Posts Tagged ‘Mark Biernat’

Wargaming Russia’s Collapse

Thursday, May 30th, 2024

Several people have wargamed possible outcomes to the Russo-Ukrainian War, but probably few have so literally gamified it.

His argument is pretty simple: Russia has X-industrial capacity, it’s using up Y amounts of war material, broken down into rough categories of how much Z time it takes to replace said war material. As this material is used up faster than it can be replaced, a scale estimates the chances of the Russian lines collapsing due to lack of material to carry on the fight, which runs from 10% in June to 100% on December 26, 2026.

There is a certain rough and ready logic to this analysis, and Russia is using up its stockpiles of Soviet-era equipment at an unsustainable rate, especially when it comes to aircraft. But there are numerous problems with this gamified analysis:

  • This is an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction. The map is not the territory, and the Russo-Ukrainian War is not a game of Strategic Conquest where any city’s productive capacity can be set to any task.
  • It’s not a question of how much generic productive capacity, it’s how much steel, gas, titanium, precision machinery, semiconductors, etc., Russia can produce.
  • By assuming Europe will keep Ukraine well supplied with war material, the YouTuber (Mark Biernat, “a Ph.D. student in Poland and teach college economics in the US”) is making assumptions that may not be warranted, especially when it comes to manpower, which may be a serious constraint on Ukraine.
  • It also assume that Russia won’t change it’s wasteful, grinding assault tactics to conserve men and material. Maybe not a bad bet, given their continued stupidity, but not a sure thing.
  • The author has not covered the general state of the Russian economy here, but he seems to have gone into that in other videos. The problem is that YouTubers have correctly predicted 10,000 of the last zero Russian economic collapses, so I’m getting a little jaded on this front. Russia’s economy is clearly in trouble, but large economies can stay in trouble for quite a long time before collapsing.
  • I am broadly sympathetic to the author’s thesis and worldview, but this argument is too abstracted from reality for me to assign any veracity to the estimation dates for possible collapse.