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this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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I can hardly wait for Ukraine to fall so that I can stop listening to all the fucking "experts" telling me how Russia is just doing human wave tactics like they're playing an undead faction in a vidya
Don't hold your breath, they will only change present tense to past "Russia won because they did human wave attacks", same thing they say about how Red Army beaten previous nazis.
The ironic thing is that NAFO was probably heavily reprimanded for publically doubting the cause.
Seriously, these people are utterly insufferable.
It does honestly feel like people - on both sides of the war, I will freely admit - put way too much focus on individual events and are unable to see the bigger picture of logistics and equipment produced and so on.
So you end up with, just as a recent example, the Ukrainians going on and on about that Bradley vs tank incident and how "owned" Russia was or whatever (that is managed to keep going for like 5 minutes in constant Bradley fire? sounds like a pretty awesome example of how great Russian tanks are tbh), or that Russian plane full of Ukrainian POWs being shot down by a Patriot, or now this boat being sunk. But none of this actually matters. What's really going on here is that the pro-Ukraine crowd is seeing these events and drawing absolutely massive conclusions from it. "Aha, see, we can now destroy all Russian tanks with just our infantry carriers! Aha, see, we can now shoot down every Russian plane with our air defense! Aha, see, we can now sink every boat in the Russian fleet!" Russia has thousands of tanks, its planes are routinely not shot down by Ukrainian air defense because of how depleted it is and the Russian countermeasures (flying low, etc), and honestly, sinking the Russian Black Sea fleet would be an L but it would be very far from war-ending, given that Ukraine has no navy for it to fight anyway and Russia obviously has inland missile launchers. But the pro-Russian side like Rybar tends to take these narratives and feels the need to address them because they're just as caught up in these narratives as everybody else, when they could just ignore them and watch as they're forgotten in a week.
Wars are determined by systemic issues and, most importantly, the capacity for the warring nations to overcome those issues. Neither side is permanently locked into its state of affairs (in most cases; e.g. WW2 Germany had problems the whole war with getting enough fuel due to simple geography). Not being able to see how a military could make up for its deficiencies is what lead to the Kharkov surprise for the pro-Russian side who didn't understand that Russia went into the war with too few troops to man parts of the front and that Ukraine had been creating brigades in the rear while their frontline army was getting mauled over the spring and summer, and then the surprise of the failure of the counteroffensive for Ukraine, who didn't understand that Russia had found a way to counter the Ukrainian offensive strategy and thought that the same trick was guaranteed to work twice.
In short, if you're going to make an assumption that a military is unable to counter a new problem, you need a LOT of evidence for it - not just vibes about how you think the conflict is going to go. Never assume that a military is stagnant unless you have extremely good reasons to believe so. I personally don't believe that the Ukrainian military is stagnant and totally doomed and they can still probably keep defending for at least the better part of a year and finding new strategies to counter Russia, but the ongoing lack of Western military reindustrialization is my 'extremely good reason' to believe that Ukraine will be unable to win unless there is a very sudden change in the economic strategy of the West away from neoliberalism and just-in-time manufacturing.
At the end of the day, the Kremlin is seeing the same info we are and much more that we aren't. So any kind of certainty that they can't adapt to problems is just silly.
For sure, I made that mistake at the start of the war as well. It seemed like every skirmish was going to be relevant somehow. After a while I realized that it's pretty safe to ignore most of the reporting about small positional changes and who captured what hill on a particular day.
And completely agree that at the end of the day it all comes down to the logistics. The military will adapt and evolve as it faces new problems. There are smart and determined people on both sides who are constantly working on ways to get upper hand. The industry problem on the other hand is much harder to solve. Russia has a huge advantage because they retained a lot of the Soviet industry that they're now modernizing and expanding on. Russia also has a stronger education system that has more focus on trade jobs, which is key for having skilled workers to operate the factories. And of course, Russia is next to China and India giving them access to two large manufacturing powers. Even DPRK likely has a bigger industrial base than most of Europe.
Another big factor here is the economic war between Russia and the west. Since Ukraine is entirely dependent on the west for everything, what really matters is the economic war. The west realized this early on, and they thought they could choke off Russian economy via sanctions. This backfired spectacularly, and now it looks like it's European economy that's being destroyed instead.
While Europe keeps pumping money into Ukraine, there is serious civil unrest brewing internally. One huge factor is that energy prices went up because LNG is way more expensive than pipeline gas. Initially, European governments started giving out subsidies to keep the public happy. The idea was that they were just going to have to weather a few months and then Russia would collapse. That didn't happen, and the subsidies are no longer sustainable. This is what's driving all the farmer protests across Europe now. They simply can't make ends meet with the new energy prices and no government support.
They have no fucking idea how modern wars work. Their understanding of battle comes entirely from WW2 larping and video games. Hell, just listen to how they talk about the counteroffensives. They thought Ukraine was going to magically reorganize their decimated military and push all the way to Moscow as if they were the Rohirrim in Lord of the Rings. No thought to logistics, ammunition, nothing.
Totally, and it's been absolutely hilarious to watch. The funny part is that anybody who's played RTS games like StarCraft could immediately see the problem with logistics, and reconstituting lost units. Of course these aren't the kinds of games most people play. :)
When you only have experience in war in video games
SHOCKING NEWS: Blowing up a single boat does not stop advanced military.
Literally this lmao, every single day there is a multiple advances on several fronts, in the comments they just talk about few tanks and armored vehicles that Ukraine managed to hit or destroy at best.
We need to throw $50b and 50% of whatever's left of the Ukrainian population at recapturing that little dick part. I will go my entire life without healthcare if it means Ukraine gets whatever that white thing at the bottom of the penis is. Is that a building or a retention pond?
I wouldn’t be surprised if they started shipping the refugees back to Ukraine to fight.
little dick part
I'm sure it has a nice personality :(
Is that a building or a retention pond?
On older satellite picture there is no such shape there, there were something looking like allotment gardens there.
Fuck. There's so much potential then. I will fight this war to the last Ukrainian if it means they capture that tiny zone rouge garden.
What boat?
Ukraine released footage of naval drones hitting a missile boat Ivanovets a few days ago.
How do you follow so many topics, so consistently, all at the same time?
Time stretching technology should be shared with the proletariat!
I follow some channels like The New Atlas on youtube or Peoples Dispatch on Telegram that do a good job of sifting through the news and finding interesting stuff, and chat about news with some friends where we swap interesting stuff we find.
A lot of the news tend to be connected too. If you focus on understanding underlying causes, then you can get an idea of what to look for as well. For example, when the whole economic war with Russia started, the key aspect of it was what sort of stuff was being traded, and how being cut off from that stuff would affect Russia and the west respectively. And once you look at it from that perspective, you can start extrapolating. Europe needs energy, so can they replace cheap energy from Russia, so then you can look up what's happening in the energy markets, how much other countries can ramp up production, how much it costs to switch from pipeline gas to LNG, etc. And on Russian side, it was mostly high tech goods like phones, laptops, cars. So, you do a similar analysis to see whether Russia can replace that stuff easily or produce it domestically. And then you end up in a rabbit hole of supply chains, where manufacturing happens, etc.
I like to try and build a model of what I think is going on, and then see what I got right and what I got wrong based on how things are playing out. When I end up being wrong, then I try to figure out what I missed, and update my mental model. Having this kind of model gives you an idea what sort of news might be relevant and why, as well as how one piece of news might be connected to other seemingly unrelated news.
Ah, got it. Thanks