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Since @greyenlightenment suggested a list of topics that weren't getting enough attention in the previous CWR thread, I decided to write a bit about Russia-Ukraine situation.
The summer campaign has ended, and Ukraine has found itself in an unenviable situation. The much-hyped counteroffensive has achieved only marginal gains, but the EU has exhausted its disposable stocks of arms and armor and the US, which has enough disposable firepower to zone rouge a medium-sized country, is a) not a charity and b) kinda getting busy with other stuff.
All this means Ukraine knows it won't be able to conduct further offensive operations and its most important medium-term goal is to not lose. There are multiple ways it can lose:
Having so many ways to lose means the time is ripe for a ceasefire or even peace negotiations, but when your adversary smells blood they won't be satisfied with just what they have. So Ukraine either:
One of the things about the war I've been thinking about lately is how hard it has been to predict what's going to happen next. I'm not sure if there's anyone with a clear bill of being able to predict even the grand trends of the war for the entire duration. To have that you'd need to have:
All things considered, while my guess would be some sort of a ceasefire during this winter with frontlines wherever they are, I fully also acknowledge this has all the chances of being wrong with something else happening, though who knows what.
I haven't been accurate for the entire duration (the start of the war was indeed surprising) and I don't think picking a specific date is terribly important either, but I've actually been fairly consistent in my beliefs on the Ukraine conflict since before we got kicked off reddit and if anyone actually took the bets I was offering I'd have a 100 percent success rate so far. I think that you're right when you say that predicting the individual events that happen is insanely difficult, the general trend of the war is very easy to work out and extrapolate (the massive nuclear power is going to defeat the small economic backwater immediately adjacent to and financially dependent upon it). People just don't do that because the conclusions you come up with when you take a dispassionate look at the situation aren't very popular on twitter or facebook.
You mean like how the USSR and the US won against Afghanistan?
It's easy to flip this too and say the combined economic output of NATO vs Russia means Russia is destined to lose. That would be a similarly sophomoric analysis.
After Russia started gearing up for a long war and China signaled it didn't want to give overt military support to Russia, it became an almost certainty that the war would be determined by how much military support the West was willing to give to Ukraine. That, and the outside possibility of a black swan event probably from the Russian side.
There are multiple differences that make that comparison useless even in the incredibly glib phrasing I used - financially dependent specifically. But if you want to get into all of the reasons why the course of this war was largely predictable we'd be here for a while.
If you look at the ability to produce arms and materiel, NATO is actually the loser when compared to Russia and Russia's allies (China, Iran, North Korea etc). Comparing NATO to Russia alone isn't really that useful anyway, given that this is a conflict between a NATO proxy and Russia, as opposed to all out war between all of NATO and Russia alone.
I disagree - the west isn't actually able to give Ukraine enough military support to change the ultimate outcome of the conflict. They're currently running out of Ukrainians (you don't start conscripting women and 17 year olds if you have a choice) and they're continuing to run out of territory too. If you're interested in an article that gets my perspective on the conflict across fairly accurately, I recommend https://www.ecosophia.net/notes-on-stormtrooper-syndrome/
The big point here would be China, but since China isn't overtly sending arms to Russia it's a non-factor for this analysis. NATO or even just the EU completely trounce Russia + Iran + NK in terms of manufacturing output, but the problem is political will. You're correct that most people in the West don't really see the war as all that important, which is why the will isn't there.
The arguments saying Ukraine will run out of people are just as silly as the Western articles that predicted that Russia would run out of tanks or missiles. Both types of analyses ignore the fact that new people/tanks/missiles are maturing/convalescing or being produced constantly. There's certainly an argument to be made that Ukraine digging deeper into it's manpower pool will lead to problems in force quality, like how Russia could become production-constrained in terms of certain types of equipment. But this will simply be a force-(de)multiplier that interacts with other strengths and weaknesses. It's silly to think it will be decisive by itself. Most casualty estimates from credible sources have actually been fairly low for a conventional war that's been going on for nearly 2 years.
Incorrect. Military manufacturing takes time to spin up, and the factories that could be converted into arms and materiel factories were moved to China and various other nations. Do you know what the difference in naval manufacturing ability between China and the US is? China has 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the USA. The numbers for various other capabilities are starkly different as well, and this is a problem because ammunition factories take time to start up and you need to train people to work at them as well. Political will makes a difference, but it doesn't matter how much political will there is - you can't convert a manufacturing facility into an arms/ammunition factory when it was sold off to China ten years ago and the town that used to support it is now full of fentanyl zombies, nor can you build a new one in two seconds instead of a year no matter how hard you vote.
There's a big difference between people and ammunition - people take a lot longer to make. If you get started right now, it takes at least 18 years and 9 months to produce a human being, and there are some pretty severe bottlenecks in the process as well (like the number of fertile women). But moreover, there's a bigger difference between those two claims, which is evidence. The Russians are still shooting shells and raining down artillery - but the Ukraine is currently failing to meet mobilisation girls and there's video evidence of women being sent to the frontlines, along with photos of teenaged boys going through military training. Casualty numbers are hard to come by, but the ones I've seen certainly match up with the Ukraine being forced to send women into the field.
On your first point, most of what you're saying is true, but again it must be said that China isn't overtly supporting Russia by sending weapons. If it was, the war would be a completely different ball game. Comparing just NATO countries to Russia (and NK + Iran), the overall manufacturing potential is still overwhelmingly in favor of NATO despite deindustrialization. Political will is the utter decisive factor here, as factories indeed take time to be converted to warmaking potential, but it's been almost 2 years now and quite little progress has been made since there's a distinct lack of urgency.
They're not getting started right now though. Humans don't just start reproducing when a war breaks out, it's a continuous pipeline. Your comment on the 18 years thing is like you're implying there wasn't a single person in Ukraine under the age of 18 when the war broke out, but that's obviously not what you're saying since that's just totally goofy. I really don't know what point you're trying to make here.
Most casualty estimates I've seen are around 150-200K for the Ukrainian side, which is nowhere close to using up all the men in Ukraine. You could double it AND factor in a huge Ukrainian population loss from refugees, and it still wouldn't come close. There have been corruption issues in the Ukrainian mobilization pipeline since the war began, so the anecdotes about women or septuagenarians being kidnapped and being put into uniform are likely that, plus some degree of issues regarding force quality as I mentioned earlier. Mobilization wasn't exactly pretty on the Russian side when they had their big drive, even though they were pulling from a population 4x the size.
Implying a black and white picture of Ukraine being on the verge of having all its military-aged men being dead simply isn't credible.
In terms of ammunition and military supplies, Russia seems to have a clear advantage in the current conflict. Just to be clear, I'm of the opinion that starting this conflict with Russia was a terrible misstep on the part of the west, and the consequences of Western defeat are going to be nasty.
The point was about how any interventions designed to produce more people are going to take a very long time to bear fruit, and the personnel situation really can't be fixed at this point in time.
I don't think we're going to get credible or accurate information about the exact casualty numbers out of Ukraine - there's too much incentive to lie for everybody involved in the process. But every single other indicator we see shows Ukraine having serious recruiting issues, failing to meet mobilisation targets and sending women to the front - which are all things that would not be happening if they had a healthy pool of recruits and lots of manpower.
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