn't and never has been trying to occupy "one square meter" of Russian territory, so you also get a 20 yard penalty for the Straw man Fallacy. As for what they have done, suggest you interview the former captain of the Moskva. And maybe tally a score of Russian generals now occupying a few square meters of ground in Moscow cemeteries - for the ones where they found the bodies.
General Winter was the reason the Russians were stuck in the mud of Ukraine for two months, and squandered all advantage back at the opening. And now cannot capitalize on good weather to any notable degree either. When one cannot win in the winter, and cannot win in the summer, the weather isn't their biggest problem, is it? So what's the common denominator in Russia's inability to successfully prosecute anything other than a pyrrhic slog to eventual failure?
This was always intended as a sideshow of the main effort here at home, but neither campaign is quite coming together like certain folks planned, and their experiments keep escaping the lab, or blowing up in their faces. Worse = better.
Von Clauswitz called that "friction", and it's as real now as it was when he first wrote about it.
@Michael,
ReplyDeleteYou've accidentally hit upon the problem: there is no definition of end-state that can be posited seriously as a Russian victory. They're slow learners, and it took them 10 years at the height of their powers to admit Afghanistan was a pointless debacle that hastened the collapse of the Soviet Empire.
So for Russian Military Stupidity 2.0, their clever plan was to attack a near peer, with no language problem, much better training and equipment, and a common border, and with 1/10th of their Cold War strength to use?
Absolute Military Geniuses, right there.
The US economy powered by fiatbux has been skating on razor blades for 50 years and more. This may be the push over the edge (or not), but so might 50 other things. What cannot continue, will not.
But at the end of the day, even if they achieved all initial objectives, Russia is left with a mouthful of ashes. They couldn't hold onto Eastern Europe (now their staunchest foes), even with the Cold War and 10 times their current military might.
So tell me what they can ever "win" there in Ukraine by feeding their scarce troops into a propeller face-first, while bankrupting their meager treasury, crippling their own fragile economy, and turning more and more of their own people against Vlad.
Hitler did a great job turning Germany around from 1933-1939 compared to how it was rom 1927-1933, as Vlad has tried to do with the wreckage of the Soviet Empire. What happened to Adolph for the next six years? And what has Vlad got to look forward to, after another epic military slogfest crumbles into ashes? When his empire crumbles, how far does China advance?
Nature abhors a vacuum.
Vietnam was a proxy war too. So, how did the military power do against the entrenched and intransigent outnumbered locals in that campaign? Go ahead, tell the class who won.
And who ended up retreating from the roof of the embassy with refugees clinging to the helicopter skids.
You keep stumbling over the answer here, but then you keep picking yourself up and dashing away, as though you'd accidentally pissed on an electric fence.
Embrace the obvious.
And remember that even though Russia cannot win, it's possible for everyone to lose.
The sooner they quit, the better this becomes for the whole world.
Including Russia, most particularly.
@Rollory,
ReplyDeleteCA has been even-handed in this, including linking my viewpoints as well as others less thought-out, although I'm sure we disagree about winners and losers.
The Saker is the KGB version of Q-tardation, and confirmation bias. He was the guy telling you how the attack on the Russian airbase in Syria was a failure, until reality broke out, and we saw their air power in that conflict was decapitated for releasing chemical WMDs.
As you noted, KGB is gonna KGB.
I'm not hitching my wagon to Putin nor Zelenskyy, but anytime a large power gets kicked in the balls every day for six months, it's a victory for common sense and cosmic justice, and hamstrung weakened Russia is loads better in the long run than militarily adventurous Russia.
The sad part is that because this idiocy was instigated and baited by the Poopypants regime, the kneejerk mouth-breather contingent is against it, just as they would be if Poopypants told them oxygen is good to breathe.
This is what happens when critical thinking becomes a rare skill, and people treat life like a football game instead of a survival exercise.
If the contest is rigged, what's the point of changing sides and cheering for the other team?
People should GTFO of the stadium entirely, and go work on things that matter, but it's easier to fool people than to convince them they've been fooled, and P.T. Barnum turns out to be a sage.
These quotes from Sun Tzu remains true:
ReplyDelete2. When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength.
3. Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain.
4. Now, when your weapons are dulled, your ardor damped, your strength exhausted and your treasure spent, other chieftains will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. Then no man, however wise, will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue.
5. Thus, though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays.
6. There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.
Russia has swept up large areas of Ukraine into their control, hardly stalling. Yes, they've made mistakes and had losses. Far fewer than the Ukrainians have had though.
ReplyDeleteThe Ukraininan offensive into Kharkov has stalled, with no signinficant gains, (Of course, Zelensky makes the usual bagdhad bob claims, but they are more amusing, thank informative)
The russians are pouring dumb artillery shells into the Ukrainian positions, and the west is running out of himars and other 'smart' weapons to give to Zelensky.
6 months in, and russia controls about 25% of the Ukrainian territory, meanwhile, Europe is looking at a cold windter, and the west is running low on stuff to 'donate' to the Ukrainian military.
Why exatcly are we getting involved in this mess again? I forget, was it to 'save democracy' in the most corrupt govt in Europe? or was it for nancy's pocketbook?
Without the high level of western support, the Ukraine would have collapsed by now, and there is a limit to how much of our wealth even joey the groper can rob from us to send, Firing up new production of himars isn't a simple task.
The end state. Tell me about Crimea.
ReplyDeleteWhat if Russia is playing the really, really long game. What if he is just disrupting one of the greatest bread baskets and fertilizer producers in the world from getting their goods to market in the middle east and Africa. Should Africa and the Middle East not get grain to eat and fertilizers to get their crops to grow in abundance, you get famine and disease. What do people do when there is nothing else to eat? they seek refuge in places that do. I am talking about Europe and US. If there is a famine and a humanitarian crisis in Africa and the Middle East, they all travel to Europe and US, overwhelming the social services of those countries, diluting the population and ruining economies that are already standing on the edge of the precipice. The end state for Russia is destroying the west with its own charity and making Russia a superpower again. All it is really costing them is some lives of worthless POS generals, and proletariat class of soldier. To be honest, has Russia ever cared about the common man other than do do the bidding of the gentility? Sometimes Vlad just wants to watch the world burn to pay for the failures of Russian "Diplomacy."
ReplyDeleteI do feel the need to point out that the Soviets in Afghanistan and the Americans in Vietnam failed because they failed to change the status quo, despite having the means. In the soviets’ case, they could have forcibly urbanized the regions that were hotbeds of resistance (similar to how the British razed villages when they came back to Afghanistan), this drying up the sea in which the mujahadeen swam.
ReplyDeleteIn Vietnam, the issue was cutting the Ho Chi Minh trail. Westmooreland kept asking for permission to thrust into Laos but was denied permission. Abrams was able to leave South Vietnam as a modernized force, but then Congress cut off all aid and support to the country, mea I the South Vietnamese army was buying ammo/grenades on the black market with their personal pay.
In both instances, the underdog winner was wholly reliant on outside support. The ability to fight is (will) x (means); if either falls to zero, defeat is certain.
We can even throw in nationalist China, since George Marshall managed to strongarm Chaing into unilateral concessions to the Communists by threatening to cut off all aid, then cut it off anyways and still charged it to his lend-lease account. Meanwhile, the USSR got tons of lend-lease for free, and whatever they didn’t keep ended up in Mao, Kim-Il Sung, and Ho Chi Minh’s pockets.
@Aesop,
ReplyDeleteSo, to answer Michael's question, you have no definition of Russian victory because you don't think Russia can win.
You also said, "They're slow learners, and it took them 10 years at the height of their powers to admit Afghanistan was a pointless debacle that hastened the collapse of the Soviet Empire."
We were there for almost twenty years; how stupid does that make us?
@JimR,
ReplyDeleteRussia has taken six months to get control of the portion of Ukraine that was nominally within their control before they fired a shot. This is like fighting half a year to get control of your own underpants drawer.
And all it's cost them is 15-25% of their combat power, a tenth of their navy, and about 80% of their prestige and military capability in absolute terms, and worldwide pariah status for the next 50 years, perhaps more. they've single-handedly ended Swedish and Swiss neutrality, which neither Napoleon nor Hitler could accomplish. That's quite something to almost possess something you can never hold, even with 100% occupation for 100 years.
Vlad is a tactical bumpkin and a strategic moron.
@Anon 6:43,
Nor need I define a square circle, nor any other oxymoron.
Russia cannot ever "win".
They can fail, or they can comit genocide to the last descendant, and with the current diaspora, even that will be a fail of epic proportions.
The best they can hope for would be to unass the attempt as quickly and painlessly as possible, but they're not that smart. Yet.
If it's news to you that anything other than carpet-bombing Afghanistan into non-existence was a strategic blunder, allow me to introduce myself: I'm Aesop, and that would have been the best use of Afghanistan, and our only reason for going, and I've maintained that for nearly 20 years.
"You break it, you bought it" was the wholesale invention of Peter Principle retard the late and unlamented Colon Powell (not a typo), who used Crate & Barrel philosophy to excuse a two-decade long debacle that ended as one could (and did) predict all along.
Our policy should have been, and should always be "We didn't break it, we blew it to Hell, and if you fuck with us ever again, we'll not only bomb it until the rubble is all that's bouncing, we'll also nuke it to glass it until it glows, and then annex it as a breeding habitat for American buffalo in perpetuity, and your neighbors will tell 'don't fuck with America' stories to frighten their children for the next thousand years."
Welcome to your first reading of the blog.
As long as Putin is in charge and Joey stuttering shitty pants is in charge with Obama as his shadow this will carry on. Change that equation and something might change. Without your tax dollars and your kids and grand kids tax dollars Ukraine would as a whole would be lost in a month. Aesop, your talented and a great writer but without the senile fuck running the asylum right now and giving Zelensky and his WEF cohorts a cut of your grandkids (if you have any) tax money,Ukraine would be being rebuilt under Russian rule right now. (In the back of my mind I recall that Russia along ends up invading to the south of Ukraine along with others in the surrounding area but it doesn't work out too well) Still a reader as always and I'm with you on about everything else.
ReplyDeleteAnd maybe "it doesn't work out too well" because we keep throwing cinder blocks at Vlad's knees now.
ReplyDeletePonder that.
Russia has lost "80% of their prestige and military capability in absolute term" Care to show your math on that military capability they've lost?
ReplyDeleteIn six months, the Ukrainian forces have been decimated, they are dredging the bottom of the barrel for troops, and their foreign 'volunteers' are reporting that they are issed minimal ammo and small arms, and scrounge for food.
Losing the Moskva was a serious loss yes, but Russia is a land power, not a sea power, and doesn't rely on naval forces for force projection. Unlike the US.
Russia has conquered a lot of the Ukraine in this six month period, some 30,000 sq mi (not counting the Crimea taken.secceeded in 2014) The Ukrainian economy is in a shambles, even more than usual, and the only thing keeping it going is money from the west.
Meanwhile, Russia's economy is doing fine, the increase in price of their NG exports has proven quite a windfall
How long will the west (and especially the US) continue to prop up Zelensky?
" throwing cinder blocks at Vlad's knees"
ReplyDeleteLike what? Germany bravely not buying fuel from Russia? Driving the adoption of the Ruble as a reserve currency for BRICS?
Other than funneling funds and munitions to the Ukrainian corruptocracy, what exactly has the west done to harm Russia?
For the first few months of this war, my belief was very strong that Russia would win rather easily. What I did not account for was the US providing Ukraine with billions of dollars in assistance. If the US is willing to continue to provide Ukraine with billions in aid, then yeah, Ukraine has a good shot at forcing Russia to back out. The US cannot continue to borrow trillions of dollars from China to give away to other countries and expect our country/economy to survive. If Biden is willing to destroy America by getting us involved militarily to save Ukraine then Ukraine may have a chance.
ReplyDeleteYou're still wrong after all these weeks and months.
ReplyDeleteSad, really.
Russia WILL beat the Rothschild run Ukraine. The question is how many dead White Christians will it take? The Rothschild's certainly don't care, their boy will retire to one of his five homes.
You can gainsay this all the livelong day, but you can't show your work to back it up.
ReplyDeleteRussia's air force has occasional predominance, but not anything like superiority. Worse, they can't coordinate air attacks with ground offensives to leverage gains in any meaningful way.
All that territory they control?
1) Those were the theoretically Russia-friendly Russian-speaking territories. Who clearly didn't love Russia so much they rose up and joined Vlad's invaders.
2) They're now nothing but smoking holes and ruble. Whatever wasn't blown up or nailed down was looted.
3) Their entire fleet now has to remain 200-300km away from any territory the Ukes control, or risk a fate similar to Moskva. And last month a good chunk of that remaining fleet was shelled in its homeport of Sevastopol.
Air Farce wasted? Check.
Navy hamstrung? Check.
Then there's Vlad's supposed ground dominance.
Those troops were actually "decimated" (you use that term, but I do not think it means what you think it means). Entire brigade and regimental task forces were turned to scrap in minutes, multiple times, and the pics of Ukrainian farmers towing perfectly good but out-of-gas T80s and T-72s back to their barns are legion.
Russia shares a contended border with China, who now knows they're a paper tiger.
Ditto for another 15 -stans and provinces with no more love for Moscow than the Crips and Bloods have for cops.
Vlad is openly discussing general mobilization (this is not what dominant and winning armies do if they're winning), including a general draft, which would provoke home-turf riots, and let the cat out of the bag at home that they're getting their balls kicked up into their chest cavity on the reg.
All this against Ukraine, which by any measure on paper was 1/10th their opening strength, and armed with obsolete hand-me-down Soviet shit.
Meanwhile, Russia has had to go to draconian controls to prop up the ruble, and their GDP is already down 15%, and probably will have contracted 25% by year's end.
You can knee-jerk whinge about Biden's family graft, but what's the pull for the EU? For NATO? For all the formerly neural countries? Why, d'ya suppose, the staunchest supporters of giving until it hurts are the Baltic states, Poland, the Czechs, the Slovaks, Hungary, Romania, and Germany??? (See if you can guess what they all have in common.) All this despite Vlad playing one of his only to hole cards: energy. (The only other one is Canned Sunshine, but that takes "pyrhhic" to biblical levels.) And that hasn't slowed support for Ukraine a whit among the most-affected nations. Ponder why that's so. Graft as an answer is bankrupt.
The Bosporus? Closed off.
The Kattegat? closed off.
Every land route west? Closed in perpetuity UFN.
That leaves Murmansk, part of the year, and Vladivostok, 5000 miles east past Siberia, as the only way anything's moving in or out.
Besides fellow-pariah clients like Syria, Belorussia, and the Norks, he has China and India on his side. And that's it. And those last two will pay a price for that choice, both now and later. Vlad's forces in Syria have to be supplied by air, or via a 10,000 mile ocean voyage from the Pacific, which passes through 5 strategic choke points, past four of the US and West's staunchest allies. There are no better options.
And FTR, Crimea was Vlad's last naked land-grab in Ukraine.
This is not his first, nor second, but his third steal, and Ukraine finally decided to tell him to fuck off, and kick him in the nuts.
If all this is your idea of Russia "winning", keep rootin' for Putin.
A little more winning like this, and Kleptocrat Russia crumbles just like the Soviet Russia, except faster and harder.
Well aware of the original latin meaning of decimate. It's the kind of thing 'smart' bois mention to cover up their lack in other areas, surprised you didn't type "ackshully.." first, kudos for that.
ReplyDeleteThe bosphorus isn't closed off, the Turks currently limit Warships of belligerant powers from transiting, merchant shipping is fine This does affect Russia more than the Ukraine since the Ukes don't really have much of a navy in the first place.
It's hard, damn near impossible to accurate casualty counts from both sides, but the Ukrainian propaganda is so over the top that dismissing anything said by the Zelensky regime absent any solid corroboration is likely a wise move.
AS for the Russian economy, according to https://www.dw.com/en/is-russias-economy-really-hurting/a-63000166
''' "Even if the Russian economy is performing worse than six months ago, it's not enough to stop [Russian President Vladimir] Putin from financing the war," Maxim Mironov, a professor of finance at the IE Business School in Madrid, told DW. '''
But if you want to keep huffing Z's outgasing, no skin off my nose. Time will tell
If you know what decimate means, then maybe not using it like it's some grave catastrophe...?
ReplyDeleteAs for huffing outgassing, that sword cuts both ways: take your own advice.
I've preferentially referred to third party reports on the conflict, not the interested actors' own pronouncements for either side.
The fact that the Russian economy "performing worse than six months ago" is "not enough to stop Putin from financing the war" is the fallacy of Moving the Goal Posts, and tells us more about Putin's disregard for his own country and citizenry than it tells us about how bad things are in Russia. It doesn't tell us the war is low-cost, let alone cost-free, just that Putin's an economic shit-for-brains, as well as an arrogant sociopathic asshole: a geopolitical Captain Ahab. I not only concede the point, I've been telling you exactly that for six months.
Line up the eleventy experts who all accurately predicted the collapse of Russia prior to 1989, and we can talk about how accurate what anyone "knows" about Russia is, doubly so based solely on the output of Russia's Baghdad Bob (Moscow trained!) School of Reporting.
The fact that this far into the conflict, Russia has gained so little, has indeed told us much that the Rootin' For Putin contingent finds distasteful. It's like listening to the post-season talk about the Cubs since...ever.
The hard geopolitical truth is that there are few countries who could ever prosecute large-scale wars successfully, in any era, let alone conduct combined arms maneuver warfare, and Russia has clearly fallen out of that club, rather hard and harshly. It takes a minimum of 3:1 advantage for an attacker to defeat a defender, sometimes even multiples of that, and they can barely gain parity most days and times against an enemy 1/10th their size. Part of that is due to support from friends? Boo frickin' hoo. A lot of guests of the Norks after visiting Mig Alley, and the former residents of the Hanoi Hilton send their sincere condolences.
Payback is a bitch, and Russia had it coming. A lot of 18 year-old conscripts from Moscow are now paying for the fact that Vlad is still trying to re-fight the Cold War and win, and he's only now learning what Gorby figured out without firing a shot, and only inheriting the Afghan debacle. Experience teaches the best lessons, but she's a harsh instructor and a cruel mistress.
This is Russia paying for a session of nation-level BDSM, and their safe-word is "Uncle".