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Long-Term Lessons from the Ukraine War
A few very important lessons have been learned from the war so far:
1: Big dumb platforms are dead. Anti-tank weapons have shredded the most advanced tanks Russia had, and there is little evidence that Merkavas, Challengers, or Abrams would fare much better.
For tanks, APCs, or other large vehicles to survive, they need to get much smarter. They need electronic systems to foil the countless tank-killers that float in the air or mount on a shoulder. Even so, they would not survive the overhead drone dropping a small bomb directly on top. I am skeptical that the future battlefield will have tanks — they are analogous to suits of armor meeting firearms.
2: Manned fighters and bombers are done. There is almost nothing left in their purview that cannot be done as well by a drone, missile, or artillery shell. All the governments that spend and spend to keep the guy in the cockpit will have to abandon those programs.
The best way to defeat drones or missiles, on the other hand, is to blind or confuse them. This can be done directly or by intercepting/hacking their signals. Warfare is going to become ever more electronic.
3: Artillery, with drone spotters, work extremely well. There are countless videos of artillery shells achieving incredible hit rates on vehicles hiding in forests or next to high buildings.
Knowledge becomes ever more important. Whoever has – and can keep – a dominant edge in real-time surveillance can, with intelligent and motivated troops, outfox a larger enemy every time.
Thoughts?
Published in General
Its population has been steadily decreasing since 1992, from 148 million to 139 million. Its birth rate is 1.5. Its immigration rate is only barely higher than its emigration rate, and its population is aging rapidly.
Here’s a demographic pyramid where you can really see the sharp post-Soviet drop in birth-rate:
That apparent recovery in 0-4 and 5-9 brackets is suspicious, as a couple years ago they just “found” a few million kids who hadn’t been previously reported. But even if it does exist, it doesn’t even get the total numbers of those age cohorts up to *any* single Soviet-era cohort. The future belongs to the people who show up, and the Russians aren’t showing up.
(I’ll grant that China’s demographics are even worse, with the Chinese population estimated to drop by half in less than 30 years.)
@saintaugustine, what’s this style of argument / attack called? I saw it a lot from the late anarcho-libertarian contingent around here. Seems it’s coming back.
That timeline was excellent. It’s a keeper.
1.
Total fertility rates (Russia and an assortment of NATO countries, with Ukraine included for good measure; descending order): Estonia 1.58, Latvia 1.55, UK 1.56, Germany 1.53, Russia 1.50, Lithuania 1.48, Norway 1.48, Poland 1.38, Finland 1.37, … Ukraine 1.22.
2.
Population median age (same as above): Germany 47.8, Lithuania 44.5, Latvia 44.4, Estonia 43.7, Finland 42.8, Poland 41.9, Ukraine 41.2, UK 40.5, Russia 40.3, Norway 39.5.
3.
If you were to select, say, a random 100,000 Russian high school diploma holders and compare their language, math, and science knowledge to that of a random 100,000 U.S. high school diploma holders, you’d find that the former group would blow the latter out of the water. The results would be quite similar at the college diploma level.
No, because Franklin’s statement was to the representatives of rebellious colonies with aspirations of becoming states. How exactly does that make Europe our colony?
That’s quite a cavalierly dismissive statement, given the multitude of people who had been warning about the dangers thereof over the past 20 years or so (see link below), among whom are …
… George Kennan, Henry Kissinger, Bob Gates (U.S. SecDef ’06-’11, CIA Dir ’91-’93), Jack Matlock (U.S. Amb. to USSR ’87-’91), William Perry (U.S. SecDef ’94-97), Bill Burns (U.S. Amb. to Russia ’05-’08 and current CIA Dir), Sir Roderic Lyne (U.K. Amb. to Russia ’00-’04), George Beebe (former CIA Chief Russia analyst and VP Dick Cheney’s Special Advisor on Russia and Eurasia), et al.
Link: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1498491107902062592.html
Appeasement frequently has big-name champions. I do not care.
Because it’s to your benefit? If you strip it down, colonialism is about extracting economic surplus from another country. It’s arguable that the dollar being the world’s reserve currency does just that because so much of the world’s money is invested in US bonds. It keeps the dollar up and thereby US living standards up.
When push comes to shove they do what you tell them to.
If you’re Spain, perhaps.
England felt that it had more to offer.
English/Anglosphere colonialism is the best that ever happened to most places where it happened.
This is how it worked for the British in India, first in the form of the East India Company. In 1776 (approx) the Company won a few large battles with the Mughals, the outcome of which was that the Company was given the right to collect taxes in Bengal, Orissa and Bihar (about a third of North India). They raised taxes (of course), spent two thirds of them of running their local administration and used a third of them to buy products from India which they then sold for profit. Breaking it down, that one third of taxes was the region’s economic surplus. And this approach was taken as the Company spread its grip.
This went about as well you would expect, with the Mutiny bursting out in 1857. This was brutal, and was brutally put down. And the British Govt ended up dissolving the Company (which was as entwined in British politics as that amount of money would lead you to expect) and taking over to rule directly – and Queen Victoria became Empress of India.
Of course Her Majesty’s Govt didn’t directly engage in vulgar trade, so the extraction mechanism had to change. Here’s how it worked. If somebody in (for eg) Germany wanted to buy South Indian silk, they needed Indian Rupees. To get these, the Germans would need to pay London (gold or whatevermarks etc.) and in return get a promissary note. This promissary note was then given to their Indian supplier in exchange for the silk, the supplier took the note to a central bank in India and was paid in Indian Rupees.
Where did these Indian Rupees come from, I hear you wondering. Well. Under the Raj the British taxed India (hard), spent two thirds of what they collected on local administration and spent the remaining one third on redeeming these promissary notes. So the same basic skimming process. The difference being that India’s economic surplus moved from accummulating in the Company’s coffers to accummulating in the British treasury directly. (Whence, apparently, a lot of it was invested in North America, so it’s a small world I guess.)
That’s also how the railways worked. In British India they were backed by Government bonds sold in London – very popular, because of the very high rate of return they promised. Of course the railways returned no such profit, so the bond holders were then paid by raising taxes in the areas the railways passed through. Another way of extracting surplus. It will not surprise you that a mile of train track built in India at that time cost five times what a mile of train track built in North America did – all backed by the British Govt (Indian tax payer).
Russia is middle of the road for Europe. The US are #1 for large countries. (China is for a select subset of students.)
The sentiment expressed in the second half of the last sentence is what global-scale Realpolitik is all about, and always has been since the “end” of the Cold War. What that amounts to in current terms, it seems to me, is …
Russia knows that the U.S./NATO and China have been continually salivating at the thought of its collapse and have continually schemed to help that happen. Just as China knows that the U.S./Japan/Australia/New Zealand/etc. and Russia have been continually salivating at the thought of its collapse and have continually schemed to help that happen. And just as the U.S./NATO/Japan/Australia/New Zealand/etc. know that China and Russia have been continually salivating at the thought of their collapse and have continually schemed to help that happen.
Since the day/month/year that all of the 3 main geopolitical players mentioned above (i.e. U.S, China, and Russia) have all had nuclear weapons capability, however, DIRECT confrontations between/among them became highly, shall we say, inadvisable. Hence, “proxy” type wars.
The Ukraine War, in my estimation, is just such a war. A proxy war. It appears (based on the aforementioned second half of your last sentence) to be that type of war in YOUR (and many, many others’) estimation, too.
No?
That’s about right. In balancing whether to get involved in any conflict, we have to evaluate costs, gains, sides, principles, and risks. As I said, I’m pro-self-determination and anti-imperialist in principles, so I’m in favor of helping anyone being invaded. At the same time, what is going on over there does not impact our direct interests, so it’s not worth our soldiers’ lives. How much money and how many weapons to provide has to be balanced against our financial and security requirements; I’m no expert on exactly what we can or can’t safely provide, but $40M doesn’t seem unreasonable. (Could it be used for better things here at home? Sure. Would it be? Not likely.)
So I would already be in favor of supplying Ukraine against an invasion. To that, we add that the invader is a long-standing enemy who has worked against us and our interests. This makes suplying Ukraine for use as a proxy against Russia an even better idea.
Again, I don’t want boots on the ground. Defending Ukraine isn’t that important to us. But we spend $1.8 billion dollars a month in blue hair welfare checks; $40 million isn’t even a rounding error.
The amount that Congress has allocated to Ukraine in the past 3 months or so is about $55 Billion, not $40 million.
We should spend several times that amount to give Putin two black eyes. It’s well worth it.
I stand corrected. Thank you.
And it’s the Russians that end up emigrating here, not the other way around. Interesting.
Of course. For those who can and have transferable productive skills, doing so is as much of a no-brainer as, say, migrating from California to Texas nowadays.
Biden even before his obvious mental decline had a famously almost fatal case of logorrhea. My assumption is he wasn’t trying to provoke anything. He was just spouting off, which is inconsequential if you are a member of the Senate but has potential earth shaking consequences as a president.
Not that I don’t agree with much of this, maybe even all of it. I will reiterate though that 40 billion spent in Ukraine is probably the least harmful thing that 40 billion could do given our present circumstances. I would prefer it never to have been taxed in the first place; however, that isn’t going to happen with the democrats in charge. I too would prefer it was spent on the US border but that isn’t going to happen with the democrats in charge. It was going to be spent somehow, because that was always going to happen with the democrats in charge. I don’t think this speeds the destruction of the US any more than just having the democrats in charge does.
I don’t know it seems like Putin wasted a lot of resources on that including some of his best trained troops. I think he thought he could take Kiev quickly, depose Zelenskyy and install a friendlier government. It was a gamble that didn’t pay off for Russia. That doesn’t mean they won’t achieve their new war aims but it looks like it was a major miscalculation.
Biden’s mouth always ran when his brain was in neutral. Now that his brain has seized up, it exhibits the same behavior except he forgets the words.