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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26365 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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Do we have any reasons to believe that Russia will be stronger next year or that at least the decline of Ukraine will be faster that the one of Russia (then the artillery theorem comes into play and Ukraine is fucked).

That Russian economy won't crash because of the sanctions kicking in?

I've spent the last two years waiting for it to crash. It has definitely shrunk, but seems to have stabilized with no new sanctions on the horizon.

That Russia's military industrial complex will be able to produce enough stuff that goes boom?

It can outproduce the EU, since the EU is involved, but Russia is committed.

The biggest problem Russia has to fix if it wants to win is the quality of its officer corps. Until it's fixed it can only do frontal pushes and is incapable even of Uranus-style pincer attacks.

Of course, it can't fix it because it's afraid of its army. Look at what a single former hot dog salesman could do with his PMC. No one at the top wants a general Rohlin, a colonel Vasin or even a major Kvachkov to rise through the ranks.

Caveat: It can outproduce the EU in specific areas that are very important for Somme 2: Ukraine edition but not in other key areas like say, any plane that isn't significantly older than you.

This puts a limit on their ambitions, and REALLY incentivises them to get this done one way or the other before someone donates a 3rd string f16 block 40 NATO airforce from the 90's to Ukraine.

Ah, the coup-proofing problem. Give colonels too much independence, and you need to worry about their loyalty. Select colonels for loyalty, and you need to worry about their competence. Russia isn’t competent or efficient enough to thread that needle, so it just errs on one side rather than the other.

Even selecting for loyalty is iffy - loyalties can change quickly. Better just select for incompetence to be safe.

It works out decently for regimes which can pull it off, like Iran and the USA.

The USA, despite its many policy failures, still has a sufficiently meritocratic officer corps. And Iran, being a theocracy, uses piety instead of personal loyalty, which is much less wavering.

Well yes, because piety, either to the religious establishment joined at the hip to the state or to a set of democratic ideals, allows you to give your officers more independence.

I suspect that the spread of monarchy was a way to route around this problem; the person as an institution is a formidable combination.

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