Yeah...Not So Much

 

It's foolishly suggested that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has shifted the paradigm of war, demonstrating Russia's grasp of the new paradigm, and hopelessly outclassing NATO.

The trouble with that argument is it ignores facts from both history, and current events.

Battleships didn't become obsolete because of events at Taranto, nor Pearl Harbor, nor even because of the sinkings of two British battleships off the Malaysian coast. In point of fact, ignored wholly by Piggott, battleships continued to be deployed, successfully, for the rest of WWII (he might have noted the final Japanese surrender instrument was signed on the deck of USS Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay, had he the historical acumen to summon that factoid), and Korea, and Vietnam, and GW1, before the final retirement of ships then over 50 years old. Half a century of action after supposed obsolescence is quite a long time. 

And they weren't retired because of obsolescence, but rather because they were simply aged ships, requiring more in staffing and maintenance than they delivered in capability, and their main-gun ammunition was becoming notably wonky. Naval gunfire is fantastic, and nigh irreplaceable, but running oil-fired bunkers on a 2000+-man ship whose capabilities can be parceled out more economically among other platforms was the end game for the battleships. It was that simple. (OTOH, the defense plan if one was rammed by a speedboat IED, or hit by an Exocet or Silkworm in the multiple belts of foot-thick side armor, was to come about 180°, lower a seaman over the side with a brush and a bucket of gray enamel, and paint over the scorch mark in the hull that would result from such an attack.) 

Carriers didn't become obsolete after Midway, either.

Bad carrier tactics, yes.

Carriers, no.

Particularly against people with no defense against them. (Which is most of 185 nations out of 195 total.)

Piggott nonsensically waves the Russian hypersonic scramjet missiles as the death blow for anything in their path. They can cover 180 miles (their operational range) in a couple of minutes.

Okay, spiffy. Russia has new toys, based on technology around since the 1950s, some 70 years ago. So, had he more perspicacity, the obvious follow-up questions would be:

What are you going to do about targets 190 miles away?

How accurate are those missiles?

How easy are they to jam, spoof, or shoot down?

How are you targeting objects BVR?

How many have you got to shoot?

Where are they?

Those are questions a plebe at West Point or Annapolis would have thought of; Piggott, not so much. What he grasps about warfare in general, or in specifics, could be written longhand with a Sharpie on butcher paper and fit inside a thimble, with room to spare.

And the most obvious question is, if these missiles are so revolutionary, why is Russia in an endless meat-grinder conflict, rather than sitting atop the pyramid of victory in mere minutes, as they expected, and Piggott's suggestion predicts?

The obvious answer is, because all those questions show the utter dearth of ability of those "revolutionary" missiles to effect anything that looks like victory.

Might they have some utility? Perhaps. It remains to be seen. 

Are they a "paradigm shift" in warfare? No. They are a fart in a windstorm in the grand scheme.

Grunt Law: When you declare victory, be sure to inform the enemy.

Offense/Defense Corollary: There ain't a horse that can't be rode, and there ain't a rider that can't be throwed.

IOW, fast missiles are anything but world-beating game-changers.

It would take pages to fisk the multiplicity of military errors, from strategy, to tactics, to logistics, that underpin this pile of gelatinous shit plopped out at the link, but suffice it to say that war has not transformed in 6000 years of recorded human history, and neither have the conditions for obtaining victory. (The plural of 27 fallacious conclusions is not "wisdom". When you ask the wrong questions, and draw the wrong conclusions, you get the equivalent of gibberish from a baboon. For but one example, the machinegun didn't make infantry obsolete. It made head-on infantry charges obsolete. Wee difference, but Piggott doesn't know what he doesn't know - or else ignores it because facts mess up the flow of effluvia in his narrative.)

Hypersonic missiles haven't changed that calculus, and the failure of the Russians to sweep all opposition off the chessboard merely underlines the idiocy of the suggestion that they have.

If ICBMs with nuclear weapons didn't make armies and navies obsolete, there's little likelihood that a few missiles will do so now. The suggestion is risibly ludicrous, and only a rank amateur and total military loon would suggest otherwise. The first prerequisite of being the smartest guy in the room, is that one be smart.

Epic Fail.

Somebody wants to talk about actual new tech in this war, we can do that. But this article wasn't it.

Addendum: For the incorrigibly stupid who need this spelled out with wooden blocks, we lost our first aircraft carrier in 1942. Carriers were vulnerable 80 years ago: This is not news. We started WW II with a total of 7 carriers. We were so distraught and paradigm-shifted by the wholly unsurprising news that they could be sunk, that by war's end, we had 99 aircraft carriers afloat by VE day. And if anyone were to start lobbing missiles at any one of the 11 carriers we currently possess and had the misfortune to sink one, the life expectancy of their fleet, and capitol city, would be measured in minutes. Which is reason #27 why hypersonic AS missiles are largely irrelevant to any serious discussion of anything military-related beyond "What's a great way for a country to initiate national suicide by radiation poisoning?".

After all of the preceding, if anyone is still willing to carry water for Piggott's jackassical thesis, kindly turn up the brightness on your keyboard.

Biff Bashed

Just like Biff, Putin never saw it coming.

10K dead, 15K wounded, 5K POW/defected, as the Ukrainian Debacle enters Week Five.

Quite the box score for four weeks of blundering in the mud.

Putin's invasion forces have literally been decimated there. They've lost something close to 10% of the armored might of Russia in less than a month, and now they're getting pushed off of ground that had previously been secured by them.

For the attention-challenged, about six weeks before this Ukrainian disasterpiece, Putin had to send 250K troops to Kazakhstan to put down violent riots and open revolt there. They can't leave now without risking a two-front war.

All tolled, Putin's missing 35-55% of his entire armed forces, either destroyed or tied up, and taking troops from elsewhere risks similar risings in Georgia, Chechnya, and elsewhere, not to mention Russian borders at risk with opportunistic neighbors, including China, and staving off a coup in Moscow itself.

On paper, Russia's Biff Tannen army outnumbered Ukraine's George McFly forces 5 to 1 in combat power at the outset of this invasion. But Putin could only spare an attack force barely sufficient for a 2:1 advantage, when normal combat calculus is that an attacker needs 3:1, 5:1, or more in order to prevail. And so they haven't. And then we found out how untrained, unprepared, unprofessional, incompetent, and simply outright awful the Russian Army is at combat in 2022. How the mighty have fallen. And in their thousands.

UPDATE: Russia brags about shiny new ship unloading fresh war material at a Black Sea port. So Ukraine promptly blows it the hell up.

All the Russians have actually accomplished is to threaten to move Putin up to the medal-round in killing civilians, nearing parity with Castro, and then moving up on 4th-place Pol Pot. Whether he gets to bronze depends on whether or not he skips straight to the WMD phase once his demoralized and dreadful conventional forces are completely exhausted.

The only question remaining is whether Ukraine will continue to be resupplied with Javelins, Stingers, etc., sufficient to maintain this level of combat performance until Russia finally throws in the towel.

If they do, Russia stalls, and falters.

If they cannot do so, Russia eventually prevails by sheer weight.

For about 5 seconds. And then has to conduct an endless occupation against 100 times more fighters than the mujahideen ever mustered against the Russians in Afghanistan, but this time, against a near-peer adversary with a permanently seething hatred of all things Russian.

And every minute this continues, Russia appears militarily weaker by the minute to every other country on the planet, and their 12th place Brazil-sized economy shrinks by half, to one closer to 22nd place Taiwan's.

Unrest grows as well in the Russian military, which has lost more generals in the last 4 weeks than the US Army has lost in total since 1965. (The biiger problem is not the generals Ukraine has whacked; it's that they've identified the ones who most resemble Larry, Curly, and Moe, and have left them completely unharmed and unmolested, and free to carry out their cunning plans to the limit of their abilities. The Moscow citizenry is none too pleased either. Demonstrations recur, and someone today dropped off a gift of gasoline at Putin's Kremlin residence, in the handy 750-ml flaming wine bottle party package.

This does not bespeak a Russian victory parade any time soon, and the only group destined to suffer higher casualties than Russian troops attacking Kiev are likely to be Putin's food tasters.

Two Road Maps

 

One runs right under your opponents' noses. The other one rubs his nose in it, right in front of him in plain sight. (Born yesterday? Google them, Baby Duck.)

Neither is the wrong choice, and like chocolate or vanilla, or blondes vs. brunettes, the correct answer is liable to be "Both, please", not either/or.

Open your mind that much.

All it takes for the former is one person: Big X.

The fewer people in your organization, however, and the more jobs you delegate right back to yourself.

Operations, training, logistics, strategic and tactical planning, security, supplies, etc.

Conversely, the more like-minded folks you have, the more you can spread the load.

Over a long enough timeline, one person can do almost anything.

For most of its build history, one man was behind Mt. Rushmore. At a certain point, the scheme caught on in the imagination, and everyone, including the government, got into the act. But it happened at all because one guy thought it'd be a good idea.

The latter idea takes, obviously, quite a lot more people. In their case, people tired of communism's boots on their necks, and willing to dare the Soviets, in front of the world, to trample them once again. 1981 in Gdansk was a different world than it had been in Prague in 1968, or Budapest in 1954, and third time proved to be the charm.

So first lesson, for Plan B, is time your moves, and leverage the optics when they favor you, and make sure you have the numbers.

Ruby Ridge had no numbers, and no optics, going in. Game over.

Waco had better numbers, but all the wrong optics. Flame on.

Malheur was thoroughly penetrated with fed CIs, their main support was getting sent a literal bag of dicks to eat, and it was studied and decapitated by TPTB. End of story.

The Capitol Caper was a dumbass idea, just like the rest of the street games, and was conversely so big, the so-called organizers had no control over those participants either salted in to turn it sideways, or those who self-directed to the stupid switch. Had any number of us pointed that out, yet again, with the fateful prognosis "buffalo jump", no one would have listened. (Stupid is like that.) Looking at things at the end of the day, they might have thought differently.

Surprised by it? No; the surprise is that it isn't a once-a-week exercise, going back decades, and that no congressweasels were actually defenestrated in the traditional meaning of that word, i.e. hung out windows by their own entrails, but we can dream. Condemn it? No. Other than that they didn't actually plan to do that the first time. But note that it didn't help anything? Can't really argue against that. It didn't help anything. In historical terms, it was the Makin Island Raid, which mainly served to make sure that the Tarawa Invasion was a bloody mess.

The trouble with small group actions is getting things done.

The trouble with large group actions is not getting them undone.

Understand that, so that if/when you or "someone" you know undertakes either of them, they know what they're biting off. And maybe they use two wandering brain cells to address those contingencies. (Just kidding; they'll never do that, until they have to, or face death. Then, maybe...)

The days of half-assing things, and plainly assing them up, have finally come to a middle. Those who learn the right lessons will have more harmonious outcomes. Those who don't are looking at domestic terrorism labels, arrests, trials, and sentences.

"We killed the stupid ones first." - OIF/OEF Iraq and Afghanistan after-action assessments

Nobody's saying don't do anything.

Nobody wants anyone going out in a blaze of glory.

Just use your heads for more than a hat rack, and stop fucking things up by the numbers because you thought you could pull a thing out of your ass, on the fly.

Ask around: JSOC Ninjas aren't that because they can do the complicated things right. They are that, because they practice so much they can't do the simple things wrong.

Break things down to simple pieces, and get those right a hundred times.

When you have all the pieces right, you can put the whole puzzle together, in any size.

True for Big X Luftstalag III types of things, true for Gdansk shipyard mass protest kinds of things, true for any kinds of things.

If, and only if, you do the headwork, the legwork, and the homework.

And start by deciding: 

How do you make that decision? You pay attention to CARVER:

Criticality?

Accessibility?

Recuperability?

Vulnerability?

Effect?

Recognizability?

It looks like this:

Everything can be evaluated with that matrix.

Pieces on a chessboard.

Your daily to-do list.

Getting your kid into college.

And every potential target in your AO. In fact, TPTB have had decades to assign people to rating everything you can think of (and a lot you've never thought of) a CARVER value, so they already know the high-value targets in every county in the country.

What they can't do is protect them all to the same degree, so obviously, they have to pick what's most important.

When you're Leviathan, size matters, and it means there's not enough armor for the whole beastie. Not enough assets to protect everything. Hell, even tanks have thick armor in the front, and thinner armor on the top and bottom, and that's why we use mines and missiles that exploit the weak spots, rather than trying to duke it out with the frontal plate.

Anyone wanting to take advantage of that would have to see where the important spots are, and how well protected (or not) they are. They would then be able to find targets that offer disproportionate value for disproportionately low risk.

You're now doing a sort of analysis you may have heard of:

It's the weekend. Do some homework: Watch The Great Escape. Watch Moneyball. Not as entertainment, but as training tools. Then do the mental work behind anything else, and do the math. 

Because you'll find all the stupid things you would
have overlooked, and then not do them, assuming
you're not a total moron.

Find the 30-pt. targets. Work backwards from what you might want them to look like, with what it would take to get them that way. And then decide if that works better with a Big X solution, or a Solidarnösc approach. Which one (if either) can you pull off? (And don't go after any 10-pointers if there are still 15- or 20-pointers on the table. Duh.)

Do. The. Math.

Be different than every failed fucktard you've ever seen, who never bothered to do that much, or that little.

And maybe, just maybe, start chalking up some wins one day, instead of going out in a flaming heap of wreckage.

If only for the novelty of the approach.