It looks to me like technology advancement has made large/expensive WWII style war machines obsolete. Billions of dollars of tanks/fighters can be reliably taken out by a few hundred million dollars of munitions.
We just wasted about $1.25T on the F-35 program when $100B in drones would have been more effective.
This is all pretty delightful. Humans can't really war with each other for territory anymore. You either waste a ton of money and don't get anywhere, or you gotta use nukes or other psycho-extreme measures. How wonderful!
Accelerating the transition to renewables based sustainability, along with economic sanctions, is the clear path.
The weak link in using drones is it's only a matter of time until somebody figures out how to jam the ground link the drones use. The Iranians captured a US recon drone by jamming it. I think the US figured out how to counter that hack, but there will be more.
A manned fighter can operate separate from ground control if the pilot is trained correctly (which is standard in the west).
To add on to my own post -
I think it's very clear now that occupation of Ukraine by Russia is impossible, and I think even Putin knows that. If the US, with it's huge military budget was willing to give up on Afghanistan, there is no way Russia is going to be even remotely capable of occupying a country the size of Texas with 44 million civilians who are clearly going to fight them non-stop under occupation.
Hence why I'm starting to think Putin's plan has resorted to bomb Ukraine and essentially level it, claim that Russian has "neutralized" the Ukranian threat to the Russian people, and move his forces out of Ukraine.
I was thinking today that Putin may have assumed the damage to American stability from Afghanistan as it was after Russia pulled out of Afghanistan. He underestimated how good Americans are at forgetting.
Putin probably is looking for an escape clause, but his criteria going in was so high that the Ukrainians are never going to agree. The Russians are insisting the only way they are going to leave is if the Ukrainians are essentially left helpless the next time he invades. Ukraine knows that while they are taking severe damage, the longer they hold out, the harder the crash Russia is going to take. Russia's losing their military here.
The loss in Afghanistan for the US was financial and a hit to US pride, but the US military is not broken. The way this war is going, a large chunk of the Russian military will be a completely spent force in another week or two. A spent force is useless for any military activity, it's shattered in manpower, equipment, and morale.
The Ukrainians know this. Hold out and Russia will collapse militarily. Then they can get what they want at the negotiation table.
My partner can't find it now, but somebody took a picture of flat bed rail cars in probably Russia with civilian cars and vans with the Z symbol painted on them. The Russians have been using the 'Z' symbol to indicate their regular army forces in the north. Marines use 'V' and the southern forces often use 'O'. It might appear that the war is going so badly for the Russians they are pressing civilian cars into use. She can't find it now.
Russia has had their first labor strike starting today over conditions brought on by the war. There will be more, and the young people who are more connected to the outside world and have never believed Putin's BS will join them. If the army is flat on its back, what happens when the protests get too violent for the police to control and there is no army left to back them up? That's how civil wars or regime changes start.
The Syrian civil war started over protests about the high price of grain in the Arab Spring. The conditions in Russia are looking at least an order of magnitude more volatile. The economic disruption goes beyond the food supply to everything. Russia is cut off from the rest of the world and there are many staples they don't make anymore. And without any money, they can't set up production of those staples.
On top of that the bulk of the military is getting eaten up in a foreign war and is unavailable to back up the police at home. Even if Russia pulls out of the war, the military will not have the ability to back up the police and considering how badly this war went, a significant number would probably join the protesters.
Something my partner read last night reminded me that over the last 120 years the Russian society has destabilized whenever a war went badly:
1) 1906 - loss of the Russo-Japanese war triggered a peasant uprising that was barely put down.
2) 1917 - losses in WW I triggered a troop revolt that became the Russian Revolution
3) 1989 - the failure in Afghanistan contributed to the fall of the USSR. There was an attempted coup right around the time they pulled out.
4) 2022 - ?
My money is on the Navalny faction. They are the younger generation and Russia's future.
Do you have any thoughts on how to stop this without inciting a greater response? Is there a point where the cost for Putin is greater than the reward?
It's pretty obvious that Putin is not thinking straight. I don't know if he's on medication, went kind of nuts during COVID, sick, or what, but he's not his normal calculating self.
If there is significant disruption at home with essentially riots the police can't control, he might conclude that the only thing to do is to pull the army out and put them on the streets of Russian cities. At that point he might agree to virtually anything to get disentangled. On the other hand with his instability he might pull his troops out and nuke Ukraine until it glows to try and deal with his own problems at home without the Ukraine "threat" looming.
Though again I think that would be a miscalculation. His troops will be in bad physical shape and after the disaster of this war, they might end up on the other side.
In 2 weeks the economy collapses. What they do then is a good question and who knows. They had 500 billion in foreign reserves with much of that in gold and much of that in Switzerland which is no unobtainable. If they had been wise they could have brought that back to Russia prior to invasion. They could have given oligarchs time to really move to bitcoin. Going to be interesting now. I could see Russia moving entirely to bitcoin or some other virtual currency.
Authoritarians had crypto currency because it's tough to track. That's the main reason China banned it, though the drain on the electrical gird for mining Bitcoin was a factor too.
Crypto is ultimately the ultimate libertarian currency. That's the opposite end of the spectrum from what an authoritarian wants.
This is a bit misleading. While the tanks may be easily taken out, there are no verified reports that fighters in this conflict have been taken out by Stingers or similar inexpensive weapons. Most likely those were taken out by other AA or Ukraine's own fighters. The fighters can easily avoid Stingers by flying higher.
This is misleading also. While drones are useful in certain contexts, they don't stand a chance against even 4 gen fighters (or even perhaps older ones) when going head to head. Drone development has not reached a point yet where they can replace fighters, and if you made drones with the same capabilities as fighters, they would likely cost just as much, if not more.
I thought the fixed wing aircraft were going to go to higher altitude to avoid the MANPADS, but instead the Russians have kept them below 1000 ft to avoid radar. Hitting a jet with a MANPAD is tough, but below 1000 ft they are vulnerable. If someone has a MANPAD ready to go and a jet appears close by, the operator only has to aim in the general direction of the jet and pull the trigger, the heat seeking mechanism does the rest.
Modern fighter make use of flares to confuse heat seeking weapons, but there is a limited supply on board and they can't just spray them constantly while in enemy airspace. If the plane is at altitude, they can detect the missile coming and have time to launch flares, but at low altitude they don't have any time to get warning.
The increase in shoot downs Saturday may have been because the Russians are sending more air missions (sorties) into Ukraine. More sorties means more opportunity to get shot down. The west has provided so many MANPADS now that it has de facto created a no fly zone.
The Russians may be sending more air sorties in because they are running out of rocket artillery ammunition. The Russians may not have had much supply at the beginning of the war and now lack the ability to make more.
Some promising developments:-
I still think it is possible to negotiate a deal both sides can live with.
It if all about where lines are drawn on maps, and the percentage split of any gas royalties.
The rebel areas where Putin's justification, and they seem to be the more effective and mostly highly motivated fighters on the Russian side.
10-15 years down the track with Ukraine making good economic progress as part of the EU, they may decide they want to re-join Ukraine.
In terms of regime change in Russia, none of the Russian soldiers will be happy about being sent to this war, the Russian public will not be happy especially when they have more of the facts. Even if all sanctions were dropped today, the economic impact on Russia will last for decades. many Western businesses will not come back, the EU will move away from Russian gas ASAP,. Whether Putin survives the next 1-2 years, makes little difference, his place in history is secure.
After a negotiated peace Russia will be no threat to Ukraine, and definitely no threat to NATO, however their nukes of all kinds remain a threat, that is why a deal is a good outcome.
The two sides are very, very far from any kind of deal. The Russians want Ukraine to be completely demilitarized and want them to decommission all their nuclear power reactors. Whether it's just Russian spin or Putin really is paranoid, but the talk in Russian media is that the Ukrainians had a nuclear weapons program and at minimum they were planning on making dirty bombs to set off in Russia.
The Ukrainians want their territory in Crimea and Donbas back.
China is playing the long game, also remember Mao's adage "when weak, talk big, when strong just act". These days China is strong, so no need for aggressive talk* w/o action. My take is China could decide any moment to take over Taiwan, but it's not in her interest now, economic price would be too great re multiple tech agreements etc. China is only shaking her fists to assert her displeasure at the faction in power in Taiwan now, which wants "independence" rather than the previous well understood quid pro quo of the ultimate One China.
(*) For example, China isn't hesitating to take control of the South China Sea, nobody is really standing up to her.
BTW My guess is that the "independence/ separatist" movement is really funded by some external troublemakers (the CIA used to do that, BTW, toppling governments to install more pro US governments .. with rather poor success .. Iran, Vietnam, Peru, etc etc see
Confessions of an economic hitman )
All IMHO of course, and I may be completely wrong
China has a major weakness though. They are much more tied into the global economy than Russia ever was. The damage to their economy from the sorts of sanctions Russia is facing would crash China's economy very fast. And the Chinese have been basically mollifying the population for 30 years by keeping up constant economic growth. Basically the social agreement is, leave all the governing decisions to us and you can have an ever increasing standard of living.
In the last couple of years there has been a lot of talk in China about the withdrawal of the Mandate of Heaven. The Mandate of Heaven is a meme in Chinese politics that goes back a couple of thousands of years. Basically it's that the gods show favor on the people when they approve of the leadership and times are good. When natural disasters, economic problems, pandemic, and social unrest hit the country, the gods have withdrawn the Mandate of Heaven and there are rumblings about regime change. China was hit with some severe flooding two years ago, along with COVID and unrest in Hong Kong. An economic crash caused by international sanctions would probably push the populous over the edge.
I may have some details about the Mandate of Heaven wrong. I am coming at this as an outsider, but that's my understanding of it.
In any case, the Chinese are probably looking at this situation figuring Taiwan is going to remain a long term goal.
. This is genuinely what her grandma believe. During Covid Russians were told their vaccine was the first to be successful too (when it was at least a year behind most of the West).
