This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
100 days to victory; or, will the Ukrainian offensive ever culminate?
If the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything will look like a nail, as the old saying goes. As an amateur World War One historian, I've previously mused on this subreddit that the Russian offensive from April through to June was playing out in some ways like the German Spring Offensive of World War One: making some worrying gains on paper and inflicting heavy losses on the enemy, but also eroding some of the attackers' manpower and getting their best troops killed off.
Now that the Ukrainians are on the offensive, I'm starting to see parallels with the Allied 100 Days Offensive of the First World War - lots of offensives up and down the line, attacks behind enemy lines, heavy casualties on both sides, and no obvious culmination point where offensive operations have to cease. I think many of us were expecting the Kherson offensive, when it came, to be a short sharp shock and awe attack - throwing large amounts of resources into a small area of the line with the goal of capturing one specific city. But with the recent attacks at Kharkiv and in the Donbas, and the relatively steady pace of the offensive in Kherson, I'm wondering if the goal is to create a new unrelenting offensive up and down the line.
This would have many goals, most notably keeping the Russians continually on the backfoot. However, if Ukraine is confident in its logistics and supplies, then it might allow them to achieve a kind of "offensive escape velocity", a positive feedback loop where they maintain the initiative, pick their battles, and inflict steady casualties, gradually tipping the war more and more in their favour. This in turn could prevent Russia from regaining the initiative and concentrating new troops for an assault and allow the offensive to gradually sap their resolve and manpower.
Here are some of the indicators that we would expect to see if Ukraine had this strategy in mind and were pursuing it successfully -
Non-culmination. There won't come a distinct day or week where the offensive culminates. Instead, the offensive will be maintained continually, but with increasing emphasis given to one theatre after another.
Taking of prisoners. One distinctive feature of the 100 Days Offensive was that the Allies began to capture increasing numbers of German prisoners. This in turn reflected plunging morale among German troops. If we see the same thing here, it would provide evidence that the war might be coming to a close.
Undoing enemy progress. One painful feature of the 100 Days Offensive for the Germans was that almost all of the gains of the Spring Offensive were undone in fairly rapid order. This in turn further depressed their morale. If Ukraine were to launch successful attacks on Lysychansk and Sievierodonetsk, this could have a similar effect.
Striking seemingly impregnable strongpoints. Another key feature of the 100 Days Offensive was its successful breaching of the Hindenberg Line like the battle of St Quentin Canal. It's not clear what the equivalent would be in this war - perhaps some successful attacks on the northern tip of Crimea proper.
I'm not saying this is likely per se, and it may be mere hopium, but it's a new hypothesis about Ukraine's broader strategy that's come to mind, one that I'll be updating as news comes in.
So I'm an Amateur SupCom (Supreme Commander: Forges Alliance) player... so even further afield.
But applying my non-existent expertise...
Russia hasn't been leading an "Offensive". And the maybe 10-20 km they've creeped over the past 3 months isn't anything that could "Culminate"
.
Russia has avoided all logic of maneuver warfare since about april-may, all real dynamic movement has been near non-existent, and they've "Advanced" at the slowest imaginable snails pace, even for less than full mobilization forces they have.
None of this makes sense unless you internalize the most most important stat of the war: Russian Artillery outnumbers Ukrainian artillery 10-1.
This is a scenario that there isn't really a famous war of it happening before, or atleast not one where its penetrated pop culture But it happens all the bloody time in SupCom.
Basically when you have a numerically comparable force (not outnumbered 3-1) a massive artillery advantage, and some densive capability sufficient to resist a counter-attack you can creep up to territory your opponent HAS to defend, and force them to occupy and maneuver in it under constant bombardment of your artillery.
The obvious counter to this is just to retreat slightly out of range of the artillery, let there be a large no man's land between you, and then do fast maneuvers back and forth to attack, counter attack, parry across that land so you're still fighting the enemy and not ceding net territory, but you spend a minimum of time exposed to the artillery.
The problem is there's a lot of territory you just have to defend.
Ukraine cannot just pull back off the Donbass... this isn't a grand theater war where Russia is trying to conquer the whole of Ukraine no matter what, and provinces can be sacrificed in gambits If Russia takes all the Donbass, has their land bridge, etc. They're liable just to declare victory and dig in and that'd be it... Worse the Ukrainian army is a good percentage people conscripted in the past 6 months... you start maneuvering them around too much, a lot will take that opportunity to get lost... maybe across a border.
So what do you do when you can't cede a territory, can't hold it without being overwhelmed with artillery, and can't take out the artillery?
You endure the artillery.
I've seen maybe hundreds of players design these plays where their opponent is forced to just feed units into artillery fire, and tie up tons of resources in these attrition scenarios... and none of them ever really looked like they were moving and looked like draws to untrained eyes... then the announcer would point out the kill loss ratio.
This also allowed the player with the artillery to hold a territory with a relatively small force since the enemy's cumulatively much larger stock of units is being defeated in detail over time, and never has enough in position at once to actually attack.
Some players make big strategic sacrifices to break off from this scenario, some do really risking low numbers attacks that sometimes work, some pull of something cool with airpower.
But this is really the opposite of an offensive in the classical sense... you're forcing your opponent into a situation where they have to aggress against you but can't, and ergo suffer high attrition.
.
But the big thing is this is the opposite of an offensive which can culminate. Russia is basically fighting defensively as far as I can tell and their little territorial gains exist basically to force the Ukrainians to stay at the front, and not fall back out of arty range. Even we saw how quickly Russian divisions can move in the south of Ukraine at the start of the war... Pretty much all the southern territory was taken in a month... now a tenth of that, with all the northern forces redeployed there, have been static for 4 months? If Russia was trying to do big maneuver warfare they'd either be succeeding or failing and those lines would be moving in every direction. The fact the map looks so stagnant pretty much means they have to be pursuing semi-static tactics.
More options
Context Copy link
I believe Ukraine admits it’s a war of attrition and they lack the ability to blitzkrieg.
Russia also shows a lot of weakness lately by cutting off gas to Europe. In the short term this is painful to a Europe. In the longer term Europe will find energy solutions (unless Europes just incompetent now). US had an energy crisis in 2008. We invented shale and then become energy independent. The solution to high prices ended up being high prices. Longer term Russian energy isn’t worth it for a marginal costs saving if it’s not reliable or can be used militarily against you.
This might be true, but also there is the real possibility that Europe just cannot sustain industrial competitiveness without the Russian fossil fuel resources. Survival can mean many different things. If we aren't freezing every winter thanks to our massive newly built wind/solar capacity but Germany has lost almost all its car manufacturers in the meantime, that means effectively game over for Europe. It stops being a relevant actor in the world stage and becomes a continent wide carehouse for the elderly.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It seems to me that to attain anything resembling Ukraine's maximalist goals (that is, retaking all of its original territory), a collapse of the current Russian government is an almost unavoidable precondition - the territories Russia conquered since the start of the war are one thing, but the war on the Donbass front seems to be largely fought by separatist forces who are much more highly motivated and have their backs to the wall, Crimea is nominally actually under the Russian nuclear umbrella in a way that I doubt either Ukraine or its Western backers are particularly interested in testing, and both have local populations that are likely highly hostile to the Kiev government and could probably not be pacified while Russia's promise of support remains credible. In that regard, hastening such a collapse (which would also make the actual job of reconquest significantly easier) seems like it would be a natural objective of the counteroffensive. Clear victories would of course do this, but so would baiting the Russians into making self-defeating mistakes such as general mobilisation. For the latter purpose, in particular, it seems that it would make sense to maintain the impression of steadily increasing operational intensity even if this comes at a high cost and achieves few tactical objectives. Every victory evokes a feeling of "if we couldn't hold this village now, what's going to happen next week?", and makes it just this much more likely that Putin or a critical mass of members of his inner circle will blink.
(Regarding mistakes that Russia could be baited into, I've also been curious for a while if there are any non-public "red lines" that the American alliance has communicated to Russia. There are a number of seemingly sensible actions that they seem to markedly refuse to take, including, to the dismay of Russian milbloggers, attacks on bridges (outside of that one particular one near Odessa) and power plants in the Ukrainian rear, and (to my own greater incomprehension) a WWII-style dumb carpetbombing of Avdeevka which seems to continue punching way above its moral weight in pinning down the DNR. Perhaps there is a tacit agreement to leave the bridges in Ukrainian cities intact in return for the Crimea bridge, but I could also see that such actions would motivate greater Western engagement. Of course, in that case, baiting Russia into performing them is another way to get the necessary footbullets.)
This is something fascinating to me as well and the fact that it is not discussed openly almost at all is crazy for me. Currently there are no good explanations for why Russians aren't using tried and tested shock and awe tactics like this. Why is there a single railway junction or energy plant or bridge still standing in Ukraine? The Russian explanation (they are just too humane) and the Western explanation (they don't have the capacity) are both obviously bullshit. Early in the war the sensible explanation was that Russia wanted the infrastructure intact since it would soon own them, or need it for its own troop advances. Now that doesn't look likely either.
All of this makes me think there are a lot more backroom communications and dealing going on than what is being acknowledged for PR reasons.
More options
Context Copy link
Then it's very clever of Russia to throw the remaining male population of those areas into combat: with continued Western support for Ukraine, they'll keep lining up against that wall and falling there.
I think the collapse of Russian war effort and probably government can come with little fanfare and forewarning, certainly no nuclear option.
On this note, what do you think about Kadyrov's retirement announcement?
Kadyrov is back
after Putin downvoted his previous videoMore options
Context Copy link
I don't know how much combat deaths will actually matter demographically at the current mode of warfare. Losses are still counted in (tens of) thousands, whereas the populations of the DNR (Ukraine) are counted in (tens of) millions, and, well, there isn't a lot of human capital in that entire region anyway. Both parties are still squarely in the "spend materiel, preserve people" phase of systemic warfare, where on the margin being willing to preserve people a bit less benefits you because it lets you spend your remaining materiel much more effectively.
Anything could happen, of course, but the likelihood of this strikes me as grossly overstated. I don't think that nukes are likely in absolute terms, but my modal expectation of the situation in a year is an uneasy stalemate on a frontline that doesn't look too different from the current one, not the ideas of widespread collapse of any organised externally-directed violence that seem to be based on a Western conception that Russians will wake up and realise how their narrative is largely wrong and the Western one is obviously correct any moment now.
No opinion; I've only seen it filtered through so many non-neutral intermediaries that I couldn't discern whether it was really made, let alone any subtleties about how it was made if it was.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
My superficial reading is that this offensive seems to lack many of the key features of the 100 Day Offensive. First, there is no reserve of fresh, high-morale troops that Ukraine is bringing to the fight, like the Allies did as the Americans arrived starting in 1917. Second, there seems to be no great tactical advantage that Ukraine has brought forth to help build momentum; no tanks, creeping artillery barrages, all the hard-won experience that the Allies were able to apply after years of warfare. Third, Russia is not in the position of Germany, a nation suffering under years of blockades and steadily eroding material conditions culminating in threatening by revolutions. The key factors that led to the 100 Days Offensive becoming the closing stage of the war aren't exactly in place it seems.
In turn, all your indicators seem to be generic "winning the war" signifiers. Of course, sustaining offensive momentum, taking many prisoners, reversing your enemy's gains, these are all signs that a group is winning a fight in any conflict. What would be interesting is if you could generate insight to tell if these things will happen; when could we expect this turnaround in the war's path? I have heard about many Ukrainian counteroffensives and I have seen many Russian gains reversed, but what makes you think that this time Ukraine will be able to sustain offensive momentum long-term at a critical pace?
I think high-tech weaponry has fundamentally reshaped warfare, though the final word isn't written on this.
"unbounded supply of Javelins, Stingers and Bayraktars" is the new "reserve of fresh, high-morale troops". Maybe.
I'm skeptical. The history of warfare is chock-full of people who placed their hopes on equipment rather than manpower and the results are dubious at best, especially against Russia.
But sometimes, it does work, so time will tell.
In WWI they didn't have material superiority and lost, in II they did and won. What wars are you thinking of, where sheer manpower defeated a clearly industrially superior enemy? Manpower has been irrelevant since guns.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Why would those be the thing that finally replaces the importance of capable fighting men? Why wasn't it metal weaponry (bronze or iron, your pick), or rideable horses, or heavy plate armor, or munitions armor, or gunpowder weaponry, or rifles over muskets, or fast-firing rifles, or indirect artillery, or mass motorization, or the modern tank, or precision guided weapons? What, fundamentally, has caused the ATGM to surpass all of these other advancements and so many more? Each has transformed warfare, but never to cut out the fighting man.
Materiel != Manpower.
It comes down to relative power. If you can make a weapon that lets any idiot (or, eventually, no idiot) destroy a main battle tank unassisted, then you don't need to worry very much about military training when facing tanks. Repeat mutatis mutandis for infantry, planes, drones, etc.
My take is that the West - including Turkey - is providing weapons to Ukraine that are decisively superior to what Russia is fielding.
Ok, let's take take the example of infantry, as you brought up. We already have a weapon that is so dead simple any idiot can use it, a literal "point and click" weapon that can kill a human out to hundreds of yards. It's called a rifle, they've existed for hundreds of years, and mysteriously every professional army in the world is still spending time training basic infantrymen, practicing everything from marksmanship to tactics. Any idiot can kill an enemy infantryman, but everyone really still seems to worry about training when facing infantry and keeps training their own. Mutatis mutandis...
I don't even think it's right to claim that the Javelin works for any idiot without training. The US Army specifies 80 hours of instruction for using the Javelin. Here is an article about the current conflict, with a few choice quotes: "The bottleneck for this influx of aid is training." "In Western militaries, soldiers who operate these weapons undergo weeks or months of training before firing their first live shot." All of this training for the Javelin alone is in addition to all of their other training, of course. Mutatis mutandis for every other weapon system.
Even the Javelin is not exactly an "unassisted" weapon. The thing weighs about 50 pounds, with one missile! That gets split up, so you need an ammunition bearer if you want to have any other gear... uh oh, looks like you're not "unassisted" anymore. Mutatis mutandis... Are you going to pack a Stinger with them? That's another 35 pounds, probably have to give that to someone else. Maybe you'll need something like a SAW, better bring someone else to haul that around and ammunition for it. Maybe bring a few more people to keep an eye out while you set up your launcher, maybe someone to direct all these people... oh look, we're back to an organized group, better train them all together so that they're more than a gaggle of schoolchildren.
Every step of the way, trained personnel, and plenty of them, are needed. Warfare has not been "fundamentally reshaped," these new high-tech weapons are not a replacement for trained fighting men, even if it alters how the fighting is done, or the side with the better weapons has an advantage, just like every piece of technology before them. It's the same old claims of the past repeated ad nauseum that this time it's different. I'm unimpressed this time too.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I haven't seen much of the news since they launched their offensive a few weeks ago, but has Ukraine made much progress? I was expecting more by now but I haven't heard of very much.
This map, which I've relied on as a fairly neutral source for the duration of the war - not just because it's done by Finns, mind, but it helps - shows some Ukrainian advance towards Nova Kakhova, but the team behind it is still careful in their assessments of how much progress has been made. The crucial question is, at this point, how much the Ukrainians are advancing, but what happens when the Russians inevitably try to counterattack.
I was reading a thing (probably from one of the pro-Russian sources, so salt to taste) that both sides have discovered a winning tactic that works well in this war along the lines of "temporarily occupy small village that you don't care about with an unsustainably small force -- when the enemy 'retakes' the village, quickly withdraw and level the village (plus enemy troops) to the ground with artillery".
The Russian source claimed that the russians picked this up in the early days from the Ukrainians -- so it remains to be seen whether they would fall for something like this again.
This isn't exactly a new phenomenon - it was first employed by the Germans in WWI when they abandoned trench warfare in the west in favour of a strongpoint system in late 1916. The idea would be you have a lightly held outpost line that you pre-sight for artillery fire. Troops holding this line offer minimal resistance and then withdraw in the face of an enemy attack. Then you can counterattack an over-extended and disorganized enemy with very accurate artillery and fresh troops. This tactic was also used extensively in WWII and was something the Allies would specifically train against because it was so common.
The part about "using your own villages as bait to draw the enemy in and then destroy the whole shebang" is kind of novel from the Ukrainian side -- I presume that is why the Russians were signal boosting it (make the Ukrainians look like assholes) but the fact that the Russians are now doing it right back (with some success) and Twitter is aflame whenever one side or the other "takes" some podunk town makes it noteworthy, I think.
More options
Context Copy link
Hmm. What does the counter-training for this look like?
"Just ignore them and shell the village yourself with your numerically superior artillery" seems to be the Russian approach -- remains to be seen how well this works (and it's certainly not winning any popularity contests), but tends to explain all the news we hear about this or that farm town "changing hands" near a relatively static front.
More options
Context Copy link
The general principle was that once you seized a resistance line, dig your own foxholes and prepare for immediate counter-attacks. Using German trenches/fortifications was risky because they were usually pre-sighted for artillery and booby-trapped. This might seem like an obvious concept but in the exhilaration of battle when the enemy has seemingly broken it was not second nature to soldiers, and the tendency to get caught out by German mortar/artillery fire was common among replacements. What could really blunt the effectiveness of German counterattacks was having forward artillery observers; the firepower that American or Commonwealth troops could call on at the company and platoon level was in another universe entirely from what the Germans had on offer (German soldiers often grumbled that fighting the western Allies was a "rich man's war"), and the western allies had already mapped out range tables for the whole of France before landing in Normandy. This had been recognized as important in late WWI due to the similar need for breaking up German counterattacks.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
So Ukraine has taken a few villages and Russia hasn't even counterattacked yet? Honestly pretty blackpilling.
What do you mean?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don’t know how likely this is, given how much comms, weapons, and transport tech have changed since the Great War. The relatives economies and outside support also seem categorically different.
But I really like that you’ve given concrete predictions, and I look forward to seeing whether they pan out.
More options
Context Copy link
Is there any realistic method where Ukraine has the wherewithal to actually capture a city filled with Ukrainian civilians that the Russians don't want to give back? They probably lack the will or capability to bombard it, as the Russians would go to ground among the civilian population, and in many ways a bombed out city is easier to defend than an intact one. Siege would starve the civilians long before it starved the Russians. And taking it by frontal infantry assault would cost the Ukrainians far too many men. The idea that the Ukrainians are going to take back any cities is a pipe dream.
The Russian view is that there are no Russian-controlled cities with a significant number of pro-Ukrainian civilians (as any such civilians evacuated westward shortly before or after the beginning of the war), and so Ukraine would not have any particular compunctions. I think this is plausibly true except for Kherson and maybe Berdyansk, which does call into doubt the seriousness of the counteroffensive in taking the former. Some Russians including Strelkov have been claiming that the Kherson front is a distraction to enable another offensive (the NPP or Izyum) and doing little told-you-so dances when a push against the latter commenced today.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link