Shorting The Conventional Wisdom

The Russo-Ukraine War continues to reinforce my contrarian nature. I noted yesterday that the Institute for the Study of War seems to have grown skeptical of its own neoconservative outlook and recognized it's running a feedback loop, with the generals giving its analysts opinions, which the analysts publish and implicitly endorse, and the generals then cite these opinions as authoritative in talking-head news interviews. These are all carefully modulated in a middle of the road between reified extremes, with Ukrainian claims of Russian casualties discounted on one hand and Russian claims of their own losses also discounted on the other.

A recent article in the Daily Kos raises questions about this view, and I'm essentially in sympathy with it:

As of Tuesday morning [April 4], Oryx had cataloged more than 2,400 major piece of military equipment lost by the Russian armed forces, including some 400 tanks and 52 aircraft. These are confirmed losses verified by videos and photos that show distinct features—such as tail numbers on aircraft—that make sure each vehicle counted is unique.

However, that’s a long way from what the Ukrainian military says Russia has lost since the beginning of the invasion. They record over 200 more tanks, and nearly ten times as many aircraft in total (planes, helicopters, and UAVs).

The Defense Ministry also keeps a running total on something that Oryx and other sites cataloging lost hardware don’t touch: casualties. Russia, in the few occasions that it has given any count at all, has reported numbers that range from a fraction of those reported by Ukraine, to a ludicrously small fraction. Intelligence agencies in the U.S. and U.K. have also issued some sporadic casualty figures, with numbers that seem closer to—but still significantly lower—than those posted by Ukraine.

So who’s right? It’s quite likely that Russia doesn’t have an accurate count of their losses, even if they had any incentive to give it. It’s also generally assumed that the number from Ukraine overstates the results to make Russia look weaker and their own military more successful.

However, professor and author Phillips O’Brien suggests that Ukraine’s numbers, though they seem inflated, might be the most accurate of all those floating around. That’s because we have something in this war that hasn’t been available in other conflicts—open-source intelligence in the form of all those photos, videos, and messages captured by phones. While those images are the basis of the numbers reported by OSInt and Oryx, O’Brien points out that these numbers represent the absolute minimum for Russian losses. And the evidence of the last few days shows us just how badly these values can undershoot the truth.

. . . But what’s interesting is this: Intelligence estimates of how many Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine put that number at around 1,200. That means that, as verified by Oryx, over a third of those tanks are now either destroyed or in Ukrainian hands. If the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense is right on their numbers, Russia has lost over half the tanks it sent to Ukraine.

Those are the levels of losses that no military, anywhere, can sustain.

I think we can apply this as well to the current consensus for what's next in the war: the upcoming battle for Donbas. Per CNN as of April 6:

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been far costlier and less successful than most analysts expected over its first six weeks -- and experts now believe that Moscow is changing its military approach.

President Vladimir Putin's revised war strategy will now focus on trying to take control of the Donbas and other regions in eastern Ukraine with a target date of early May, according to several US officials familiar with the latest US intelligence assessments.

That makes the city of Sloviansk, more than 300 miles east of the capital Kyiv, a potentially crucial battleground in the coming weeks. "Efforts by Russian forces advancing from Izyum to capture Slovyansk will likely prove to be the next pivotal battle of the war in Ukraine," the Washington DC-based think tank Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said in its Monday update on the conflict in Ukraine.

. . . ISW expects Russian troops to begin offensive operations towards the city from nearby Izium in the coming days, a forecast that matches warnings on the ground.

It's worth noting that ISW is extremely fond of the phrase "in the coming days", as it has been pedicting the fall of Mariupol "in the coming days" since the start of the war, and that suggests that as a time span, it's meaningless. It's also worth noting that ISW is where everyone, including CNN, goes for the authoritative view. But as I noted yesterday, the ISW's current assessment of the Russian ability to do this is not optimistic:

The Russian military is attempting to generate sufficient combat power to seize and hold the portions of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts that it does not currently control after it completes the seizure of Mariupol. There are good reasons to question the Russian armed forces’ ability to do so and their ability to use regenerated combat power effectively despite a reported simplification of the Russian command structure.

Even so, it continues farther down,

The Russians likely will make gains nevertheless and may either trap or wear down Ukrainian forces enough to secure much of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, but it is at least equally likely that these Russian offensives will culminate before reaching their objectives, as similar Russian operations have done.

So, which is it? Maybe yes, maybe no, huh? The problem is that these guys are regarded as the experts, but they're turning out to be wrong by their own admission and are now just hedging everything. But as of this morning, the ISW assessment is:

Russian forces continued assaults on Rubizhne, Popasna, and Severodonetsk in the past 24 hours but did not make significant territorial gains. The Ukrainian General Staff claimed that Ukrainian forces repelled eight attacks and destroyed four tanks, eight armored vehicles, and seven unarmored vehicles in the past 24 hours. . . . Ukrainian Presidential Advisor Oleksiy Arestovych stated on April 9 that Russian forces have begun their major offensive on Donbas, which Kyiv expects to last 2-3 weeks.

If so, this is a Russian offensive that must inevitably be using depleted units with depleted troops, well before the predicted weeks and months it would take actually to replenish and reintegrate these forces. I just don't see the mother of all battles here, and I suspect the current shooting war will end well before the current wisdom thinks. The consistent pattern throughout this war has been to underestimate and discount Ukraine.