A certain commenter on a certain thread asserted that the Russo-Ukrainian War continued because “Putin determined that he could thoroughly degrade the military power of the United States.”
Yeah. No.
Rather than a detailed, point-by-point refutation, I’m going to let Habitual Linecrosser do they heavy lifting on this one.
Plus Thanksgiving weekend is seriously impacting my blogging bandwidth, so it’s going to be a few days before you get any sort of LinkSwarm…
Tags: Habitual Linecrosser, Military, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, video
“Thoroughly degrade.” Heh.
“We will use up all of our 30 to 60 year old stockpiled Soviet weapons, and all of our easily recruitable men, and FORCE the Americans to dig up up their old obsolete equipment from dead storage, and also make all of NATO build new munitions, in the process expanding their weapon production industrial capability, while we will be forced to acquire munitions from Iran and North Korea.”
“Brilliant!”
Let’s not leave out the drastically damaged strategic position that Russia is now facing against NATO; where they had no border with NATO except in the far Northern Arctic regions near Norway, Kaliningrad, Latvia, and Estonia… They’re now presented with having the entirety of Finland as a NATO member, along with Sweden.
Which, along with the exponentially longer land border, also effectively turns the Baltic into a NATO-surrounded lake.
Remind me again why Putin is a strategic genius?
I’ve long said that Putin is going to go down in history as the worst thing that ever happened to Russia and the Russian people. His efforts have been directed at regaining an Imperial status that Russia never really had, in terms of actual power. Instead of reforming Russian institutions of governance and the rule of law, he’s focused on making Russia better for oligarchs and looting with laser-precision, which is why most of the Russian hinterlands exist in a near-prehistoric state of development. His roads suck, what energy infrastructure he’s got were developed by foreign national firms that are highly unlikely to ever do business in Russia as it is currently constituted, and he’s even managed to run down the railways to the point where they’re nearing collapse.
If Russia makes it out of 2025 as an intact nation, I’m going to be surprised. I think that the “slowly, then suddenly…” thing is going on as we watch the leading indicators nosedive, and what results at the end will likely be worse and far more chaotic than the end of the Soviet Union.
I would not be surprised to see Belarus wind up in charge of a rump state derived from chunks of European Russia, the northern bits to fall into coherence with the old Hanseatic league nations as they were before Moscow conquered them, and the rest to wind up as chaotic grounds for Chinese and Central Asian adventurism.
Observe what is going on in Syria, and how all that turns out. If the Russians are driven out alongside Assad, that’s a harbinger for imminent Russian national collapse, with regime change as a minimum outcome.
You simply cannot keep on taking the losses Russia is in Ukraine without suffering effect at home, and the Russian people have historically set the “Yeah, you’re done…” number of no-result casualties for a regime at around a half-million to a million. Stats-wise, their whole war has been unsustainable since about the summer of ’22. The more they throw into the center of the table, the more they’re going to lose when someone calls them to show their cards.
Frankly, I never expected it to last as long as it has, before someone with sense said “No more”. The point of “no return” so far as the risk/reward equation goes was reached sometime in the fall of 2022, and should have resulted in Putin’s removal as head of state. However, the Russians are not a people with much in the way of collective common sense, so here we are.
The national project of rebuilding the Empire is going to founder shortly, with unpredictable results. The United States really should have insisted on the dissolution of the Russian Empire, right along with the other colonialist powers. Leaving it as the only surviving example of such chicanery was not a good idea; breaking the Russian people of the Imperial habit is something we should have insisted on after WWII.
One thing I learned from all my time in eastern Europe (and this applies especially in the Baltic countries) is that Vlad knows that he can bluster, since memories are still there (even by “grandfather’s tales) – and that people are jumpy because they are still locked into the idea that if Russia really, really wanted to, they could unleash a tsunami of millions of men and tens of thousands of tanks. I’ve been telling them for 20+ years that those days are done, and Russia is incapable of a 1944-style tsunami (though there still seem to be a few Vlad fanboys around who keep insisting that, you know, “Any day now…”).
Russia is a busted flush. Even by the 1980s their manufacturing base had rotted out (and has continued to do so), and their technical know-how has melted away (much of it by emigration – “An American university is a place where Chinese students are taught by Russian professors”).
But the big fail (which was already discernable even back in Soviet times) is the demographic implosion of Russia. Russia now has a population smaller than the island of Java (!!). This matters a great deal, since Russian military “strategy” (sic?) has, historically, largely been based upon having a much larger population that can be converted into large (even if low-skill) armies that can just steamroller over the opposition. There have been a few exceptions over the centuries – Ivan’s (the guy called “the Terrible”) capture of Kazan being one good example, the other being Petr I learning the hard lesson of having his army outnumber the Swedes at Narva in 1700 by 3:1 and get absolutely blasted to bits… and thus building a smaller-but-professional high-quality army that was able to defeat Sweden.
Stalin sure as heck knew this – since there was a huge baby-boom in Russia during the early/mid-1920s after the whole WW1/Civil-War episode wound down (giving Stalin an immense supply of cannon fodder – Red Army “strategy” was based largely on huge numbers and tsunamis, and Stalin really liked Zhukov because Zhukov really didn’t care too much about atrocious casualties).
Russian “strategy” in Ukraine has largely been the same-old, same-old Russian strategy of throwing lots of warm bodies at the enemy… but it’s not 1944, and Russian doesn’t *have* large gobs of warm bodies to do this with… but Russian military leadership has rarely shown much imagination, and this is the only way they know…
The heartbreaking aspect of this war is that in many ways it’s the first war of the 21st century – *neither* side has the demographics for a large-scale war. I don’t know how that aspect will play out, but that’s ultimately the defining issue here.
Another place my work has taken me more than a few times is France – and if you travel around rural France, it’s common to go into some small little hamlet somewhere and encounter a WW1 memorial, which is usually topped by a French soldier in helmet and great coat (but carrying no weapons) looking rather dejectedly at the ground. On one side is the simple statement “Morte Pour La France,” and on the reverse side a shockingly-long list (for a hamlet) of the names of the dead from that little village. Besides the numbers, it can be stunning to see an uncommon surname (meaning that it is a single family, or at least something close to that) that is listed six or eight times. Families lost sons to the tune of 6, 7, 8 to a family in that war. That was with healthy demographics – which no one in Europe (other than maybe Albania) has now…
Demographics are destiny…
The abiding lesson of the 21st Century is going to be this: If you’re running a country or a civilization, then the key and critical thing you are responsible for is the nurturing and maintenance of your human capital. Literally nothing else matters; if the long-term implications of your decisions result in your fertility rates dropping well below one? You done f*cked up, and unless you get to work fixing the problems leading to that below-replacement rate reproductive number, you are well and truly screwed.
Japan and Korea are both harbingers of things to come, as civilizations commit suicide-by-birth-rate. I don’t know what the hell is going to happen, but the sad reality is, nothing anyone has done has really brought those numbers up. Once we’re into the demographic vise wherein the aging population requires the virtual enslavement of the youth, with all the implications that has for birth rate, then we’re going to see whether or not people decide to jettison the elderly and reduce expectations such that the fertile can actually afford children… Which is going to have ugly, ugly implications throughout society.
Putin has just pissed away an ungodly amount of human potential. And, for what? Azovstal, which is so thoroughly wrecked that it likely won’t ever be rebuilt? A few square kilometers of Ukraine?
Sad fact is, all the lives he’s pissed away were worth more in terms of economic potential than he could ever have gained. This is a fact that the world’s leadership cadre is increasingly going to have to face; the habitual adventurism and insouciance with which they’ve squandered the lives of their common folk was always a disastrous choice, but in the coming decades, it will be come increasingly clear that it’s also suicidal for their societies as well.
Commissioned. The most recent Arleigh Burke was commissioned two weeks ago here in NYC, the USS John Basilone.
Re Vlad still being able to bully effectively in Eastern Europe: From way over here it seems like his efforts have had the opposite effect in Poland.
With the Germans deciding to disassemble their economy from the inside out, and their systematic undermanning and under-equipping of the German military, the irony of the Poles standing to so as to effectively defend the Germans, along with Finland and Sweden joining NATO, is perhaps not the outcome for which The Shirtless Tsar was hoping.
But for Eastern Europe, I guess the Winged Hussars are back.
A truly successful imperialist power manages the feat of making the subjected peoples and nations full participants and true believers in Empire. The Romans eventually got there, to the point that by the end of their Empire, many of their conquests were more Roman than the Romans.
The British partially succeeded; witness the codependency of Scotland and Northern Ireland, along with Canada and Australia. To a degree, at least…
Russia never broke the code, never managed to be more than a thin veneer of “Russian” slathered over their conquests, many of whom resent the hell out of them to this day. This is what will eventually destroy their dreams of Empire, even if the demographics don’t. Russia ruled by force; they looted and pillaged all the “outer lands” in order to enrich the capital. Look at what happened to all the Novgorod-affiliated city-states after Moscow took them over: Impoverished economic basket cases, raped and pillaged to make Moscow and St. Petersburg great. None of Russia’s hinterlands see any benefit from their economic contributions; it’s all confiscated and concentrated at the center of it all, around Moscow and St. Petersburg. This is not a stable situation; eventually, the various victim groups are going to encounter the harsh reality of life under Moscow, recognize it, and then take the appropriate actions… Which will leave Moscow and St. Petersburg in a state of economic irrelevance.
The ruins may be subsidized for a few generations for convenience’s sake, due to the centralization of the transport networks. I can’t see the regional governments sending much cash their way, however. Once the force is gone, so too will Empire vanish…
This entertaining video focuses on Russia without mentioning the barren DoD weapons stocks. Habitual Linecrosser fails to explain why the Biden Administration is unable to supply $ 10 billion of the appropriated PDA and USAI weapons to Ukraine before their mandate ends on January 20th. This would not require him to speak or understand the Russian language, so it should be within his limited intellectual grasp to present this caveat.
The reason the U.S. will not fulfill its promised weapons deliveries to Ukraine is simple, but embarrassing. Those weapons either don’t exist or are so deteriorated from poor storage that they cannot be rehabilitated. Explore why the Pentagon has failed all seven annual attempts to audit their operation. Many of their kinetic assets were scrapped years ago, but still live on their balance sheets.
Russia also has deteriorated weapons stocks, but their military industrial complex is running flat out. They are replenishing their Ukraine losses from current production. Our military industrial complex is still in the planning stages.
Ukrainian soldiers need real weapons, not promises. Many have figured out that they are doomed, which is why Ukrainian prosecutors have had to open 60,000 desertion cases in the last six months. 10% of their combat soldiers have deserted since April. AFU is probably not going to lead Habitual Linecrosser’s fantasy attack on Russia.
Yep, and the incredible Russian military machine will soon rise from the dead in Syria, and drive back the onslaught of attackers…
I hope you’ve budgeted for when the checks from the FSB suddenly stop clearing.
“I hope you’ve budgeted for when the checks from the FSB suddenly stop clearing.”
Russia’s anemic GDP approximates that of Italy. Their war-time economy is generating rapidly rising consumer costs. When the Ruble exchanges at five per penny, those FSB checks aren’t going very far.
“Russia also has deteriorated weapons stocks, but their military industrial complex is running flat out. They are replenishing their Ukraine losses from current production.”
This comes at a cost. Putin has no magical ability to overcome the guns/butter Production Possibilities Curve.
“Rusprodsoyuz, a union of food producers, reported that a kilogram of butter now costs an average of 1,000 rubles ($10.66), up by 20% since January.”
Potatoes have similarly seen a 72% price hike, depriving Vatniks of cheap vodka, a necessary staple in Putin’s dystopian dynasty.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/11/01/butter-prices-spike-in-russia-dairy-producers-blame-ice-cream-a86883
“ They are replenishing their Ukraine losses from current production.”
This is demonstrably not true, else why would T-62s and even T-55s be in front line use, and why would they be begging across their allies in Asia for Chinese and NorK artillery shells, and now NorK artillery pieces including both towed and SP guns.
If current production was making up losses, surely they would be making up said losses with current Russian equipment.
This infinite production mythology is based on Soviet production capabilities, and those are long gone. Any newer-than-1991 production capability is based on European CNC mills and such, which is subject to sanctions-driven deterioration without spares and support.
Also empirically long gone is the myth of infinite manpower. Russia would obviously not be deploying NorK troops to frontline service if they had enough Russian Federation troops.
The question is, if the conflict freezes with sanctions remaining in place, will Russia even be able to fully man the stare-off line for ten years?
“This is demonstrably not true, else why would T-62s and even T-55s be in front line use, and why would they be begging across their allies in Asia for Chinese and NorK artillery shells, and now NorK artillery pieces including both towed and SP guns.”
T-62s were the original super tank and are still quite viable when kitted out with Kontakt-5 ERA and modern fire control as the Russians have done. They are far superior in black soil to the wallowing NATO hogs due to their light weight. They also lack the problematical autoloaders of later Soviet tanks.
Russians have been using T-54s and T-55s as bunkered artillery in Ukraine, probably to take advantage of available 100mm ammunition stocks. Russian losses of T-54/55 tanks in Ukraine have been less than AFU losses of M1A1 Abrams tanks, both by count and percentage of vehicles deployed.
Habitual Linecrosser might want to explore Fox News today. Dr. Rebecca Grant posted an opinion piece:
‘America’s nuclear submarine crisis on a collision course with China –
Production and repairs of our nuclear submarines have cratered since Trump left office’
which directly contradicts his gushing naval superiority analyses. Dr. Grant is the Vice President of the Lexington Institute, so don’t waste your time smearing her as a Russian asset.
“Russia’s anemic GDP approximates that of Italy. Their war-time economy is generating rapidly rising consumer costs. When the Ruble exchanges at five per penny, those FSB checks aren’t going very far.”
Russia’s entire GDP is less than the USG budget deficit. They are experiencing inflation because as a country of 146 million, they are challenging a collection of countries with over 1 billion in population (47 countries) and over 1.5 trillion in annual defense expenditures.
Russia are paying for their Ukraine war military expenditures as they are incurred. The U.S. and most NATO governments are not. Germany’s government just collapsed when they could not further afford to support Ukraine. Germany was the only NATO country supporting Ukraine PAYGO.
We will gradually pay for PDA and USAI military expenditures as the weapons stocks are replenished. The Biden Administration and the weapons contractors have delayed most of this until 2026 and later years, so get ready for a real economic roller coaster ride in the second half of the second Trump Administration. Or the U.S. military will shrink 40%.
French Prime Minister Michel Barnier’s government will fall by the end of this week. President Macron has been trying to offset Ukraine support expenditures with taxes and budget cuts, but both the Left and Right in Parlement Français have revolted.
This is a big problem for the EU. Now their two largest economies are rudderless and adrift. The Germans will not have a government until early next year. The French will go without a government until July, at the earliest.
Isn’t Lexington Institute just Loren Thompson’s “think tank” that says whatever somebody pays him to say?
That’s not to say the USN hasn’t been horrifically mismanaged–really, since the Peace Dividend, not just the last 4 years, and by admirals as much as by Presidents and their appointees. Having most of the admirals who wanted to train for war fired and replaced by admirals who wanted Marxism and DEI back during the Obama years certainly didn’t help fix the Navy’s broken culture.
As for arms to Ukraine… you do realize that most of what’s been sent is old stuff, right? No Stormbreakers, JASSM, JSOW, unitary-warhead ATACMS (which is most of them), THAAD, AARGM, AIM-120D etc. And the newer stuff that *has* been sent has been purchased and stockpiled in rather large amounts, like JDAM, SDB1, AMRAAM, GMLRS, PAC-3, etc. So, trying to claim that the US military has nothing left for its own use seems a bit of a stretch. Meanwhile, you’re defending Russia’s use of the T-62 and even T-55; o.k., they can certainly perform tank missions against Ukraine, but that doesn’t explain why their use was necessary in the first place if Russian production of new equipment is as sufficient to the task as you claim.
So, if it came down to a conventional fight, the USAF could pretty much wipe out Russian logistics within a week by dropping key rail and road bridges between their forces and their factories and distant supply dumps. The only way to prevent that (without going nuclear) would be to launch some kind of surprise attack on the airbases being used as the USAF set up shop, presumably using drones. And we’ve seen that US EW seems to be good enough to deal with commercial-grade drone comms, given that ISIS, AQ, and the Taliban tried to use them over a decade ago to little effect.
Confronting our “expert” 10X25mm on his bullshit is a waste of time. He’s nothing more than a self-appointed advocate for the Russian point of view, because… I dunno. Probably something deep-rooted in the same sort of self-hating moronicism you observe in most of the effectively anti-American interest chattering classes: Everything the Russians do is good, and anything the US or its allies do is bad. That’s an obvious knee-jerk reaction of his/hers/xirs, and you’re not going to be able to “discuss” any of it with them/it. That’s a demonstratedly impervious mind, one made up a long time ago. Back when the Soviets ruled the world, likely…
“As for arms to Ukraine… you do realize that most of what’s been sent is old stuff, right? No Stormbreakers, JASSM, JSOW, unitary-warhead ATACMS (which is most of them), THAAD, AARGM, AIM-120D etc. And the newer stuff that *has* been sent has been purchased and stockpiled in rather large amounts, like JDAM, SDB1, AMRAAM, GMLRS, PAC-3, etc.”
Our “new stuff” PGMs are almost all GPS guided. Russian GPS jamming and spoofing has rendered GPS guided PGMs worthless near the Ukrainian front lines, where the Russians have concentrated their anti-GPS systems. So Ukrainians are being sent older, inertial guided systems.
GPS guided munitions may work on deep strikes in Russia in the areas the Russians stripped of GPS jamming and spoofing systems, but such strikes with American PGMs have only been authorized for two weeks; too recently to coordinate with logistics. Note that the Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA) package announced on December 2nd does not include any PGMs. It appears that we are out of inertial guided PGMs.
Ukrainians have received substantial quantities of AGM-154 Joint Standoff Weapon (JSOW)s this year. They can be guided on inertia only by turning off their GPS correction system.
The U.S. production base for military hardened inertial guidance systems no longer exists.
It is reasonable to assume that the Russians and their several allies are furiously working overtime to further improve and produce GPS jamming and spoofing systems. Their large scale adoption renders our existing “new stuff” PGMs worthless against the Russians and their allies, but they could still be useful against Third World militaries and insurgencies.
Presumably, we are working on GPS systems which can operate correctly in anti-GPS environments, or new forms of inertial guidance. There is no unclassified information on such developments available.
The government of French Prime Minister Michel Barnier just fell, in no small part due to their reckless support of Ukraine.
If Putin really wants to end his Ukraine war, he will detonate a tactical nuclear weapon on the Kursk/Sumy Oblast border sometime during the morning of January 20th. There will be no decision makers to oppose him.
Putin is not going to attempt to detonate a tactical nuclear weapon on the morning of January 20th, or any other morning.
Odds are excellent that there are few, if any actual functional warheads remaining in the Russian arsenal. Given the crap state of their conventional forces and all the remnant gear left over from Soviet times, the extrapolation should be made that things aren’t any different over in the Strategic Rocket Forces where the nukes are kept and cared for. If anything, I’d wager good money that the state there is even shittier.
I’ve mention my actual acquaintance with a first-hand witness to it all, who was on the START inspection teams. A fair chunk of what his non-disclosure statements went over was “Never talk about what you found, lest our Congress find out how over-blown the ‘Soviet Threat’ really was…”
Part of the reason they couldn’t ever determine what happened to all of the Soviet nukes was down to the same thing that took place all across Soviet industry; falsification of records, diversion of funds and other resources, and a general lack of a will at the top to discover what was really going on out in the hinterlands of Soviet defense.
You observe what happened on the way to Kyiv? What’s been going on every day of the war where the Russian front lines are? That’s your clue; they can’t even put together basic motorized rifle company combat teams, and the basics of low-level discipline for the majority of the troops are non-existent. What would make anyone think that they’re any better at all the details of nuclear weapons maintenance and warfare?
No, Putin is not going to be nuking anyone. If he tries, that will be a last-ditch effort, when there is nothing left to lose, because he dare not reveal the truth that is the “little man behind the curtain”. Right now, he’s barely maintaining the pretext that he’s the “Great and Powerful Oz”. Attempting to use a nuke? LOL… That’d be pulling the curtain a bit too far aside, and he’ll be gone shortly after.
“Putin is not going to attempt to detonate a tactical nuclear weapon on the morning of January 20th, or any other morning.”
From Vlad’s lips to your ear.
“Odds are excellent that there are few, if any actual functional warheads remaining in the Russian arsenal. Given the crap state of their conventional forces and all the remnant gear left over from Soviet times, the extrapolation should be made that things aren’t any different over in the Strategic Rocket Forces where the nukes are kept and cared for. If anything, I’d wager good money that the state there is even shittier.”
Not the opinion of the American IC. You might want to update your perspective by reading:
“Yes, the Russians Are Testing Nuclear Weapons and It Is Very Important”
By Mark B. Schneider on August 14, 2019
Published by Center for Security Policy
The money shots:
“There will be increasing uncertainty concerning the effectiveness of a declining U.S. nuclear deterrent while there will be little uncertainty about increasing Russian nuclear capabilities.”
“In May 2019, Lt. Gen. Robert P. Ashley, Jr., Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, in an important speech at the Hudson Institute, stated:
Russia’s development of new warhead designs and overall stockpile management efforts have been enhanced by its approach to nuclear testing. The United States believes that Russia probably is not adhering to its nuclear testing moratorium in a manner consistent with the “zero-yield” standard.
Our understanding of nuclear weapon development leads us to believe Russia’s testing activities would help it to improve its nuclear weapons capabilities. The United States, by contrast, has forgone such benefits by upholding a “zero-yield” standard.[1]
This is an extremely important conclusion because it linked covert Russian nuclear testing to the development of new nuclear warhead designs with improved capabilities, which is very significant because of the threat posed by Russia’s ever growing nuclear capability. Despite the uproar in the arms control enthusiast community about his remarks, there is substantial open-source evidence going back over two decades to support his statement. The 2009 U.S. Strategic Commission report stated, “Apparently Russia and possibly China are conducting low yield tests.”[2] Russian press reports concerning Russian conduct of very low-yield hydronuclear tests have appeared since the 1990s.[3] According to Ralph Alewine, then-Director of the Pentagon’s nuclear treaty programs, “We do have information that a seismic event with explosive characteristics occurred in the vicinity of the Russian nuclear test range at Novaya Zemlya on August 16 [1997].”[4] Writing in The New York Times in March 2001, William J. Broad and Patrick E. Tyler reported, “Some [in the intelligence community] have concluded that Russia is lying and is instead detonating small nuclear blasts…”[5] In May 2002, the New York Times again reported that some CIA intelligence analysts were saying, “Russia may already have detonated tiny nuclear devices.”[6]”