I think the consensus views you cite underestimate Russia's capacity and commitment to continue destruction.
I'd like to see US policy encourage any peace deal that is acceptable to both Ukraine and Russia. I don't see evidence of that. It seems as if the administration wants a peace that is a clear defeat for Russia.
In other words, I think our terms are tougher than Ukraine's terms. And that seems wrong.
Like you, I continue to be puzzled why people are so confident that Russia will not mobilize more resources, which it does have. But policy implication now is imho exact opposite - in order for Ukraine to get an acceptable peace deal, support for them should be maintained, otherwise there is a high risk they’ll get rolled over.
I agree though that Biden should have done more to encourage compromise between the sides before the war. Now it is kind of late, or, more precisely, only way to get to a compromise is to beat Russia on the battlefield.
In WW1, the chances of a peace deal were reduced the more costly the war became in its destruction of life. I fear this is the phenomenon in this war. Returning to some approximation of the situation before the war will become increasingly unacceptable to both combatants the longer the war goes on.
I think the biggest weapons the US can send to Ukraine are the bargaining chips of sanctions relief for Russia and economic aid to rebuild Ukraine.
I do not think this is an accurate portrayal of what happened in WW1.
But regardless, returning to prewar situation would be considered a total defeat in Russia. That is not even a conpromise. They would have to be badly and bloodily beaten in order to be willing to accept it.
I would see Russia invading Finland at this point as strong evidence of either an intent to mass-deploy nuclear weapons, evidence of actual insanity on the part of Putin and a decision-making quorum of Russian high command, or both. Finland's armed forces are strictly superior to Ukraine's in terms of equipment, training, and manpower. Since I don't think Putin is actually insane, I see any Russian comments on potential conflict with Finland as useful calibration on how their PR people are willing to talk about things with an approximately 0% chance of happening.
"I would like to see us offer more carrots for joining our diplomatic camp. It would, let’s say, be highly beneficial to broadly offer free trade with all the countries in dark blue who fully back our sanctions, and let anyone who joins the group later get in on those benefits. If we wanted to be really ambitious, we could offer at least the current members of that group open borders and I am pretty sure entirely good things would happen."
Sounds like the 2022 Grimdark, Amazon Prime version of the old broacast TV 1980's cold war to me. Who do you think they'll get to play the US CIA operatives training and paying Grimdark Castelo Branco?
"but also why do oligarchs always have such terrible taste?"
I was about to say at least its not as bad as brutalism, because 7 minutes ago I would have told you that nothing is worse than brutalism. But now I guess there is something worse than brutalism...
I would like to disagree, but some dead person once said "In matters of taste, there can be no disputes" so I guess I can't. I can only defend myself by saying that I had a strong distates for brutalism before it was a meme on the internet.
There's a brutalist housing estate near my home. It looks out over a canal, has lots of greenery, a cool playground, and very interesting architecture. That's brutalism done well, and I enjoy walking through it.
I don't know what a "super" EMP is but 30 years ago when I was in satellite communications in the army all of our equipment was "regular" EMP hardened. It's got to be better now. That super-EMP thread sounds like a good story for a novel though.
Its actually not. The US military is using more COTS components than they were 30 years ago because they no longer can secure superior computer hardware through the old procurment procedures that do allow them to get better vehicles and whatnot.
Same thing is happening with firearms, except they haven't given up the old procurement procedures, which is how they ended up paing billions of dollars to Knights Armament in 2007 for a snipre rifle that was technologically inferior but WAY more expensive than my precision rifle from 2003.
Actually asking and want to know, can you explain what's gone so wrong with the procurement process (in general) and how one would go about fixing it if one had the authority to do so?
Less that something has gone wrong (setting aside the trope of the pentagon way overpaying for stuff and also by wild coincidence being a pipeline to cushy jobs at places selling overpriced stuff), and more that it hasn't kept up in the times.
Between the interwar period and the late cold war (so 1920-1990 or so) the military had an interest in getting stuff that was faster, stronger, harder, robuster than civilian counterparts. An air superiority fighter is way different than anything on the civilian market, but even military transport aircraft reasonably had to be more robust than civilian transport. So the military couldn't just go to the private market and say "give me 10,000 units of this off-the-shelf thing" because either it just didn't exist, or it wasn't up to snuff for force-on-force shit. And 10,000 bespoke transport aircraft can't take advantage of economies of scale and need to distribute development costs over crazy-small product runs. So, military shit was best in class and super expensive.
This is a background fact that I need to introduce, but it’s not the nut yet. Everyone thinks that computer technology is this unique unicorn of technical advancement, where nothing else is keeping up. But that's wrong. Manufacturing and design is just as fast, and logistics technology is arguably faster, depending on what you measure.
Background fact 2. Data processing and communication technology starting in the 90’s began operating in (mostly! put a pin in this) the same force-on-force scenarios that used to be the exclusive domain of the military.
Actual cause: The military wanted to encrypt their data to hide it from eastern European spies, but private industry wanted to encrypt their data from eastern European scam artist. The CIA has, for all their faults, been a hive of some of the best cryptographers on the planet. But in the 90's, private industry needed a shit ton of cryptographers, and capitalism gonna capitalize and within a few years there was a flood of academic and private industry mathematicians working on this problem. Suddenly the CIA couldn't keep up. The best they could do was slip some magic integers into elliptical curve functions or install man in the middle boxes on fiber lines + beg AT&T for their keys. To say nothing of the next generation of folks who would probably have been theoretical physicists or agronomists, but ended up with comp sci degrees.
On the hardware side, it’s mostly the same story. Turning those crypto equations on a paper into firmware or an ASIC, correctly, without leaking your cleartext, is a class of problem known to engineers as “fucking hard”. Making boxes that can’t be owned is “literally impossible but we are going to try anyway”.
Obvious implication: The military couldn’t keep up with private industry. Expensive bespoke radios were inferior to cheap mass produced radios. And no parallel dev pipeline is going to be able to design a chip anywhere near the existing dev pipeline. So, military basically gets civilian stuff for coms and the like.
Twist Implication: The one thing private industry hasn’t been faced with, but the military probably will be, is EMP shielding. So your $20 impulse buy Baofeng radio on amazon is superior to any possible bespoke military design (at least in countries where encrypted radios are legal aka not America the land of the free).... but only along the attack surface that private use gets attacked on. They get attacked on eavesdropping. They don’t get EMPed. So they don’t get EMP hardened. So the military (every military) is stuck using comms with great encryption and their copper asses hanging in the EMP wind.
TOTOALLY DIFFERENT SMALL ARMS ISSUE: Rifles, on the other hand, are basically the oppose story. I’ll try to write that up later today if I get some time.
I should probably clarify what was actually EMP hardened. The equipment itself (circuit boards, cabling, test equipment etc) wasn't but where this equipment was kept was. So the equipment vans, the operations center buildings, the equipment rooms in the antennas and the cable runs between them were hardened. We were using plenty of COTS stuff back then (especially test equipment). To be fair, I have no idea what the military uses these days.
I think the consensus views you cite underestimate Russia's capacity and commitment to continue destruction.
I'd like to see US policy encourage any peace deal that is acceptable to both Ukraine and Russia. I don't see evidence of that. It seems as if the administration wants a peace that is a clear defeat for Russia.
In other words, I think our terms are tougher than Ukraine's terms. And that seems wrong.
Like you, I continue to be puzzled why people are so confident that Russia will not mobilize more resources, which it does have. But policy implication now is imho exact opposite - in order for Ukraine to get an acceptable peace deal, support for them should be maintained, otherwise there is a high risk they’ll get rolled over.
I agree though that Biden should have done more to encourage compromise between the sides before the war. Now it is kind of late, or, more precisely, only way to get to a compromise is to beat Russia on the battlefield.
In WW1, the chances of a peace deal were reduced the more costly the war became in its destruction of life. I fear this is the phenomenon in this war. Returning to some approximation of the situation before the war will become increasingly unacceptable to both combatants the longer the war goes on.
I think the biggest weapons the US can send to Ukraine are the bargaining chips of sanctions relief for Russia and economic aid to rebuild Ukraine.
I do not think this is an accurate portrayal of what happened in WW1.
But regardless, returning to prewar situation would be considered a total defeat in Russia. That is not even a conpromise. They would have to be badly and bloodily beaten in order to be willing to accept it.
I would see Russia invading Finland at this point as strong evidence of either an intent to mass-deploy nuclear weapons, evidence of actual insanity on the part of Putin and a decision-making quorum of Russian high command, or both. Finland's armed forces are strictly superior to Ukraine's in terms of equipment, training, and manpower. Since I don't think Putin is actually insane, I see any Russian comments on potential conflict with Finland as useful calibration on how their PR people are willing to talk about things with an approximately 0% chance of happening.
So called "Czeck Republic" is increasingly called by relatively more sensible name "Czechia"
Ah, ok. I suppose I am too old.
"I would like to see us offer more carrots for joining our diplomatic camp. It would, let’s say, be highly beneficial to broadly offer free trade with all the countries in dark blue who fully back our sanctions, and let anyone who joins the group later get in on those benefits. If we wanted to be really ambitious, we could offer at least the current members of that group open borders and I am pretty sure entirely good things would happen."
Sounds like the 2022 Grimdark, Amazon Prime version of the old broacast TV 1980's cold war to me. Who do you think they'll get to play the US CIA operatives training and paying Grimdark Castelo Branco?
"but also why do oligarchs always have such terrible taste?"
I was about to say at least its not as bad as brutalism, because 7 minutes ago I would have told you that nothing is worse than brutalism. But now I guess there is something worse than brutalism...
Brutalism well done is cool.
I would like to disagree, but some dead person once said "In matters of taste, there can be no disputes" so I guess I can't. I can only defend myself by saying that I had a strong distates for brutalism before it was a meme on the internet.
Dead people said a lot of things, most of them wrong. There can totally be disputes.
(My personal position is that almost anything done sufficiently well is always cool but that in practice brutalism is well named.)
There's a brutalist housing estate near my home. It looks out over a canal, has lots of greenery, a cool playground, and very interesting architecture. That's brutalism done well, and I enjoy walking through it.
I don't know what a "super" EMP is but 30 years ago when I was in satellite communications in the army all of our equipment was "regular" EMP hardened. It's got to be better now. That super-EMP thread sounds like a good story for a novel though.
Its actually not. The US military is using more COTS components than they were 30 years ago because they no longer can secure superior computer hardware through the old procurment procedures that do allow them to get better vehicles and whatnot.
Same thing is happening with firearms, except they haven't given up the old procurement procedures, which is how they ended up paing billions of dollars to Knights Armament in 2007 for a snipre rifle that was technologically inferior but WAY more expensive than my precision rifle from 2003.
Actually asking and want to know, can you explain what's gone so wrong with the procurement process (in general) and how one would go about fixing it if one had the authority to do so?
Less that something has gone wrong (setting aside the trope of the pentagon way overpaying for stuff and also by wild coincidence being a pipeline to cushy jobs at places selling overpriced stuff), and more that it hasn't kept up in the times.
Between the interwar period and the late cold war (so 1920-1990 or so) the military had an interest in getting stuff that was faster, stronger, harder, robuster than civilian counterparts. An air superiority fighter is way different than anything on the civilian market, but even military transport aircraft reasonably had to be more robust than civilian transport. So the military couldn't just go to the private market and say "give me 10,000 units of this off-the-shelf thing" because either it just didn't exist, or it wasn't up to snuff for force-on-force shit. And 10,000 bespoke transport aircraft can't take advantage of economies of scale and need to distribute development costs over crazy-small product runs. So, military shit was best in class and super expensive.
This is a background fact that I need to introduce, but it’s not the nut yet. Everyone thinks that computer technology is this unique unicorn of technical advancement, where nothing else is keeping up. But that's wrong. Manufacturing and design is just as fast, and logistics technology is arguably faster, depending on what you measure.
Background fact 2. Data processing and communication technology starting in the 90’s began operating in (mostly! put a pin in this) the same force-on-force scenarios that used to be the exclusive domain of the military.
Actual cause: The military wanted to encrypt their data to hide it from eastern European spies, but private industry wanted to encrypt their data from eastern European scam artist. The CIA has, for all their faults, been a hive of some of the best cryptographers on the planet. But in the 90's, private industry needed a shit ton of cryptographers, and capitalism gonna capitalize and within a few years there was a flood of academic and private industry mathematicians working on this problem. Suddenly the CIA couldn't keep up. The best they could do was slip some magic integers into elliptical curve functions or install man in the middle boxes on fiber lines + beg AT&T for their keys. To say nothing of the next generation of folks who would probably have been theoretical physicists or agronomists, but ended up with comp sci degrees.
On the hardware side, it’s mostly the same story. Turning those crypto equations on a paper into firmware or an ASIC, correctly, without leaking your cleartext, is a class of problem known to engineers as “fucking hard”. Making boxes that can’t be owned is “literally impossible but we are going to try anyway”.
Obvious implication: The military couldn’t keep up with private industry. Expensive bespoke radios were inferior to cheap mass produced radios. And no parallel dev pipeline is going to be able to design a chip anywhere near the existing dev pipeline. So, military basically gets civilian stuff for coms and the like.
Twist Implication: The one thing private industry hasn’t been faced with, but the military probably will be, is EMP shielding. So your $20 impulse buy Baofeng radio on amazon is superior to any possible bespoke military design (at least in countries where encrypted radios are legal aka not America the land of the free).... but only along the attack surface that private use gets attacked on. They get attacked on eavesdropping. They don’t get EMPed. So they don’t get EMP hardened. So the military (every military) is stuck using comms with great encryption and their copper asses hanging in the EMP wind.
TOTOALLY DIFFERENT SMALL ARMS ISSUE: Rifles, on the other hand, are basically the oppose story. I’ll try to write that up later today if I get some time.
I should probably clarify what was actually EMP hardened. The equipment itself (circuit boards, cabling, test equipment etc) wasn't but where this equipment was kept was. So the equipment vans, the operations center buildings, the equipment rooms in the antennas and the cable runs between them were hardened. We were using plenty of COTS stuff back then (especially test equipment). To be fair, I have no idea what the military uses these days.
Ah, that makes sense.