In order to get this paradox you do have to think of truth as something that can be taken as universal, not something contingent on a perspective.

If you follow Berkeley on "to be is to be perceived," (at least as far a knowledge is concerned) then I don't think you have an issue. The truth of propositions like "no one knows that Theseus is standing" cannot be perceived, as the perception of said truth entails that the knower does, in fact, know that Theseus is standing (the paradox in a universalist view). But if to be is to be perceived then this imperceivable "truth" isn't true, since truths presumably cannot lack being.

This would indeed entail that "all truths are known," but rather than being a paradox it is simply trivial, a result of the ontology.

For people who don't buy into those sorts of Berkelean arguments about being this might seem facile, but consider that, if being can exist outside perception, that would entail that you're committed to "truths that cannot be perceived." But if you have truths that cannot be perceived then clearly "all truths are knowable," cannot obtain. The difficulty I see for this position is this: what difference can any necessarily unknowable truth ever make to anyone? It seems like a totally extraneous ontological entity that can't do any lifting.

Now, Berkeley would say all truths are known because God knows them (God is always a big help at resolving issues). Hegel would have the paradox driving the engine of the dialectical and progress towards the Absolute. In a Hegelian system the two truths result in a new entity, a world where "no one knew (past tense)" that Thesus is standing, but things have progressed and now someone does know -> being into becoming. The being of both truths creates a contradiction, the becoming of our world has one proposition pass into a present tense. This could be formalized nicely, but instead we're more likely to get a page long run on sentence about how this is the progression of Spirit (or some shit like that, smart guy, not the easiest style). These sorts of contradictions then are what drive the process of becoming that we exist in, as opposed to static "being" which is also a contradiction.


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On a side note: You can get the same paradox to show up with truthmakers thrown in:

-Theseus is standing. (Truthmaker: Theseus standing)
-No one knows Theseus is standing. (Truthmaker: everyone's lack of knowledge of the fact that Theseus is standing, presumably Theseus as well, perhaps he is asleep)
-Persumably, knowledge can only be of true things. "No one knows the Earth is flat," would not cause this paradox if the world is actually round.
-Thus, the truthmaker for "no one knows Theseus is standing" relies on the very same truthmaker as "Theseus is standing," plus an added truthmaker about the state of knowledge relative to said truthmaker amongst all entities. The paradox emerges from this sharing of a single truthmaker.

Just a different way to view the same problem but I think some may find it more intuitive.

You can see how this isn't an issue with a Berkeley inspired system because the truthmaker for the thing no one knows about doesn't exist (granted, a sleeping man is a bad example here because people arguably still have perceptions while asleep).

By the way, this is an area where I think formalism might be making things less clear because you're not creating a definition for what a set of all truths entails. For this set to be defined, you surely have to decide if the past or future exists or not.

The paradox reminds me a bit of problems in physics around information and entropy (which is really the truth value of propositions about the configuration of particles if you think about it). We have elaborate statistical ways of knowing about systems based on the possible configurations given X,Y, etc.

But, in reality, none of these "possible" configurations are actually possible aside from the one that actually obtains. The entire intellectual apparatus is based on a finite being's ability to know X about Y (the same can arguably be said for epistemology). Now in physics, we can throw out paradoxes that result from infinite information, such as Maxwell's Demon, by simply pointing out that said demon violates the laws of physics by needing to collect potentially infinite information to do his thing, and such infinite information cannot physically exist. But in the world of epistemology we can talk about sets of all true propositions (something also potentially infinite).

Perhaps there is a similar issue here where we are attempting to define truth from an absolute perspective, when really it is about information X can have about Y, as it has to be in physics.

I'm not sure if I get your meaning. Indexicals could certainly preform the function of a timestamp by fixing a proposition's referent as well. Why is that not a solution?

As noted in my earlier post, I think the problem here is deeply rooted to one's ontology and one's conception of time.

For eternalists, this does seem like a problem, but a referent to the time the proposition refers to seems like it would resolve the issue.

For presentists, I'm not sure if a contradiction ever actually exists. Only propositions about the present can be true.

Moreover, very bare ontologies would have it that only a very small set of all possible semantic propositions are actually meaningful, and would exclude these examples anyhow in favor of a binary representation of what most people would call the "physical world." It seems like the paradox needs certain assumptions unless I am missing something.

The problem, which has been proposed since Boltzmann's time, is that time and entropy are not necessarily correlated. They are contingently so. This is known as Loschmidt's paradox.

Boltzmann's logic for thinking that entropy will increase in the future is very sound. If you took a set of all the trajectories of every particle in the universe consistent with the current macrostate, the vast, vast majority would trend towards higher entropy. That said, there are indeed potential sets of trajectories that would lead to lower entropy, so we can't know for sure that entropy will always increase, but it's a safe enough bet. This isn't a big issue because the number of states that would trend towards lower entropy are so much smaller than the states that trend towards higher entropy.

However, there is a deeper problem here. For any one observed state of "medium" entropy, i.e. what we see around us (a universe at neither maximal nor minimal entropy), there is a vastly higher number of prior states that have more entropy than less entropy. That is, Boltzmann's logic works exactly the same in the other direction. Sitting outside the universe, looking at a frozen macrostate from our current moment, we should predict that the entropy will be higher in the future, but also that it would have been higher in the past. This is due to the fact that the past has vastly more ways to be high entropy than low entropy.

Boltzmann tried to fix this with H Theorem but it turned out that the axioms of said theorem assume, subtly, a direction of time to begin with.

That's sort of where I was going with the whole time entropy thing. It's just a way of flipping the spatial entropy concept on its head to get at mysteries/problems with current statistical mechanics, namely "why the past had a lower entropy." But the neato thing about the time entropy concept is that, if the start of the universe is not an arbitrary point, this measure does necessarily increase or stay the same with time unlike our current measure.

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On a side note, I can see why a "time entropy," could be redundant due to Leplace's Demon. The concept of Leplace's Demon is that an entity, given the exact relative position, velocity, mass, etc. of every particle in the universe, can predict everything that will happen in the future and retrodict everything that will happen in the past from that information. This is because information is conserved (hopefully, some experimental data seems to show violations of the First Law of Thermodynamics, but that's aside the point). So complete knowledge of a microstate limits the number of potential past and future states to just one set (provided a theoretical truly closed system).

What gets me is that this seems to imply that time entropy, the collection of all past microstates consistent with an observed state has the same exact information content as spatial entropy. They both tell you the same thing, namely every possible state of a system. But if they are the same information, why does one seem like it should increase in both directions whilst the other must only increase or go down .

I think this or a form of it is the obvious solution. If I imagine a database of all possible propositions, with a truth value column, I can just as well imagine duplicates of many propositions with them being differentiated by a timestamp column. This would allow you to have the set of all true propositions without timing becoming a source of contradiction.

But you can also look at the truth of a thing being something progressive through time. True propositions about the thing sprout up and die away with time. So, the truth of a tree is the acorn, the sappling, the tree, and the mature branch that yields another acorn, all together. "The flower does not refute the bus."

Or, with more detail at the risk of being more convoluted:

Philosophy, on the contrary, does not deal with a determination that is non-essential, but with a determination so far as it is an essential factor. The abstract or unreal is not its element and content, but the real, what is self-establishing, has life within itself, existence in its very notion. It is the process that creates its own moments in its course, and goes through them all; and the whole of this movement constitutes its positive content and its truth. This movement includes, therefore, within it the negative factor as well, the element which would be named falsity if it could be considered one from which we had to abstract. The element that disappears has rather to be looked at as itself essential, not in the sense of being something fixed, that has to be cut off from truth and allowed to lie outside it, heaven knows where; just as similarly the truth is not to be held to stand on the other side as an immovable lifeless positive element. Appearance is the process of arising into being and passing away again, a process that itself does not arise and does not pass away, but is per se, and constitutes reality and the life-movement of truth. The truth is thus the bacchanalian revel, where not a member is sober; and because every member no sooner becomes detached than it eo ipso collapses straightway, the revel is just as much a state of transparent unbroken calm. Judged by that movement, the particular shapes which mind assumes do not indeed subsist any more than do determinate thoughts or ideas; but they are, all the same, as much positive and necessary moments, as negative and transitory. In the entirety of the movement, taken as an unbroken quiescent whole, that which obtains distinctness in the course of its process and secures specific existence, is preserved in the form of a self-recollection, in which existence is self-knowledge, and self-knowledge, again, is immediate existence.

Whew...

Sorry, I took that to mean "as of the observations of 1905," not as "only things published before 1905." The attempt to do physics without math was driven by the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument, which came after 1905, but has nothing to do with quantum mechanics or changes to physics after 1905.

My bad.

There is a Borges story, "On Exactitude in Science," about map makers who were so accurate that they would make 1:1 scale maps the same size of the territories they were mapping. Not only this, but they would carry forward enough detail that the two became indistinguishable.

Similarly, with "Funes the Memorious" there is a character whose memory is exact. He can relive entire days, but it takes him 24 hours to do so. He rejects objects. For example, referring to Carlos's dog is ridiculous, you should refer to Carlos's dog on January 19th at 8:32 AM, as that dog is totally different from the one on February 11th at 6:01 PM.

I thought they were clever little ways to poke fun at the way some metaphysics seems pretty arbitrary, grounded in human capabilities and nothing more.

There might be issues with point 4. There have been attempts to redefine physics fully in terms of relationships so as to avoid the necessity of numbers being "real." Apparently they have been somewhat successful, at least for Newton's laws, although far more convoluted than the mathematical versions.

There is a lecture of this in the Great Courses' course on philosophy of physics.

Or to make my point much simpler, the "brute facts of physics," the speed of light, the relative strengths and values of the fundemental forces, etc. are all irreducible ontological entities (maybe, some might be unified in the future).

Simulation theory is attempting to reduce these brute facts to a single cause, so they are swapping a great deal of entities for just one. Thier case might be the more parsimonious actually, but the problem remains, why should we believe this?

As for a simulation taking more information, that's aside the point for Ockham's. We're concerned about multiplying types of primitive things that can't be reduced not with there being a greater quantity of things.

This is why scientists want to unify the fundemental forces, as they have with electromagnetism and the weak force, because it means fewer entities, even if the amount of information stays the same.

I don't see how this applies to most forms of idealism I am familiar with.

In terms of the multiplication of entities, I think you are mostly right. However, the argument generally goes that:

1. If the universe turns out to be fully broken down into discrete chunks (quanta), including discrete amounts of space and time, we have an issue. We have an issue because mathematics tells us we should be able to have continuous things, but instead we only have discrete things. Why would this be?

2. If the universe is a finite collection of discrete bits, then in theory you could simulate it. S(M) without infinite subdivisions of space and time could be simulated without an infinite amount of computation.

3. Simulation theory attempts to answer questions about the world that appear in physics to be brute facts. Why is there a limit on how fast objects can go? Why are objects not infinitely divisible? Why do we have a universe seemingly made up of small pixels, to use an analogy? Multiplying entities should be avoided, but in this case the multiplication is being invoked to answer a question that isn't currently answered. In this case, Ockham's Razor isn't being violated. Ockham's Razor does not entail that labeling everything as brute fact avoids multiplying entities. Indeed, each brute fact is its own ontological entity, and so simulation theory attempts to scoop up a bunch of these ontological primitives and explain them with one mechanism. A better critique might be that the claim is unfalsifiable and doesn't make any new predictions, but this is actually true of the entire field of quantum foundations so I'm not sure if it is fair to single out the simulation folks.

4. Not directly related, but S(M) might only have to model the experienced of all humans (maybe not even all of them, some could be "NPCs"). Since the amount of data in consciousness is vastly smaller than the amount in "actual" space-time, the size of the simulation might be able to be vastly, orders of magnitude, more simple than we think it is. The Matrix AI only has to render what we're looking at. And indeed, simulation theorists use the fact that many phenomena don't have values until we look at them as potential evidence of the simulation hypothesis.

Perhaps I am missing something, but isn't this problem resolved by declaring that propositions are fixed implicitly in the time of their utterance (unless otherwise modified)?

This same sort of issue shows up in Aristotle with talk about the true/false values of past truths that no longer maintain. For example, "the Colossus of Rhodes is standing," is a proposition that had a truthmaker at one point, but that truthmaker disappeared when the statue fell over. Likewise, the proposition that "p is an unknown truth," is a negative claim about knowledge, and so it has a corresponding falsemaker that ceases to maintain when the truth of p is discovered. By allowing truth values to change over time you solve the problem.

People were unhappy with this storm of changing truth values, but it has, perhaps, been rectified with the idea of possible worlds. We start off with a set of all possible worlds, all those that aren't logically contradicted. As time progresses, the number of worlds consistent with actual events is winnowed down, and so changing truth values is really just the winnowing of possible worlds. Although, I'm not sure you even need possible worlds, you could also just have a set of all truths that has a time stamp on when a proposition was uttered.

It seems to me that the problem only holds up under a narrow set of assumptions. Let's look at how it fares under a few possible viewpoints:

1. Presentism holds that the past and future lack existence. In this case, the unknown truth could be in the set of all truths but it would cease to be as soon as someone knows about p. But really though, the past doesn't actually exist, so the set of all truths never has the contradictory overlap, fixing our problem.

2. This is no issue for eternalism as the future is as existent as the past or present (e.g., block time universes), so if p is ever known, it is not an unknown truth, since the future already exists.

3. For many forms of actualism (i.e. actual occurrences exist, modal truths do not) it seems like this is just the regular occurrence of actual events narrowing the horizon of all possible worlds consistent with actual true propositions. So the "p being an unknown truth" worlds just get shifted from the possible to impossible side of our possible worlds ledger.

There is also the information theoretic approach in which the primary ontological entity is information, that is, propositions. But many of these propositions are "derived" propositions. The only fundemental propositions are about fundemental particles/field excitations as related to each other in space and time. In this view, seeming contradictions are just the result of error and data compression. Broad, high level, derived propositions are multiply realizable because they are compressing information and dropping a lot of it. But in reality, this isn't causing contradictions, the problem is simply that multiple informational microstates are consistent with the truth value of a single macro-proposition.

Thankfully, information has this protean character where it can take multiple forms, and reencoding of information (with relative amounts of compression and error) in forms of self-similarity at different scales (fractal recurrence) allows us to make these derived propositions with some degree of accuracy, but we shouldn't take derived propositions as having ultimate truth values in terms of contradiction as they are multiply realizable.

But in these systems, you're also still talking about truth values given a certain slice of time (generally, most I've seen tend to be actualist or eternalism).

They really amped up the Bond villain vibes with the state news network showing graphics of their nuclear powered super submarine drone detonating a 100 megaton bomb on the ocean floor beside the UK, generating a tsunami that, somehow in magical Russian physics world, permanently buries the UK underneath the ocean.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1604020/Putin-nuclear-drone-Poseidon-UK-nuclear-attack-russia-1-video-Dmitry-Kiselyov-vn

It's the perfect super villain combo of the totally atrocious and the completely impractical.

For some reason they also throw Ireland underneath the ocean too...

Siberia was mostly uninhabited, not the same for Bukhara, Khiva, Poland, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kishi, the large area belonging to China when Russia took it by gun point (which they still claim as theirs), etc. Not to mention their later conquest and repression of East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, etc. Nor were areas where people who spoke Russian or mutually intelligible languages necissarily pleased about becoming part of the Russian state (e.g., Novgorod, the Cossacks, etc.).

The position of Ukrainians and Belarussians is perhaps analogous to Scotland or Wales vis-á-vis England (long history of integration, but also fraught with conflict). Although, in some ways it is more like Bohemia/the modern Czech Republic and "Greater Germany in terms of a greater/longer lived linguistic gap. Then again it's also more like Ireland and England in some ways, where the smaller state has not only been conquered by the larger, but subject to horrific acts by them that drastically changed the smaller nation's development (such that, even with migration, the population of Ireland is STILL below what it was before the Potato Famine, during which England continued to export food from Ireland at gun point, something Russia did to Finland to a lesser extent during the same blight). It's similar right down to nationalists in the smaller state being relatively cool with the Germans despite the huge war because they wanted out of the forced union.

Plus, the fact remains that the dominant world power today is America. Germany was eliminated as an obstacle to American hegemony, and now it is Russia's turn to be eliminated, by economic, financial, or military means.

Isolationism was very popular in the US . It had an absolutely tiny army before WWI and one that was still quite small before World War II. The US entry into WWII came because Japan attacked the United States. It's an open question if Pearl Harbor would have given Roosevelt the ammo he needed to join the war in Europe, he certainly wanted to, but we'll never know because Germany declared war on the United States.

The whole Mearsheimer, offensive realism model of rising powers taking out any potential rivals makes no sense with the actual contingencies of history. The US was the largest economy in the world by 1880, 1890 at the latest, but didn't go around annexing territories it easily could have (e.g. Canada or the rest of Mexico). At the end of the Civil War, the mobilized Union Army was completely capable of destroying anything Britain could get across the Atlantic, but the US essentially demilitarized outside of its navy. It had an army the size of Serbia's in 1914 despite having a population dwarfing every other great power except Russia and the highest per capita GDP to fund an army of any power.

It also doesn't explain the US doing all it could to get China into international organizations like the WTO, or spending trillions to develop China's industrial capacity. Tom Christensen, who I got to talk to on the subject has a pointed question for this topic: "what country has done more to assist the rise of China than the US?"

His book on this is illustrative. Between huge amounts of capital investment and major technology transfers, the US played a major role in helping China develop.

Being a China hawk was not nearly as popular until the Obama years. In the 1990s the US was supposed to worry about a reunified Germany and Japan's astronomic growth. That's why 80s sci-fi has Japanese megacorps running everything around this time.

US policymakers really appear to have believed their own rhetoric about free markets and economic development leading inexorably to pressure for democratic institutions.

Hopes for Russia were high too. The whole idea of the US being so scared of Russia that it was sabotaging it after the fall of the USSR makes no real strategic sense. Why wouldn't the US want a liberalized Russia, one in the EU even? It would give liberal democracies enough of a share of the global energy market to be able to push OPEC around to some degree. China's new military hardware is mostly licensed and modified Russian equipment. If Russia is on board with the liberal states, then the problem of arms control gets far easier, as do worries about Chinese military development.

Russia still being a peer competitor with the US or EU is a Russian fever dream, as their performance in Ukraine shows. Less their nuclear arsenal, they'd have to seriously worry about Poland or Romania alone settling old historical scores with them.

But then again, you don't exactly expect clear-eyed analysis from a guy who got into power setting up terrorist attacks on his own countries apartment buildings, so there you go...

In any case, I don't think you can seriously compare Russia’s liberation from Mongol occupation with England’s invading and occupying India, Africa, and other places .... :grin:

No, but you could certainly compare Russia invading and occupying most of the kingdoms of Central Asia, Poland, Finland, the Baltics, the Caucuses, and Siberia with it. Not to mention their occupation of Eastern Europe for the second half of the 20th century. A major part of 19th century "Great Game" politics was Russia trying to take India away from Britain, so it could occupy it itself. It didn't succeed, but it conquered a lot of land trying.


You're correct. Russia had plenty of reasons to think the war could be a cake walk. It is just baffling that they did not prepared for resistance as even a low risk eventuality.

Aside from the completely inadequate number of troops mobilized, they are invading with T-72As and even T-72 Urals. They spent $40-70 billion a year for 15 years and didn't get around to modernizing anywhere close to a decent number of their tanks? Even their special forces can't get optics, while the Chechen Til Tok brigades they send tribute to are kitted out like a trade show? Where is the T-14 vaporware? They've managed to build all of four production SU-57s in 12 years and now they are building more wunderwaffen with the MiG-31 space ship fighter? Tsunami causing nuclear torpedos to destroy the UK? Seriously, where did all the roubles go!? You expect some to get stolen, maybe even a lot. But it looks like a solid 75% was stolen.

Predatory relationships between large multinationals and countries with poor labor rights/protections, poor enviornmental regulations, weak rule of law, and weak states, would be significantly improved if all the world's nations reached a level of development on par with the OECD.

It's hard to imagine US companies pulling the shit they pull in Central America or Africa in Austria or Belgium, despite those two states not having much economic leverage against the US.

Canada and the US host the same oil companies that are involved in all sorts of exploitation and corruption abroad. Environmental regulation isn't prefect there, and to be sure, not all the state oil revenues are put to their best uses, but the situation is still night and day compared to how these companies are allowed to act in the developing world.

Accountable government ensures that natural resource revenues flow back into the nation that owns those resources. Strong rule of law allows the victims of enviornmental degradation to effectively seek recourse, even if no justice system is perfect. Labor rights mean that minimum standards for employment are met.

How do we get from poor to developed states? Why did some states that were quite poor, with low quality governments, see a huge shift in the 20th century, while others did not (e.g. the rapid development of South Korea, Finland, Iceland, etc.)? Why did some wealthy states go off their growth trajectories and see their economies and state capacity collapse (e.g., Argentina was wealthier than much of Europe going into the 20th century)?

It's a very tough set of questions.

Francis Fukuyama has an excellent two volume opus on state development. The question he uses is: how do states 'get to Denmark?'"

That is, how do states develop a well functioning rule of law, accountable institutions that respond to citizen complaints, provide a fairly wide amount of political and economic liberty, ensure access to basic services and meet the basic needs of most citizens, and provide a high standard of living.

The value of the book isn't so much Fukuyama's unique takes (although those are good too), but that it is basically a summary of all the existing state development literature. You get a tour through the political science literature, but also look at political philosophy going back to Plato, going through Machiavelli, Weber, etc.

He does a pretty fair assessment of the pros and cons of each of the views, covering the theses of books like Why Nations Fail, geographical explanations of development, genetic ones, the arguments of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Whig History, etc.

(Side note: Why Nation's Fail is worth reading only because it explains why autocrats choose not to modernize even though it makes their nations weaker and makes them more open to conquest. Quaddafi was richer than Musk, and no amount of money in a modern state gives you impunity to kill your enemies, take women, etc. However, it is pretty much "selecting on the dependant variable: the book;" apparently Rome declined because the Republic fell... after 1,400 years.)

Fukuyama's main thesis is pretty much main stream political science. Modern states requires three (sometimes four pillars).

1. Rule of law, no special privileges for the nobility, rich people can go to jail even if justice isn't totally equal. Property rights and contracts are enforceable.

2. A strong, centralized state with a monopoly on the use of violence and a meritocratic, independent bureaucracy (sometimes the independence of the bureaucracy is its own pillar).

3. Accountable government, generally this means some form of democracy. Basically, if the rulers mess up, they can be replaced at regular intervals without violence. Citizens can change laws through some sort of mechanism.

The case studies Fukuyama has for why some, but not all of these emerged in some places are pretty good.

Russia had the strong state emerge, but because the church and nobility were subservient to it, there was no balance of power that led to the rule of law being established. The nobility kept special economic rights into the Russian Revolution, and serfdom carried on till almost the US abolition of slavery. The bureaucracy was never fully independent, and so didn't develop as a counter to bad political leadership, and obviously accountable government never happened.

China had a strong state and civil service develop early, and decent rule of law for the time, but not accountability. Rule of law had never fully developed, the state is allowed to step in and violate legal agreements on a routine basis (e.g., markets getting closed during volatility as a regular practice, Jack Ma, China's Bezos, getting disappeared for speaking out about Chinese state banking policy, etc.)

Strong states emerged in Europe because the nobility was initially stronger than the kings. The common people used their support to empower the monarchs to deal with recalcitrant elites. As they did so though, they also demanded rule of law (plus some rule of law carried over from Rome, particularly in Church law).

But development is also contingent on a lot of other factors. I would recommend Kaplan's The Revenge of Geography, which looks at 21st century politics and grand strategy through a geographic lens. Resources also matter to some degree, and too many exportable raw materials actually seems to hinder growth. It means elites can get rich just by extracting something like oil, instead of developing their economies.

Geography changes slowly, but it does change (e.g., climate change and water supplies, the desertification of North Africa due to over farming and natural climate change fucking Rome, etc.). Kaplan also throws demographics in there, which is something that changes slowly, but has long term strategic implications

Fukuyama's The End of History also helps to explain the success of liberal democracy, but I would say 90% of people who talk about it haven't read it or fundamentally misunderstand it. Fukuyama has later said he pronounced the end of history too soon, global governance to deal with global issues like climate change and multinational megacorps is another step that seems likely.

I could say a lot about this one. The best parts of the analysis are the parts he explicitly borrows from Hegel, and the weakest areas are where he seems to misunderstand Hegel. Liberal democracy didn't "beat" fascism and communism, it sublated them and made elements of both central to it. All liberal democracies now have socialist welfare policies. Liberal democracy now explicitly legitimizes itself using nationalism as well, the right of a given people to choose their own leaders (e.g., liberals would generally not say Algeria didn't need independence from France, it just needed voting rights; the idea is an Algerian democracy for Algerian people).

Global institutions also stop predation. For all the negative impacts of multilateral trade agreements that get attention, they actually do stop huge multinationals from being able to exploit poorer countries as well.

The problem is that fostering development is very difficult. The US has given tons of aid to Egypt and it is still repressive and poor. Meanwhile, support for Korea and steady pressure, paired with major internal changes, led to Korea going from an impoverished backwater to one of the world's wealthiest states, with solid rule of law.

The Baltics are another good example of rapid development, as is Chile, or Spain after Franco. Argentina is probably the premier example of backwards progress, but Russia might be another, and Lebanon.

The problem is that the commonalities successes have are very hard to replicate.

The other problem is that issues like global warming and powerful global corporations require global responses, but global institutions tend to be fairly weak. The AU for instance is a far cry from the EU.

Speaking of historical knowledge, Napoleon invaded Russia in "The War of the Sixth Coalition." I wonder what the other five wars were before that and if they involved Russia? :roll:

I'm just going to throw this out there: maybe there aren't good hard working nations and predatory ones. Maybe nations are variably predatory towards different nations in different time periods, depending on their culture, norms, leadership, internal politics, economic situation, etc.?

The problem for the Russian nationalist version of history, where Russia is subject to waves on invasion from the West, is that it leaves out a few key details:

1. France was definetly expansionist under Napoleon, although this was also spurred on by the monarchies of Europe all attacking it due to the politics of the Revolution while it was also embroiled in its own civil wars (the Vendee, etc.). That said, it is also true that Russia sent armies west to attack France during the earlier coalitions, starting with it coming to the Austrian Empire's aid with the campaign under Suvorov.

Russia didn't invade France before France invaded Russia only because Napoleon had a preternatural ability to win battles despite being out numbered and kept routing the coalitions (notably with Russia's army and the German allies at Austerlitz). Both sides were expansionist here. France was setting up sister republics as it took territory, and building an empire. Meanwhile, the other thing Suvorov is famous for is kicking off the partitions of Poland. Russia was also conquering land across Central Asia across this period.

2. France and Britain aiding the Ottomans was not an attempt to "conquer Russia." This is explicit in their war aims and also the fact that the forces they sent were entirely insufficient to invade even part of Russia. The goal of the war was to prop to Ottomans up in order to keep a "balance of power" in the East. They wanted to avoid a Russian monopoly on the Black Sea and check their power relative to the other Great Powers, which isn't a moral war aim, but also not an attempt to conquer Russia.

3. There is plenty of blame to go around for WWI. The Russian nationalist line of this being another in a series of invasions seems to leave out a lot. The war resulted from a disasterous collection of miscalculations and interlocking security guarantees. German aggression towards Russia being the primary driver, a common theme in nationalist retellings, seems to miss that:

A. Russia mobilized first out of any of the great powers (although this was largely due to them having the slowest time table for mobilization). Germany would mobilize last (and attack poor Belgium).

B. Russia invaded Germany first during the war while Germany sat on the defensive and threw the vast bulk of its army at France. Only after the Russian army was routed in East Prussia with relatively light German losses and the invasion of France had stalled did Germany switch to planning an offensive against Russia.

When the Tsardom fell, after the February Revolution and the July Days, the Bolsheviks got their turn in power. They renounced Russian imperialist claims on other people's territories. This claim lasted until the Red Army was in a good place to reinvade Russia's neighbors, at which point it went into Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia to re-annexing them. It attempted to retake Poland but was defeated, and lacked the military capacity to retake the Baltics or Finland. Notably, only Belarus seems likely to have stayed with the Soviets based on the preferences of its residents.

The reason all the post Soviet states have such large Russian minorities is in part because the boundaries for the new Soviet "autonomous" regions were drawn so as ensure a large Russian population in them, as well as other minorities, to help create backlash against majority nationalist movements. This was further cemented by later mass deportations and genocides. So, in 1930, Ukraine was 9% Russian. Following the Hodolomor and further mass deportations after WWII, that had almost doubled.

Then you get to World War 2, which, with Victory Day, has become the greatest pillar of the founding mythos of modern Russia. The great invasion from the Germans and their allies that justifies whatever harsh acts the Soviet regime may have taken.

The problem here is that Hitler was quite explicit about his plans for war with the Soviets long before the outbreak of the war, in both his speeches and his book. Despite this, Russia formed a military alliance with the Nazi regime. Its surprise attack on Poland, in coordination with the Nazis, greatly reduced the already significant toll the conquest of Poland took on the Wermacht.

Russia also had plans to split other areas of Eastern Europe with its Nazi allies, although these had to wait due to the Red Army being a mess due to the ill thought out attempt to conquer Finland in another war of aggression, and Stalin's purge of his officer corps.

Ukraine thus had to deal with a genocide by the Soviets in the early 1930s, followed by a Nazi invasion that its government couldn't effectively stop until the suburbs of Moscow due to its earlier focus on reclaiming the territories of the old Russian empire.

The Soviets also continued to supply Germany with the material it would use in Barbarossa right up until the invasion.

Russia has plenty to celebrate in its people's sacrifice and heroism in defeating the Nazis. However, it's a true mark of how effective propaganda can be that Joseph Stalin is still voted the greatest Russian leader in history by Russians to this day. The idea is that, whatever atrocities he may have committed, his iron will was necessary to defeating the Third Reich. In reality, he is responsible for the absolute shit show that was Russian defense at the outset of the war, and they should be celebrating their ability to prevail in spite of their leader's total incompetence, not because of it.

Unfortunately, the myth of the actually effective Stalin is still used to justify Putin's more repressive actions.

I assume you're referring to Page and Gilen's work, since that is the big piece claims like that tend to come from? It's great research. It is also, as the authors have to frequently note, blown pretty far out of context.

First, the study is on the preferences of the highest earning 10% of the US, not the preferences of elites. Reason being that there is no polling data on the specific policy preferences of people with huge networths.

Second, policies that at least 80% of the top 10% distribution didn't like still got passed 18% of the time versus 45% of the time if 80% were in favor of a policy. That's a large amount of influence, but not a finding denoting some sort of absolute control by the wealthy.

Third, as the authors have to stress when reporting on their work, the wealthy don't all agree on policies. There are very liberal and very conservative wealthy people, so the effects plays out mostly where the wealthy have divergent interests from the median voters, rather than across all policies.

Fourth, the same research shows that interest groups (the NRA, Planned Parenthood, etc.) also wield a large amount of influence on policy adoption. Membership in these groups cuts across income levels. Both advocates for gay rights and religious conservatives have had policies they prefer passed in different states at different times, and neither group is defined by income level.

Anyhow, I thought America was a fascist dictatorship. Why doesn't Biden send rich people who disagree with him to a concentration camp?

Naive would be thinking politics is actually just window dressing to distract from a giant manichean struggle between well organized elites, who agree on most everything, and "regular" people.

Biden has certainly tried to get his agenda passed, he just lacks the votes to do so. Likewise, it was Obama's genuine conviction that he could be the "compromise" President, a new type of pragmatic unifier, that made him squander his time with a supermajority. Had Ted Kennedy lived longer, you'd likely have a public option in Obamacare, something that was jettisoned for votes. I'll agree that Trump didn't actually want to kill Obamacare due to expected blowback, but every indication is he did very much want to do immigration reform, it's just that members of his party knew shutting off a supply of cheap labor and a strong upward pressure on real estate would hurt their most important supporters.

Likewise, Bush II really did want to privatize Social Security and pass cap and trade for carbon emissions. He got towards the end of his Presidency and realized he didn't have much in terms of a big domestic legacy (not forseeing the Great Recession obviously), and decided to go for two of his big policy ideas. Privatizing Social Security would be a huge ideological win, and cap and trade would head off Democrats dictating climate change policy. There was also some real conviction behind the latter, as, despite his long list of failings, W. Bush does at least believe in climate change.

Anyone thinking it's therefore the only possible narrative is either struggling with their ego or their imagination.

Agreed. I never said it was the only possible analysis. It is possible that, had NATO explicitly told Ukraine it would do nothing to help them, they may have laid down their arms. Or it could have gone a step further and actively sanctioned Ukraine and pressured them to surrender, cutting it off from other sources of military and humanitarian aid.

Maybe the second would work; like I said, it is unclear the former would do much except make Ukraine rely more on its defense in depth strategy. I haven't seen a deep analysis of the politics of Ukraine to suggest that a rapid collapse was in the cards without NATO support. While the argument has been made, I've only seen it made in broad brush strokes: e.g., "the Russian military advantage is so large that without NATO aid there is no way the Ukrainians would have fought."

This argument just doesn't seem that good to me, largely because there is no historical precedent for this type of thinking driving homefront defense decisions. The military Ukraine started the war with was, compared to the Russian military, significantly stronger, larger, and better armed than:

Finland vs the USSR
The VC and NV forces vs the USA
The Taliban vs the USA
The Afghan mujahideen vs the USSR
Vietnam vs China
Vietnam vs France
Various Palestinian groups vs Israel (in later conflicts not involving the Arab states)
The Peshmerga vs Saddam's Iraq
The Tamil Tigers vs Sri Lanka
Various Syrian rebels vs the SAA, Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia (and other Syrian rebels, e.g., ISIS attacking even other Jihadi groups)
Proto-Israeli defense groups vs all of Israel's would-be neighbors (on paper at least, the Arab states were more concerned with boxing each other out of control for land than fighting Israel half the time, coordinating with Israel at times, so this might not count)
The KMT and Chinese Red Army vs Japan (arguably, this might be the best comparison because Japan had a huge firepower advantage, but also lacked the logistics and manpower to actually conquer China just as Russia did not send nearly enough troops to conquer a 40 million person nation the size of Texas).

In all these cases, despite larger disadvantages, groups with the political will to resist chose to resist better armed forces, in some cases quite successfully.

If someone put together an argument for a collapse of Ukrainian morale based on less NATO support based on better evidence, e.g., opinion data, interviews with Ukrainian decision-makers, internal documents, reports of the general staff, etc. I'd buy that. Unfortunately, that sort of information won't be around until the history books come out.

Anyhow, that ship has sailed. Ukraine did resist. They did get extra shipments of food, small arms, anti-tank weapons, radars, MANPADs, infantry armor, medical supplies, coms equipment, etc. early on. This was enough to cause the Russian advance to collapse. They are just now receiving heavier equipment (IFVs, APCs, tanks, artillery) and that hasn't been deployed to any great extent yet in theater, so it remains to be seen how it changes things.

The point I'd make here is that NATO cutting off aid now is almost certainly far less likely to stop Ukraine from resisting. First, because they have already defeated Russia's main effort and drastically sapped Russia's ability to mass combat power across a wide axis. Second, because Russian massacres, organized gang rapes of women and girls, widespread looting, attacks on residential blocks, and mining of settlements as they left the north, were all strategic blunders that appear to have hardened resistance and increased support for the war. Not that I think Russian leaders planned for most of those (the use of shelling for collective punishment and mining must have been approved at higher levels, the looting and killings is probably due to terrible discipline), but they are responsible for them to the extent that they didn't professionalize their armed forces.

If I'm repeatedly punching you in the face and you ask me to stop, it is not a reasonable counter-argument for me to say "well, what exactly do you think should happen instead?"

What is this analogy supposed to be? The "West" is repeatedly punching a passive Russia in the face? Seems to me the more appropriate analogy would be a bunch of guys with assault rifles and RPGs showed up at some guys house to take it over, and the West threw him a bolt action rifle and a shotgun when he asked for them to help even up the odds.

I imagine that what should be done is one of the literally dozens of other strategies that other experts are considering, which is why there's not one united opinion about everything.

Such as?

You are correct on the point about alternatives. I'm not sure if giving Ukraine the capabilities to retake Crimea, let alone encouraging them to do so, as the UK is doing, is a good idea. NATO can certainly lean on Ukraine to make a concessions for peace by threatening to withold aid and intelligence support.

My guess is that they are indeed doing this through diplomatic channels. If I had to guess, the much larger size of the new aid package from the US, which will take far longer to distribute, is aimed at dissuading Russia from embarking on a wider mobilization effort and a shift to large scale conscription to continue the war. We're seeing the stick side of negotiations publiclly because the funds have to be authorized by a public body, and the actual delivery of equipment is a strong signal that there will be high costs for a expanded effort by Russia.

It's also a way for people who want to support Ukraine to get funding authorized now, while support is popular politically. Once the war ends, public sentiment against foreign aid will likely flare back up. Money is fungible; if US funds cover defense, other revenues can fund rebuilding (and a good deal of the funding is humanitarian aid anyhow).

A good parallel here is the Yom Kippur War. Nickel Grass and the corresponding large Soviet shipment of arms to Syria and Egypt were public at the time. They were signals that continued fighting would be costly for either side.

You also had the Soviets ratcheting up their nuclear readiness, and the US following suit. (Aside: this might actually be a case where nuclear proliferation helped security, because Soviet willingness for any first strike was almost certainly reduced by the fact that, even if the US balked at defending Israel when push came to shove, Israel's own nuclear response could destroy the USSR's major cities).

What we now know, as documents have been declassified on both sides, memoirs written, dissertations on the war produced, etc. was that both the Soviets and the US where putting significant pressure on their allies to make a ceasefire agreement. Obviously there were also internal disagreements on how much pressure to put on each side's allies. The US DoD wanted Israel to make concessions for a ceasefire as soon as they had repulsed the main advances into Israel, the State side was more amenable to Israel's efforts to stall for time as they gained ground. Ultimately, the IDF's push into Damascus and encirclement of a large bulk of the Egyptian army in the Sinai, with Cairo left totally open, settled the issue, but even here the US put pressure on Israel to offer concessions to Egypt, which it did, paving the way for peace between the two.


None of this was public at the time. Both sides were attempting to credibly signal that they'd back their allies, although efforts at de-escalation continued through back channels.

Pressure for a ceasefire is going to occur in negotiations. The threat of Ukraine being well armed enough to retake Crimea, a political disaster for Putin, puts pressure on Russia for a peace where Russian troops evacuate at least some of the land they have taken. Negotiators likely want to leverage the return of Kherson, which has seen very significant protests against Russian occupation, and so isn't palatable to abandon. Mariupol might be another sticking point, as access to the Sea of Azov is economically important.

Giving Ukrainians the ability to keep hold of the rest of Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts is essential here in that it gives them something to trade for these more pro-Ukrainian areas, which also let's Putin come off with a win (along with a treaty keeping Ukraine out of NATO).

Building up Ukraine's military capacity also should make them more willing to give up NATO lobbying efforts.

What I'm interested in here is why everybody has taken this (to me) completely absurd line of simply assuming everything the government says and does is, this time, completely sensible and the only good choice, despite the fact that we've been subjected to exactly the same media manipulation, lies, and blatant profiteering that has been the hallmark of literally all the other occasions when corporation and governments have screwed the working class to further engorge themselves.

Who here is taking their talking points from government press releases? The best analysis of the situation has tended to come from OSINT organizations, think tanks, academics, and former Soviet/Russian/Warsaw Pact/NATO military officers and diplomats opining on what they see. Not everything is reducable to class struggle. The world saw a large number of large and destructive wars before an urban working class ever existed on any large scale. Indeed, war, and the percentage of populations killed by wars, as well as homicide rates in general, have been falling dramatically throughout history.

Pillage, looting, and genocide used to be done as a matter of course during wars. No one tried to hide it. Cassius Dio writes unflinchingly about the Roman tactic of butchering villages in modern-day Scotland to bait Pict insurgents out of hiding. Soldiers used to be paid explicitly in loot and their ability to take slaves from conquered peoples. If anything, both forensic anthropology and studies of existent hunter gatherer tribes that survived into the 20th century suggest that deaths in conflicts were even more common before the dawn of civilization. Wars were certainly smaller, but they were far more common, to the extent that one in every five men who made it to adulthood may have died in conflict.

Certainly we see higher death rates in earlier wars. The Thirty Years War killed a larger share of Europe than both World Wars combined, and was significantly more deadly in Germany than both the later wars. Battles also tended to be more deadly. The Romans, with a population a small fraction of the US in the 1960s, lost more men in a few hours at Cannae then the US lost in Vietnam or Korea. The most deadly single days of battle almost all date to pre-modern periods. Scaled up for population, the American Revolution would have killed about 2.5-9 million Americans today (depending on if you count excess deaths conservatively or not, military deaths alone would be 2.3 million).

Capitalism might be unjust and stoke wars, but it certainly isn't a necessary condition for wars. Technological development, better education, greater degrees of political and economic freedom, etc. have all coincided with far fewer deaths from conflict over time. This does also happen to also be the period during which the fusion of modern market economies, socialist welfare policies, and elected government emerge. Hard to say what caused what, but it's definitely a robust trend that liberal democracies don't go to war with one another.



Yeah, this is the hard part. Particularly if it's, "find a someone realistic, politically feasible alternative."

Dictatorial power. See unitary theory of government and any time prez is backed by majority in both houses.

Ah yes, I recall when Barak Obama had a super majority in the Senate and the House and was able to get through a massive raft of major bills, or how, when Donald Trump's party held both chambers, the White House, and the Court, we saw the repeal of Obamacare and sweeping changes to immigration law, the two things the GOP had run on. No way they failed to repeal Obamacare and then failed to hold a single vote on immigration.

Joe Biden has both chambers right now, ask him how his agenda is going.

Not to mention that increasingly diametrically.opposwd parties trading off power every 4-8 years doesn't exactly sound like a dictatorship.

What is your counterfactual? What do you think would happen if additional aid shipments didn't reach Ukraine? Without NATO whispering in Ukrainians ears they would have all surrendered? Then why did they put up enough resistance to stall the advance and turn it into an urban combat grind before a single NATO shipment arrived?

It seems likely to me that:
A. The heavy resistance to the invasion that began before NATO aid arrived was likely to continue regardless of what was provided.
B. Russia would have made more progress into Kyiv and Kharkiv proper if Ukraine had fewer quality anti-tank weapons.

Because of A and B, C follows, that more combat would have occured in the large cities Russia attempted to take, and that Russia would have followed the same disasterous ROE it used in Mariupol.

The ambushes on Russian supply lines and MANPADs used to down all the Russian rotary wing assets in there insane air assaults without SEAD all used existing Ukrainian weapons. The old Stingers they had have more confirmed kills than any other platform (Starstreak didn't arrive till much later). Russia's naval losses were from a Grad, a 1960s rocket artillery system, and Neptune missiles, a system designed and built in Ukraine. As far case video evidence goes, the biggest killer of Russian tanks has been old 152mm Soviet artillery shells.

Certainly NATO weapons that arrived after the invasion have been hugely helpful, allowing Ukrainians to abandon the initial strategy of ceding ground and drawing Russia into urban combat, where their advantage in hardware counts for less. Precision munitions are particularly helpful for counter battery fire and dealing with armored columns, but also reduce the risk of off target shells hitting civilians or infrastructure to a large degree. It also greatly reduces the number of shells that need to be fired, which means fewer munitions falling in settled areas.

Part of the reason Russian bombing and shelling as killed so many civilians and damaged so much infrastructure is because they ran out of precision munitions extremely quickly. The other factor is that, in some cases, the shelling appears to intentionally target residential areas as a means of breaking morale. This sort of strategy has been shown to actually increase resistance, so again, another factor more relevant than NATO.

Yeah, yeah, the West controls everything, people elsewhere lack all agency.

But by your logic, isn't it Iran's fault that Palestine is getting bombed? After all, if they didn't have any weapons to defend themselves with, Israel wouldn't be bombing them.

Likewise, it's sort of Russia's fault that Israel bombs Syria, right? If they hadn't sold Assad weapons, he'd be gone, and so no reason for the bombs! (Although in reality, Israel has overwhelmingly be bombing Iranian targets in Syria, so that might not hold up).

It's $20 billion in security assistance, not $20 billion in weapons. $5 billion of it is just a spending authorization. The funding doesn't necissarily cover new weapons, it's for all the normal costs of running a military.

Could it make things better? Certainly, it could change the calculus for pursing further operations against Ukraine.

It already has done a world of good. As noted above, the most likely outcome of witholding all aid would have been a Mariupol/Grozny style meat grinder in two vastly larger cities. NATO hasn't given Ukraine wonder weapons. They just started giving them artillery, a large scale resistance wasn't contingent on NATO telling Ukrainians to resist; without aid they still would have had the ability to carry out a significant resistance. The key difference would be more urban combat, which would lead to more destroyed infrastructure and more civilian deaths.

As to weapons, it really depends on what type of weapons are supplied. Cruise missiles capable of blowing up Putin's Victory Day parade, not such a good idea. Guided shells that are exponentially less likely to accidentally hit civilians? Not a bad one.

How exactly do you escalate from throwing all the troops you can muster (as evidenced from the fact that no fresh units are rotating into the theater) for a multi-pronged full invasion of a country?

It is certainly unclear if Russia would have been successful in taking Kyiv regardless of what other countries did. Maybe the lack of external support would have resulted in a collapse in Ukrainian morale? It doesn't seem super likely though. The Russian advance had already started stalling before any new was making it to the Ukrainians. Their problem was that they had a ridiculous number of lines of attack, vehicles that hadn't seen proper maintainance and so were breaking down all over the place, and an completely insufficient force for the mission.

Ukrainian willingness to fight also seemed quite high, with citizens taking up the surplus rifles offered to them, making piles of Molotov cocktails in the street, and people offering bribes to get into the gaurd units.

So it seems likely what you'd see is just a further Russian advance, and then sort of urban fighting you saw in Mariupol on a larger scale in Kharkiv and Kyiv.

Russians began hitting residential neighborhoods in an attempt to hit morale in the first week of the war. It's not like "the gloves came off," they were never on.

Right, because if Ukrainians end up having to defend themselves with old Kalashnikovs and improvised explosives, less of them will die.

In general, asymmetrical wars cause more military and civilians casualties for the disadvantaged side, by a pretty significant margin.

Given Russian planes will continue to bomb Ukrainian cities, it seems like a SAM system that will either convince the Russians not to fly sorties over those cities, or will shoot down their planes if they insist on trying, seems like a way to keep Ukrainians alive. Same goes for the more destructive shelling; given it doesn't seem to be stopping any other way, my guess is the people having their apartments randomly destroyed might appreciate a longer range howitzer with guided munitions that can silence those guns.

In any event, close to half of it is economic aid, food shipments, etc.

Yeah, unfortunately it's about average for some work sites I've been to as well, including a US National Guard company I worked with. On the upside, someone who didn't want to deploy with someone who might be drunk when called for support turned them in and they were pretty severely punished, which does not seem to be the case for all militaries (Russia seemingly, certainly not the ANA, where you could muster in the middle of a heroin nod and not be exceptional).

I also picked up a hitch hiker in a blizzard once who was actually the operator of a plow truck that had run out gas. He offered to hold the wheel for me while we "blasted some nips" from his shopping bag of little whiskey bottles. I was pretty young then so I didn't think to ask him to consider if there might be some connection between the whiskey and joints, and his managing to run out of gas in the middle of his shift...

I find it increasingly incomprehensible how Russia boosters can claim continuing this war is a good strategic choice for Russia. Even if you take a totally amoral, power politics look at it, all they are doing now is grinding down their military, losing irreplaceable hardware in large numbers, and absolutely tanking their economy as Europe looks to cut Russian energy imports by 2/3rds now and totally by 2027. The EU sucks at follow through, sure, but even half this plan would be a disaster. 42% of Russian state revenues come from energy exports. Europe buys 90% of those. Even partial implementation would tank government revenues, making rebuilding the military impossible even if they hadn't also lost themselves access to a ton of the imports they need for that.

Strategically, it showed they had absolutely no back up plan for Ukrainian resistance. They used all of 195,000 troops for this campaign. By contrast the US had 500,000 for the invasion of Iraq, a smaller country with more favorable geography, after they had decimated its military already and defacto partitioned the Kurdish third of it. They had almost a million troops for the Gulf War. Troops levels for controlling half of Vietnam, with a significantly smaller population than Ukraine, peaked at 1.4 million total.


:lol:

One of the videos of the guy who stole a $13 million AA system appeared to have had a BAC of at least 1.6 while doing it. Not good when the town drunk is stealing your elite hardware.

lol, reminds me of the Reddit "covens" organizing to support the ANA. I have to assume at least half the posts were made in jest though, at least I hope so.

Yes, it's not the data I'm referring to, it's the interpretation. The data needs careful and expert interpretation. One can't simply look at some intelligence reports, even of the highest confidence, and say "well, I reckon that means..."

That's literally what OSINT is meant to do, to put analysis in clear language for the public.

Intelligence reports aren't a foreign language. When I started working on them I used mostly the same skills I had learned in my education.

A friend who worked with them extensively told me it could be really quickly, two weeks of drills or even a bit less if they are working with experienced teams. That jives with DoD messaging of "about a week." The superiority in range means that the team's ability to rapidly set up and take down the gun to reposition isn't quite as important, at least at first as they fire from safer positions while they gain experience. Rapid repositioning will matter more as they start trying to use indirect fire for advances.

Apparently the digital fire control system isn't that hard to learn, but integrating whatever else they are using for target aquisition might be trickier. Obviously they have been using drones to spot, as the copious video of successful arty strikes shows. I don't know if NATO is also sharing satalite imagery and data. The Army did a bunch of press releases on integrating of the M777 fire control with satalite guidance a few years ago. They might also be using the Air Force's SBIRS, which should be updating every 10 minutes. The Excalibur shell can be satalite guided.

While involving more interconnectivity, that might actually make training quicker, since teams would have up to date information on the location of Russian batteries and could set up out of range, where speed isn't as much of an issue.

The teams will still have to worry about Russian air assets, but Russia doesn't seem to have the ability to rapidly deploy that sort of support, still has to worry about the AA network, pilots are probably quite hesitant due to getting painted by AWACS each sortie (Russian cockpit info infamously only gives the pilot an indication of the strongest radar painting them, so there would be the fear that an S-300 is also targeting them), and the Russians appear to have been mostly out of guided munitions for a while, making hitting a mobile towed weapon difficult.

Given it's been 11 days since the announcement and the weapons were already in Europe, I would guess they'd be appearing fairly soon. DoD messaging suggest the weapons are only arriving now, from the US (Canada is sending M777s too) but that could just be an effort to obscure when they will show up. I'd imagine they had them ready as the authorization was set up.

A M142 HIMARS was also sent, which has an effective range of 310 miles. This might explain the alleged hit on a meeting of the entire Russian command yesterday (if it actually happened). It certainly won't be good for any new multi-kilometer convoys that show up again.

They'll be a game changer, particularly because the Russian artillery, while having a major numerical advantage, seems absolutely terrible. For instance, you have a self propelled gun specifically designed for shoot and scoot. You fire, then move about 10m back into the tree line, where you also have conveniently parked all your ammunition right next to each other, within the range of a single incoming shell, so that cook of will destroy all of them.

Then you also park your vehicles right next to the building you're hiding in and sit there for several hours, giving ample time for your adversary to tow up their own guns and put a shell directly on to where you clumped all your assets.

https://youtu.be/VRaA-aNss0E


Russia's argument isn't about Western hypocrisy. You don't invade a country over hypocrisy. Its messaging is explicitly about a major military threat posed by Neo-Nazi militias operating in Ukraine, which are, in fact, smaller and less well armed than the Neo-Nazi militias Russia allows to operate in Russia. And indeed, Russia has also long funded and provided direct support to these larger Neo-Nazi groups.

On a side note, with the French gone and the Russians in, the ISIS affiliate in Mali has already overrun one of their bases. These forces they've cultivated seem capable of war crimes against unarmed civilians and not a whole lot else.

predict moves even CIA strategists missed, work out battle plans from a few newspaper articles, judge war crimes using Facebook, and all without the need for experts

You do realize open source intelligence reports exist, right? It isn't all "newspaper articles and Facebook." News outlets are a terrible place to learn about the course of any war, that's true, because they don't assume any military knowledge on the part of their audience, or an interest in the military details of the war. OSINT outlets do include this. You also have the Ukrainian General Staff's public reports. If intelligence reports by former intelligence staff that is overseen by former general officers doesn't count as "expert" opinion, I'm not sure what does.

The war crimes investigation is also being conducted by professionals, namely the ICC, who arrived on the ground as Russia pulled out, not via Facebook.

I'm just not seeing how that's a coherent argument. You need to invade a country because there is a neo-Nazi force there that can field 900 soldiers, but then you cultivate a 6,000+ man neo-Nazi force within your own borders?

That's not whataboutism because we're talking about the exact same event; recruiting neo-Nazis to fight neo-Nazis.

BTW, Putin has personally commended the units implicated in the Bucha massacurres and slated then for medals. I guess this is some weird sort of deflection.

The other people implicated? The Wagner Group.

The Wagner Group, who, incidentally were hired in Mali to conduct COIN after they booted the French out (lol). The French kept eyes on their old base, and what do you know, they see the Wagner group carting in corpses and doing some filming. They then release some whataboutism propaganda video about French massacurres of civilians, seemingly unaware of 21st century surveillance techniques and that they had been observed doing the whole damn thing.

https://youtu.be/rpVrpJ5s6nE

Embarrassing, especially since there is barely any sunlight between the Wagner group and the Russian MoD. Imagine thinking "hmm, let's do some more war crimes to distract from our recent abhorrent war crimes, that will work!"

Yeah, that's the big question. Sometimes wars lead to greater unity. A citizenry that has defended its self goes on to demand greater economic equality and social mobility, and puts aside old differences. Ukraine has long running issues with extreme corruption and powerful oligarchs holding back any reform, as well as radical ideologies infecting the nation's politics. They also have a huge debt problem and are incredibly poor compared to most of Europe. For now at least, Russia has made the Ukrainian government immensely popular, something it could not boast about before.

New found unity from the war, EU membership, and a stream of aid and debt restructuring/forgiveness could see them into a new era. But just as often war only makes entrenched interests more powerful, and radical politics more appealing.

It might not be the worst thing for them to lose the newly discovered gas fields out east. Certainly they could provide capital for development, but resource revenues actually tend to retard economic development and decrease democratization in weak states.

Such a loss seems less and less likely though. Ukraine is now fielding more tanks in theater than the Russians. Their mobilization efforts to date have merely replaced losses, there haven't been new BTGs entering the fronts. According to the Ukrainian General Staff, that is about to change, with new BTGs taking up less active positions on the front and allowing veteran units to retrain on new equipment and deploy to the hot areas. So soon, Ukraine will also boast a large numerical advantage.

To counter this, Russia is filling out its war crimes bingo card by planning to conscript Ukrainians around Kherson and push them into combat. They've also done this to a shocking degree in the "republics," picking men off the street and pressing them into service. They're allegedly down to taking teens and old men. This seems pointlessly cruel, it isn't generating new combat power for them, and very short sighted. They already have partisan activity behind their lines. They seem to be turning the populations of the places they've held since 2014 heavily against them and increasing the risk of partisan activity harassing supply lines across their entire eastern advance.

Most relevantly, once Ukrainian teams are trained on the large influx of M777s coming in, they will have a large artillery advantage that should allow them to begin much more effective counter attacks and cut out the Russian artillery advantage.

Russia is using a lot of old ancient D20s and aside from that is mostly fielding 2S19s (also fairly old). They have a smaller number of 2S19M1s, and some batteries will have Krasnapol shells.

These have a range of 11 and 25 kilometers respectively, a bit longer for the 2S19M1 with the modern shells, but still under 30km.

The M777 with the Excalibur guided shell can hit targets up to 70 kilometers away, 45 with the older version of the shell, with a great deal of accuracy (newer versions have in air target acquisition and course correction and can hit moving targets). The US also has a cheaper package to turn old shells into smart shells. These aren't just "guided" like the shells of the 1980s, with laser targeting, but have deployable fins that steer the shell on to a target, or submunitions that fire our at acquired targets in the terminal phase.

Even older shells will get them 43 kilometres. The M777 also sets up faster and had a higher ROF, as well as better integration with radar and drones. Obviously outranging your opponent by 13-60 kilometers makes for extremely effective counter battery fire, and allows you to make advances with indirect fire support that isn't under effective counter battery fire.

Point being, Russia might soon be at a significant firepower disadvantage, so it's unclear why they are continuing with the ineffective attacks and sending conscripts to their deaths. They seem to be making it more likely they lose land they've held since 2014.




I agree. The tank is still going to be useful as a survivable vehicle offering a lot of firepower. I do think we might see a shift to the guided mortars of the Merkava over the main gun to some degree. The US is doing a ton of projects for 155mm shells, the standard for artillery and naval guns now (has been for a while but the Navy filled out their stealth ship with a non-155mm gun with ammo too expensive to use). Aside from smart munitions, there are also rocket assisted rounds in the works with up to 200+ km range and a new hypersonic round that can be used to intercept missiles, which is already being tested. It seems pretty infeasible to retool the current fleet for 155mm, but I could see the tanks of the future being more heavily armored mobile mortar and drone launchers, with HMGs for infantry, and a main gun that is able to function more like a howitzer at a distance.

I think the days of the armored division are done though. After this, many nations are probably going to switch to something like the Armored Brigade Combat Team, realizing that tanks need to move with interceptor assets, recon assets, and indirect fire assistance.

When it comes to artillery, drones and smart munitions are just the enabler of this ancient arm of the military. In fact I assume that easiness of drones as forward observers, just few mouse clicks and you have sent the coordinates to the artillery for a fire mission, is this "revolution" that drones have given us. Far easier if the other option is for you to have the forward observer hiding somewhere and seeing the target, then who has to inspect a map, then get the coordinates correctly and send them by a voice radio to somewhere in the organization. Yet the only thing what needs to happen is for air defence systems to adapt to kill small slow vehicles the Cold War era systems weren't designed to defeat.

Yup, and drones are just the beginning. The US just announced the replacements for the M4 and M249 SAW. Much of the focus had been on the switch to 6.8mm ammo. This was done to double the effective range of the round, something the new optics and built in ballistics computers should make more of an asset, and to deal with the proliferation of body armor that can stop numerous M4 rounds (6.8mm still won't penetrate Level IV armor though). The big debate is if this will actually work for urban combat, because higher recoil makes automatic firing more difficult, and the added ammunition weight and size means carrying 20 vs 30 round mags and less ammo.

This is burying the lead though, which is the new XM157 fire control system. Rather than just an optic, it's a range finder and targeting system with a ballistics computer built in (which may one day offer some "smart scope" functionality. Current smart scopes already let journalists who have never held a gun before hit targets at a distance better than trained marksmen, but are too delicate and expensive for widespread use.)

The new system will allow interconnectivity between squads and drone, air, and artillery assets across the battle space. So, it's not just drones doing recon for artillery; every soldiers' rifle can send out precise data on where they need a shell extremely quicky.

Get pinned down by fire from a window? No sitting on the phone waiting to call in indirect fire as you might be getting flanked. Your squad ground drone can lay down high caliber suppressing fire. Your new IFV can move, unmanned, into position to hit the window with 30mm autocannon fire, a small drone above can hit the window with a 40mm grenade, or a 155mm shell can get fired off from 70 kilometers away and hit the target.

The other big deal is the IVAS, an augmented reality HUD overlay for all soldiers. This will lay out the location of OPFOR spotted by drones and other soldiers that are currently out of sight of the operator. It will also give soldiers a real time map of their location, with the position of OPFOR and other squads relative to them. Biometric data can also get medevac going right away following injuries, and lets command know when soldiers are at their limit.

All really neat stuff we've been hearing about for years that is (finally) actually ready for force wide implementation.

I for one am just excited to get to shoot the new Sig. Maybe one day this stuff will get cheap enough for paintball too; that'd be fun. Or airsoft, which I've been meaning to try because apparently it's better for milsim.

Well that too. The supposed existential threat of the Azov group is consists of a bit over one BTG worth of fighters and lacks adequate equipment to even act as a BTG.


Well yeah, there is a larger group of fighters than Azov with ties to Neo-Nazism fighting in Ukraine. They boast 6,000+ versus 900 members, and have some heavier hardware too.

Just check out their leader, rocking an SS tattoo and swastika.



This would of course be the Wagner group, who, incidentally, fights for Russia, with funding from the Russian government who has also allowed them to use heavier military hardware.

The Rusich group represents an explicit Neo-Nazi militia used under Russia's amorphous "mercenary" forces, is transported by the Russian military, and utilizes their health care services.

Guess you gotta make a bigger army of Nazis to fight the smaller army of Nazis?

What happened to the bioweapons that were an existential threat justifying the invasion? Surely, the Slav targeting super virus and killer bird flocks remain. But now the entire Kyiv axis was a feint?

Didn't Nuland admit to the bio weapons!?

Or:
C. Able to distinguish nuance. Maybe it isn't about a specific number of Nazis, but what they are doing. Are they massacuring civilians and gearing up to invade their neighbors the way the real Nazis did? Do they actually have the capacity to do these things or is there an immanent risk of them gaining those capabilities? How will said Nazis be eliminated and what collateral damage will occur during these efforts? What tools are available for dispatching the Nazis: a modern, professional military with guided munitions for avoiding collateral damage, or one that is going to begin punitively shelling residential neighborhoods when they meet resistance and which will start gang raping women and children? Are there ways to engage the Nazi threat with more limited means?

There are plenty of people who are not "pro-Nazi," who nonetheless, seeing isolated US areas with active neo-Nazi groups, don't think the correct course of action is to begin shelling those communities.

Got no takers on the "is this the end of the main battle tank era?" question I see, but I'm starting to think the bigger lesson learned will be the reemergence of artillery as a much larger part of operations. Guided artillery shells seem to be doing much more damage as the war goes on. The ability to use far cheaper artillery, with infinite "loiter" time, to provide the equivalent of close air support and to hit moving vehicles seems like a game changer. The Excalibur shell the US fields has come down in cost, from $250,000 to $65,000. It allows the use of 155mm artillery to within 150 feet of friendly forces. Newer rounds can be blind fired and pick up targets and feed back recon data in flight, and can be called off if too close to friendlies. Extended range versions can cover 43 miles.

This could be huge for lower budget forces. The ANA was extremely hampered by coming to rely on close air support that it lost when the US left. This provides similar functionality at a fraction of the cost. It appears to be devestating Russian advances in some cases, that is for sure.

Edit: my understanding is that the ability to hit moving targets is somewhat limited, and self-guided shells that pick targets are more expensive. Ok for hitting something large like a tank, APC, or IFV, provided it is moving slowly, not at the level of drones or jets, where a guided munition can hit a windshield on a truck speeding down the highway (yet).

Already though, there is a counter to this. The new M1 has an interceptor system for shells, rockets, and drones, but more impressively, Israel just unveiled a laser system that fries incoming shells and rockets. The bonus here is that you don't have to rely on munitions, and it should be cheaper over time. In theory, you could cover counter battery fire using a system powered by a solar panel.

The new Mitsubishi F-3, which might be the first Gen 6 air superiority fighter to actually make it out, has a huge powerplant for future laser projectile defense, and the ability for it to intercept long range missiles with the laser system (in theory). However, it strangely is missing the ability to fly without a pilot, which I think will be common in the future (my guess is that all first wave bombers will be unmanned soon, but not fighters for a while).

Russia, overshooting the space between high concept and ridiculous sci-fi, claims that the MiG-31 will not only have both these abilities, but will have a working scramjet, allowing it to hit Mach 4-5 (sort of ridiculous) and the ability to travel into space (farcical on the level of Reagan's satalite-based laser missile defense bullshit).

You seem to have a serious problem with black and white thinking. "Morale is sometimes the most important issue in a conflict," is not equivalent to "morale is always the deciding issue in a conflict."

Obviously some degree of morale is a necessary condition for victory. In certain cases, as I have given examples of, superior morale is a sufficient cause for victory in spite of inferior numbers, equipment, tactics, and leadership. Obviously, sometimes dumb luck also intervenes to change the course of history as well (e.g., the role of storms in attempts to invade Japan and the degree of losses suffered by the Spanish Armada).

It's from 2013, although they also have assurances for Ukraine dating to the 1990s, these were more explicit, and recall US "nuclear umbrella," language.

It raised a lot of eyebrows at the time, and China has had to move to clarify after the recent invasion. It's now repositioning it as "a gaurentee against nuclear weapons," which still has relevance for Russia's first use "escalate to descalate" doctrine.

https://thediplomat.com/2014/01/chinas-nuclear-parasol/

I think the goal was to get such an agreement in "the West," as a bit of a power play, but might also have been aimed at Russia. Despite the various incentives for Russia and China to play up their cooperation, as a balance to US alliances in Europe and Asia, the two countries have a great deal of outstanding differences. They might get along better now that Russia is so dependant on China, and because China's relationship with India has gone from bad to shit recently, and they are sort of hard up for strategic allies with any economic heft.



Is there any real argument that the collapse of Afghanistan's defense forces didn't have to do with morale?

Even with all the ghost soldiers, the ANA still had probably 100,000 soldiers and a lot of quality hardware for mounting a defense against the Taliban. The extremely rapid collapse of the ANA after their initial pushback on the Taliban advance in May 2021 didn't stem from any strategic route, but from morale collapsing. The Taliban took provincial capitals without a shot being fired and road in to cheering crowds. They were at the very least seen as the lesser of two evils, at least in Pashtun areas.

Meanwhile, in the Panjshir they had 8,000 fighters and resistance has remained for 9 months, with it even stepping up as of late. The key difference is morale and support (or lack of it) in a minority area for what is partly a Pashtun nationalist government at this point.

There are plenty of other examples from modern and ancient history. The proto-IDF was at a significant equipment disadvantage in 1948, with surplus Czech Kar98ks (ironically with swastikas stamped on them) the main foreign aid (from the Soviets, not the USA). However, they had a significant morale and leadership advantage. (The Arabs also had an advantage in jets, tanks, etc. in the later wars, but arguably it was inferior hardware in those cases).

The Soviets had a major equipment and manpower advantage in the Winter War and faired terribly due to poor leadership and high Finnish morale. Hannibal did everything right, inflicted massive losses (Cannae is still one of the highest death rolls for a single day in history), but couldn't overcome Roman morale and willingness to keep raising more armies.

The Siege of Antioch may be the best example. The Crusader army trapped in the city was starving and disease ridden. Against all the doctrine of the era, they left the safety of the city walls to attack a force twice as large, with significantly more heavy horse (the dominant battlefield factor of the era). Due to being insanely hyped up from a priest having unearthed "the spear that pierced the side of Christ," and in a religious frenzy, they somehow managed not only fight through the Turk's flanks, but to envelop most of the host, killing a large portion of them. The massive amount of manpower lost in a single day paved the way to the existence of the Crusader states.

Judas Maccabeus defeated a Seleucid host of 20,000 infantry, 10,000 calvary, and 22 elephants with 10,000 not well equipped or trained, but very fired up religious zealots.

Or there is the White Army failing everywhere in the Russian civil war by tanking peasant morale everywhere they went by promising to return land to the landlords.

These are all examples of morale winning out over equal or sometimes bad tactics (Antioch was suicidal tactically, but worked), and against larger, better armed, forces. This is as opposed to some sort of underdog win through tactical/strategic genius (like say, Napoleon in the Italian campaign winning again and again with inferior forces; all evidence is that the professional armies he faced had fine morale, he just had a preternatural ability to lead battles and sieges).

No threat of proportional response 'in kind' which a nice thing to have in a conflict.

Right, and this is why low yield nukes; artillery shells dialed to a few hundred tons, man portable rockets capable of replicating the explosive power of the world's largest conventional bombs, etc. become unthinkable to use. An individual use isn't that qualitatively different from a large conventional strike, it's just far easier to use. However, the firepower advantage is so huge that you will force your opponent to also begin using nuclear arms. Conventional forces will be helpless against the onslaught of tactical nuclear weapons, and you'll quickly get to a point where lobbing strategic arsenals at each other is the only thing that makes sense, given a single howitzer can wipe out a division with a 5 kiloton yield shell.

It's actually more of a problem for powers like the US and China, who expect to have a conventional advantage in wars if tactical nuclear weapons spread since it reduces their comparable advantage. I have to imagine some of this played a role in the Chinese nuclear guarantee of Ukraine.

I don't think it's that simple. The US use of nuclear weapons took place when they were new and an unknown factor in warfare. They were used before MAD, before hydrogen bombs and multimegaton yields, and before ICBMs allowed for global delivery of the weapons on a hair trigger. Their use in 1945 couldn't cause an apocalypse.

Their use was in the context of air wars that were killing significantly more civilians than the primitive nuclear devices did. They were, on the one hand, a game changer as new uses for them rapidly developed, and on the other, less deadly than other single US air raids carried out in Japan and Germany with conventional bombs. They also came in the context of the Axis and Allies having used indiscriminate air raids on each other for almost 6 years in Europe, and over a decade in Asia.

Maybe more importantly, they existed outside the context of a proscription against first use that has since been adopted by every nuclear power for most of a century now.

It's a violation of norms other powers don't want. China has no incentive in seeing Russia normalize the use of nuclear weapons. It could spark development by their neighbors, which would ruin its strategic position. It sees itself gaining ground conventionally in the Pacific Rim. Nuclear armed neighbors fighting in a world where using nukes doesn't make you a exile state would ruin all their long term ambitions vis-á-vis the balance of power. India also doesn't want nuclear use normalized for Pakistan, who is has a conventional advantage against.

The problem for would be allies of Russia if they use nukes is that they will create an incentive for nukes to be used on them. Right now official doctrine and agreements say that first users get exiled from the international community, and there is strong incentives to live up to that, at least initially.

Not to mention that it would be a sea change in Russian standing in the world and an excuse to push historic claims on Russian land (which Japan and China have). Both like to remind Russia every now and again that they are illegally occupying their land, and China has actually done something about it with a labor policy that has made the areas of the Russian Far East majority Han, and the entire Federal District around 12.5-15% Han since 2000, when almost no Chinese citizens lived there.

I should have also noted that, unlike the USSR, Russia doesn't have a policy of "no first use" for nuclear weapons.

Since 2010, they have also had an explicit first use policy of "escalate to descalate," which calls for using tactical nuclear weapons if they begin losing a conventional war, and face existential threats. The question hanging over this is "existential threats to Russia, or existential threats to Putin's rule of Russia?" Putin published a decree reaffirming this doctrine in 2020.

The idea is that the use of a tactical nuke would cause enough fear of a strategic exchange to force adversaries to compromise. It's part of a trend towards a more aggressive nuclear posture that Putin's Russia has continually made as it falls further behind its neighbors technologically and militarily.


For a strategic attack they would have to launch what they can before attacks on their arsenal began. I think the trickier thing is how the order would be given. If you plan it before hand, you risk a leak (and their whole invasion plan just leaked, so intentional, humint leaks and/or signals intelligence leaks could lead to a devestating first strike). If you give the order without prior indication, you risk the response being slow or people refusing to go through with it, which would compromise the strike.

The UR-100N and R-36s they have a good deal of their nuclear weapons on are near retirement date and might not work, so that's a real issue. The US arsenal is a known mess due to underfunding, and it has a budget the size of the entire Russian defense budget, so there is probably some concerns with how well the arsenal would preform, especially given the state of the conventional military in a war that was obviously planned for.

Just a guess, but I think the target audience might be members of Congress who are calling for high end aid to go to Ukraine. The CIA doesn't want the war to escalate. The best outcome in terms of US security is for Russia's army to continue to be worn down and embarrassed, but for Russia to still be able to declare victory in securing Donetsk or something, and a cease fire going into place.

Too much aid to Ukraine runs the risk of them pushing back into Donetsk and Crimea, which could make Putin double down on the war due to the risk to his public image and popularity. Initial Ukrainian victories with better arms could then result in the mobilization of a war economy in Russia, increased conscription, etc. This has the negative effect of prolonging the war and destabilizing Russia.

As much as I'm sure the CIA would love to see Putin go, they'd rather have him around than some sort of chaos in Russia in the form of mutinies, etc.

You have people calling for the US to donate M1s, F-15s, etc. What you don't want for escalation is Ukraine able to carry out air strikes in Russia and shoot down their planes across the border, or tank columns punching holes across the Russian border. Not to mention training time and logistics is infeasible without even more US involvement. At the end of the day, the aid so far is a tiny amount of the NATO budget and not particularly high end hardware. There is an effort not to escalate.