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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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So as far as I can tell, Russia is losing this war, as it is almost a year later and they have failed to complete their objectives in forcing Ukraine back into their sphere of influence or secured territorial integrity. All observers assumed Russia would swiftly win this war, but their armies and industry are in such a shambles that they are unable to defeat the Ukrainians in the field and are reduced to terror bombing with artillery and missiles.

Against an inferior foe which they (according to Serge) have destroyed multiple times over. How could you not have great gains against a numerically and qualitatively inferior foe?

Does this sound like the strength of a great power to you?

The 'attritional strategy', so as far as I know, is a cope. There was no grand plan to grind the Ukranian resolve to fight through manpower and material because that would be planning for defeat, and even worse, planning for defeat against an inferior power. Now Russia is isolated and scraping the bottom of the barrel for allies while the entirety of the Western military-industrial complex is pumping every available resource into the country.

The Soviets, with their empire, couldn't match the American spend on military, much less all of NATO. How can the Russian Federation - a faded, declining power in comparison - hope to match a richer, larger version of the alliance? So as long as the Ukrainians want to fight, they will have the latest and greatest in NATO arms. The only hope for the Russians was to win early and decisively. If Serge's narrative is for a long war then there really is no hope of victory left - one that is worth throwing away the last of the Russian youth and prosperity.

reduced to terror bombing with artillery and missiles.

As far as I can tell, you are taken in with propaganda. There's terror bombing in Ukraine, but most of that was going the other way, and always explained as 'Donbass has been shelling itself since '14)

The recent 'terror bombing' by a repurposed anti-ship missile was almost certainly a successful interception that failed to detonate.

I say this because the missile Kh-55 is well within the parameters of S-300 which Ukraine uses, yet they're lying about this, in spite of the data showing it's well within the abilities of S-300 is all over the web, and you can also find reports of past intercepts by UA, as The Times noted.

The Arestovych who admitted the truth due to possibly miscommunication had to resign.

The Soviets, with their empire, couldn't match the American spend on military, much less all of NATO. How can the Russian Federation - a faded, declining power in comparison - hope to match a richer, larger version of the alliance?

...uh... what? No, seriously, you think present-day US military or NATO as a whole has more conventional weaponry than it had back in the day?

That's beyond laughable, as any look at the order of battle, production numbers and so on would reveal. I thought it was common knowledge that conventional forces have contracted greatly not just in Russia?

Russia has some major problems with its army and industrial organisation, as despite being able to produce as much as steel as US in WW2, and something like ..20% of world's fertilizers, they don't have all the artillery ammo they need at the moment.

The quality of military analysises on the web is very low as usual.

People think that if the U.S was invading Ukraine they could do it in a matter of months, spoiler: they can't.

Firstly occidental populations are past the point of dying for killing humans, the number of americans willing to die is a scarcer resources than in authoritarian countries.

Secondly, war has changed the prior advantage of air superiority and tank superiority is gone. Anti air such as S-300s have broken the economics and impact of aviation. Secondly ATGMs have broken the economics of tanks.

This is it, we can no longer make disruptive military attacks, it's all a slow attrition and geographic crabbing, with extreme losses of military machines.

I could argue that soviet miltary machines are in many regards highly superior to their U.S counterparts both in metrics and in economics but that is besides the point, for both superpowers, the efficiency and economics of past wars is long gone as Ukraine spectacularly shows.

The only remaining "hopes" for military tactical disruption would either be true drone swarming, which russia doesn't do enough, or tactical nuclear bombs, or bio-weapons or a much more highly targeted attack on the energy infrastructure of Ukraine.

The only classical card Russia has not played is the real terror bombing of using bombers which russia has not used a single time in this war. While modern antiair would destroy a lot of bombers during a swarm, if russia sent enough they would achieve disruptive destruction also, it would be interesting to see the TU-160 in action since it is the fastest military aircraft to exists.

edit tu-160 is the fastest bomber, not the fastest aircraft.

It is the largest and heaviest Mach 2+ supersonic military aircraft ever built and second to the experimental XB-70 Valkyrie in overall length. As of 2022, it is the largest and heaviest combat aircraft, the fastest bomber in use and the largest and heaviest variable-sweep wing airplane ever flown.[2]

  • -16

Anti air such as S-300s have broken the economics and impact of aviation. Secondly ATGMs have broken the economics of tanks.

  1. Whether integrated air defenses can truly withstand competent airforces who also have things such as stealth cruise missile is unclear

Secondly ATGMs have broken the economics of tanks.

  1. Oh yeah. Is an ATGM cheaper or more expensive than the dead simple dumb muniition used by APS systems ? Cause these aren't expensive to make, and almost completely negate legacy ATGMs unless paired with a sophisticated jamming attack ..

APS surely are an interesting topic:

The U.S does not yet seems to have a soft kill APS in production but Russia uses the

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shtora-1 on T-80 and (all?) T-90s

According to the manufacturers, Shtora decreases the chances of a tank being hit by an anti-tank missile, such as the Dragon, by a factor of 4–5:1.[10]

While russia has in addition 3 generations of hard kill APS, the U.S has 2 independent proof of concept models

first APS in history:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drozd

Although reported to offer an 80% increase in survival rate during its testing in Afghanistan, the radar was unable to adequately detect threats and the firing of its rockets caused unacceptably high levels of collateral damage.[1]

later succeded with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arena_(countermeasure)

The computer has a reaction time of 0.05 seconds and protects the tank over a 300-degree arc, everywhere but the rear side of the turret. The system engages targets within 50 metres (55 yd) of the vehicle it is defending, and the ammunition detonates at around 1.5 metres (1.6 yd) from the threat.[10] It will engage any threat approaching the tank between the velocities of 70 metres per second (230 ft/s) and 700 metres per second (2,300 ft/s), and can detect false targets, such as outgoing projectiles, birds and small caliber bullets.[11] Arena works during the day and night, and the lack of electromagnetic interference allows the system to be used by multiple vehicles as a team.[23] The 27-volt system requires approximately one kilowatt of power, and weighs around 1,100 kilograms (2,400 lb).[11] Arena increases a tank's probability of surviving a rocket-propelled grenade by between 1.5[11]–2 times.[24]

Despite being very interesting, It seems this system is not in use but is available for export versions

Last gen deployed on Armata vehicles:

Afganit (Russian: Афганит, lit. 'Afghanite') is a Russian active protection system (APS) employed on modern Russian Armata family of vehicles.[1] It is intended to supersede the Arena APS and utilises radar and electro-optical sensors in the ultraviolet and infrared bands.[2][3] The millimeter-wavelength radar detects and tracks incoming anti-tank munitions. The system can reportedly intercept armour-piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot kinetic energy penetrators in addition to high-explosive anti-tank (HEAT) munitions.[4][5] Currently, the maximum speed that can be intercepted is 1,700 m/s (Mach 5.0), with projected future increases of up to 3,000 m/s (Mach 8.8).[6] According to news sources, it protects the tank from all sides.[7][8]

A few armata (not the T-14) have been seen in Ukraine but not meaningfully deployed yet.

Interestingly Ukraine has its own APS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaslin_Active_Protection_System however I have no clue how much it is used in practice?

About the US prototype APS:

n 2006–2007, the Institute for Defense Analysis found Quick Kill to be relatively immature and had significant development risks. Important components such as the radar were not yet fully developed and testing of the system as a whole was on hold while the warhead was redesigned. They also found Trophy, which uses a shotgun-like kill mechanism, to be the most mature of the 15 systems they analyzed.

while the other one seems promising:

However, in August 2018 the Army decided not to continue qualifying Iron Curtain onto the Stryker, saying that while the system "generally worked in concept" and was "generally able to hit its targets," it was still not mature enough.[11]

China recently deployed the GL-5 which has a range of 100 meters, twice that of arena (no clue for afganit)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GL5_Active_Protection_System

innovative since it launch 2 rockets.

The irsaely trophy seems interesting. Gun based.

almost completely negate legacy ATGMs unless paired with a sophisticated jamming attack ..

This is an unrealistic claim as of yet.

Firstly as we can see, at least for Russia and the U.S, hard kill APS are nothing more than uncertain and possibly buggy proof of concepts.

Russia did deploy some successfully in afghanistan but the fact they didn't deploy them shows that the tech is mostly not ready.

It could be that the new APS system on armatas is disruptives and working well, but that is unproven. It's possible but uncertain that using recent machine learning techniques would yield lower danger/false positives but given the classical inertia, if that were the answer, we're not ready to see that deployed until 20 years, and even so ML techniques have generally dangerous error rates.

It would be interesting to evaluate how much deployed in the wild are the ukrainian and chinese and israeli APS systems are though.

and what about hard kill APS for aircrafts/helicos?

As for soft kill APS, well russia is the only to have one widely deployed but Ukraine still manage to destroy T-90s just fine.

beyond the real world production ready-ness/falsepositives issues/safety of hard kill APS, what the manufacturer says is not necessarily objective truth

about the range, the claimed 360 degree coverage, reaction time, etc

especially I suspect many APS are weak and possibly useless against top-down attacking ATGMS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_protection_system#Top_attack_munitions

Overall I am very curious about the future of this technology and we might get answers either by:

studying academic papers/experiments about them

waiting for a china-taiwan war (unlikely)

waiting for a new israel based war (no idea)

waiting for the ukrainian APS system to be deployed or for western countries giving APS to ukraine (e.g. germany supposedly has one)

waiting for the armata systems to see some action in Ukraine, most likely but only if the war last a few years.

But your initial point is wrong, ATGMs have currently and probably for the foreasable future, destroyed tanks economics.

This is an unrealistic claim as of yet.

No, pretty much Israeli trophy use fighting Hezbollah showed that is the case.

Feel free to prove me wrong there, however. That's what I remember as being the case.

Also, iirc, US and other NATO are going to buy Trophy and install it.

People think that if the U.S was invading Ukraine they could do it in a matter of months, spoiler: they can't.

Well, if USA would invade Ukraine then large part of population would be really happy and even larger part would immediately start to think how to profit from that.

Even if we assume that Ukrainian military fights as much as it can, then we get Gulf War rerun.

the number of americans willing to die is a scarcer resources than in authoritarian countries.

Still larger enough to maintain military.

Anti air such as S-300s have broken the economics and impact of aviation.

not sure

Secondly ATGMs have broken the economics of tanks.

Definitely not true.

This is it, we can no longer make disruptive military attacks

And that is why Kharkiv offensive has not happened.

bio-weapons

that is a dead end as far as military use goes, mentioning them seriously is really weird here

The only remaining "hopes" for military tactical disruption

Or proper use of existing tools. Assuming no nukes, USA would be able to simultaneously take Kyiv and Moscow and all major cities in both Ukraine and European part of Russia. Even if Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Finland and Baltic states would be hostile to USA.

If USA army would deploy in Ukraine (and gremlins would steal Russian nukes) then the war would be over within months - and that is only because Crimea would be really annoying to retake without heavy casualties.

That is why America entered into a grueling, year+ long advance and retreat conflict with Iraq which completely degraded the 11th armored cav and the rangers and needed to reactivate the draft leading to... Wait a second, that didn't happen at all!

Listen, if a wizzard magicked all nukes out of existence, Nato could turn Russia into a parkinglot in a couple weeks. Shit, the US could probably do it on their own.

They would then inevitably lose the occupation, but lets not talk about that.

So what the worlwide coalition in the gulf war managed to destroy Irak air defense quickly and that allows you to generalize from a single event to the U.S having a power that make it transcend Russia performance in Ukraine? What is this imaginary magic technology they have that disrupt their abilties? None, you are just wishful thinkingly over-generalizing.

I have not extensively studied Irak military but:

  • They had osbolete air-defense, zero S-300..

  • I have heard that the Irakis aircrafts pilots universally refused to fly, no will to fight what a joke

“When United States and coalition forces invaded Iraq in 2003 [during Operation Iraqi Freedom], they faced no Iraqi Air Force opposition. Not one Iraqi warplane attacked the invaders as they proceeded toward Baghdad,” Daniel L. Haulman, PhD Air Force Historical Research Agency.

It seems they didn't use air force significantly in gulf war either.

  • probably not enough modern ATGMs and probably no GLONAS/GPS

So Irak air defense and will to fight was basically in practice a joke, not something comparable to Ukraine in any realistic way.

Note though that during the Vietnam war, North Vietnam even with virtually no air force managed to take down a crazy high number of U.S planes: 8,540 + 1,351 allied

Nato could turn Russia into a parkinglot in a couple weeks.

A groundless childish fiction based on a weak and uncomparable single event with zero a priori argument, the only one would be the 100 million dollars "stealth" F-35 on which I call bullshit as being not enough to disrupt a war especially considering their weak payloads, maintenance burden and vast detectability loopholes. Besides that point U.S and russian hardware are largely comparable in most cases.

the TU-160 is... the fastest military aircraft to exists.

You might have drunk a bit too deep of the propaganda.

You are right I misremembered but:

It is the largest and heaviest Mach 2+ supersonic military aircraft ever built and second to the experimental XB-70 Valkyrie in overall length. As of 2022, it is the largest and heaviest combat aircraft, the fastest bomber in use and the largest and heaviest variable-sweep wing airplane ever flown.[2]

Well that's all well and good, but you could say exactly the same things about Ghani's Afghanistan vs. the Taliban. Indeed, the Taliban had zero state resources compared to Russia's nonzero. But despite receiving infinity NATO materiél, Ghani's Afghanistan fell the instant there weren't Coalition troops on the ground. Ukraine doesn't have Coalition troops on the ground, therefore...

I find it pretty hard to cast the Russians in the role of the Taliban considering that the Taliban was the group resisting a foreign invasion and not the other way around. The Americans lost to the Taliban despite not even resorting to drafting soldiers, why do you think the Russians are ahead of the curve on this?

I feel like I'm being gish-gallopped here, because now you're moving the goalposts into the conscript/professionalism of the army and home ground advantage and whatever. The only point I'm making is that receiving a jillion dollars' worth of NATO aid didn't help the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan much, so there's hardly a guarantee it'll help Ukraine. Indeed, iirc pre-war Ukraine was about as corrupt as Afghanistan, so we might expect most of the materiél is getting pawned rather than used on the front, which is why the NATO dollars weren't much use in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan fell apart because the government wasn't full of rabid nationalists but full of tribals profiteering off the war.

It's a completely different situation in Ukraine.

No, I'm pretty sure that the NATO dollars weren't any use in Afghanistan was because Islamic republic of Afghanistan troops saw Islamic emirate of Afghanistan forces and promptly surrendered or ran away. This does not appear to be a major problem for the Ukrainian Army. Despite a lot of the aid getting embezzled, IRA forces generally held an equipment advantage over taliban troops, they just refused to fight(and thus lost).

The only point I'm making is that receiving a jillion dollars' worth of NATO aid didn't help the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan much, so there's hardly a guarantee it'll help Ukraine.

What does helping Ukraine mean to you? The last big movement of the war, the Kherson retreat, was enabled by Western long range artillery making the supply situation of the Russians on the western side of the Dnepr untenable. There are hours of video material showing how Western weapons are being used effectively by the Ukrainian forces.

The Afghan army, aside from never receiving gear as advanced as Ukraine, had a fundamental issue with morale. This is not the case in the current war AFAICT. The comparison with Afghanistan seems like a stretch to me.

iirc pre-war Ukraine was about as corrupt as Afghanistan

Not according to the Corruption Perceptions Index:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

Naturally an imperfect measure, but do you have a better one?