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 -
A Tone-Shift in the Ukraine War
Lately, I've noticed that the tone of the discussion regarding Ukraine both on the Motte and on X has changed considerably. Notably, it seems that people are taking a much more pessimistic view of Ukraine's chances. The default assumption now is that Ukraine will lose the war.
I think a stalemate is still quite possible, but the more optimistic assumptions that Ukraine would regain lost territory (or comically, Crimea) are now a dead letter. So what, exactly, are our leaders thinking? Recently, Macron went off-narrative a bit, suggesting that France could send troops into Ukraine. More ominously, Secretary of State Blinken said that Ukraine will join NATO.
Perhaps Western leaders view this sabre-rattling as good for their electoral chances. And, until recently, the war was seen as a relatively cost-effective way to weaken Russia. (Sadly, this seems to have failed as Russia has freely exported oil to India and China and is making armaments in great numbers).
But what of Ukrainians themselves? Will they tire of being NATO's cat's paw? It's impossible to find good numbers on how many Ukrainian men have been killed so far in this war. It's likely in the hundreds of thousands. Towns and villages throughout the country are devoid of men, as the men (hunted by conscription) either flee, hide, or are sent to the fronts.
User @Sloot shared this nuclear-grade propoganda. While Ukrainian men fight and die in some trench, an increasing number of Ukrainian women are finding new homes (and Tinder dates) in Germany. Concern about female fidelity has always been a prominent feature of wartime propaganda. But, this takes it to a new level, since the women are in a different country, making new, better lives for themselves. How many will ever even return to Ukraine?
Ukrainian men are getting a raw deal in an effort to reconquer lost territory, whose residents probably want to be part of Russia anyway. Why should Ukrainians fight and die for some abstract geopolitical goal of NATO?
I've said it before, I'll say it again: bleeding Russia is on sale right at an amazing discount right now, so we're buying a bit.
"But [list of reasons why long term Ukraine is screwed, won't be able to get back lost territory, etc, etc]." Yeah, sure. Also Russia is exhausting itself at a very small cost to the American taxpayer.
If Russia spends years grinding away to a standstill in Ukraine, then they won't have the ability to attack any further anytime soon.
And very optimistically, it serves as a warning to other countries wanting to invade their neighbors. If they badly desire a drawn out conflict that drains their resources for no obvious gain, we'll give it to them.
I suppose this is rational, as long as your assumptions are accurate.
Is Russia exhausting itself? I’ve seen reports that their standing army right now is far large than pre war even accounting for casualties.
It seems that the Russian army was pretty rusty during the first year of the war. Logistics issues. Command issues. Not enough bodies. Etc. that seems to have been remedied. They in fact now have a great deal of experience fighting against NATO kit. And it seems like they’re doing well adapting to drones, electronic warfare, etc. I wonder how that compares to the US and NATO. We have a great deal of experience fighting the GWOT and insurgents.
All of that is to say, I wonder how Russia today compares to Russia 2021 in terms of how much of a threat they are to NATO.
And all of that says nothing about the ethics of egging on and prolonging a doomed conflict on the chance that it might weaken a geopolitical rival.
It depends on if you consider leadership or equipment attrition relevant to exhaustion, or just manpower numbers. Really, both are true simultaneously.
The Russian army is larger than it was before the war started both because (a) it mobilized- which the pre-war military on eve of invasion hadn't, and (b) it has been drawing cold war stocks for reactivation. If you define exhaustion as an inability to form big armies of vehicles that move, the Russian army isn't exhausted.
However, many of the assets that provided capabilities beyond raw numbers- say precision weapons to take out operationally relevant objectives at range rapidly to enable a manevuer offense, tanks with modernized sensors needed to survive well against ATGMs, strategic aircraft capable of maintaining airborn AWACs coverage to identify drone intrusions, highly trained officer corps to manage complex operations- are gone, and have been replaced by inferior, not superior, quality. Other assets for maintaining strategic endurance have also shown fraying- the Russian prison system for convict conscription is not, in fact, limitless, just as Russian economic interventions are not, in fact, costless and do not disprove impacts of sanctions, and the Soviet Union stockpiles are also not infinite.
Russia is dependent on iranian-style drone swarm attacks because it ran out of its much more capable cruise missiles stockpiles, and was using them at a relatively minuscule production rate afterwards- meaning that considerably less advanced air defense capabilities are required to shoot down considerably more attempts. Russia cannibalized its officer training corps in the first year of the war, using them in the front lines even before the first mobilization, leading to far less capable officers leading far more blunt attacks that were far more prone to artillery disruption and internal report falsification. Russia's prestige units started the war with near state-of-the-art armor which included about-as-modernized-as-possible end of the cold war tank models, and many of them have begun to adopt 1950s-eras tanks simply because those were the first that could be pushed through modernization because they didn't have need for the various 60s/70s/80s and beyond capability enhancing technologies. Russia started with the largest artillery army in the war and massive artillery advantages... and now is importing ammunition from North Korea which is substandard even compared to the aging soviet ammo that the Russians were using before, which is to say it's considerably more likely to explode on the wrong side of the barrel, or not explode on target, than what Russia started with. There are more examples to, from aircraft quantities to arms exports to it's energy export portfolio- a lot of things, while still continuing, are just worse than a few years ago.
Before the war, there was a joke that Russia had a large army, and a modern army, but not a large modern army. Now the modern part is dropped: Russia has a large army, and a devolved army, and it has a large devolved army. But it's still a large devolved army.
Does the inability to maintain quality of arms mean exhaustion? You'll be forgiven for thinking not, but it does imply things about Russia's ability to maintain effective offensive operations, hence the second and third order effects of relying on high-casualty tactics for relatively marginal territorial gains... which, as far larger and more aggressive armies than the Russians have demonstrated in the past, is a path to military exhaustion.
More in the short term, less in the long term.
In the short term, while quality has devolved, quantity has increased, and quantity has a quality all of its own when it's not matched by anything on the other side. While having late-WW2 tanks with cope cages is a national disgrace as far as military prestige goes, WW2 tanks still resist small arms fire, and while the loss of anti-tank capability by Ukraine/NATO is far overstated, volume does matter. If NATO were unwilling to fight for a long time, more immediate threat is worse than less but more capable immediate threat.
On the other hand, volume can be matched and overcome with time, and while the Russians were the first to mobilize to a war economy, the Europeans both can- and more recently have begun to- recognize themselves as in a military-industrial race which they need to compensate for being late too, and as they begin to catch up in volume, quality starts to matter more again. Comparisons to the Gulf War of the 90s aren't accurate, but aren't entirely wrong either: if the only way for Russian military units to survive is under air defense bubbles, they aren't advancing and the economic differences will start to add with yet more time.
As such, the European-NATO nightmare is that they have to face the Russian mobilized force in the near term, before they have the time to re-arm. As such, the Ukrainians are both a time and a scale buffer: if the Ukrainians give up, the Europeans risk facing the threat sooner before they mobilize, but if the Ukrainians keep fighting the Europeans both increase their time to re-arm and decrease the capabilities they have to arm against (because Ukraine will continue to attrit the Russian capabilities / wear down that Soviet stockpile / eat tens of thousands of more rounds of artillery with their trench lines).
This is a significant reason as to why the Europeans will likely keep supporting Ukraine even if the US fully ceases to (say, under Trump). Ukraine capitulating increases the risk of a threat the Europeans are less likely to conventionally match (the larger-but-devolved RUS conventional forces), while Ukraine resisting increases the European posture vis-a-vis the Russians.
More options
Context Copy link
I thought the Russian economy lacked the ability to replace expended or destroyed high tech equipment. Or recently destroyed oil infrastructure for that matter. They could be throwing large amounts of effectively unreplacabe materiel at Ukraine. And then none will be left for other uses. Bleeding them.
I have little doubt in their ability to field many men for a long time and gradually grind at the Ukrainians. I don't take more men under arms as a sign of economic strength for them. But it doesn't matter since our ""allies"" in Europe will fund them more and more through oil purchases so their GDP will grow merely by being a petrostate.
Ukrainians have agency and I am not at all sympathetic to arguments we are egging them on when we give them the arms they ask for. Or that hastening their brutalization by Russia is somehow a moral good.
If Ukrainians didn't want to fight, they won't. People have their own agency, and no amount of cajoling and money got the Pashtuns to fight for 'Afghanistan' or Cubans to fight against Castro. Remember that Azov started as a wholly domestic Mariupol militia because they really really hated Russians, and Slovyansk had a shitload of people leave because they did not want to stay under Russian - sorry 'Novorossiya' rule. I maintain that if the west pulled all support entirely to Ukraine we would see many more one way suicide drone strikes against refineries, and that the west is maintaining support to Ukraine to avoid further collapse of energy market infrastructure
Most arguments about Russia busting sanctions and their army being regenerated are cope. Muscovy resents being looked down on; their pretensions of continued luxury with their cheap chinese knockoffs and inability to be seen buying the real deal in Paris or Milan smarts far more than just not wearing it, not to mention the endless bitching from Muscovites about their life now being more difficult. Similarly, the Russian army going from BMPT (or more realistically BMP3) to MTLB and BMP1 is hardly an upmuscling of the RuAF (a different argument about whether upgrading from MTLB to BMP3 makes any difference can be made but thats separate to this thread.)
Ultimately, the Russians are likely to grind through the Ukrainians regardless, but the sanctions will leave them an embittered and lesser (in their own eyes) people, deservedly disrespected for their incompetence at defeating their weak and corrupt cousins at the outset and resorting to WW2 era cope.
I'm mostly agree but it seems that most of the Ukrainians want to fight in abstract, as country, but not themselves, as the existence and unpopularity of mobilization show. You don't close the borders for fighting-age males if you aren't suspecting that they will choose to run from the country instead of risking their lives for it.
Yes, most want some other countryman to fight. Conscription always has this tension of 'are we getting the right bodies in the fight' and right now, especially since mid 2023 we can posit that war enthusiasm has died down with the calculus shifting on where Ukraines maximal capability is following Ukrainian failures even with the much vaunted European armour. Mobilization in any country has never been popular, with responses ranging 'bitching about it' to 'fragging the Lt'. On this front I will give Russians a measure of credit, the sheer number of buryats and tajiks enthusiastically clambering into shitboxes to catch a mine is quite amazing.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link