The State Of Commentary On The War

The Austrian Col Markus Reisner is still highly regarded as a war analyst on reddit, but as I've noted, although he certainly looks the part, his recent commentary has been largely irrelevant, overtaken by events, and even disingenuous. On the other hand, the eponymous Kos at the left-wing Daily Kos has been consistently the most insightful and predictive throughout the war. Let's take an example. Here's last night's analysis from the Institute for the Study of War, which is actually a cut above their usual performance:

Russian forces continue to conduct meaningless offensive operations around Donetsk City and Bakhmut instead of focusing on defending against Ukrainian counteroffensives that continue to advance. Russian troops continue to attack Bakhmut and various villages near Donetsk City of emotional significance to pro-war residents of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) but little other importance. . . . The Russians cannot hope to make gains around Bakhmut or Donetsk City on a large enough scale to derail Ukrainian counteroffensives and appear to be continuing an almost robotic effort to gain ground in Donetsk Oblast that seems increasingly divorced from the overall realities of the theater.

There's some furrowing of the brow and stroking of the chin, but no real attempt to explain why. As of early this morning, Kos does a much better job with the same material:

It’s patently absurd that at the same time that Ukraine is notching gains in Kherson, Kharkiv, and northern Luhansk Oblasts, Russia is wasting time, men, and material pushing forward in a region that offers no strategic payoff.

Indeed, the original point of attacking this front was to form the southern claw of a pincer movement that would’ve trapped tens of thousands of entrenched Ukrainian forces in the Donbas. . . . This pincer plan was the reason Russia pushed hard into Izyum, at great logistical cost.

. . . Still, as long as they held Izyum, Russia could maintain the fiction that pushing hard in Donetsk oblast made some kind of military sense. But now that Izyum is liberated, what exactly is the military reason to continue this self-destructive behavior?

This in fact is the unmentioned elephant in the room of Col Reisner's latest YouTube commentary -- in his prior July presentation, he stressed the Russian pincer strategy and strongly implied its likelihood of success. But faced with the Russian withdrawal from Izyum, Col Reisner has simply dropped any further mention of the pincers. But let's return to Kos's question, why are the Russians continuing to attack at the southern claw of the pincer when the northern claw is no longer in play?

The reason is simple: Russia isn’t actually in charge in this corner of the front.

This is Wagner PMC (private military contractor) territory. Russian forces lack a unified command: there’s the Russian army (divided into sectors led by separate military districts), VDV (airborne)corps, Luhansk proxies, Donetsk proxies, Rosgvardia (Putin’s personal army, the national guard), the Chechen Kadyrovites, and Wagner mercenaries.

So we laughed at pro-Russian sources for celebrating the capture of that hill near Kodema while the entire northern front was collapsing. Yet they were genuinely celebrating in Wagner circles. . . . Wagner’s corporate leadership apparently decided that “we’re the only group in Russia making progress” was a much better business development slogan than “we’re all in this together.”

Kos concludes that Russian strategy is a [redacted]. This is certainly a better explanation -- or maybe I should say, simply an explanation, in the absence of any from Col Reisner or the ISW -- but why is this insight still so rare and hard to reach? I think it's still reasonable to ask why US and Western strategic analysis generally saw the Russian military as a near-peer to the US and NATO. Let's keep iin mind that before February, Trump was hardly unique in seeing Putin as a negotiating genius in threatening to invade Ukraine -- Trump thought it was a legitimate trade for Putin to offer the status quo in Ukraine in return for a Western agreement to keep Ukraine out of NATO and the EU.

That assessment in turn was based on the prewar consensus that a Russian invasion would see tanks in Kyiv in a matter of days. I believe that if you'd asked anyone, Trump, Biden, Obama, Boris Johnson, Merkel, Macron, whomever, you'd have had agreement on that outcome. Yet within weeks of the actual invasion, it emerged that a third-rate power could fight the putative near-peer to the US and NATO to a standstill with improvised hand-held weapons and cheap drones.

This in fact has been a lesson for the US in misapplied spending. So far, we've spent $15 billion in the Ukraine war that's likely to end permanently any assumption that Russia is our military near-peer. In comparison, the futile Afghanistan exercise cost over $2 trillion, nearly $300 million a day. It failed to defeat the Taliban and had little perceptible impact over and above the two Iraq wars in containing Islamism. My calculator says $300 million a day is about $110 billion a year. The money we've spent in Ukraine, and the money we're likely to spend, will be far more of a bargain.

On top of that, initial hesitation on matters like supplying Ukraine with secondhand Migs via third parties or giving them heavy artillery on the basis that such moves would provoke Putin and start World War III also proved misguided, as did assumptions that Ukraine's military was just as corrupt and incompetent as Russia's. What was the source of these miscalculations on our part?

That's the real question worth pursuing.