The Institute For The Study Of War Wakes Up!

Normally I check the Institute for the Study of War site once a day to get a read on the conventional wisdom -- pretty much the middle of the road opinion on when or whether the 40-mile convoy is going to get moving now, next week, or next month (they always settle on next week). So I was a bit startled this morning to find something new:

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. This update, which we offer on a day without significant military operations on which to report, attempts to explain and unpack some of the complexities involved in making these assessments.

. . . The US Department of Defense (DoD) reported on April 8 that the Russian armed forces have lost 15-20 percent of the “combat power” they had arrayed against Ukraine before the invasion. This statement is somewhat (unintentionally) misleading because it uses the phrase “combat power” loosely.

Whoa! In effect, they're saying they've been listening to the generals, who've unintentionally been giving them overoptimistic interpretations of Russian capability! Why would the generals do that?

The US DoD statements about Russian “combat power” appear to refer to the percentage of troops mobilized for the invasion that are still in principle available for fighting—that is, that are still alive, not badly injured, and with their units. But “combat power” means much more than that. US Army doctrine defines combat power as “the total means of destructive, constructive, and information capabilities that a military unit or formation can apply at a given time.”

Then we get into the sort of thing that sent me snoozing in ROTC classes, which is why I got thrown out:

It identifies eight elements of combat power: “leadership, information, command and control, movement and maneuver, intelligence, fires, sustainment, and protection.”

The ISW concludes well, yeah, if you include every last typewriter repairman in the Russian army, they've only lost 15-20 percent of their combat power, but the guys who actually shoot the guns are the ones who are important, and a lot more of those have gotten blown up. The report goes on for a couple thousand more words, but that's its main point.

The point it omits is that the ISW has been listening to the generals, which it admits in this morning's post. It essentially admits that it's been passing this information back to its audience, which is more generals, including the retired talking heads who cite it in their appearances on network news. The same generals then feed the same opinions back to the ISW. At some point, getting toward two months into the war, the ISW wonders if maybe something's wrong.

I think this may suggest to me why I was thrown out of ROTC. I've grown to believe in guardian angels.

As part of its reassessment, the ISW says they're doing it "on a day without significant military operations on which to report". Whoa again!

NEW: Russia is sending an 8-mi long convoy of 100s of vehicles, including armored vehicles and artillery southbound through the Ukrainian town of Velykyi Burluk.

The convoy is moving about 60 mi east of Ukraine’s 2nd-largest city of Kharkiv, as 🇷🇺 focuses on Donbas.

📷:@Maxar pic.twitter.com/4EJRHSQZvk

— Jack Detsch (@JackDetsch) April 10, 2022

While the tweet has a time stamp of 10:13 PM on April 9, the satellite view is clearly in daylight, and with Ukraine 7 hours ahead of the ISW in Washington, shouldn't the ISW have had a good part of their own working day to become aware of this development? Apparently not. In fact, this release from Ukraine says the photo dates from April 8, which makes it even less excusable that the ISW apparently isn't aware of it.

But even more recently, there's a report Kharkiv region: Ukrainian military destroyed big Russian military column on the way to Izyum. So over a period of days, there are reports, first, of a big Russian column, and then of a big Russian column being destroyed as so frequently seems to happen to big Russian columns, on a day or days when the ISW says nothing's going on.

The problem is that journalists, with the overall initiative and skill level of bright middle school students, can't be expected to ferret this out on their own. But the people in the ISW are full time paid professionals. Frederick W Kagan, the lead author of today's reassessment, is a Yalie and heavily connected to the deep state:

Kagan graduated from Hamden High School before he earned a B.A. in Soviet and East European studies and a Ph.D. in Russian and Soviet military history, both from Yale University. He worked as an Assistant professor of military history at West Point from 1995 to 2001 and as an associate professor of military history from 2001 to 2005. The courses that he taught at West Point included the history of military art, grand strategy, revolutionary warfare, and diplomatic history.

Kagan's brother is the foreign policy analyst Robert Kagan, whose wife is Victoria Nuland, CEO of the Center for a New American Security.

Frederick Kagan is married to Kimberly Kagan, the president of the Institute for the Study of War.

He and his father, Donald Kagan, who was a professor at Yale and a fellow at the Hudson Institute, both authored While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today (2000). The book argued in favor of a large increase in military spending and warned of future threats, including from a potential revival of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program. Frederick along with his brother Robert Kagan, who is a member of the Aspen Strategy Group, and their father, Donald, were all signatories to the Project for the New American Century manifesto, Rebuilding America's Defenses (2000).

Oh, I see. The ISW is but a branch of the Kagan family business, and they're all in bed with each other, Yale, the Bushes, Petraeus, McChrystal, the CIA, Robert Gates, and the whole Afghan boondoggle.

This is all gonna turn out fine.