They Use Clausewitz's Words, But They Don't Read Him

Here's a data point for the Russo-Ukraine War: as of Sunday, the Institute for the Study of War's report on the Russian offensive contained the same boilerplate it's had for several weeks:

Russian forces continued to capture territory in central Mariupol and will likely capture the city in the coming days.

As of yesterday, the ISW began to back off:

Little information about what is occurring in Mariupol is available likely due to the loss/interdiction of communications from the city. Russian media reported fighting in the city on April 2.

But as of today, they're in full retreat:

Additionally, the Ukrainian defenders of Mariupol have outperformed ISW’s previous estimates and continue to hold the city.

Shouldn't people be asking questions about the "experts" who are guiding our military policy? A couple of weeks ago, the buzzword was "culminate". The Russian advance on Kyiv had "culminated", but none of the talking heads would draw any conclusions about that. It's a little bit like saying we're having weather today. Should I wear sunscreen or take an umbrella? Well, nobody's gonna commit, we'll just go so far as to call it weather. The best they could predict was that there would be "stalemate" around Kyiv, which was the next big buzzword. The ISW itself only gradually shifted from that assessment. As of even last Friday, April 1, their view was:

Russian forces around Kyiv and in northeastern Ukraine seek to conduct a retrograde action—the orderly withdrawal of combat forces—for refit and further redeployment to other axes of advance. Russian forces remaining on the forward trace of Russian lines are a covering force intended to screen the retrograde of most of the combat power previously deployed around Kyiv. Ukrainian forces retook substantial territory both northwest and east of Kyiv in the past 24 hours. Ukrainian forces likely advanced faster than Russian forces anticipated, but Russian forces successfully withdrew much of the damaged combat power remaining around Kyiv into Belarus.

But as of last Sunday, April 3,the ISW changed its tune, a day after even Wikipedia declared Ukraine the victor in the Battle of Kyiv as of 31 March:

Ukraine has won the Battle of Kyiv. Russian forces are completing their withdrawal, but not in good order. Ukrainian forces are continuing to clear Kyiv Oblast of isolated Russian troops left behind in the retreat, which some Ukrainian officials describe as “lost orcs.” Russian forces had attempted to conduct an orderly retreat from their positions around Kyiv with designated covering forces supported by artillery and mines to allow the main body to withdraw. The main body of Russian troops has withdrawn from the west bank of the Dnipro and is completing its withdrawal from the east bank, but the retrograde has been sufficiently disorderly that some Russian troops were left behind.

This is mild indeed. Photos and videos widely available on the web show Russian columns, in some cases comprising entire battalion tactical groups, in "highway of death" tableaux with burned and dismembered bodies strewn around their scorched and flattened vehicles. That's how "sufficiently disorderly" the "retrograde" was. But why did it take the ISW until April 3 to call the battle when days earlier I could have had better information from Wikipedia?

The Atlantic has been publishing some good pieces lately, like How the West Got Russia’s Military So, So Wrong

What we are seeing today in Ukraine is the result of a purportedly great military being punched in the mouth. The resilience of Ukrainian resistance is embarrassing for a Western think-tank and military community that had confidently predicted that the Russians would conquer Ukraine in a matter of days. For years, Western “experts” prattled on about the Russian military’s expensive, high-tech “modernization.”

. . . Western analysts took basic metrics (such as numbers and types of tanks and aircraft), imagined those measured forces executing Russian military doctrine, then concluded that the Ukrainians had no chance. . . . As The Atlantic’s Eliot Cohen has argued, the systems that the West used to evaluate the Russian military have failed nearly as comprehensively as that military has.

The author notes,

[P]rognosticators paid too little attention to the basic motivations and morale of the soldiers who would be asked to use the Russian military’s allegedly excellent doctrine and equipment.

When the talking heads started throwing around buzzwords like "culminate", I did what my contrarian mentors in graduate school taught me to do -- I went and read Clausewitz, free for the browsing on the web. Just for starters, "culminate" didn't really mean for Clausewitz what the retired generals thought he meant. But let's go farther:

[T]he moral forces are amongst the most important subjects in war. They are the spirits which permeate the whole element of war, and which fasten themselves soonest and with the greatest affinity to the will which puts in motion and guides the whole mass of powers, unite with it as it were in one stream, because it is a moral force itself. Unfortunately they seek to escape from all book-knowledge, for they will neither be brought into numbers nor into classes, and want only to be seen and felt.

. . . Even if the theory of the art of war does no more in reality than that it calls these things to remembrance, shows the necessity of allowing to the moral forces their full value, and of always taking them into consideration, then it has in fact extended its borders over the region of immaterial forces, and by establishing that point of view, has condemned beforehand every one who would endeavour to justify himself before its judgment seat by the mere physical relations of forces.

The moral forces in Ukraine are making monkeys out of people like Gen Petraeus, whose predictions of stalemate have been as bad as his hairpiece. This man was head of the CIA? Just yesterday I saw him on YouTube, well after the revelations of executed civilian bodies left on the streets in Irpin and Bucha, asserting that the Russo-Ukraine war would end with a negotiated settlement.

I wouldn't count on it. On the other hand, Petraeus made a monkey of himself well before Ukraine's moral forces did.