archived https://archive.ph/0lnCy
I mean a miracle could happen, but given that they spent two months without achieving a breakthrough and wasted something like 30% of western equipment already even according to western media, it’s pretty unlikely that they’ve now come up with some magic formula for success. Either way, once this burns out, things are going to clear up a lot I suspect.
I don’t think it’s about miracles. It’s about intelligence. I guarantee that the US lacked the intelligence it wanted on Russian capabilities and part of this entire conflict has been about trying to draw more Russian capabilities out into the open so they can be assessed. The US has so much materiel, so much intelligence gathering apparatus, so much ability to hide their capabilities. I think it’s feasible that the US could wait out any opponent in any conflict. The worst thing for all of us would be for the US to fundamental change the state of play, and therefore I think we need to remain skeptical of our own assessments of the ground truth and look for as much evidence as possible of being incorrect. Otherwise we’re going to get blindsided if it turns out we’re wrong.
We obviously can’t dismiss different possibilities, but everything we’ve seen over past two years indicates that US is not having much success. I disagree that US can wait out Russia here because US is increasingly seeing lack of political will to keep going. It’s worth noting that exact same thing happened in Vietnam and Afghanistan where US was forced to pull out in the end when the cost of the war got too high. The cost of keeping Ukraine going eclipses those conflicts.
US also has much tougher logistics situation than Russia, and this I would say is the biggest factor. Russia can just ship weapons and ammunition by rail while the west is not able to disrupt that in any way. On the other hand, US has to ship stuff across the ocean and through multiple countries only to have much of it blown up once it crosses the Ukrainian border.
There’s also nothing magical in terms of what Russia is doing. They have artillery dominance that they use to great effect. They depleted Ukrainian air defence, and now Russian aviation operates with impunity. They use drones to hunt Ukrainian armor. And finally, they have massive mine fields that are effectively impassible.
There’s been no evidence over the past two years to indicate that US has some ace up their sleeve, but I guess we’ll see soon.
I agree with your assessment of the Russian position. I disagree with the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
I doubt it was a political will situation, nor a cost thing. It seems more likely that it was a useful base of operations for black ops and asymmetrical covert war and influence campaigns against China. US contractors were making a lot of profit. And 20 years in Afghanistan hadn’t managed to get the US to anything resembling Vietnam levels of unrest.
To me, the withdrawal from Afghanistan was either mission accomplished in establishing and embedding asymmetrical capabilities in the guerilla networks and/or a need to remove a weak holding in advance of a war with China to avoid it being a distracting front and/or a need to pull back materiel for redeployment. I am not convinced it was money loss nor political will.
Interesting point. I hadn’t really considered that a US goal, but they very well could be using this conflict in order to assess Russian military capabilities.
I definitely think that was part of the goal, but Russia hasn’t really revealed much so far. We now know that Russia has excellent EW capability that can disrupt western guided weapons and drones. They also showed that they have missiles that western AD can’t handle.
None of this revealed much about Russian overall capability however. One thing Russia made clear is that they have very strong military industrial complex and are not at risk of running low in terms of weapons. The big surprise for everyone, including Russia, was just how effective Russian drones ended up being.
So, far we haven’t seen any really advanced weapons like Su-57 or T-14 used, so Russia is definitely not playing their full hand here. Seems that they’re largely just clearing out their old Soviet inventory for the most part.
If the US war game against China has a big question mark about Russian engagement, it would make sense to both get them wrapped up in other conflicts and also draw out their capabilities to improve intelligence. Remember Sun Tzu. Direct force comparisons are a lot less useful than intelligence imbalances.
