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On its face, and from my comfy armchair, consuming my western news, the invasion of Ukraine seems like such a colossal waste of human lives and military power.
When I think about other recent conflicts, the ones that come to mind were also incredibly wasteful, but they make sense to me in a way that the Ukraine war does not (maybe because I'm not russian?). The recent examples that come to mind are the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the American defense of South Vietnam. These were arguably also very wasteful but maybe not on the scale of the Ukraine war. Are these good analogies for the war in Ukraine?
My initial ideas relate to the idea that Russia had a lot of military power that was sitting around unused and a bunch of petro income that made any sanctions less meaningful. Maybe the invasion/war hasn't actually been costly? Perhaps Russian leaders (and the hawks among them) saw nationalist fracturing of the tech supply chain coming anyways and this just accelerates it?
What does Russia get for the tremendous expenditure of resources in the invasion and following conflict? Is there some piece of context that helps the invasion make sense to a westerner?
Small scale, huh?
I’m not an expert, and I think trawling Twitter for OSINT and tell-all insiders is a waste of time. So my suspicion is not specific to Russia. No, I think what we’re seeing today is the natural consequence of two factors.
First, waging war is hard. Consider the Falklands War: one side was a second-rate Cold War navy, and the other was Argentina. In less than 3 months, over 1000 people were killed, three times as many were injured, and millions of dollars of aircraft, ships, and munitions were thrown into the ocean. Ultimately, the UK held the islands and their population of less than 2,000 souls.
For a more thorough write up, I recommend SSC user @bean’s rather extensive series, especially Logistics at Ascension and Siege Pt. 1. Suffice to say that getting materiel in place was hard, avoiding mishaps was hard, but contact with an enemy was harder. Imperfect information and tactics made for a series of bloody jabs rather than any decisive action.
Now compare Russia. More troops, more armor, more artillery. Shorter supply lines and more reliable communications. Which brings us to the second point: people don’t want to believe the first. They want to improve on Blitzkrieg and take out all major resistance with their superior military. Seems like a much better deal, yeah? Especially when imperfect information strikes again. I don’t know if Putin’s advisors are yes-men or incentivized to boast, but for one reason or another they gave the wrong assessment of Ukraine’s durability.
So it is a waste—but it might not have been.
Fair point, I looked it up, and the Vietnam war is much bigger in scale (so far).
If I recall correctly, NATO estimates casualties in the hundreds of thousands for either side in the Ukraine war (to be fair these claims aren’t necessarily accurate because there is an ongoing conflict)
On the other hand, the sum total of the American casualties for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan (including 1991) are far lower than for either side in Ukraine.
Seems like materiel losses in those conflicts (excluding Vietnam) are similarly much lower. This indicates to me that whatever benefits were gleaned from those conflicts had a lower cost than whatever Russia will get out of invading Ukraine.
(Civilian casualties are another matter, I’m mostly interested in the military cost/benefit here)
I used this resource to estimate American casualties in all of the Middle East conflicts: https://dcas.dmdc.osd.mil/dcas/app/conflictCasualties
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