Bad Writing And Ukraine Analysis

I spent the first part of my working career making red (or blue) marks like those above, and I thereby learned what Samuel Johnson meant when he said teaching is "intricate misery". If I discovered anything else in the process, it was that bad writing has a close relation to bad thinking, but I'm not sure if I can go much beyond that.

This seems to apply to what passes for prestigious analysis of the current war in Ukraine, especially from the Institute for the Study of War. Let's take a passage from their April 26 update:

Russian forces have adopted a sounder pattern of operational movement in eastern Ukraine, at least along the line from Izyum to Rubizhne. Russian troops are pushing down multiple roughly parallel roads within supporting distance of one another, allowing them to bring more combat power to bear than their previous practice had supported.

This could actually be a good introductory sentence for several subsequent paragraphs giving specific instances, but it's followed only by a few sentences that are essentially unsupported:

Russian troops on this line are making better progress than any other Russian advances in this phase of the war. They are pushing from Izyum southwest toward Barvinkove and southeast toward Slovyansk. They are also pushing several columns west and south of Rubizhne, likely intending to encircle it and complete its capture.

They're pushing, and they're pushing, and they'll likely, but if they're so much sounder, why haven't they done it yet? The whole story of the eastern front so far has been that it's static. Contrast this assessment with yesterday's analysis from the Daily Kos, which I think is better written and probably more accurate, though less prestigious:

Russia continued making slow, grinding progress on Wednesday, taking five settlements, repulsed on six other approaches, and pushing into some of the larger towns. Ukrainian resistance is stiff.

I won’t belabor the point I’ve made repeatedly—how Russia [is] guilty once again of spreading its forces thin across way too many lines of attack. Yes, they’ve had some tactical victories, taking a town here or there, but they are still failing their strategic goal of taking the entire Donbas region and building a land bridge that extends all the way across Ukraine’s south, through Odesa, and on to Moldova’s Transnistria region.

Remember, Russia had loads of tactical victories around Kyiv, Sumy, Chernihiv, and Kharkiv. How’d that turn out for them strategically?

. . . It’s been two weeks since Russia announced their big Donbas offensive, yet Russia has managed to push only ~22 kilometers (14 miles) to the south and west. That leaves just another 240-320 kilometers (~150-200 miles) of roads to go to close the gap to the south (depending on the route), not to mention all the territory in the middle, which at around 5,000 square miles, would entirely fit the state of Connecticut.

The Daily Kos analysis is far more concrete and even asks pertinent questions, which the ISW analysis completely leaves out. Now, I'm interested in this war, and being retired, I have time on my hands, so I'm able to look around for the best information. In general, the ISW is currently unique in insisting the Russians have cleaned up their act -- but the question remains that if their operational pattern is now sounder, as the ISW claims, why aren't we seeing them benefit from it? This is effectively the point the Daily Kos is raising.

The ISW says the Russians are making "better progress", but there's no specific comparison. This is no different from claiming our detergent will get your clothes 50% cleaner. The Russian progress so far is actually similar to what we saw around Kyiv, which is the point the Daily Kos makes. There, we saw seesawing along a largely static front, followed soon enough by a complete Russian collapse.

It's worth noting that the lead author of the April 26 ISW post I've linked here as a bad example is again Frederick W Kagan, the Ivy Leaguer with a PhD in Russian and Soviet military history, and who as I noted more than two weeks ago, seems inclined not just to repeat conventional wisdom but to create it himself ex nihilo. There's been a school of thought that goes more or less, "Just wait. The Russians are going to regroup, recalibrate, and refit, and we'll see a real advance n the Donbas." But so far, other than an advance here countered by a retreat there, we still aren't seeing it, but Kagan is sticking to his guns, and I think he's even jiggering his analysis to accommodate it.

And this leaves aside the increasing reports that the US-NATO heavy artillery that had been moving to Ukraine over the past two weeks is reaching the front, along with the trained Ukraine units to use it. The best reports I've been able to find are still at the reddit r/ ukraine conflict site. They are anecdotal and often unconfirmed, but I think they're a good counterbalance to the more respectable but badly written and badly reasoned analysis elsewhere.