Well, the ability of the Russians to keep fighting surprised no one who knows some military history. Likewise the Houthis; once you start caring about the enemy's civilians, you can't crush insurgent-type forces very quickly.
Agreed, if anything I'd say the bigger surprise on average was the ability of the Ukrainians to sustain the fight as long as they have, and particularly how catastrophically short the 2014 and 2022 sneak attacks fell from their full objectives.
In the years prior to February 2022, the sycophants in the senior Russian leadership convinced Vladimir Putin that Ukraine's pro-western government could be taken down quickly, and at a reasonable cost in human and material casualties on both sides, not just on the Russian side.
The course of events proved differently. Those Putin sycophants greatly underestimated Ukraine's will to resist; and worse, Ukraine's ability to resist.
Given that Slavic peoples have a cultural propensity for bitterly fighting any long war they find themselves in, the response from both sides was to accept the human and material casualties needed to fight their side of the war, and then to just get on with it.
"In the years prior to February 2022, the sycophants in the senior Russian leadership convinced Vladimir Putin that Ukraine's pro-western government could be taken down quickly, and at a reasonable cost in human and material casualties on both sides, not just on the Russian side.
The course of events proved differently. Those Putin sycophants greatly underestimated Ukraine's will to resist; and worse, Ukraine's ability to resist."
To play devil's advocate for the sycophants, I think it was possible that the Ukrainian government could've been taken down quickly and with modestish costs (at least if you started counting from when the mask dropped, and not talked about the protracted war in the Donbas). We love memeing on the Kremlin and its idiocy and for good reasons, but people often overlook how hard pressed the Kyiv perimeter battles were and how far the Kremlin's troops got, and how (apparently though we don't know) they managed to flip a good number of Ukrainian VIPs to act as traitors. The Russian way of war loves opening conflicts with a decapitation strike (and we see this with Poland in 1792 and Afghanistan in 1978-80)., and were it not for a number of screwups like Hostomel they might have done it.
What I don't think was possible is wrapping up the WAR or pro-Western FIGHTERS quickly or at a reasonable cost in human and material casualties. Even if the Kremlin could topple or destroy the Ukrainian government and conventional resistance in 1 Day (and I figured it was a possibility - however slim - that was possible) they would still be dealing with a huge, populous nation that now hates them and is quite capable of protracted resistance that would make Chechnya look like a school day. It's amusing how much the term "Banderaite" is thrown around by people who seem to ignore that the UPA-B/OUN-B managed to hold out for about 20 years in a relatively small, surrounded part of Ukraine with minimal outside support.
"Given that Slavic peoples have a cultural propensity for bitterly fighting any long war they find themselves in, the response from both sides was to accept the human and material casualties needed to fight their side of the war, and then to just get on with it."
Eh, I'm not sure it has as much to do with "Slavic Peoples." The Poles in their golden age were notoriously fickle, and so were the Russians in their periods of division. In this case I think it's more because both Russia and Ukraine view this fight as existential (and for the Ukrainians and various Belarusian and Russian dissidents it is) and there is no clear ground for compromise (Zelenskyy tried it, he even got elected on that, it didn't work). So they go on.
> were it not for a number of screwups like Hostomel they might have done it.
For all the well-deserved crap the Biden admin has gotten from me on many issues, that was apparently due to the CIA whispering into someone's ear. And the UAF reacted, not as well as they probably would have liked, but adequately and in time.
"Had not the Euros and Biden not armed them a million or so Ukrainians would be alive and the war over inside a month."
Yeah right. Try going to Georgia and telling them that, and I promise to try and say something nice at your funeral.
For those who are not aware:
Firstly: The war well predated Brandon's arrival in "power", starting in 2014 when Putin responded to his moppet in Ukraine's violent and corrupt overreach (largely prompted by Putin's own forcing of Yanukovych to walk back on his election promise to triangulate between Russia and the EU on Trade) leading to his ouster by sending in "little green men" to Crimea and the Donbas to arm or "volunteer" local anti-Maidan militias. Even Putin has stopped pretending the troops that took Crimea were not Russian Federation regulars and special forces (See: Crimea: The Road Home), and any plausible or even implausible deniability that they did not do the same in the Donbas was shattered by a mixture of "Looking at Unit IDs and gear exclusive to the Russian Federation, and literal mentions of them in Russian lawsuits for unrelated matters."
Secondly: The reason I mention Georgia in particular about how naive and staggeringly ignorant this is is because South Ossetia and Abkhazia became "ungovernable" in the early 1990s with significant help from the Russian military, and periods of open, conventional conflict between them and the Kremlin on one side and the Georgians on the other have generally been brief and onesided (most recently in 2008).
And yet the VAST MAJORITY of the killing has happened in the times of "peace", with the Kremlin giving large scale support to the ethnic cleansing of Georgians throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Which is one reason why the conflict is so bitter. And which we have seen similar elements of in the Kremlin controlled areas of Ukraine going back to 2014 with the DNR and LNR.
As RJ Rummel pointed out to the idiot gungrabbers: the majority of the bloodshed tends not to happen in actual war, it tends to happen from one side with the guns brutally oppressing and trying to exterminate the side without them. You are assuming the Kremlin will be a virtuous and fair occupier, something that is utterly and completely without justification or merit since Yeltsin left power and probably not even before that.
Thirdly: On top of the historical illiteracy, there's also the basic military issue. While the Kremlin likes banging gongs about "Banderaists" and its mouthpieces like Ritter and MacGregor and "The Squad" amplify that, they tend to ignore the fact that the original "Banderaists" - the OUN-B/UPA-B - were essentially a moderate sized guerilla cum terrorist movement engaged in their own brutal civil war against the Melnyk faction, with almost nil support abroad (especially after Hitler betrayed them in 1941), and limited to a relatively small portion of Western Ukraine and it *STILL* Took the Kremlin about 15 years after the Soviets retook the area in 1944 to finally, entirely finish them off.
If you think a Kremlin victory in Ukraine will result in less bloodshed in this era of new generation, cellular warfare, I point to the fact that the Kremlin *Still* can't track down all the loyalist underground movements in Crimea where they have been feeding intel to Kyiv and providing targeting data and propaganda broadcasts, let alone in the Donbas or other occupied areas where you quite literally have large scale guerilla warbands blowing up rails and ambushing patrols like it's 1944 again.
So no, it makes absolutely no sense to not arm the Ukrainians at least to a point, or to believe that a Kremlin victory would be either short or likely to spare lives.
The Russians, like the folks on Gilligan's Island, expected a three-day war.
They've now been fighting longer than they fought the Germans in WWII and are no closer to any perceivable victory condition than the day they started....
Flight-ER-Doc: Ah, but don't forget...it's a Special Military Operation, not a war. Real militaries don't fight wars anymore, because winning wars is bad for business.
As observed above, they thought they wouldn't need to do much fighting, so they got their best units bloodied pretty good. But still thought the war would be quick, so didn't hit the infrastructure of the Ukrainians as hard as they normally would. So here we are...
OK, let's accept your premise, but the Russians seemed to have transitioned fairly quickly into attrition-style war. I think an exception is on the Black Sea where I don't think the Russians came to grips with how to use their forces. It's hard for me to see a scenario where Russia doesn't end up controlling the Donbas, let alone Crimea and maybe Odessa.
They didn't "transition fairly quickly into attrition style warfare" as a result of lessons learned, they transitioned into it for lack of any better options. This becomes particularly obvious when you look at the wider war, such as the Second Battle of Debaltseve in the pre-2022 period of the conflict where they did indeed win but they missed a major chance to destroy or even seriously damage Loyalist units, resulting in the Donbaschukuos steadily losing terrain from about 2016 onwards until Putin dropped the facade in 2022.
That helped contribute to the plan for a grand decapitation blow in 2022, and to be fair they came much closer to succeeding than many realize (and the gains in the South would be held for years or in some cases still now), but they ultimately failed and suffered heavily, meaning decisive breakthrough became basically unworkable while they also had to send more troops to basically occupy Belarus to prop up Lukashenko. And the results have been brutal for both sides but seriously devastated Russian prestige and belief in themselves as a superpower and that Ukrainians would be a kindred people easily absorbed.
As for controlling the Donbas, they had their chance and they have suffered it badly. Refusing to negotiate on that matter with Zelenskyy (who people forget was elected as a dove and proposed splitting the region in a vote)and then refusing to rehab it as a giant rust belt greatly undermined their credibility there. While the chance to take Odessa was either in 2014 or very early in 2022, when the element of surprise was still on their side and before Moskva and sizable chunks of the Black Sea Fleet were screwed over and ODessa was a much more politically charged, divided city. But months of shore bombardment did wonders to harden hatred, and frankly it'd be difficult for the Russian military to occupy a city of that size and disposition without outright levelling it. TBH I'd rate Ukraine's chances of taking Crimea back as better than that of the Kremlin taking Odessa, and that's not me being a NAFO moron rah rahing (though I admit I am biased), that's more due to the way a power able to take the Isthmus and dam the rivers can have Crimea by the throat, how Crimean AA defenses have been hit badly, and how taking and securing Odessa would involve a heavy involvement of not just military forces but also money and civilian rebuilding that the Kremlin probably can't afford and hasn't even done in the Donbas, where the circumstances were a lot more favorable.
"What" and "how many" are variables in the calculus of firepower in conflict that require constant and intense scrutiny and rolling, periodic reevaluation. Carpet bombing and grid square artillery barrages still happen and arguably have their place but are usually a suboptimal choice. "Preferred munitions" are often "bespoke" (MOAB / deep penetrators) with a limited target set and delivery platform options. Having lots of cheap munitions that are relatively flexible with a wide variety of delivery options seems to be the way to go. Brutal reality: Having the organizational acumen to determine what those munitions are and organizational will to overcome the "Iron Triangle's resistance" to abandoning their current pet moneymaker is a real human problem for us. OBTW, you must create the industrial capability to produce those munitions. Otherwise, they are another nice "study with attached .ppt". Have to point out, there is a lot of money to be made in "admiring a problem". IMO, YMMV
FWIW, bombs are still kind of a Tinkertoy type of thing. Standard bodies in 500, 1000, 2000lb sizes; add a fuse to suit; add a guidance kit; add a wing kit; etc. allows you to build up the most suitable for the mission.
That said, it seems that is starting to erode some with specialized bombs such as the SDB.
Sure, we've been putting "kits" on WWII type bombs (Laser, JDAM, etc) for decades. Turning a dumb bomb into a smart bomb is a quantum leap in the kill chain. The production lines for artillery shells (non-Excalibar), "dumb" bombs, and the various kits were never sufficient prior to the conflict. I sure hope the profit margin is sufficient for the "primes" to ramp up to meet the "unexpected" demand. Of course, "rates" are negotiable...
Agree. Though one issue was amount of expenditures. Apparently at least as recently as 2019 bomb bodies from the Vietnam era were being built into ordnance going down range.
I think we've probably all seen that to some extent. And made the same jokes. But if the storage facilities are full, stacking them out in the open probably isn't the answer. Training probably doesn't require as much expenditure as wartime to maintain proficiency. And just decommissioning old stuff doesn't really solve it either when the limiting factor is secure storage.
Perhaps stockpiling components that can quickly be assembled is the answer.
Production facilities. For example, literally medieval military tech (black powder) is necessary for most modern explosives and propellants to initiate. There is one factory in the US making it. It was destroyed in an explosion a couple of years ago. Bought and rebuilt by Estes, the model rocket people, bought by another company. And was shut down for a couple weeks because of an accident.
I've seen open-source numbers for procured JDAM kits in the 600,000 range. Not sure I believe that, but we have a LOT of JDAM kits in the various flavors.
"That fourth moment—the delta between what we can make and what we need to sustain the fight. We have to solve that problem or we will simply fail to meet the math that mass will bring."
Having pondered this a bit, I have to conclude that simply more is not the answer. At least not in all cases.
More does not seem to have solved Verdun. Nor Korea, Vietnam, or Ukraine. Maybe more solved WWII, but despite the Soviet maxim of "Quantity has a quality of its own" it's really not that simple.
A significant issue is how you apply that more. I would submit the Soviets used their masses of infantry and tanks unwisely. It worked, but the consequences were devastating. Better tactical, operational and, probably, logistical skill would have served them better in applying the masses they had.
Morale, both of the troops and as a nation, is an important factor. It allows one to suffer the mass attacks of the enemy and stand fast while one's own attacks are crafted and delivered. If you give up hope, or stop caring, you cannot press the attack to victory.
One must also be realistic about application of mass fires. History has shown us again and again the folly of man reliant upon simply raining destruction upon a foe without sending in the infantry to finish the task. BDA has never been accurate. Economic targets are amazingly resilient, tactical targets can be spoofed with maskirova. I think I can accurately say that never, ever, in the history of man has just shelling or bombing, no matter how massive, ever permanently solved the problem.
I have no solutions to these issues, it's not in my wheelhouse. I just see that no matter how much shit we hurl down range it won't solve the problem and likely creates more, unless it is done in a manner that is designed fully destroy the problem and see that it doesn't reoccur. (And no, that doesn't mean we have to do decades of nation building. And yes, if the problem goes away for a couple decades before it requires attention again, that could be a satisfactory outcome.)
Human behavior in conflict is a variable that "varies" widely, (you're welcome, yes, I'm Captain Obvious). Russia and UKR conflict performance both reflect the underestimated human ability (at times) to endure violence and suffering beyond what appears logical. History is also replete with examples of seemingly overwhelming forces being routed (Arab Israeli conflicts, Greece-Persia, U.S. early civil war). "Why we fight" and "why we give up" is a field ripe for AI "insights". Here's hoping AI provides "helpful" reality checks, and not psychotic hallucinations. The human track record of that "wish casting" vs reality is bad enough already.
If you want to buy a stock, then LUMEN which has a contract with Palantir, is best bet with huge upside potential. They have recently gotten into AI development in a big way. r/Karl
The US has eliminated all sorts of 'dirty' industry - steelmaking, heavy forging, mining and the like....
Even if we wanted to build a plant in Willow Run, Michigan to build weapons of war, where are the pieces to make the pieces going to come from? Where are the raw materials coming from?
And as far as the building goes - with the environmental left (funded by our enemies) throwing legal stops out like confetti? Can't pollute (insert whatever). Can't hire people that understand basic arithmetic unless you also hire illegals with sexual dysphoria and body issues?
"Well that'll be a problem after I'm dead" and Yes In Other People's Backyards is an unfortunate combination that doesn't need any effort from the opposition.
Aren't there workarounds for enviroweenie roadblock efforts, available via executive order or via the Defense Production Act (DPA) of 1950? I seem to recall Slick Willie exempting JSOC from all kinds of environmental and other constraints by plain ol' decree.
None of those measures are legitimate for the Bad Orange Man. We have to wait to see which 1-bit local judge decides to usurp the elected President in any given week.
Jetcal1: Yes, but, a Model T was a durable good, not a consumeable. A Model T created a huge aftermarket of parts and service. Actually, the Model T created a whole economic ecosystem (gas stations, motels, roadside diners, etc.) Palantir wants to make money designing and operating highly lucrative computerized defense and security systems, which require constant upgrading. I don't think Palantir wants to make lower-cost, consumeable munitions. I could be wrong (and often am!)
I believe Mr. Sankar's point is we need to be able to build and develop both low lost cost munitions and the super duper gee whiz stuff. (And build the gee whiz economically.
Jetca1: I believe that, too. I also believe that Mr. Sankar wants to sell super-duper, gee-wiz, Palantir products and support services, not low-cost munitions. Mr. Sankar does not ask or answer the question: How do you make money manufacturing and selling low-cost munitions? The answer is, you don't.
Jetcal1: Yes, I realize that, and I appreciate our back-and-forth on this topic (that's what's great about this site). The problem lies with Wall Street. Investors want fancy, big-ticket hardware and huge defense procurement contracts. Producing beans, bullets, artillery shells and cheap, one-way drones (flying lawnmowers) does not excite investors. As an example, consider Olin Corporation's Winchester ammo unit, a major producer of the US Military's small arms ammo. Low margin and boring for investors. If Winchester were to make a wiz-bang, GPS-guided bullet that cost $1,000 per round, investors would love it.
Brett: Honestly, I don't know if that is the case in the defense industry, where manufacturers make their money on costly weapons weapons systems, be they one-time use munitions (guided missiles, smart bombs) or large scale hardware and systems (ships, aircraft, armor, space hardware).
Rheinmetall paid a bunch of money (vicinity $950 million) for a company whose main product is tank tracks. (Loc Performance Products) in 2024. These have a limited lifetime.
All the mentioned parties appear to have national will and a relatively unified political system. We do not. We got lucky because the Naval Acts that rebuilt the Navy created jobs during the depression and had enough bipartisan support to pass.
Nor did we have the aviation infrastructure in place in 1938 when the British and the French swooped in and paid for factory expansion.
Sankar echoes people like Kaiser or Higgins. Is anyone in Congress listening, able to understand, the problem, and powerful enough to act?
Edit: Is there anyone in the EU, Japan, Australia, etc. echoing these same thoughts? It seems the whole world is watching the Spanish Civil war/Japan in Manchuria and unable to connect the dots.
A key interval in the preparation for American entry was the last half of 1940. France fell, and the political class in Washington had a Sputnik moment. It wasn't just the Two-Ocean Navy Act; look up what they did with the Engineering, Science, and Management War Training program to train the people needed for war production.
With apologies - I don’t bye the Sputnik analogy. By “sputnik moment” I presume the reference is to the apparent technological surprise to the world that in 1957 the USSR launched the first human engineered Earth orbit satellite.
The use of that event as metaphor for defense/war policy is like Fukuyama’s embarrassing “end of history” thesis, or Friedman’s pre-Kosovo McDonalds & War link.
The 1957 sputnik moment is like a guy who walks up to Mike Tyson in the mid-90s and tries to sucker punch him. How’s that going to work out for the guy? Or, put another way, who walked on the moon and who didn’t?
And it’s especially ironic that one of the sputnik moments described is the Russian’s adventure in Eastern Europe and its current, tragically escalating casualty count.
And the Chinese hyper glide missile? Maybe it’s more reliable or real than the Chinese designed and built air defense system they sold the Iranians.
You want Sputnik Moments?
Space X chopstick catch of the booster for the largest space system ever launched comes to mind. For that matter Musk&Co. alone has more examples or Sputnik Moments than can be counted on two hands, ex: reinvigorate American manufacturing, create a private company with cash flow(StarLink) to fund a space launch project that then creates it’s own cashflow through capturing the lion’s share of launch for hire business, design advance through the acceptance of iterative failure, and the aforementioned Starship; build, launch and then chopstick catch the largest space launch system ever.
What about Anduril Industries, spec developing weapons systems and offering them to the US military?
Then, of course, recently there’s the Maduro snatch and grab, the first and second Iranian operations.
That brings up US stealth weapons; F-117, B-2. As it does JSOC and it’s below the radar effectiveness. It also reminds me of our intelligence capability, signals, humint, space-based.
Or how about the Mossad pager gambit and all the stunning intel moments the Mossad has revealed in the past couple years?
Or go back a few years to the first Iraq operation and the Battle of 73 Easting, among others.
Sputnik is a metaphor for a surprise that leads to nothing. I walk into an empty room, my buddy yells “BOO!” I reply, “Nice sputnik”.
You should see the sw it replaced. The Army intel in the field fought long and hard to replace the crap they were being supplied by the usual suspects and the institutional Army with Palantir.
Sorry, but the gentleman is wrong. The problem is not the weapons themselves. The problem is that we have been scaling production of weapons to peacetime needs. But this is a CHOICE, not an impediment.
Example: An M-16 style rifle requires three forgings (upper receiver, lower receiver, and barrel). These are made at a foundry and shipped to a factory where they are finish-machined. When the M-16 was developed, manufacturing it required highly skilled machinists to manufacture. So much so that the original designer developed a similar gun made out of stampings. Nowadays, those same guns are made by random civilian industries in the US using hordes of CNC machines. Put the stamping in a jig on the machine, close the cabinet door, press the button, walk to the next machine. Repeat. Twenty machines = twenty parts being milled at once.
Now apply that to say... the shell of a Tomahawk. Billet of aluminum goes in, finished shell comes out. How many milling steps does that take? How many machines could we line up to do that work? Right now, nobody in the US government asks those questions because they don't intend to buy enough Tomahawks for it to matter. Our habit has been to build enough to provide a 'loadout' to 'x' amount of US warships plus a small stockpile. And that's it. We don't build new ones. We refurbish the old ones, so why would Raytheon go buy dozens of advanced milling machines to do crank out TLAMs? Name a US weapon system, the result is pretty much the same. We don't invest in machine tools to mass-manufacture them because we plan for peace instead of war.
Europe is even worse. The USN buys quantities of ESSMs, TLAMs, Standards, et al every year. Europe develops a weapon, buys x quantity, shuts down the assembly line, and lets he manufacturer go belly up. And then tries to restart something like the SCALP/Stormshadow assembly line years after the things have been out of production.
This is NOT a problem with weapons. We don't need the tech-bros to come save us on this with extruded plastic missiles with miniscule ranges and tiny warheads. Ask the Ukrainian government if they'd like to continue with their slap-together drones or receive hundreds of TLAMs a month, and the answer would be, TLAM, whatever color is available.
What we need is an industrial strategy on how to build capacity in time of war before the war actually starts. I said this in another thread somewhere on the wide internet. Somebody smart needs to build a plan for finding brownfield locations around the country that can be turned into factory sites. Somebody needs to make a plan to stockpile factory machinery, tooling, jigs, etc to fill those factories. Somebody needs to keep those plans up to date continuously as brownfield sites go on and off market.
The U.S. lost control of its machine tool industry, the machines that make machines, to its detriment. Long ago in 1989, "When the machine stopped: A cautionary tale from industrial America" was published discussing innovation, foreign and domestic competition, leveraged buyouts, U.S. trade policy. Somebody has to build domestic CNC machines and develop the attendant software to implement the innovations at a price point that smaller U.S. companies can use.
BZ to CDR Salamander for Shyam Sankar's comments. Sankar is absolutely bang on. Unfortunately, he will probably be ignored until the wolf is at the door like the 'obscure' Captain Basil Liddell-Hart, then- Lieutenant Colonel Erwin Rommel and then-Captain Erich von Manstein. I am sad to say that Sankar, along with these then-obscure officers, and even Winston Churchill were voices in the wilderness that most people ignored to their misfortune.
Well, the ability of the Russians to keep fighting surprised no one who knows some military history. Likewise the Houthis; once you start caring about the enemy's civilians, you can't crush insurgent-type forces very quickly.
Agreed, if anything I'd say the bigger surprise on average was the ability of the Ukrainians to sustain the fight as long as they have, and particularly how catastrophically short the 2014 and 2022 sneak attacks fell from their full objectives.
In the years prior to February 2022, the sycophants in the senior Russian leadership convinced Vladimir Putin that Ukraine's pro-western government could be taken down quickly, and at a reasonable cost in human and material casualties on both sides, not just on the Russian side.
The course of events proved differently. Those Putin sycophants greatly underestimated Ukraine's will to resist; and worse, Ukraine's ability to resist.
Given that Slavic peoples have a cultural propensity for bitterly fighting any long war they find themselves in, the response from both sides was to accept the human and material casualties needed to fight their side of the war, and then to just get on with it.
"In the years prior to February 2022, the sycophants in the senior Russian leadership convinced Vladimir Putin that Ukraine's pro-western government could be taken down quickly, and at a reasonable cost in human and material casualties on both sides, not just on the Russian side.
The course of events proved differently. Those Putin sycophants greatly underestimated Ukraine's will to resist; and worse, Ukraine's ability to resist."
To play devil's advocate for the sycophants, I think it was possible that the Ukrainian government could've been taken down quickly and with modestish costs (at least if you started counting from when the mask dropped, and not talked about the protracted war in the Donbas). We love memeing on the Kremlin and its idiocy and for good reasons, but people often overlook how hard pressed the Kyiv perimeter battles were and how far the Kremlin's troops got, and how (apparently though we don't know) they managed to flip a good number of Ukrainian VIPs to act as traitors. The Russian way of war loves opening conflicts with a decapitation strike (and we see this with Poland in 1792 and Afghanistan in 1978-80)., and were it not for a number of screwups like Hostomel they might have done it.
What I don't think was possible is wrapping up the WAR or pro-Western FIGHTERS quickly or at a reasonable cost in human and material casualties. Even if the Kremlin could topple or destroy the Ukrainian government and conventional resistance in 1 Day (and I figured it was a possibility - however slim - that was possible) they would still be dealing with a huge, populous nation that now hates them and is quite capable of protracted resistance that would make Chechnya look like a school day. It's amusing how much the term "Banderaite" is thrown around by people who seem to ignore that the UPA-B/OUN-B managed to hold out for about 20 years in a relatively small, surrounded part of Ukraine with minimal outside support.
"Given that Slavic peoples have a cultural propensity for bitterly fighting any long war they find themselves in, the response from both sides was to accept the human and material casualties needed to fight their side of the war, and then to just get on with it."
Eh, I'm not sure it has as much to do with "Slavic Peoples." The Poles in their golden age were notoriously fickle, and so were the Russians in their periods of division. In this case I think it's more because both Russia and Ukraine view this fight as existential (and for the Ukrainians and various Belarusian and Russian dissidents it is) and there is no clear ground for compromise (Zelenskyy tried it, he even got elected on that, it didn't work). So they go on.
> were it not for a number of screwups like Hostomel they might have done it.
For all the well-deserved crap the Biden admin has gotten from me on many issues, that was apparently due to the CIA whispering into someone's ear. And the UAF reacted, not as well as they probably would have liked, but adequately and in time.
Had not the Euros and Biden not armed them a million or so Ukrainians would be alive and the war over inside a month.
"Had not the Euros and Biden not armed them a million or so Ukrainians would be alive and the war over inside a month."
Yeah right. Try going to Georgia and telling them that, and I promise to try and say something nice at your funeral.
For those who are not aware:
Firstly: The war well predated Brandon's arrival in "power", starting in 2014 when Putin responded to his moppet in Ukraine's violent and corrupt overreach (largely prompted by Putin's own forcing of Yanukovych to walk back on his election promise to triangulate between Russia and the EU on Trade) leading to his ouster by sending in "little green men" to Crimea and the Donbas to arm or "volunteer" local anti-Maidan militias. Even Putin has stopped pretending the troops that took Crimea were not Russian Federation regulars and special forces (See: Crimea: The Road Home), and any plausible or even implausible deniability that they did not do the same in the Donbas was shattered by a mixture of "Looking at Unit IDs and gear exclusive to the Russian Federation, and literal mentions of them in Russian lawsuits for unrelated matters."
Secondly: The reason I mention Georgia in particular about how naive and staggeringly ignorant this is is because South Ossetia and Abkhazia became "ungovernable" in the early 1990s with significant help from the Russian military, and periods of open, conventional conflict between them and the Kremlin on one side and the Georgians on the other have generally been brief and onesided (most recently in 2008).
And yet the VAST MAJORITY of the killing has happened in the times of "peace", with the Kremlin giving large scale support to the ethnic cleansing of Georgians throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Which is one reason why the conflict is so bitter. And which we have seen similar elements of in the Kremlin controlled areas of Ukraine going back to 2014 with the DNR and LNR.
As RJ Rummel pointed out to the idiot gungrabbers: the majority of the bloodshed tends not to happen in actual war, it tends to happen from one side with the guns brutally oppressing and trying to exterminate the side without them. You are assuming the Kremlin will be a virtuous and fair occupier, something that is utterly and completely without justification or merit since Yeltsin left power and probably not even before that.
Thirdly: On top of the historical illiteracy, there's also the basic military issue. While the Kremlin likes banging gongs about "Banderaists" and its mouthpieces like Ritter and MacGregor and "The Squad" amplify that, they tend to ignore the fact that the original "Banderaists" - the OUN-B/UPA-B - were essentially a moderate sized guerilla cum terrorist movement engaged in their own brutal civil war against the Melnyk faction, with almost nil support abroad (especially after Hitler betrayed them in 1941), and limited to a relatively small portion of Western Ukraine and it *STILL* Took the Kremlin about 15 years after the Soviets retook the area in 1944 to finally, entirely finish them off.
If you think a Kremlin victory in Ukraine will result in less bloodshed in this era of new generation, cellular warfare, I point to the fact that the Kremlin *Still* can't track down all the loyalist underground movements in Crimea where they have been feeding intel to Kyiv and providing targeting data and propaganda broadcasts, let alone in the Donbas or other occupied areas where you quite literally have large scale guerilla warbands blowing up rails and ambushing patrols like it's 1944 again.
So no, it makes absolutely no sense to not arm the Ukrainians at least to a point, or to believe that a Kremlin victory would be either short or likely to spare lives.
The Russians, like the folks on Gilligan's Island, expected a three-day war.
They've now been fighting longer than they fought the Germans in WWII and are no closer to any perceivable victory condition than the day they started....
A curious way to fight a war
Flight-ER-Doc: Ah, but don't forget...it's a Special Military Operation, not a war. Real militaries don't fight wars anymore, because winning wars is bad for business.
As observed above, they thought they wouldn't need to do much fighting, so they got their best units bloodied pretty good. But still thought the war would be quick, so didn't hit the infrastructure of the Ukrainians as hard as they normally would. So here we are...
OK, let's accept your premise, but the Russians seemed to have transitioned fairly quickly into attrition-style war. I think an exception is on the Black Sea where I don't think the Russians came to grips with how to use their forces. It's hard for me to see a scenario where Russia doesn't end up controlling the Donbas, let alone Crimea and maybe Odessa.
Odessa is on the wrong side of two rivers. The Russians lost their best chance of taking it early in the war when they stalled in front of Mikolaiv.
They didn't "transition fairly quickly into attrition style warfare" as a result of lessons learned, they transitioned into it for lack of any better options. This becomes particularly obvious when you look at the wider war, such as the Second Battle of Debaltseve in the pre-2022 period of the conflict where they did indeed win but they missed a major chance to destroy or even seriously damage Loyalist units, resulting in the Donbaschukuos steadily losing terrain from about 2016 onwards until Putin dropped the facade in 2022.
That helped contribute to the plan for a grand decapitation blow in 2022, and to be fair they came much closer to succeeding than many realize (and the gains in the South would be held for years or in some cases still now), but they ultimately failed and suffered heavily, meaning decisive breakthrough became basically unworkable while they also had to send more troops to basically occupy Belarus to prop up Lukashenko. And the results have been brutal for both sides but seriously devastated Russian prestige and belief in themselves as a superpower and that Ukrainians would be a kindred people easily absorbed.
As for controlling the Donbas, they had their chance and they have suffered it badly. Refusing to negotiate on that matter with Zelenskyy (who people forget was elected as a dove and proposed splitting the region in a vote)and then refusing to rehab it as a giant rust belt greatly undermined their credibility there. While the chance to take Odessa was either in 2014 or very early in 2022, when the element of surprise was still on their side and before Moskva and sizable chunks of the Black Sea Fleet were screwed over and ODessa was a much more politically charged, divided city. But months of shore bombardment did wonders to harden hatred, and frankly it'd be difficult for the Russian military to occupy a city of that size and disposition without outright levelling it. TBH I'd rate Ukraine's chances of taking Crimea back as better than that of the Kremlin taking Odessa, and that's not me being a NAFO moron rah rahing (though I admit I am biased), that's more due to the way a power able to take the Isthmus and dam the rivers can have Crimea by the throat, how Crimean AA defenses have been hit badly, and how taking and securing Odessa would involve a heavy involvement of not just military forces but also money and civilian rebuilding that the Kremlin probably can't afford and hasn't even done in the Donbas, where the circumstances were a lot more favorable.
CDR Sal,
Appreciate the heads up and good outline.
"What" and "how many" are variables in the calculus of firepower in conflict that require constant and intense scrutiny and rolling, periodic reevaluation. Carpet bombing and grid square artillery barrages still happen and arguably have their place but are usually a suboptimal choice. "Preferred munitions" are often "bespoke" (MOAB / deep penetrators) with a limited target set and delivery platform options. Having lots of cheap munitions that are relatively flexible with a wide variety of delivery options seems to be the way to go. Brutal reality: Having the organizational acumen to determine what those munitions are and organizational will to overcome the "Iron Triangle's resistance" to abandoning their current pet moneymaker is a real human problem for us. OBTW, you must create the industrial capability to produce those munitions. Otherwise, they are another nice "study with attached .ppt". Have to point out, there is a lot of money to be made in "admiring a problem". IMO, YMMV
FWIW, bombs are still kind of a Tinkertoy type of thing. Standard bodies in 500, 1000, 2000lb sizes; add a fuse to suit; add a guidance kit; add a wing kit; etc. allows you to build up the most suitable for the mission.
That said, it seems that is starting to erode some with specialized bombs such as the SDB.
Sure, we've been putting "kits" on WWII type bombs (Laser, JDAM, etc) for decades. Turning a dumb bomb into a smart bomb is a quantum leap in the kill chain. The production lines for artillery shells (non-Excalibar), "dumb" bombs, and the various kits were never sufficient prior to the conflict. I sure hope the profit margin is sufficient for the "primes" to ramp up to meet the "unexpected" demand. Of course, "rates" are negotiable...
Agree. Though one issue was amount of expenditures. Apparently at least as recently as 2019 bomb bodies from the Vietnam era were being built into ordnance going down range.
I think we've probably all seen that to some extent. And made the same jokes. But if the storage facilities are full, stacking them out in the open probably isn't the answer. Training probably doesn't require as much expenditure as wartime to maintain proficiency. And just decommissioning old stuff doesn't really solve it either when the limiting factor is secure storage.
Perhaps stockpiling components that can quickly be assembled is the answer.
Production facilities. For example, literally medieval military tech (black powder) is necessary for most modern explosives and propellants to initiate. There is one factory in the US making it. It was destroyed in an explosion a couple of years ago. Bought and rebuilt by Estes, the model rocket people, bought by another company. And was shut down for a couple weeks because of an accident.
Yes. Can't be figuring out the import logistics chain when the balloon goes up.
Point failure facilities (sole source for a widget or material) are priority items we should fix.
I've seen open-source numbers for procured JDAM kits in the 600,000 range. Not sure I believe that, but we have a LOT of JDAM kits in the various flavors.
"That fourth moment—the delta between what we can make and what we need to sustain the fight. We have to solve that problem or we will simply fail to meet the math that mass will bring."
Having pondered this a bit, I have to conclude that simply more is not the answer. At least not in all cases.
More does not seem to have solved Verdun. Nor Korea, Vietnam, or Ukraine. Maybe more solved WWII, but despite the Soviet maxim of "Quantity has a quality of its own" it's really not that simple.
A significant issue is how you apply that more. I would submit the Soviets used their masses of infantry and tanks unwisely. It worked, but the consequences were devastating. Better tactical, operational and, probably, logistical skill would have served them better in applying the masses they had.
Morale, both of the troops and as a nation, is an important factor. It allows one to suffer the mass attacks of the enemy and stand fast while one's own attacks are crafted and delivered. If you give up hope, or stop caring, you cannot press the attack to victory.
One must also be realistic about application of mass fires. History has shown us again and again the folly of man reliant upon simply raining destruction upon a foe without sending in the infantry to finish the task. BDA has never been accurate. Economic targets are amazingly resilient, tactical targets can be spoofed with maskirova. I think I can accurately say that never, ever, in the history of man has just shelling or bombing, no matter how massive, ever permanently solved the problem.
I have no solutions to these issues, it's not in my wheelhouse. I just see that no matter how much shit we hurl down range it won't solve the problem and likely creates more, unless it is done in a manner that is designed fully destroy the problem and see that it doesn't reoccur. (And no, that doesn't mean we have to do decades of nation building. And yes, if the problem goes away for a couple decades before it requires attention again, that could be a satisfactory outcome.)
The hope seems involve street lights, ropes and mullahs. How likely that really is I do not know.
Human behavior in conflict is a variable that "varies" widely, (you're welcome, yes, I'm Captain Obvious). Russia and UKR conflict performance both reflect the underestimated human ability (at times) to endure violence and suffering beyond what appears logical. History is also replete with examples of seemingly overwhelming forces being routed (Arab Israeli conflicts, Greece-Persia, U.S. early civil war). "Why we fight" and "why we give up" is a field ripe for AI "insights". Here's hoping AI provides "helpful" reality checks, and not psychotic hallucinations. The human track record of that "wish casting" vs reality is bad enough already.
FYI.
https://www.firstbreakfast.com/p/mobilization-day
These count as "insights" only in an intellectual culture wherein history is dead.
If you want to buy a stock, then LUMEN which has a contract with Palantir, is best bet with huge upside potential. They have recently gotten into AI development in a big way. r/Karl
I've got the book on order, but have questions:
The US has eliminated all sorts of 'dirty' industry - steelmaking, heavy forging, mining and the like....
Even if we wanted to build a plant in Willow Run, Michigan to build weapons of war, where are the pieces to make the pieces going to come from? Where are the raw materials coming from?
And as far as the building goes - with the environmental left (funded by our enemies) throwing legal stops out like confetti? Can't pollute (insert whatever). Can't hire people that understand basic arithmetic unless you also hire illegals with sexual dysphoria and body issues?
"Well that'll be a problem after I'm dead" and Yes In Other People's Backyards is an unfortunate combination that doesn't need any effort from the opposition.
"Millions must die is not a meme, anon".
"Many of you will die, and that is a price I'm willing to pay."
Hitchens's Razor meets Dunning Kruger.
Aren't there workarounds for enviroweenie roadblock efforts, available via executive order or via the Defense Production Act (DPA) of 1950? I seem to recall Slick Willie exempting JSOC from all kinds of environmental and other constraints by plain ol' decree.
Until Emperor Boasberg or some other federal judge decides he has the power.
None of those measures are legitimate for the Bad Orange Man. We have to wait to see which 1-bit local judge decides to usurp the elected President in any given week.
I shall buy it tonight on Kindle.
There's no money in cheap, expendable munitions.
Lots of money was made by the Model T as quantity dropped costs.
Jetcal1: Yes, but, a Model T was a durable good, not a consumeable. A Model T created a huge aftermarket of parts and service. Actually, the Model T created a whole economic ecosystem (gas stations, motels, roadside diners, etc.) Palantir wants to make money designing and operating highly lucrative computerized defense and security systems, which require constant upgrading. I don't think Palantir wants to make lower-cost, consumeable munitions. I could be wrong (and often am!)
I believe Mr. Sankar's point is we need to be able to build and develop both low lost cost munitions and the super duper gee whiz stuff. (And build the gee whiz economically.
Jetca1: I believe that, too. I also believe that Mr. Sankar wants to sell super-duper, gee-wiz, Palantir products and support services, not low-cost munitions. Mr. Sankar does not ask or answer the question: How do you make money manufacturing and selling low-cost munitions? The answer is, you don't.
Large scale production lowers the unit costs associated with engineering, tooling, and fixed overhead.
Jetcal1: Yes, I realize that, and I appreciate our back-and-forth on this topic (that's what's great about this site). The problem lies with Wall Street. Investors want fancy, big-ticket hardware and huge defense procurement contracts. Producing beans, bullets, artillery shells and cheap, one-way drones (flying lawnmowers) does not excite investors. As an example, consider Olin Corporation's Winchester ammo unit, a major producer of the US Military's small arms ammo. Low margin and boring for investors. If Winchester were to make a wiz-bang, GPS-guided bullet that cost $1,000 per round, investors would love it.
There is if you sell enough....
Brett: Honestly, I don't know if that is the case in the defense industry, where manufacturers make their money on costly weapons weapons systems, be they one-time use munitions (guided missiles, smart bombs) or large scale hardware and systems (ships, aircraft, armor, space hardware).
Rheinmetall paid a bunch of money (vicinity $950 million) for a company whose main product is tank tracks. (Loc Performance Products) in 2024. These have a limited lifetime.
All the mentioned parties appear to have national will and a relatively unified political system. We do not. We got lucky because the Naval Acts that rebuilt the Navy created jobs during the depression and had enough bipartisan support to pass.
Nor did we have the aviation infrastructure in place in 1938 when the British and the French swooped in and paid for factory expansion.
Sankar echoes people like Kaiser or Higgins. Is anyone in Congress listening, able to understand, the problem, and powerful enough to act?
Edit: Is there anyone in the EU, Japan, Australia, etc. echoing these same thoughts? It seems the whole world is watching the Spanish Civil war/Japan in Manchuria and unable to connect the dots.
A key interval in the preparation for American entry was the last half of 1940. France fell, and the political class in Washington had a Sputnik moment. It wasn't just the Two-Ocean Navy Act; look up what they did with the Engineering, Science, and Management War Training program to train the people needed for war production.
With apologies - I don’t bye the Sputnik analogy. By “sputnik moment” I presume the reference is to the apparent technological surprise to the world that in 1957 the USSR launched the first human engineered Earth orbit satellite.
The use of that event as metaphor for defense/war policy is like Fukuyama’s embarrassing “end of history” thesis, or Friedman’s pre-Kosovo McDonalds & War link.
The 1957 sputnik moment is like a guy who walks up to Mike Tyson in the mid-90s and tries to sucker punch him. How’s that going to work out for the guy? Or, put another way, who walked on the moon and who didn’t?
And it’s especially ironic that one of the sputnik moments described is the Russian’s adventure in Eastern Europe and its current, tragically escalating casualty count.
And the Chinese hyper glide missile? Maybe it’s more reliable or real than the Chinese designed and built air defense system they sold the Iranians.
You want Sputnik Moments?
Space X chopstick catch of the booster for the largest space system ever launched comes to mind. For that matter Musk&Co. alone has more examples or Sputnik Moments than can be counted on two hands, ex: reinvigorate American manufacturing, create a private company with cash flow(StarLink) to fund a space launch project that then creates it’s own cashflow through capturing the lion’s share of launch for hire business, design advance through the acceptance of iterative failure, and the aforementioned Starship; build, launch and then chopstick catch the largest space launch system ever.
What about Anduril Industries, spec developing weapons systems and offering them to the US military?
Then, of course, recently there’s the Maduro snatch and grab, the first and second Iranian operations.
That brings up US stealth weapons; F-117, B-2. As it does JSOC and it’s below the radar effectiveness. It also reminds me of our intelligence capability, signals, humint, space-based.
Or how about the Mossad pager gambit and all the stunning intel moments the Mossad has revealed in the past couple years?
Or go back a few years to the first Iraq operation and the Battle of 73 Easting, among others.
Sputnik is a metaphor for a surprise that leads to nothing. I walk into an empty room, my buddy yells “BOO!” I reply, “Nice sputnik”.
We have some fancy Palantir software at work.
Lets just say, none of us are particularly impressed. It's quite unstable, and "they" (people based in India I think) can't stop tinkering with it.
You should see the sw it replaced. The Army intel in the field fought long and hard to replace the crap they were being supplied by the usual suspects and the institutional Army with Palantir.
This is at a private firm...
It has promise, but it seems the distant folks on the other end of the Teams help chat want to treat it as a science project.
Sorry, but the gentleman is wrong. The problem is not the weapons themselves. The problem is that we have been scaling production of weapons to peacetime needs. But this is a CHOICE, not an impediment.
Example: An M-16 style rifle requires three forgings (upper receiver, lower receiver, and barrel). These are made at a foundry and shipped to a factory where they are finish-machined. When the M-16 was developed, manufacturing it required highly skilled machinists to manufacture. So much so that the original designer developed a similar gun made out of stampings. Nowadays, those same guns are made by random civilian industries in the US using hordes of CNC machines. Put the stamping in a jig on the machine, close the cabinet door, press the button, walk to the next machine. Repeat. Twenty machines = twenty parts being milled at once.
Now apply that to say... the shell of a Tomahawk. Billet of aluminum goes in, finished shell comes out. How many milling steps does that take? How many machines could we line up to do that work? Right now, nobody in the US government asks those questions because they don't intend to buy enough Tomahawks for it to matter. Our habit has been to build enough to provide a 'loadout' to 'x' amount of US warships plus a small stockpile. And that's it. We don't build new ones. We refurbish the old ones, so why would Raytheon go buy dozens of advanced milling machines to do crank out TLAMs? Name a US weapon system, the result is pretty much the same. We don't invest in machine tools to mass-manufacture them because we plan for peace instead of war.
Europe is even worse. The USN buys quantities of ESSMs, TLAMs, Standards, et al every year. Europe develops a weapon, buys x quantity, shuts down the assembly line, and lets he manufacturer go belly up. And then tries to restart something like the SCALP/Stormshadow assembly line years after the things have been out of production.
This is NOT a problem with weapons. We don't need the tech-bros to come save us on this with extruded plastic missiles with miniscule ranges and tiny warheads. Ask the Ukrainian government if they'd like to continue with their slap-together drones or receive hundreds of TLAMs a month, and the answer would be, TLAM, whatever color is available.
What we need is an industrial strategy on how to build capacity in time of war before the war actually starts. I said this in another thread somewhere on the wide internet. Somebody smart needs to build a plan for finding brownfield locations around the country that can be turned into factory sites. Somebody needs to make a plan to stockpile factory machinery, tooling, jigs, etc to fill those factories. Somebody needs to keep those plans up to date continuously as brownfield sites go on and off market.
The U.S. lost control of its machine tool industry, the machines that make machines, to its detriment. Long ago in 1989, "When the machine stopped: A cautionary tale from industrial America" was published discussing innovation, foreign and domestic competition, leveraged buyouts, U.S. trade policy. Somebody has to build domestic CNC machines and develop the attendant software to implement the innovations at a price point that smaller U.S. companies can use.
BZ to CDR Salamander for Shyam Sankar's comments. Sankar is absolutely bang on. Unfortunately, he will probably be ignored until the wolf is at the door like the 'obscure' Captain Basil Liddell-Hart, then- Lieutenant Colonel Erwin Rommel and then-Captain Erich von Manstein. I am sad to say that Sankar, along with these then-obscure officers, and even Winston Churchill were voices in the wilderness that most people ignored to their misfortune.