Show Your Work

 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.

Napkin Math

 

Eaton Rapids Joe took a look at Russian casualties in Ukraine.

It's a good idea, and a welcome break from too much all-heat and no-light screaming from the shallow end of the IQ pool.

His conclusion: compared to WWII casualties, they're not doing too bad in Ukraine.

Let's take a closer look. All work will be shown.

First, let's set some guidelines.

In WWII, the Soviet Army had about 11.5M men. 

Their war lasted 1470 days, from the German invasion on 22 June 1941 to VE day when Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945. (The 15 seconds to take their half of Poland, and the week or two between them finally declaring war on Japan, and Japan surrendering, entailed no serious military engagements.) 

In that time, they suffered 6.3M KIAs and Died Of Wounds casualties. I'm not looking at other casualty numbers, because KIA/DoW is all we're looking at for Ukraine.

That puts all Russian military losses in WWII at an average of about 4,285/day, 24/7/365.

(Joe comes up with a higher number, but it isn't going to matter much in the grand scheme, as we'll show presently.)

First of all, consider a wee historical tidbit: the Soviet Army suffered those losses fighting 150 divisions of the Wermacht, including 15 armored divisions. (For comparison, right now, the entire US land forces, Army and Marines combined total, is 13 active divisions total (10+3), and 9 reserve divisions (8+1), including a total of one armored division.)

Secondly, the Russian Army now is only about 500K men, and the size of the force that invaded Ukraine is generally acknowledged to be about half that size, i.e. 250K troops, all in.

The Soviet Army of WWII was therefore 46 times bigger than the Russian invasion force (well, until they started making contact with Ukrainian forces) that entered Ukraine.

So for a comparison that's apples to apples, instead of apples to pineapples, that 4285/day casualty rate, divided by a force 1/46th the size, drops to 93/day, for any 250K troops.

But of the 250K troops who invaded, the casualty number after 14 days of conflict is 6000 men.

As Joe correctly noted, barely a bad day for WWII. For that matter, barely a bad afternoon at Antietam or Gettysburg in the US Civil War, and hardly more than one stupid attack across No Man's Land any day at Ypres in WWI. But this wasn't our Civil War, or WWI, or WWII.

And the Army in question isn't the behemoth juggernaut 46 times bigger than the present one, nor engaged in combat with the most ferocious army in world history through 1942.

It's a campaign with literally half the current Russian Army, and experiencing a casualty rate not the 93/day (per 250K troops) from WWII, but rather a death rate of 428/day, which is only 4.6 times worse than Russia experienced at the height of WWII, against most of the German Army.

Inflicted on them by a ragamuffin militia that wouldn't even qualify for the U.S. Notional Guard, except they have Javelin anti-tank missiles, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, and the usual Russian hand-me-down small arms.

And they're fighting the "mighty" Russian Army clown posse to a standstill.

In short:

By any objective standard, the Russians have been getting the ever-loving shit kicked out of them, six times a week and twice on Sundays.

This is why the Russians are now attacking passively, by holding up short, and shelling cities full of civilians from 15 miles outside of town: because when they go toe to toe with the Ukrainian ragamuffins, they get their asses handed to them, shit their pants, and retreat.

At the height of the Vietnam War, we had about 500K troops in-country.

On the absolute worst day of the Vietnam War, the day after the 1968 Tet offensive, when battles broke out in 100 cities and hamlets nationwide, what happened?

The deadliest day of the Vietnam War for the U.S. was 31 January [1968] at the start of the Tet Offensive when 246 Americans were killed in action.

If every day in Vietnam had been that bad, the entire war would have lasted just 8 months, to get to the number of deaths (over 58,000) it took 10 solid years to accomplish.

The Russian forces in Ukraine - half the size of the US Army in Vietnam - are dying at nearly twice that number, every single day for two solid weeks. They'll have suffered a Vietnam in just 4 months, at the current rate.

If any American commander since 1960 had suffered 10% KIA and 25% casualties and equipment losses for anything short of nuclear warfare, they'd have been relieved and court-martialed.

The Russians are and have been suffering Kasserine Pass levels of ass-whupping, every week they keep this up. And every day, they get weaker, while the Ukrainian forces get stronger.

If you can't conceive what a dick-punching is being delivered on Putin's invaders, you simply can't count. It's worse that WWII, and it's worse than Vietnam on its worst day. TheRussians are not getting better at it over time, and they're burning up war stocks of material and ammunition of which they only have a finite supply.

[BTW: Russian doctrine when they're getting rolled, since the 1950s, stipulates that Plan B is to drop chemical or tactical nuclear weapons, to rock the enemy and gain offensive momentum. How curious that they just magically "discovered" 'bio-warfare labs' in Ukraine, just as their invasion fleet runs aground on the rocks of Reality, and just after they shipped in a good supply of chemical warfare suits for their troops in Ukraine. Just a serendipitous coincidence, I'm sure.]

Putin has pulled his own pants down, and the Ukrainians are smacking his sky-clad cheeks with a board. Every other nation that doesn't like Russia can see that, and that only destabilizes the entire world, and makes future pushback against Russia not just likely, but inevitable.

You got Bunker?

Math For Common Core English Grads

 

To drive home the point from today's earlier post, let's give you How To Lie With Graphs 101:

Today's Exemplar: (A)

Outer Slobovia has had a lycanthropy outbreak, and I used this graph to illustrate for you who is at the greatest risk of death from it.

My Less Evil Twin, however, has told you a different story, using this graph: (B)

Which graph is worse?

It depends on how old you are!

So now, the poser for you, warmly ensconced in your Common Core cocoon of fuzzy math, because you're an English Major, taught only from the perspective of Writers Of Color, to avoid all that mathy racist White Supremacy:

Which one of us is fear-mongering, and lying our ass off?

a) A - me

b) B - my Less Evil Twin

c) Both of us

__________

Bummer for you, it's a trick question.

The correct answer is technically d) neither one of us.

Why?

Because both graphs are actually true.

The better question is, which one represents reality better?

You can't answer that, until we give you graph (C), which shows you how much of the population makes up each of those brackets.

A) Makes it look like the elderly have a far higher risk of death from lycanthropy.

B) Lets you know far more people aged 45-54 than aged 85 and up are dying from it.

Neither is lying to you overtly, but A) lulls people into a false sense of security, and B) frightens those in the hardest hit bracket.

So both of us told you the truth, or at least some of it, and yet both of us used a graph to lie to you, because we weren't giving the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

You can't do the math if the person setting up the problem doesn't give you the variables.

An honest graph would transparently break the demographic sections, not into pseudo-handy 10-year spans, but into timespans that would make each column on the graph the exact same size as it was of the actual population. That's apples-to-apples, and fair.

Just like there are two ways to slice a pizza into 4 slices for four people:

One example is fair and honest, and the other one is bullshit.

(If anyone can't grasp that, let's go out for pizza: you buy it, and I'll slice it and divvy it up.)

Crying "But I gave you one slice, and I cut it four ways, just like I promised!" for the second example is going to get your ass kicked by the two guys who get the little slices.

The same is true for making graphs that make one column look 15X bigger, then finding out it's bullshit.

This is why a shitty graph is always dirty pool, and why you need to understand math and use it to know when you're being lied to or bamboozled, just like you were taught to count money to teach you how to know someone making change is honest, or a cheat.

We yell because we care, and the internet is not the place to check your brains and believe everyone who says "Trust me. I teach statistics."

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.