More On Chronic Putardation

 

Nuclear Option

1) It's not 1945 any more. No one has a monopoly on nuclear force. A "limited" nuclear war doesn't stay limited. Five thousand simulations have demonstrated this to the point it's beyond arguing. Pop one nuke, anywhere, and it snowballs in a couple of days until someone shoots their leader in the head, or until everything north of the equator is radioactive glass. Russia pops a nuke, anywhere, they're signaling their wish for an extinction-level societal event.

2) Russian generals know this too. Which makes popping Putin's pumpkin head with a pistol far easier than complying with a nuclear deployment or launch order, and orders of magnitude more likely.

3) We know this too. Which means the odds are, no one will pay any attention to this as anything other than a bluff, on the theory that Russia isn't as crazy as Putin is. If we're wrong, Australia, Brazil, and Argentina can fight over the world in a hundred years. (Related Food For Thought: Different CinC for sure, but when Russia released control of WMDs in Syria in 2017 and used them on rebels there, we wiped out an entire Russian Air Wing there next day with 59 Tomahawk missiles with the hint not to deploy WMDs again. Putin pops a nuke in Ukraine, or anywhere else, and the engines will start warming up at the 509th and 131st BWs in Whiteman. After that it gets ugly.)

4) So his nukes are an empty rattle unless he's got a death wish for the entire Russian people, and Putin's going to have to dance with the gal who brung him: his drunken, incompetent, untrained and ill-prepared Russian Army boobs and bumpkins. Boo frickin' hoo.

Conventional Forces

1) Putin has plenty of troops already. So why "mobilize" partially?

2) Because he has thousands of miles of hostile borders, with every single nation. Russia has fought China, and incurred thousands of casualties in border skirmishes over the last century. They're not friendly with Iran or Afghanistan either. Turkey, Norway, and the Baltic States are NATO. Finland and Sweden want to be. Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, and Hungary are also NATO, and have no wish to return to the fold of their temporary overlords from Moscow; in fact, they're rabidly strident about that point.

3) More than half a dozen -stans have no wish to be under Moscow's thumb either, and they make that point known to Moscow every few years, violently. St. Petersburg is a looong way from Moscow as well. And even the Russian capital is no hotbed of Putin-lovers these days, or any days.

4) In short, Putin has a metric fuckton of conflicts that need troops to staff them, 24/7/365. None of those guys can be pulled without risking invasion, internal disaster, or even civil war. Bummer, for Vlad.

5) Those conscripts haven't been in the military for months to years. It will be months and months before they can be processed, re-trained, equipped, and deployable to units, whether piecemeal, or wholesale. That's next spring, at the earliest, before they make any difference at all. And then he'll have 300,000 green, untested troops to throw at a problem that 190,000 soldiers have proven unable to handle. Or with people who don't want to be there at all left to guard his vital national interests from actual enemies, while moving, at great difficulty and expense, the better-prepared and more politically reliable units to the Ukrainian meatgrinder. Well-played, MápШaԯ. That will turn out well.

6) Russian doctrine since ever is to reinforce success, not failure. That's true at the soldier level, and the army level. They don't reinforce struggling units, they leave them to their fate, and send fresh troops to make new attacks.

7) The problem in Ukraine is the US, NATO, the whole world, and 3000 satellites, are all watching everything Putin does, live and in color. Elon Musk has single-handedly given Ukraine a first-world satcom comms capability. Putin's a two-dimensional thinker in a three-dimensional battlespace. And he's paying for that now, in real time.

8) His forces right now continue to get rolled back, in most cases faster than they can make defensive lines to hold. 

Political Sideshow

1) Trying faux referendums, among a population that is either dead by Russia's hand, refugees in Poland and Slovakia, or rabidly anti-Russia in the occupied zones isn't going to fly. Nobody will buy the bullshit, and it will be d.o.a. anywhere it's peddled.

2) Putin wants to claim this is about protecting Russian sovereignty. The problem with that is that he thinks "Russia" is any territory he wants to grab ahold of, whether they want it or not. If he and his murderous military fucktards would simply fuck off, and march back to Russian territory mutually agreed upon by all parties as of December 31, 1990, he'd be at peace with the world. Nobody wants to talk about that inconvenient little truth. GTFO of Ukraine, and MYOB, respecting the status quo ante, and this is over by breakfast tomorrow.

3) India has openly rebuked him for the Ukrainian war, and China has "severe doubts and hesitations" about his entire ill-advised enterprise. His alliances of convenience are becoming inconvenient to the only allies he has in the world.

Conclusions

You don't mobilize reserves and send in 150% more people than you started out with when you're winning a war. Look no farther than LBJ or Dubbya to figure out the truth of that statement. So Russia isn't winning this, and they've obviously even gone beyond what the initial troop commitment could get and hold. And they're not done losing yet.

Current Russian losses are lied about by both sides, but anyone who believes Ukraine managed to bum rush a million square miles of territory and more out of Russia's grasp because the Russians were retreating faster than Ukraine could catch up to them, and suffered negligible casualties in such a wholesale rout, is smoking truckloads of hopeium. 

If you think Russia is going to strike back, it begs the question: If they were any such competent, and capable, why did they get their asses kicked back inside the Russian border in the first place?

Because they're not that competent and capable. Duh.

The initial offensive has slowed, but not stopped, and Ukraine is putting continual pressure on Russian forces, increasingly against troops poorly motivated, abysmally led, and running out of critical supplies. The retreat and despair grows by the day, which emboldens Ukraine, and encourages the West to continue and indeed increase supplying Ukraine with what they need to humble Russia all the way back to inside their own borders - where Putin should've kept them in the first place.

The losses that have to be the highest now are in Moscow. Anti-war protests by hundreds and thousands of Muscovites who said "Hell no! We won't go!" sprung up within hours of Putin's mobilization. Bombs are being thrown at his motorcade. And at this rate, the only unit taking more casualties than the ones in contact with Ukrainian forces in Kharkiv and Donbas are Putin's food-tasters in the Kremlin. He's probably losing 100 a week at the current rate.

And it's a going to be a long, cold winter ahead of him.

For the midwits out there trying to do this with half the IQ points needed, Putin's a world-class @$$hole because he's a KGB thug and ruthless murdering dick-tater, always has been one (you could look it up) since ever, and not because Poopypants likes him or hates him. You're not right on this because you're opposed to Emperor Poopypants' opinion, you're wrong because you're twenty-five years behind the curve on Vlad. You have enemies closer to home than Vlad, but they're not your only enemies. When you set the problem up wrong, you'll never get the right answer.

50:50 odds Putin never sees Christmas if nothing changes. Even if he does, Santa's bringing him a lump of coal. And if he's very, very lucky, it won't be from the charred remains of his army, or his capital.

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.

Who Run Bartertown?

The first two Godfather movies should be required viewing for Political Science 101. It's Plato, Machiavelli, von Clauswitz, and Sun Tzu, in Technicolor.

Case in point:

Bonasera comes to America and finds freedom, peace, law and order, circa 1990.

Then young punks (Putin) rape his daughter, twice, once by taking Crimea back, and again by putting paratroops in street clothes into Donetsk and Luhansk, and claiming they wanted "independence".

Finlly, Putin comes back to rape and pillage a third time, and Bonasera goes to the Godfather (the West) for justice.

The Godfather sends a couple of Clemenza's people, Javelin, NLAW, etc., over to break the punks' legs, and now Bonasera finds himself forever indebted to the Godfather.

QED

Putin hasn't been able to take Ukraine in three months and tens of thousands of casualties of trying, and he's bleeding himself white for the effort. And the Godfather is upset with him for disrespecting his protection.

All Putin can do is scorch the earth, endlessly, and win a mouthful of ashes. He's a proud fool, and a slow learner. When broken knees don't get the point across, the arms will be next.

But the West could snuff out Ukraine's candle with the snap of a finger, merely by withdrawing any further aid.

That's power.

Murphy's Laws Of Combat, #19

 

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.