I think this is the rationale.
It's not, as there is no single rational.
There are a multitude of competing interests and desires, and trying to consolidate them into a single position is going to
It doesn't seem to be working. The sanctions have failed. Utterly.
They really haven't, unless you misunderstood various purposes of the various differing sanctions.
It turns out that China, not the West, is the key trade partner of any commodity producer. Russian oil and commodities freely trade on the world market, and the West is actually afraid to sanction Russia more strongly because it hurts them more than Russia. Sanction Russian metals? Great, welcome to higher prices and China will scoop up all Russian production for cheap.
These, for example, were not the goals.
In order- the Chinese have not substituted for the Europeans in Russian energy export volumes, the sanctions on Russian energy exports were about profit margins rather than keeping them out of the world market, the Western sanctions have been about driving the economic separation of the European economic system from the Russian system despite Russian attempts at triggering economic devastation via abrupt cutoffs, and keeping Russian metals off the global market was never the goal as much as to break the European supply line dependencies.
Saying 'you're failing because you're paying more to not be addicted' rather misses the point of an economic policy to break addiction to cheap commodities that were kept cheap via policies to encourage dependence that could- and was attempted to be used as- geopolitical blackmail. China's gain to Europe's pain is not a counter-argument to this, as China paying more at the cost of Europe staying dependent is not a success of a policy to economically disentangle Europe from Russia. This is simply trying to smuggle a bilateral zero-sum argument in a three-party arrangement to claim that Russia and China both have to lose simultaneously for the other parties to win. (Rather than, say, noting that China exploiting Russia and taking over European market share and more at the expense of Russian autonomy from Chinese interests is not a Russian strategic victory.)
The bigger issue is that the Russian army is 15% larger than before the war and apparently Russia is outproducing the West in key armaments by large margins.
The Russian army is 15% larger by size, not capability- which is to say, they have conscripted a lot of infantry after losing most of their professional officer corps, and their armament level devolved from late cold war technology hardware to mid- and early-cold war vehicles pulled out of storage with minimal modernization. The key armaments Russia is outproducing the West in are artillery ammunition and middle-Cold War vehicle reactivations, which- while relevant- are neither indefinite nor enduring production advantages.
Surprise surprise, it turns out that if you start war economy mobilization first, first-mover advantage allows you to have more industry mobilized than people who spent more of the first year hoping they wouldn't have to mobilize.
There are separate other assets that the Russians are utilizing to good effect- like Drones and airpower- but saying that Russia is outproducing the West in airpower assets or drones would both be quite bad takes.
But even if this strategy was effective, killing 1 million people to "weaken" an adversary is just incredibly evil.
That is indeed why the Russian government is incredibly evil, since they are indeed killing to the adversary they have identified in a way that war crimes have become practically a point unto themselves as proof of their power via untouchability or recourse.
Fortunately, the people assisting the Ukrainians are not killing the Ukrainians, but instead helping them resist the evil people who have been quite open on their desire to erase the Ukrainian nation in the third continuation war in a decade.
Are you, “… uh … ”, aware that America and Israel have funded insurgency groups in Iran’s backyards for more than a decade now?
Considering how I posted multiple times over the years on various external supporters for groups in the Syrian Civil War, sure.
Just as you are no doubt aware that Iran was supporting insurgency and terrorist groups to attack its geopolitical enemies for decades before the Syrian Civil War, and as such the Israeli/US involvement in the Syrian civil war was neither the instigating factor nor the basis for Iran adopting such a tactic.
Groups that went on to kill civilians in Iran?
Per your own citation excerpt- and what's not hidden behind a subscription wall- the groups supported by Israel did not, but rather had members who defected to other groups, which were not being funded or directed by the US or Israel to do such.
In fact, the correlation in the citation- of group members who defected to the Islamic State- is a notable contrast with the policy purpose- which was for groups to fight the Islamic State and keep it from the Israeli borders. While a conflation of groups is indeed a convenient and common policy to try an critique Israeli and US policy in Syrai, as far as the policy purpose of 'funding insurgency groups', the rather clear purpose here is not 'to attack Iran.'
Now, while there is certainly an argument to be made for responsibility for unintended/undesired consequences of policy, that argument would be far broader and also self-incriminating to Iran itself given the influence it and its proxies had in kickstarting ISIS. Which, while interesting, negates any real relevance to why Iran is supplying and helping direct hundreds of missile strikes into Israel over the last 6 months, and why that context shouldn't be relevant to why a country might retaliate to that.
Iran is no more responsible for Hezbollah as Israel is to the insurgent terrorist groups that attack them domestically.
If Israel were to arm and direct insurgent terrorist groups for the purpose of attacking Iran to the degree that tens of thousands of Iranians were displaced by conflict, they would indeed be deemed responsible by most reasonable persons.
Now, unless you intend to argue that Iran is to be deemed less responsible for what it has done than Israel is to be in your hypothetical, I'm pleased to see we have a consensus that Iran is no more, and no less, and indeed just as responsible as Israel would be were Israel to pursue an equivalent policy of provocation.
Now, as Israel did not pursue such a policy, but Iran has and is...
Questions: Do you think national strategies are a good idea?
Sure, in the sense that planning is a good practice. However, bad planning can easily produce results worse than no planning, especially when built on bad foundations, such as understanding one's own strengths, surrounding contexts, and how others respond. For a more modern example of a failure of this, Russia indisputably has a national strategy, is led with people with very deliberate intent for national-interest maximization, and the invasion of Ukraine was well within the scope of that vision, but it has been the biggest national strategic disaster for the Russians since 1941.
The importance of contextual understanding matters to strategy just as much, and that includes acknowledging costs and benefits. DEI as a policy is unpopular with substantial parts of the US public.... but it's also popular with other substantial parts of the public, and there are a variety of strategic benefits of a DEI 'strategy' that acrue from the sort of mentality/policy considerations making that generates DEI, such as how corporate-demographic interest behind DEI is also what drives how the US relates with population inflows that will occur regardless and to structure relations with the sources sending them.
For all the political tension and contortions it brings- and there are arguments that the costs of migration outweigh the benefits, or that actively facilitating illegal migration against established laws undermines popular support- if in the Cold War the US had a strategic opportunity to take 5% of the Soviet population in a 3 year and incorporate them into the Western coalition, few would fail to see that as a meaningful strategic shift. Well, that hasn't happened with China- but that is basically what happened with Cuba in the last four years, and similarly anti-American Nicaragua since Ortega got back in power in 2007, while something like 3% of the Venezuelan population has left the Bolivarian revolution for the US alone- and the US is far less than the migration into Latin America. While DEI didn't cause that, DEI-mentality is behind the sort of policy construct of the sort of people to accept that migration flow and try to incorporate it.
So when you say DEI is a strategy, you allude terms of its more pejorative/unpopular form of discriminatory hiring policies. But when I hear DEI as a strategy, a DEI-strategy for the US entails the US's most bitter and ideological foes losing or even sending their own people to be part of the US's labor and potential military pools, the built-in cultivation of loyalist interests more interested in the DEI-archetecture than in their source country interests, while coincidentally closing one of the more significant gaps between the US and the PRC.
Is DEI worth it, on a strategic level? That could be an interesting discussion, but it's not the one that was being raised.
Similarly, just as understanding strengths is important, so is understanding weaknesses behind strengths. A common failure of armchair strategizing is to treat states like they exist in strategy games, where the populace is implicitly supportive of the controlling player and where the agent only has to get the Technologies and Industry and all the good metrics just go up and up and up. There's almost no reflection on the implications of the Tang Ping subculture growth, how that relates to the Chinese demographic trajectory, and how that (or both of those) relate to the unfolding property debt crisis, and how that is likely to rebound on both of those.
And just the property crisis alone- no matter one's politics- has significant implications for Chinese strategic strengths and vulnerabilities, as the loss of private consumer life savings at a nearly unprecedented scale is almost certain to neuter the prospects of a Chinese consumption-based economy, and thus it's dependence on a maritime-blockadable export economy, which in turn drives a number of third and fourth order effects on how the Chinese economy is structured, it's external-trade and financial dependencies the US could target, demographic pressures, and so on.
(And while the PRC certainly isn't seeing the sort of demographic outflow that, say, Latin America is, in the last two years the Chinese have become the largest extra-hemispheric source of southern border migration the US receives, with an exceptional growth rate, and the Chinese private-capital flight from the country has been leagues ahead of it. These are consequences not only of current strategic policies, but almost certain to increase as a result of the housing investment crisis.)
Will that make it a net negative? It doesn't really matter. The point is that it's a factor of consideration, and evaluation, and something someone else could benefit from.
Finally, to return to the starting question, there's always the metacontext that not having a strategy is, itself, a strategy, it just is one that is far more reactive and non-deliberate and these are rarely good things in and of themselves. A bad strategy can be worse than no strategy, but a lack of strategy is rarely as good as a competent strategy.
Do you agree with my characterization of national strategy for either country?
Not really, though this is more structural to the argument, and as a consequence most of your follow-on arguments fail.
Edit: And also, as revealed down threat, because you never actually read the national strategy for the United States.
For one, the US has a public national security strategy, which is the American strategy as far as country strategy goes, and your characterization-summary is really not really reflective of that position. Which itself is helpfully summarized in its own agenda as-
PART IV: Our (US) Strategy By Region -Promote a Free and Open Indo-Pacific -Deepen Our Alliance with Europe -Foster Democracy and Shared Prosperity in the Western Hemisphere -Support De-Escalation and Integration in the Middle East -Build 21st Century US-Africa Partnerships -Maintain a Peaceful Arctic -Protect Sea, Air, and Space
Now, you could argue that the US fails to achieve that (meh), isn't consistently being followed (sure), that it's not the real strategy of the United States (it is), or that Biden has a separate strategy (possible- the Democratic Party is not the US government, and it has its own strategy which itself would have a different success criteria).
But summarizing a strategy down to a pejorative boo-word (DEI) that isn't advanced by the other party in that way* makes as much sense as saying China's strategy is a property crisis. That's a strawman to jouse against, to which the fair refutation would be- no, the property crisis isn't the strategy, it's a consequence of the strategy (industrial development driven by infrastructure investment fueled by local-area land sales). To which the defenders against the DEI-strategy can agree, and say that DEI isn't the strategy, it's a consequence of trying to manage a large number of regional relationships with migratory implications in a way that promotes buy-in to the American international system.
*And to be clear, DEI is referenced in the strategy... but in the following terms-
The success of these efforts and our foreign policy will require strengthening the national security workforce by recruiting and retaining diverse, high-caliber talent. We are: x Prioritizing diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility to ensure national security institutions reflect the American public they represent.
Note that this is on page 46- sharpening statecraft. As in, as a tool for how to influence other states.
...and now consider how that fits into the 'stealing the enemy's pops' strategy, as part of a series of policies. IF you're going to face mass-migration regardless, THEN you might as well leverage. But how do you leverage demographic dividends, get buy-in from emerging demographic interests/power centers, bolster perceptions of legitimacy from people without historic ties, and frame it in a way that boosts relations with outside powers from across the world?
Well... there's a reason that the DEI mention is in the 'how do we shape our national security workforce to meet our statecraft modernization needs', and not as one of the seven modernizable statecraft tools above it. Because DEI is not the strategy- it's a policy to support a workforce to pursue the strategy.
Which is also the point of structural disagreement two, the difference between policy and strategy.
You fail to draw a distinction between them, treating them as synonyms, but the former are a subset of the later. Strategies will encompass many policies, but a policy should not be the strategy. If it is, this is a red-flag of the weakness of the strategy, as singular policies can dominate all other considerations, or reconsiderations, as those invested in the continuation/growth of the policy have interests distinct from the achievement of the strategic objective.
More prevalent in your post is your handling of DEI, when DEI would be the archetypical policy as opposed to strategy. DEI is a principal of action to be pushed and adopted by bureaucracies, but it's not a national strategy in and of itself, any more than traffic lights are street crossings are. Those are means, a part of a larger strategy (the overarching traffic control system, with overlapping systems of public signals, enforcement, penalization, maintenance, and so on). DEI, in turn, is part of something else- and while 'what' that strategy is a part of is up for debate, if it's being framed as part of an international competititon strategy, then it should probably be framed in terms of how it fits into the overarching picture of racial-diversity organization and co-option, i.e. the idea of a strategy of stealing the enemy's pops and making them your own citizens.
The reason this matters- aside from the accuracy of the merits of a policy in and of itself- when you compare policies to strategies, it's only natural that the strategies are going to come off looking better. Of course they would- they tend to be broader and more comprehensive, because that's what they are by design. But this is as relevant to the relative merits as comparing a horse to a herd- a 1.25 horsepower horse is always going to be out-muscled by a 40 horse-herd, and it also doesn't matter. The policy of 1.25 horsepower horse-breeding can still be a winner as part of a strategy of herd-quality competition. Choosing to frame policy versus strategy is apples to fruit basket comparisons at best, or little more than argument gerry mandering at worse.
The result is not a surprise- and often not an accident per see- but it's not that useful.
Dean
4d ago
It's kind of an old conventional wisdom at this point, but the basic point is that late last century, the Israeli right and left were significantly divided by the question of how to deal with the Palestinian territories, and the Israeli left was discredited when withdrawal from militarily occupying Gaza led to its takeover and militarization by Hamas, ruining the Israeli-left security policy that peace could be achieved by making unilateral concessions to the Palestinians in the name of peace.
For a more extended version-
When the Israelis occupied Gaza and the West Bank in the Six-Day War in 1967, one of the reasons for seizing the territory was both as a military buffer, but also that they could be traded back for peace in the future. This is what happened with the Sinai Peninsula and Egypt, but for various reasons did not happen with the other territories.
Said reasons variously involved the fracturing of Pan-Arabism and the growing divides between the Palestinians and regional Arab states.
During the early cold war pan-arabism was a movement for a common Arab state which even saw some states voluntarily try to associate/join eachother, but ultimately inter-elite disagreements and the shocks of the Arab-Israeli wars fractured that movement to the point that Egypt, which had been one of the leaders of the Pan-Arab movement earlier, refused to take the Gaza Strip when it regained the Sinai as part of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. The Egyptian position was that it's refusal was because it had never held Gaza as part of Egypt before the war, but a not-uncommon belief is that this was because Egypt didn't want the trouble of governing gaza / having to deal with the Palestinians / it made a useful thorn in Israel's side.
In the West Bank, Jordan renounced claims to the West Bank (which it had previously annexed) in the aftermath of the Black September civil war, when the PLO (who was present in Israeli-occupied Israel as well as Jordan) attempted to overthrow the King of Jordan in 1970. The Kingdom of Jordan won that, but the PLO remained in the Israeli-occupied territories, and in 1974, the Arab Leage recognized the PLO- and not Jordan- as the sole representative of the Palestinians, and compelled Jordan to recognize a Palestinian independent of Jordan. Jordan would later formally renounce claims in 1988, as part of cutting monetary expenditures and dissolving a lower house of legislature that was half composed of constituencies in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, i.e. Palestinians. Jordan and Israel would go on to establish relations in 1994, without needing any sort of concession of the West Bank back to Jordan, who it had been captured from in the first war.
What this meant is that come the 90s, when the Cold War was ending and there was no US-Soviet context to the middle east conflict, Israel had achieved peace with its immediate neighbors it had conquered Palestinian territory from, without having actually to trade back Palestinian territory as part of the deal. However, this peace between states wasn't the same as peace: the First Intifada at about the 20 year anniversary of the 1967 war in 1987-1990 was years of violence / murders / increased unrest, and it was clear that it could happen again. As a result, Israeli politics shifted to a question of how to resolve the Palestinian issue. This was the... not start, but how the Two State solution took new life in the post-Cold War environment, with the Left and the Right disagreeing on how to approach it, or whether even if it should.
An oversimplification of this is that the Israeli left was vehemently onboard with the two state solution, and more associated with making compromises- or even unilateral concessions- to advance negotiations. The Israeli right was far more skeptical, alternatively wanting terms that would functionally limit Palestinian sovereignty in their own state (no military allowed, right for Israeli incursion against groups attacking from Palestinian soil) or not wanting to have to do it at all. Then there was how settler politics played into both parties, as settlers were both a way to secure territory that might not have to be returned due to changing facts on the ground (the Israeli right), but also a bargaining chip that could be traded away at the negotiating table (the Israeli left), and of course an actor in their own right.
The so-what here is that in the late 90s, the Israeli left had an politically ascendant moment. Prime Minister Ehud Barak of the Labor Party came into office, at the same time that Bill Clinton was still in office, and they were relatively like-minded enough to put together the Camp David Summit... whose failure was one of the triggering events for the Second Intifada. The exact reasons why it failed are subject to dispute / position / your belief on what Yasser Arafat could actually deliver on behalf of the PLO, but from a more common Israeli perspective, this was a sincere effort with politically-damaging offers at the sort of land-swaps that had been a functional base of negotiations for a good while, and it not only failed, but it blew up into another 5 years of violence.
Part of what ended the 5 years of violence was the Israeli-PLO Sharm El Sheikh Summit of 2005, where President Abbas of the Palestinian Authority- the same Abbas still in power today- had assumed power from Arafat. And this was in part because not only had Arafat died in 2004- and so robbed the Palestinian movement of one of its unifying figures- but in 2004 the Israelis had also done a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
While the Second Intifada was a blow to the credibility of the Israeli left, the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip is what I'd consider to have been the fatal blow to the Israeli left.
While it was conducted by Ariel Sharon- who at the time was part of the conservative/right-wing Likud party- it was so controversial a policy that Sharon's faction left Likud and established the central-liberal Kadima party, which attracted a number of the Labour party members as well. It was as such a policy that was identified with the left/center-left in spirit and practice, as not only was it's proponents the dominant leftist political force of the era, but it was a quid done for no quo. Israeli infrastructure was left behind, including things like greenhouses, and while for awhile it could have been argued that it set conditions for the cease fire the year after, which probably had something to do with Kadima's victory in 2006 to top the government- i.e. the political reward for ending the Second Intifada through good leftist political wisdom, bravery, and...
...and a year later, in 2007, Hamas completed its takeover of Gaza Strip after its own 2006 electoral victory by throwing PLO officials off of skyscrapers, and began a sustained rocket campaign into Israel. By January 2008, it was up to hundreds of rockets a month. The rocket campaign would more or less go on until the Gaza War of 2009-2010, after which the rockets... never went away, but were more varying, and a constant source of tension and unease. For as bad as the Intifada was, it wasn't that degree of regularity in rocket attacks on a weekly basis.
As a result, in Israeli politics, the Gaza Withdrawal became the political kryptonite of the left, a sort of feckless concession that made things worse. Prime Minister Netanyahu first assumed power in 2009 as a result of running on a tough-on-security policy, and ever since the decades of 1990s and 2000s have been the death knell of the Israeli left. After running and winning on the post-cold-war optimism of the 90s, the ideological basis of the leftest approach to Palestinian negotiation/conciliation was discredited. Not only were perceived-as-sincere offers of trades and concessions not only rejected but answered with an Intifada, but further unilateral concessions to amoliate even that only served to facilitate even more violence by even more dedicated partisans.
The Israeli left, associated with both conciliatory approach to the Palestinians (that visibly failed) and a commitment to a two-state solution lost a political generation as Netanyahu spun in power. In so much as they could define themselves still as an alternative to the right, the Israeli left was still defined by its commitment to a Two State solution, and thus as the respectable political faction that outsiders (like various US administrations) could like and work with...
And Oct 7 has rendered even that an albatross, because arguments for a two-state solution with the people who relished in their own ISIS-level brutality doesn't go down well with the electorate. For all that Netanyahu is unpopular and is unlikely to survive the death of his reputation as an effective security providor, Netanyahu is unpopular as a man. The two state solution is now unpopular as even an idea, and that is practically the most defining distinction of the Israeli left in some circles.
Or so the story goes. Perspectives and recollections may differ.
Dean
11d ago
You seem like a Perun-watcher. I watch him too. He's great.
He is. Strongly endorsed for anyone interested in a non-American/non-European perspective from another hemisphere, and also anyone who for some strange reason has personal interest in how militaries are designed and planned for.
I should have specified a bit more clearly: Russia will be able to reconstitute the majority of its combat capacity in 5-10 years. There will be some lingering areas that take longer of course, but people are acting like Russia is going to be incapable of launching another invasion for 20+ years. The US army was severely battered after Vietnam, yet it reconstituted itself very effectively in 18 years to curbstomp Saddam in '91. It probably could have done so a lot earlier too.
I concur with this recalibration, and your other points as well. I think a 5 year recovery is too short, and a 20 year too long, but 10 years is quite reasonable in general terms.
It's also one reason I don't expect the Europeans to cease support for Ukraine even if the US does, as the 10-year rebuilding point functionally starts when Ukraine ceases to cause more attrition of the important capabilities than Russia builds in a year, and the advent of drones to strike airbases / strategic infrastructure suggests that will be when the conflict more or less formally ends, or just before. Every additional year the Ukrainians hold out is a year the Europeans can continue their own military reconstitution (which itself may take the 5/10/15 year timeframe), and as the European further expand their capability, the more they can support Ukraine to prolong to further expand the European capability.
This seems like it would be referencing NCOs, but Russia never had a robust and empowered NCO contingent. It's always been a very top-heavy organization relative to other militaries. This conflict practically erased the reforms trying to implement the Battalion Tactical Group as a coherent fighting unit, but in many ways this conflict has been a return to the basics for Russia. It's a big stupid artillery-centric army that tries to solve problems by blasting them with a truckload of artillery and frontal assaults using infiltration tactics in good scenarios and cannonfodder kamikazes in bad ones. In other words, there's not really a lot to relearn here.
Actually a reference to the officer corps.
One of the key moments in the first year of the war that underlined to me just how bad the conflict was going to be for the Russian military as an institution was the fate of the pre-war officer corps. It's been noted in the past that much of the pre-war NATO-trained first generation of Ukrainians who have been fighting from the start have since died, but the Russian officer corps not only was devastated in the course of the conflict- see the number of generals who died early on, or the Ukrainian precision campaign against identified officer locations- but their training institutions as well. One of the (many) short-sighted things Putin did in an effort to put off having to invoke conscription was cannabilize his training units to fill the front lines.
For those unaware, the Russians don't (didn't) operate under a training-base model like the US, where soldiers would go to an installation dedicated for training before moving to the installation with their home unit. Instead, every major Russian formation had its training units built-in, where the conscripts would directly report to the main unit and be a part of the detachment before going to a 'normal' position. The implication of this is that when Putin had these training units deployed to the front line, it killed not only many of the students, but the cadres teaching them as well. This was the root of some of those videos around the first mobilization of conscripts arriving at bases and receiving next to no training before deploying to the front line- the teachers who should have been there were either dead or already forward.
As a result of both of these dynamics- the culling campaign and the loss of the cadre generation- Russia's military has lost so much institutional knowledge, and what the replacements are learning instead isn't necessarily 'better', but rather a selection effect of what works in the current, extremely atypical context. You rightly note that the Battalion Tactical Group has died- and that was relevant as the Russian strategy relied on easy-to-mobilize BTGs as the modular deployable option for various conflict scenarios- but it also goes further than that. The Russian-NATO conflict strategy typically relied on a Russian war of maneuver to rapidly attack before the US could mobilize and intervene at scale; however, the current rising war generation is one trained and pruned for slow, attritional trench warfare. And while they will certainly do that far better than the Americans, that is also exactly the wrong strategy to take against a maritime/air power dependent power like the US who- by expeditionary necessity- will be coming in behind other people's front lines. The entire Russian rapid aggression strategy was to pre-empt the American ability to enter a theater, but for the next twenty years it's going to be in the hands of people whose formative/career defining experience is closer to WW1 with drones.
That's not nothing- and that could easily be very relevant in various types of conflicts and there will be countless posts in the future of how the Russian lived experience is worth more than the American inexperience- but WW1 with drones is a strategic model that heavily, heavily favors the American strategic model of not fighting WW1 yourself, but helping someone else fight it on your behalf.
There's also a point/argument that big dumb artillery armies are as much on their way out as the Airforce-models, and for the same reason- drones and long-range fires. One of the most surprising things about the HIMARs injection into the war wasn't how much damage it did to Russia artillery stocks directly, but how much it throttled the Russian throughput of ammo-to-guns despite how few launchers were actually in the Ukrainian possession. The volume and scale of ammunition required to keep the guns firing with an overmatch to make very slow gains over relatively basic trench systems created a tension of how much is needed versus how vulnerable you are moving that much ammo forward. As drones continue to proliferate, the viability of such major ammunition reserves needed to brute force advances is likely to be a liability as drones get better and better at targeting up and down the value chain from the massed munitions to the massed artillery.
Do you have links to this polling?
While there's nothing I know of that can't be dismissed if you really want to, this is probably the best / most current public polling that covers this subject.
This is Feb 24 polling conducted by CISR - the Center for Insights in Survey Research- which is the research arm of IRI - the International Republican Institute - which is a non-profit funded by the US government- with this specific research funded by USAID. That does mean it's US-govt funded research, but IRI isn't a US government organ as such- it's actually part of a pair of organizations, with its counterpart being the NDI (National Democratic Institute)- with the board members of each respective organization being drawn from the American Republican and Democratic parties respectively, making it a govt-funded partisan research organization of sorts. That makes it close enough to the US government if you want to insist anything that US government funding touches is propaganda, but it's (a) Republican party propaganda during a period where Republicans as an institution are far from aligned with the US government position on Ukraine, and (b) that's not reason enough to reject all data. The IRI (and similar institutions) may have interests, but they also have an interest in understanding the data to support further policy creation, and aren't exactly organs who present data to drive public policy. Pick fights over the data methodology if you'd like...
...which is described on page 2, with demographics on page 3. Computer-assisted telephonic survey, n = 2000 Ukrainians, nearly 900 men vs 1100 women, response rate of 14% until they got the 2000, etc. etc. Responses are broken down by gender / age, but also by regional breakdowns, but not necessarily gender & age breakdowns. (You'd probably need to request access to the research data directly for more nuanced breakdowns.)
In other words, typical telephonic polling with typical telephonic polling strengths and weaknesses. Sufficiently motivated people will find excuses to reject it, but in lieu of alternative more authoritative polling data, it can serve as a ballpark.
Now for what you're most interested in, go to page 22, 'How do you feel about the current level of mobilization in Ukraine'. (Remember that conscription is functionally synonymous with mobilization as mobilization is just the euphism treadmill for the process provided by conscription.)
If it shows a majority of draft-age Ukrainian men support conscription as implemented, it would probably shift my view of the conflict.
It doesn't show that a majority of Ukrainian men support conscription as implemented- because it actually shows a plurality of Ukrainian men in Ukraine believe there isn't enough conscription (36%) with almost as many believing the current level of mobilization is just right (31%), while only 17% of men believe there is too much.
While there's a notable age bias implicit in that- with about 30% of under-30s (male and female) believing there is too much mobilization compared to 10% of the too-old-for-conscription 60+ pops- even the under-30 bracket is decisively in favor of as-much-or-more mobilization (65% to 29%). The next 3 conscriptable brackets are even more decisively in favor of the current level of mobilization or more, with 'we need more mobilization' increasing as you go up the age bracket, and 'too much mobilization' decreasing as you go older as well.
Does this mean that a majority of Ukrainian men support conscription 'as implemented'? Well, 50-stalins criticism is still criticism. And someone interested in cross-linguistic semantic quibling, there's things you can quibble on.
But there's also an interesting question that was posed, shown on slide 51, which is rather relevant to the conscription-is-unpopular / the most important thing is Ukrainian lives / the West is forcing Ukraine to fight to the last Ukrainian arguments.
Q: If Ukraine is only able to accomplish one of the following objectives, which do you think is the most important for our country to achieve? "Freezing the conflict at the present lines to stop the loss of more Ukrainian lives" is... 19%.
Which is, admittedly, ahead of full EU membership (11%), but also behind full NATO membership (23%), and less than half (39%) of the dominant answer of what Ukrainians think is the most important objective.
Full-scale war to recapture all lands included in the 1991 borders.
They don't think that's going to be quick or easy, either.
People who think the Ukrainians are war-weary reluctants forced to fight against their will by western powers are woefully unaware. The Ukraine War is a war of nationalism, and the Ukrainians are nuts.
The distance from Northern Ukraine to Moscow is significantly less than from the Baltics to Moscow, 460 km to 600 km which is relevant to a decapitation strike.
And note what the actual distinction is here, as there no significant range limiting factor at the 460-to-600km range in the modern era. Rather, it's time.
A nuclear decapitation in the modern age would be reliant on hypersonic weapons which- if not simply branding for old ballistic weapons- are traveling at a minimum of about mach 5, or 6, 173 km/hr. As the additionally 140 km is the distance to be traveled, this this simply adds time to the transit time, not a range limitation in itself.
An extra 140km at 6170 km/hr equates to an extra 80 seconds- again, at a slow hypersonic rate. Which, while not nothing- and I'm sure you will insist is very relevant- doesn't actually change the acceptableness of a nuclear first strike. If the goal of the decapitation strike is to kill a leader then the 80 second differential won't realistically make a difference in the target escaping the nuclear blast radius, and if the goal is to do a nuclear armegeddon first strike, this doesn't change that the success factor is being primarily driven by the ability to mitigate second strike capability, not the 80-extra seconds to alert / get release authorities for non-second strike.
Which returns to the question of who is unleashing nuclear holocaust on Russia in the first place in light of second strike capabilities. Which isn't the US, both because (a) the US has been deterred by much less capable nuclear risks for decades, and (b) the idea that the US is looking to nuclear genocide the russians is based in fever fantasy rather than any realistic understanding of American politics or its military-strategic community.
Which returns to the point that nuclear deterrence is still being waived away, because the argument premise is silly when Russia's own nuclear capabilities are brought into the picture.
Missile defence based in Ukraine would also complicate Russian nuclear strikes. They would have to defend thousands of kilometres of extra airspace in addition to the Belarus-St Petersburg area.
Missile defenses based in Ukraine would complicate Russian nuclear strikes on Ukraine or over the Black Sea. The nature of the curvature of the earth is such that the Russians don't need to fire over Ukraine to hit any other NATO nuclear member for the purposes of maintaining deterrence, and that they'd have to actively go out of their way to do so.
Now, if your argument will shift to that Russia really needs to be able to nuke non-nuclear members like Turkey, I will grant you that Ukraine would help defend Turkey... but now we are conceding that the Russians need to act based on threats not actually in Ukraine, and not nuclear-driven in the first place. And while Russia certain had war plans to nuke most non-nuclear states it could come into conflict with in NATO, that mentality was rather a significant part as to why they wanted to be in NATO under a nuclear umbrella.
The Russian Black Sea Fleet is not known for its excellence, they aren't in a position to to lose bases to NATO warships. Given the interest British and US warships seem to have in the Black Sea, it's likely there'd be many AEGIS-equipped ships in Crimea or the Sea of Azov. This obviously limits Russian power-projection abilities, their ability to support Syria or other allies.
Whether the Russian Black Sea fleet is known for excellence, they were the original impetus for the strategic value of the Crimean peninsula as a naval base, and this was considered a major key to support Russian power projection despite the Black Sea being cut off from Syria or other allies regardless of how many AEGIS-equipped systems are in the Black Sea by virtue that the Black Sea is controlled by the Turkish straight.
Ukraine provides no advantage for the Russians to expand power-projection abilities into the Middle East, unless you hand-waive Turkey out of the way. Crimea is a prestige port, not an enabling port for out-of-blacksea activities.
And what happens once Ukraine joins NATO? Everyone and their dog has been saying this will happen for years now.
Based on history to date, Putin publicly claims it doesn't change anything and Russia doesn't care anyway and continues not to attack a NATO power and the NATO powers continue not to attack Russia because no one involved- least of all the US- wants the expense or hassle of attacking Russia.
Peace, in other words.
You're not supposed to be able to join NATO with territorial disputes - yet NATO training and integration has continued through 2014, through 2022 and continues to this day despite this.
NATO training and integration leadup are not joining NATO, and there is no position that NATO cannot work with willing candidates in preparation for the time that they resolve the territorial disputes- the resolution of which was the official Russian of 2014 through 2022 and even now.
And, of course, this goes back to why this matters, which amounts to pretending that Russian nuclear deterrence doesn't exist and that 80 seconds of travel time is somehow what is preventing the US from unleashing a nuclear genocide opening against the Russians.
Suppose they amend the 'no territorial disputes' clause or strategically ignore it like Blinken does to bring in Ukraine and Ukraine moved on Donbass in a counter-factual where Russia didn't invade. Then Russia would be forced to choose between losing Donbass or war with NATO.
This would unironically be a net gain for the average Russian, and would have been a major strategic gain for the Russian defense interest had it been done years ago. The average Russian would no longer be on the hook for subsidizing a broke mafia statelet that has been responsible for tens of thousands of Russian deaths to date with more to come, and had it been abandoned years ago the Russians wouldn't have crippled their northern flank's very viable option for a significant military victory against the NATO alliance, it wouldn't have reinvigorated NATO at a time where the Americans and Europeans were openly discussing strategic divorce over the lack of a perceived shared security interests, and not only would tens of thousands of Russian military-aged men by alive and 10% of the Russian IT workforce still in the country, but hundreds of thousands of pieces of equipment wouldn't have been lost in the sunk cost fallacy over a failed popular uprising that primarily had the effect of taking the pro-Russian demographic out of the Ukrainian electorate and accelerating Ukraine's political reorientation from wanting to to be a part of the European Union but militarily neutral to the most anti-Russian demographic this side of Poland.
NovaRussia was a Russian strategic blunder in the great power competition year before the Ukraine War turned the Russian military into a mid-cold war army and made the Russians synonymous with cope cages for years to come.
Furthermore, it's a basic strategic principle that great powers don't want their neighbours to be members of hostile alliance groups. Everyone knows that Russia was extremely unhappy with the idea of Ukraine being in NATO, Burns's 'nyet means nyet' cable shows this. We can identify efforts to prevent this in Russian strategy - debt relief and energy subsidies pre-2014 and increasingly intense economic and military pressure since the Special Diplomatic Operation you don't want to call a coup.
Furthermore furthermore, it's a basic known fact of history that great powers who repeatedly attack their neighbors drive their neighbors into alliance groups by their own hostility, and that if the goal is to not drive neighbors into hostile alliance groups, a great power should not result to repeated armed interventions. Russia was indeed extremely unhappy that its former subjects feared it like a battered wife might fear a drunken Husband, and yet Russia continued to attempt to coerce and threaten and hit its former subjects into compliance.
This is, in strategic lexicon, an 'own goal.'
Furthermore furthermore furthermore, it's an even more basic strategic principle that great powers who pick stupid wars get stupid prizes. The eras of empires of conquest ended years ago not merely because most of the Europeans realized it was morally abhorrent, but also because it was economically and militarily ruinous due to the technologies (that russian enabled and widely spread) for cost-effective resistance. The ability of minor powers to disproportionately hit back against an invader so long as they were willing to fight and had foreign support was the hallmark of many of the wars of the Cold War, and Russia's belief that they would be greeted as liberators was as stupid for them as it was for the Americans in Iraq.
Or perhaps even more stupid. The Americans were initially welcomed by the Shia, but then stuck around and tried to stop the follow-on civil war that was initially ignorring them. The Russians planned to have torture facilities and kill lists from the start.
Regardless, I return to a long-stood by claim that appeals to strategic principles are misaimed when it comes to Russia, because Putin has demonstrated his strategic incompetence for over a decade at this point.
since the Special Diplomatic Operation you don't want to call a coup.
Which I do not for the same reason that you don't want to admit the rather inconvenient but uncontested context of Yanukovych's departure: that he was not escorted out of the country by the military or security forces, but rather fled before he could be arrested and tried for crimes against the nation after the military and broader security forces refused orders to follow along in shooting civilians in the streets after he granted himself the power and began to do so without legislative consent while his government executed a sniper campaign to justify the crackdown.
No one in the 'it was a coup!' camp ever really addresses what the level of impeachable conduct is that might warrant a legislature moving against an executive without being a coup, but in other contexts they generally concede that the executive granting themselves the right to shoot their political opponents at foreign behest typically qualifies as a legitimate rather than illegal basis for removing a president.
Dean
11d ago
Rebuilding doesn't take that long.
Militarily? It certainly can. An officer corps of 20-years experience takes 20 years to build, and much of Russia's institutional experience was razed and the current crop have been resorting to much lower-level operational designs than previously done- the current generation of new direct leaders is going to have to unlearn trench infantry tactics to relearn actual Russian manevuer warfare doctrine. Similarly, building up a cold war's worth of artillery ammunition stockpiles took the Soviets literal decades, and the Russians don't have the Soviet industrial base to do so with.
Military hardware wise, also yes, in various categories. The Russian production rates of aircraft are, well, bad, and while the drone economy is a booming, it doesn't exactly enable the sort of deep-strike operations that Russia started the war off with. The naval losses will take a similarly long time to build. And while Russia can absolutely bring out raw numbers of reactivated obsolescent tanks to pad the numbers, this is the reminder that they weren't even able to get a meaningful production run of the Armata before it went back behind the lines to hide out the war. Any production run of modern tanks will be from a much deeper pit than they hadn't gotten out of before they started digging themselves into the war.
The bigger issue for the Russian military-industrial complex is the Russian arms export industry. It's been struggling for awhile, and appears to be cratering to a bare select few clients since, especially as the Russians have had clear trouble both honoring various contracts in favor of supplying their own forces. Given both the role that Russian arms exports plays in its foreign policy, and the long trail times for being displaced, one of the key Russian funding models for managing the costs of the industry is going out the window, with the longer it's out the worse it will be. Russia's ability to rebuild its arms market share is... probably dead, as people with needs will have gone elsewhere, and people with resources will have more promising partners to work with. Rather than the post-cold-war T-72 sales and such, expect Russia to be one of many drone providers, a much less lucrative and much more crowded market.
Dean
4d ago
It's been interesting to watch the reaction from Western pro-Ukrainians to Ukraine's sweeping new mobilization orders. The prevailing sentiment seems to be "that's a tragedy, and obviously the draft shouldn't exist to begin with, but what can be done?" Suggesting that it would be better to negotiate a peaceful end to the conflict is outside the Overton window. It's a foregone conclusion that Ukraine must fight to the last man.
I find it interesting in another direction, such as why you believe it's a foregone conclusion, as opposed to a dismissed propaganda narrative that outran its legs.
We have numbers to use, and the war attrition of the Ukraine War is nowhere near that Ukraine is being attrited to such a degree in population terms. The early-war narratives to that effect required the inclusion of the capture of major demographic centers in the east during the early war and projected that forward, but in the time sense Russia hasn't captured the demographics previously associated with the territory, and the combat attrition rates- even factoring in some of the more incredible Russian claims- are nowhere near enough to warrant a demographic-level narrative. Ukraine may be struggling with the manpower to resist the russian manpower, but that's a balance of scale and desire to mobilize available population, not running out of population.
This also turns on the motte-and-bailey of what negotiating a peaceful end of the conflict entails. The Russian terms from the start of the conflict- including the narrative that the West forced Ukraine to cancel a near-deal- have consistently been terms that were, shall we say, not conducive to a negotiated peaceful end of the conflict, as opposed to obvious set-ups for a fourth continuation war to greater Russian advantage by demanding dismantling of Ukraine's means to resist any future invasion and providing Russia a veto over any external support in case of a future Russian invasion. The Russians have been rather consistent on that front, and have further expanded their claims since, and so it generally falls on the advocates of a negotiating a peaceful end of the conflict as to argue as to how the Russian position is compatible with a negotiated peaceful end of the conflict, which itself was the third unprovoked continuation war in a decade.
There is something hellishly dystopian about fleeing to another country, possibly even across the ocean, and your country of birth is still trying to pull you back. Particularly because women are given a free pass. It's natural to feel like there should be some cost associated with the privilege of not having to be forcibly conscripted to fight against an invading army.
Why would you feel it's hellishly dystopian, when it's a positively banal part of the international system and has been for longer than you've been alive? As long as you claim citizenship of Country X, you have reciprocal obligations with country X, and while countries Y-Z often don't go along in enforcing other countries laws regarding those obligations, they often practice similar practices. This ranges from conscription- I've personally met Koreans who left Ivy League colleges to serve their service time- to taxation abroad, to extradition treaties, and so on.
Conscription is not some international abnormality, and neither is it being gender-restricted. If a normality comes off as dystopian, that implies more about the standard of dystopia than the nature.
This raises questions about Ukraine's ability to keep their fighting force well-staffed going forward, and also questions about the morale of Ukrainian soldiers. Every conflict has some number of draft dodgers, but I wonder if there are any hard stats about whether dodgers are particularly overrepresented in this conflict? That could help adjudicate the question of whether the Ukrainian resistance is an authentic homegrown phenomenon, or if it's largely being sustained by Western pressure.
If you lack numbers of draft dodgers to make any judgement on relative numbers, why would you believe the conflict is being sustained by Western pressure as opposed to authentic homegrown opinion? Especially when you already have access to now years of Ukrainian opinion polling by a multitude of actors that go beyond Ukrainian capacity to control?
It's not exactly impossible to do polling in Ukraine without Ukrainian government approval, and the polling efforts that survive scrutiny are generally consistent. Even on conscription, it's not particularly remarkable: individuals don't necessarily like being conscripted, but can accept/support conscriptions as a legitimate and even necessary component of defense.
I'm more curious as to what you think the alleged Western pressure on the Ukrainians to keep fighting is. Typically that refers to the early 2022 breakdown of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, which actors claimed were 'close to agreement', but reporting on actual contents of the negotiations include revealed rather significant gaps in position like-
The draft treaty with Ukraine included banning foreign weapons, “including missile weapons of any type, armed forces and formations.” Moscow wanted Ukraine’s armed forces capped at 85,000 troops, 342 tanks and 519 artillery pieces. Ukrainian negotiators wanted 250,000 troops, 800 tanks and 1,900 artillery pieces, according to the document. Russia wanted to have the range of Ukrainian missiles capped at 40 kilometers (about 25 miles).
And included Russians provisions like-
Other issues remained outstanding, notably what would happen if Ukraine was attacked. Russia wanted all guarantor states to agree on a response, meaning a unified response was unlikely if Russia itself was the aggressor. In case of an attack on Ukraine, Ukrainian negotiators wanted its airspace to then be closed, which would require guarantor states to enforce a no-fly zone, and the provision of weapons by the guarantors, a clause not approved by Russia.
I don't think anyone has seriously argued that refusing terms like these requires external pressure, given the rather logical implications for one's prospects for a peaceful future if the current invader insists that they must agree to any international assistance to you in case they invade again after you dismantle your means to resist.
Given that the current Ukraine War is at least the third continuation war in a decade after the occupation of Crimea (the first continuation war being the NovaRussia campaign that was intended to start a mass uprising, and the second continuation war being the conventional Russian military intervention to preserve the enclaves as separatists when the NovaRussia campaign failed), peace talks really do have to address the prospects of future wars, and not treat the current war as one in isolation. Especially as multiple Russian claims as to why their invasion was justified would retain for future use would not be resolved in any near-term ceasefire.
Dean
11d ago
Is Russia exhausting itself? I’ve seen reports that their standing army right now is far large than pre war even accounting for casualties.
It depends on if you consider leadership or equipment attrition relevant to exhaustion, or just manpower numbers. Really, both are true simultaneously.
The Russian army is larger than it was before the war started both because (a) it mobilized- which the pre-war military on eve of invasion hadn't, and (b) it has been drawing cold war stocks for reactivation. If you define exhaustion as an inability to form big armies of vehicles that move, the Russian army isn't exhausted.
However, many of the assets that provided capabilities beyond raw numbers- say precision weapons to take out operationally relevant objectives at range rapidly to enable a manevuer offense, tanks with modernized sensors needed to survive well against ATGMs, strategic aircraft capable of maintaining airborn AWACs coverage to identify drone intrusions, highly trained officer corps to manage complex operations- are gone, and have been replaced by inferior, not superior, quality. Other assets for maintaining strategic endurance have also shown fraying- the Russian prison system for convict conscription is not, in fact, limitless, just as Russian economic interventions are not, in fact, costless and do not disprove impacts of sanctions, and the Soviet Union stockpiles are also not infinite.
Russia is dependent on iranian-style drone swarm attacks because it ran out of its much more capable cruise missiles stockpiles, and was using them at a relatively minuscule production rate afterwards- meaning that considerably less advanced air defense capabilities are required to shoot down considerably more attempts. Russia cannibalized its officer training corps in the first year of the war, using them in the front lines even before the first mobilization, leading to far less capable officers leading far more blunt attacks that were far more prone to artillery disruption and internal report falsification. Russia's prestige units started the war with near state-of-the-art armor which included about-as-modernized-as-possible end of the cold war tank models, and many of them have begun to adopt 1950s-eras tanks simply because those were the first that could be pushed through modernization because they didn't have need for the various 60s/70s/80s and beyond capability enhancing technologies. Russia started with the largest artillery army in the war and massive artillery advantages... and now is importing ammunition from North Korea which is substandard even compared to the aging soviet ammo that the Russians were using before, which is to say it's considerably more likely to explode on the wrong side of the barrel, or not explode on target, than what Russia started with. There are more examples to, from aircraft quantities to arms exports to it's energy export portfolio- a lot of things, while still continuing, are just worse than a few years ago.
Before the war, there was a joke that Russia had a large army, and a modern army, but not a large modern army. Now the modern part is dropped: Russia has a large army, and a devolved army, and it has a large devolved army. But it's still a large devolved army.
Does the inability to maintain quality of arms mean exhaustion? You'll be forgiven for thinking not, but it does imply things about Russia's ability to maintain effective offensive operations, hence the second and third order effects of relying on high-casualty tactics for relatively marginal territorial gains... which, as far larger and more aggressive armies than the Russians have demonstrated in the past, is a path to military exhaustion.
All of that is to say, I wonder how Russia today compares to Russia 2021 in terms of how much of a threat they are to NATO.
More in the short term, less in the long term.
In the short term, while quality has devolved, quantity has increased, and quantity has a quality all of its own when it's not matched by anything on the other side. While having late-WW2 tanks with cope cages is a national disgrace as far as military prestige goes, WW2 tanks still resist small arms fire, and while the loss of anti-tank capability by Ukraine/NATO is far overstated, volume does matter. If NATO were unwilling to fight for a long time, more immediate threat is worse than less but more capable immediate threat.
On the other hand, volume can be matched and overcome with time, and while the Russians were the first to mobilize to a war economy, the Europeans both can- and more recently have begun to- recognize themselves as in a military-industrial race which they need to compensate for being late too, and as they begin to catch up in volume, quality starts to matter more again. Comparisons to the Gulf War of the 90s aren't accurate, but aren't entirely wrong either: if the only way for Russian military units to survive is under air defense bubbles, they aren't advancing and the economic differences will start to add with yet more time.
As such, the European-NATO nightmare is that they have to face the Russian mobilized force in the near term, before they have the time to re-arm. As such, the Ukrainians are both a time and a scale buffer: if the Ukrainians give up, the Europeans risk facing the threat sooner before they mobilize, but if the Ukrainians keep fighting the Europeans both increase their time to re-arm and decrease the capabilities they have to arm against (because Ukraine will continue to attrit the Russian capabilities / wear down that Soviet stockpile / eat tens of thousands of more rounds of artillery with their trench lines).
This is a significant reason as to why the Europeans will likely keep supporting Ukraine even if the US fully ceases to (say, under Trump). Ukraine capitulating increases the risk of a threat the Europeans are less likely to conventionally match (the larger-but-devolved RUS conventional forces), while Ukraine resisting increases the European posture vis-a-vis the Russians.
Dean
4d ago
I don't know any statistics, but I do remember reading multiple articles to that effect during the Black Lives Matter protests of groups bringing in out-of-state protestors who were regularly playing the role of agitators.
There are absolutely career activist networks as well, generally parts of political machines whose job it is to organize protests using established channels. They're the sort of people who work with the people who do things like bus students to protests. The student isn't necessarily showing up for any given protest, but the network behind the mobilization is regularly being tapped and exercised.
Dean
13d ago
Setting aside that you confused two different countries in two different hemispheres with over 200 million population difference, your own article has the slight issue with ignoring some inconvenience context- like the numerous Russian demands that were rather obviously not close to being agreed to.
For example, terms like what Ukraine could defend itself with if Russia launched a third continuation war-
The draft treaty with Ukraine included banning foreign weapons, “including missile weapons of any type, armed forces and formations.” Moscow wanted Ukraine’s armed forces capped at 85,000 troops, 342 tanks and 519 artillery pieces. Ukrainian negotiators wanted 250,000 troops, 800 tanks and 1,900 artillery pieces, according to the document. Russia wanted to have the range of Ukrainian missiles capped at 40 kilometers (about 25 miles).
-or who the question of security guarantors for Ukraine in lieu of NATO-
Other issues remained outstanding, notably what would happen if Ukraine was attacked. Russia wanted all guarantor states to agree on a response, meaning a unified response was unlikely if Russia itself was the aggressor. In case of an attack on Ukraine, Ukrainian negotiators wanted its airspace to then be closed, which would require guarantor states to enforce a no-fly zone, and the provision of weapons by the guarantors, a clause not approved by Russia.
In other words, Russia was perfectly willing to accept a peace in which Ukraine dismantled the military that had just stopped it's advance, Ukraine limit itself to being unable to hit back to any significant distance against the extensive Russian use of long range fires, and so long as Russia could veto any external support to Ukraine in case it invaded a fourth time.
Truly, the Ukrainians and Russians negotiators were close to the same page.
Or, alternatively, the Ukrainians lack agency, and the UK-US-ians are to blame.
But my money is that history will remember that the people who launched the war of national destruction, on claims that there was no Ukrainian nation, who went prepared for mass graves and torture chambers and kill lists, and who deliberately attempted to trigger humanitarian crisis of winter power outages and mass floodings and endangering nuclear reactor plants... I suspect they'll be the one blamed for any genocide they cause.
Dean
14d ago
Which was also state terrorism.
Unless it was for the purpose of terror, especially against civilians, for political purposes, it really wasn't.
State terrorism isn't a catch-all term for any sort of lethal activity done by a state, or even illegal actions. And that, in turn, turns to the legality when a party is a military target.
If you want to make an international law argument of it, international laws of conflict absolutely do allow for the deliberate targeting of military commanders, which Soleimani and Zahedi were, of belligerent parties, which the IRGC is and has been.
If we're going to go the route of "political assassinations are okey-dokey", then you can't object to foreign countries attempting to assassinate American political and military figures on American soil.
There's never been a legal objection to parties in conflict killing eachother in the course of armed conflict. It's curious you think that is a retort.
Ultimately international law exists to regulate conflicts between nations by the mutual agreement of said nations, and the derivative force behind this is reciprocity, not external enforcement. The flip side is that if Country A attempts to assassinate Country B military and political figures, Country A doesn't get to claim any defense when struck back... and in this context, Iran has a long history of assassinating political and military figures, as well as targeting civilian targets.
The Americans killed Soleimani because Soleimani was involved in the business of killing Americans. Likewise, the Israelis killed Zahedi because Zahedi was in the business of killing Israelis. Under the laws of armed conflict- which do not require that either beligerrent declare a state of war- that made them legitimate military targets.
Unless you deny that the states involved were in a state of armed conflict- which is not prevented simply due to Iran working through proxies- that would make them valid military targets under the international laws of war. The same laws of war are constructed in such a way that when a valid military target moves into a location protected by laws of armed conflict, that location is no longer protected due to having a valid military target.
Ultimately, international law for armed conflicts is not nice, and does not have an 'It's okey-dokey for me to hit you, but no hit backs' requirement. States may voluntarily choose to refrain from retaliating militarily, but they are under no obligation to.
Dean
14d ago
...you, uh, are aware that Iranian-aligned and supplied groups have been shooting rockets into northern Israel for months now, right? Like, well into the hundreds of rockets. To a degree that 60,000 Israelis were mandatorily evacuated from parts of northern Israel due to the ongoing campaign.
And you are aware that one of the main groups doing so, Hezbollah, is regionally seen and understood as an Iranian proxy-ally, with significant degrees of coordination / support / direct armaments?
And you are aware that the primary agency of Iran that conducts this coordination/arming is the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, whose commander was the one targeted in the strike?
This is really not a mystery. Iran has been participating in the Gaza conflict for several months. It has been directly instrumental in its efforts to expand the conflict to a second front in Lebanon against Hezbollah, which it has been arming and coordinating with via its positions Syria. It's not even the first effort to cause a multi-front war, which date to the start of the conflict.
The metaphor of kicking a hornet's nest relies on the implicit pre-state that the hornets are not already out and trying to sting you.
Dean
11d ago
Eh. I don't intend to challenge your feelings / say that your enjoyment was in any way wrong, but I feel ME1's writing was in many respects emblematic of the problems the trilogy had a hole, which is to say a clear lack of planning.
In RPGs like Mass Effect, the 'critical path' refers to the series of must-make choices that the player cannot avoid. Sidequest choices may never be seen if you don't take a side quest, but you can't complete the main story and reach the sequel without the critical path. And every. Single. Choice. in ME1's critical path amounts to 'Kill person X, or not.'
And there was no plan- as seen in how ME2 picked up these choices- for what would follow if you actually killed someone (in several contexts, literally no content vis-a-vis a cameo of the surviving person), even as at the same time anyone who could be killed could no longer be relevant to the plot. As soon as you had the option to kill Wrex, every story arc Wrex could touch if he survived had to be carried forward if he was dead (because game development resources are limited if you weren't the Witcher 2 of the era), and this applied to everyone and everything. Later ME started to learn that not all choices needed to kill people off to suggest a difference- ME Andromeda actually had a good dynamic for its planets, like what sort of hive and scum and villainy would be the criminal underworld's dominant player- but from the start, ME1 didn't know how to build a choice structure to provide meaningful content contrasts. Especially with a penchant for choices too big to mutually co-exist as narrative drivers: the hyper-expansive rachni could only matter as much as they could exist in a narrative where they didn't exist at all, while the saved Council and the all-Human council could only lead to the same general location. No understanding that bigger choices aren't better.
Nor did it really understand how to do an ideology-morality system. Paragon was internally consistent in ME1- just defer to the Council when it's not literally the end of galactic civilization- but Renegade was just a mess. It couldn't decide whether it was human-first, Council-skeptic, xenophobic, utilitarian, sociopathic, or if it could tell a difference between them all. ME2 got even worse, as it would have the same argument positions flip sides of the morality wheel in the same conversation, but ME1 was the one to get to define a morality curve, and it couldn't.
I do agree that the writing strictly went downhill immediately after- the second game spent about a third of the trilogy introducing or reintroducing a character cast who could be dead by the end of it (thus guaranteeing they couldn't be plot-carrying characters for a game that didn't move forward the meta-plot)- and the ending of the trilogy is practically a case study for why you need to know how your story will end from the start so that you can work towards it.
Black sheep opinion as it is, but from a writing perspective my favorite games of the series were not quite ME3- which aside from the ending was actually quite solid as an apocalypse story- but actually Andromeda. While I fully accept and respect people who didn't like Andromeda's choice of tone for being campy, and the mechanical issues in presentation were real, the writing was trying to be both a deliberate sort of campy and a 'new introduction' spiritual reboot, and I honestly thought it worked better at that than ME1 did. There was enough deviations so that it was a spiritual reboot rather than a clone, even as it wrote itself out of the corner that the ME trilogy painted itself into with choices too big to ever properly reflect. Andromeda was much more judicious with its choices, leaning more on emotional relevance than 'massive geopolitical differences'- the sort of thing like which person is the hero-figure to a nation, rather than whether the nation would die or not- and these were things that were much better set up for being reflected in a sequel than the ME trilogy did. As far as writing for a trilogy, it was much better founded.
But, alas, it seems the next one will be in the Milky Way.
Dean
13d ago
The Jack romance certainly ends with a lovers relationship, and her romance is the only one where she makes meaningful emotional healing and interpersonal progression in ME2. Miranda is uniquely characterized as smiling in a way she never did before and is also only able to have a healthy emotional relationship solely if Shepard is the one to provide it (with their dick). Kelly Chambers, in so much as that one qualifies, resolves it's emotional catharsis by having her do stripper dances in your room after she was kidnapped, locked into a pod, and nearly turned into bio-goop. Tali is much less emotionally traumatized, but certainly emotionally questionable given that she risks death itself for the sake of the Shepard bone out of a mix of captain-crushing hero crush (and the fact that you covered up her father's cultural war crimes).
Ashley... is a more mature frank attraction in ME1, but Ashely's character arc also jumps to the point that the tomboy not-a-model gets a major model glow up come ME3, so who knows there.
Dean
13d ago
I've noticed that sci-fi games are far more likely to qualify as "quality writing" for me. Even my contemporary examples (such as Prey) are sci-fi as well. That's not to say I can't enjoy other types, but I'm wondering if I either have a bias; if sci-fi lends itself to deeper writing, or attracts writers who can do so; or both. Note that I can give some very bad sci-fi examples of games (I am outspoken in how much I find Mass Effect completely awful in almost every way).
Whoah. I was just about to bring up Mass Effect as an example of popular bad sci-fi. Not simply for its ending, but from structural design perspective (a terribly managed/planned trilogy structure that led to the ending), an inability to stick to character arcs (many reoccuring characters flip from their initial story arcs to fit into the narrative / character appeal niches as needed), it's heavy power fantasy dynamic verging into sycophantism, the tendency to emotionally heal traumatized women by boning them, and so on. A good enough contrarian could even write an amusing spiel on it's fascistic themes and narrative style (though admittedly most who do aren't good enough to pull it off).
Dean
15d ago
You are probably thinking of the Icelink proposal.
This was a proposal as opposed to a project, and more or less died in the later 2010s at the Feasibility study level. There are probably three main reasons for that. One, cost-benefit on a technical level, as Icelink was more of an environmental proposal for UK governments to boast green credentials than an actual way to most efficiently use green energy in industry (as you could just invest the energy consumption infrastructure in Iceland). Two, related to cost and benefit, was Brexit, on top of the internal budget disruption to the UK governmental also put the UK and Iceland on opposite sides of the EU single market wall at a time when UK and EU relations at the regulatory and policy level were, shall we say, uninterested in major investments to the UK benefit. Third was the point that any UK investment in Icelink would land in territories with significant risk of separating from the UK over the medium/long term, as the cables would either naturally land in Scotland- where the SNP was having a strong period and polling near-majorities in hypothetical separation referendums- or in Northern Ireland- which the post-Brexit EU policy was to have economically segregated from the rest of the UK economic-legal architecture. A major, UK-level investment which would provide EU baseload power to territories with significant political interests who would rather be a part of the EU than UK would be a territorial integrity risk.
So, don't expect it to go through.
Which is a shame, because when it is available at economically viable rates, geothermal is one of the 'better' green power systems because it meets the baseload power requirements of predictable, non-swingy power. The economic viability is dependent on geography that isn't necessarily where you want it, but that's actually why long-range transmission makes sense in that context because you can't simply build a closer geothermal plant, but geothermal is good baseload generation and if you do build it, you don't have to build duplicative generation capacity like with intermittant green sources.
Dean
23d ago
It's not hugely discussed because it's not particularly controversial, to the point that it's like water that the fish swimming through don't recognize.
The 'issue' is that many scientific developments with military applications aren't actually all-that visible, being more about integration of capabilities than distinct form. A 'post-sputnik space effort' is visually impressive when there are no space rockets. A re-usable space-launch rocket is not visually all that distinct from a non-reusable one, and only (greatly) expands the amount of material moved into space, rather than introducing first-of-its-kind capabilities.
Another issue is that a lot of significantly advancing technology is also a lot more democratized, with periods of sole-state advantage being shorter than ever before. Thirty years ago, GPS-guided weapons and real-time tracking of forces was an unprecedented technological advantage that allowed the Gulf War US to slice through one of the largest Soviet-style armies in the world to an unprecedented degree. Now you have the same technological capability in your pocket, in some cases provided by the same companies putting satellites into orbit rather than the states that once had a monopoly on doing that. What isn't invented can still be replicated, often for a fraction of the cost.
That doesn't mean that the technology -> military loops isn't occuring, or having strategic payoffs. After being the target of proxy war for the better part of two decades, the US is arguably waging one of the most effective proxy wars in human history, in large part because of the technologies it has developed and deployed in favor of it's backed party while using lessons from the previous conflicts. The advent of drone warfare is a revolution in military affairs which will be a great weakness to all major military powers by greatly increasing the costs when operating in hostile terrain- but effect the US less due to the US's geographic and alliance contexts. This is far more relevant and impressive on a strategic level than, say, a carrier-killing ballistic missile, a weapon with only about 50 applicable targets in the world.
But drones aren't sexy a decade after the Iraq War, and a carrier-killing missile is whoosh.
Dean
14d ago
There's also the points that one of the key premise of the Iron Dome system as a system that doesn't just bankrupt the country is it's trajectory tracking for when things are believed to be going for low-risk impact areas. Rather than shooting expensive interceptors at everything, it, well, doesn't, and the parameters for what it does/does not accept risk on are subject to different factors.
As such, Ranger's twitter doesn't really indicate as much as one might want one way or another. Things 'getting through' the Iron Dome isn't the failure state, it's the intended state. At the same time, it doesn't mean the system wasn't being overwhelmed... but also doesn't mean that the system was running out of ammo / got hit / etc.
Without clarity on to what was being hit, there's not much saying whether the system succeeded of failed at it's purpose.
What else could they do? Israel bombs their consulate and kills their people.
They could credibly signal they intend to no longer actively engage in proxy warfare and distance themselves from their proxies. They won't, but they could.
Israel bombed the Iranian consulate because the Iranian asymetric warfare commander who has been organizing a multi-month bombardment campaign of Northern Israel was at the consulate, where he was quite likely in the business of facilitating further bombardments because that literally was part of his job. Everyone with an understanding of the region understood that context as soon as the Iranians publicized and admitted it was the IRGC Commander, and that as such this was not a tit-for-tat provocation stand-alone incident where Iran was responding to an Israeli kinetic instigation, but a tat-for-tit-for-tat cycle where Iran would be responding to an Israeli response.
The difference is significant- and telling in how the Arab states responded- as the difference between responding to a response versus responding to an instigating response is that any game cyclic equilibrium will look at the response of the response for indications on whether the cycle will continue. People who believe that an Iranian non-response would be perceived as cowardliness and Israel believing it can act with impunity aren't familiar with the region. The accusations could come regardless- how Iran chose to respond is indicative of how it intends to continue with the policies that provoked the Israeli retaliation.
Ayup. And why the Japanese economic strategy of farshoring (Japanese companies investing into foreign countries instead of japan), and broader American/western 'friendshoring' (investing manufactories in more local supply chains in friendly-ish countries) is the crux of the US/western divestment strategy: by putting the industry in non-chinese countries, it guides those countries to have an interest in tariffs as an anti-dumping measure in order to keep domestic industry viable and employing.
A further... issue? Contingency? Is that as the PRC investments more influence/resources into keeping trade barriers low, the dependence on the maritime flows increases. This increases the advantage of the US's blue water capabilities, as while the PRC has invested significantly in local maritime denial capabilities, it's ability to project maritime power remains limited and subject to both phsyical and economic disruption. If/when there comes a conflict, the PRC's ability to maintain the low-tariff dynamic will be militarily and not just politically challenged, and various countries will have strong incentives to assume more direct control of their PRC-paid for investments and sell to viable consumers even as the PRC is cut off.
Not a clear or clean approach by any means, but one of the key strategic questions for the US in a conflict with the PRC is how to manage/mitigate the economic fallout.
This is true, and ultimately a detriment to China in terms of manufacturing strategy as the advanced robotics factories have to be installed in place of the old ones, and there are multiple reasons- ranging from economic to political- to build your new manufacturing low-labor-cost factory in somewhere other than China. China could be the place... but if the cost-savings are primarily from the automation, you could just build them behind someone else's tariff wall, and not risk being caught in the geopolitical risk factors.
Currently China is trying to leverage the sunk-cost advantage, rather than a worker advantage, but the key investors on the more advanced robotics factories are external companies, and they are the ones being pressured (or lured) by other governments to be elsewhere.
China will have its own robotics factories all the same, but the normal international response to this is tariff walls to prevent dumping, and the more China leverages it's current strength to keep barries low for its own advantages, the more diplomatic costs it incurs even as it expands the dependence on others to consume.
Dean
22d ago
Worse than Yeltsin and the 1990s? Worse than the collapse of the Soviet Union?
Ukraine has been by far the worse Russian strategic failure.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was a failure of ideology, and even legitimacy- a lack of belief that the system was worth maintaining. However, recognizing that no one believed in the project, that it was ruining the nation vis-a-vis reforms, and that brutal oppression of unwilling subjects was not necessary was... an accurate and even validated strategic assessments. The Russians lost their empire, and yet the military suppression of their neighbors was proven to NOT be necessary to prevent war or an invasion of Russia. The Soviet empire was unnecessary for Russia's security needs, because Russia was not, in fact, at meaningful risk of NATO invasion despite the loss of a major conventional military, even as the Gulf War of '91 already demonstrated that they had lost military dominance.
By contrast, Ukraine was a failure of strategy because it was unforced error born of systemic incompetence at strategic evaluation. All the costs- direct and opportunity- have been unnecessary, and it was incredibly counter-productive on even its own stated goals and rationals, propagandized as many of those were.
A common failure of armchair strategizing is to treat states like they exist in strategy games, where the populace is implicitly supportive of the controlling player and where the agent only has to get the Technologies and Industry and all the good metrics just go up and up and up.
I spent some time talking about popularity and how well the strategy was communicated through to the population. Just lie flat gets a lot of hype in certain parts of Western media - but what results have come from it?
The results are that despite how 'well' the strategy is being communicated through to the population, there is a growing subculture in China's increasingly important and undersized youth pillar, required to maintain the system as the ideological generation retires, who are increasingly don't care to maintain the ideological project, for reasons that are both compounding and beyond the the CCP's ability to stop. Reasons like the pending loss of generational savings of the retiring ideological generation due to the property crisis that is resulting from party policy, which will place more of the burden of supporting (and recovering) on the youth-generation where the passive-resistance has manifested and spread because of, and not despite, social pressure efforts.
Their existence is a counter to arguments of social mobilization behind Xi's national rejuvination narrative, and their growth is a strategic vulnerability to strategies which rely on a supportive populace, as opposed to an apathetic-indifferent one.
Similarly, there are NEETs and quiet quitters in the West - they're not exactly bringing down the govt. This looks like it's part of the modern lifestyle, common to all developed countries.
And this defense is what undermines the previous sentence and the implicit premise of the first post, which attempted to set up a contrast to the popular unity of the Chinese strategy versus the unpopular dissent of the American strategy. Equivalence of NEETs and cultural equivalencies isn't an advantage remaining with China, it's the undermining factor of any strategy that depends on social elan by denying it unique advantages proscribed to it.
There certainly have been strategies over history that attempted to rely on the assumption of a hyper-motivated populace on one's own side, vis-a-vis the apathetic and decadent losers on the other. They are typically poor strategies, serving more as rationalizations of those dependent on the offense rather than actually well founded, and just as often built on the rhetoric of the propaganda state being echoed by the compliant subjects, who by the nature of the state lack the outside perspective to actually make well informed conclusions of their system.
Promote a Free and Open Indo-Pacific -Deepen Our Alliance with Europe -Foster Democracy and Shared Prosperity in the Western Hemisphere -Support De-Escalation and Integration in the Middle East -Build 21st Century US-Africa Partnerships -Maintain a Peaceful Arctic -Protect Sea, Air, and Space
Yes, that's the part I described as 'rules based order', one of the three strands of US strategy.
And that would an inaccurate characterization, particularly given what is behind the (multiple pages) of each of those geographic and technical areas.
Note that I said national strategy as opposed to national security strategy.
And note that I predicted you might try this deflection-
Now, you could argue that the US fails to achieve that (meh), isn't consistently being followed (sure), that it's not the real strategy of the United States ...
-and as I said then- it is. This is how the American government- by law- articulates and communicates national strategy. It is called the National Security Strategy by the virtue of the same law- the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, because that's what they called it in 1986, and no one in the US Congress has felt a need to rename it even as the Presidents have gradually broadened it to the whole-of-government strategy.
Unless you wish to identify some other document as the the real actual national strategy document, I charge this as a No True Scotsman appeal to a semantic that the American government doesn't abide by.
You seem to be thinking about national strategy only in the field of security, which is a very important factor but not everything.
You seem to be under the impression that the national security strategy is only about the field of security, which is a very important indicator that you haven't read it. And are probably confusing it with the National Defense Strategy.
The US National Security Strategy only 48 pages, including the cover and agendas. Admittedly more than some other countries, but nothing a serious commentator on national strategies should find overwhelming. Here you go. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Biden-Harris-Administrations-National-Security-Strategy-10.2022.pdf
By contrast, the National Defense Strategy is a wee 30 more pages, but does go into far more detail as to how the 800-lb-gorilla of the US government thinks about going about competition. https://www.hsdl.org/c/abstract/?docid=872444
DEI isn't just a policy used to achieve a strategic goal, it's an end in itself. The US has tried influencing Estonia to be more multicultural. Blinken apparently brings up LGBTQI in every conversation with the Saudis. US media pushes the virtues of blacks just like Chinese media pushes nationalism, albeit in a less hamfisted way. I was watching an Avengers film the other day, the super-smart black African girl in the hidden hyper-advanced African country clowning on the white physicist was a little cringe-worthy. There's a huge affirmative action apparatus in the USA, subsidies and assistance for non-white businesses.
And yet, this does not make DEI the American national strategy, and does not keep DEI from being a policy. I would certainly agree that DEI is a policy that it's advocates believe in as a good in and of itself, and even that is irrelevant to whether the spread of DEI is viewed as a advancing American strategy, but neither of those are relevant to the difference between being a strategy and being a policy advanced on the basis of strategy.
They didn't naively read that McKinsey paper and think 'hey diversity is really efficient and improves our other goals, let's do it'. There are true believers that the US Air Force ought to be more representative of the country's demographics, that there should be plenty of female construction workers building chip factories, that there need to be more people from marginalized communities on company boards. The people who write these papers believe in reshaping the world in a certain direction and that is happening in all kinds of different areas. China teaches national rejuvenation in schools, America teaches diversity in schools, you've got the gay-straight alliance and various other initiatives. Perhaps I could add China's 'uphold the supremacy of communist party' as a strategy with all kinds of supporting policies but that really goes without saying.
This, too, does not make DEI the American national strategy, nor does it keep DEI from being a policy. In fact, it is directly compatible with DEI being a policy- policies counter eachother.
Such a large-scale and comprehensive effort isn't just a policy. A policy would be something like the semiconductor suppression against Chinese high-tech industry, it's subordinate to US national security. It's specific, discrete and focused, usually in just one sector like economics.
Such a large-scale and comprehensive effort is precisely what an American WGA entails.
Whole-of-Government Approach (“WGA”) refers to the joint activities performed by diverse ministries, public administrations and public agencies in order to provide a common solution to particular problems or issues, and involve some form of cross-boundary work and restructuring.
Which is to say- a government policy.
Never the worst decision, but Paul Krugman in particular stopped being an economist and traded that for being a credentialed political attack dog... probably decades ago at this point. Certainly back in the 2000s he was serving the role of the Certified Economist to tell NYT readers how stupid his political opponents plans were, and how good the Democratic policy was as being based in Science and Facts.
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