What Is Colonel Reisner's Real Message?

After a two-month absence from YouTube, Austrian Col Reisner is back after only two weeks with another odd take on the Russo-Ukraine War. Let me preface this by saying yet again that I was thrown out of the ROTC after a year, and that's the full extent of my experience in the US or any other country's army. But here's my take on that war.

Russia, thought to be the second-ranked military power on the planet, managed to bungle its invasion of Ukraine from the start. Within days, US generals were commenting that the Russian army was simply failing to meet its initial objectives, and this was with Ukraine's army having no Western resupply and fighting almost entirely with its existing stock of hand-held anti-tank weapons and cheap drones.

Within months, still with hesitant Western support, Ukraine was able to force the Russians to retreat from their main line of attack, the effort to seize Kyiv. In the next phase of the war, Ukraine fought Russia to a stalemate with secondhand, obsolete Warsaw Pact weapons augmented with second-tier US artillery; this phase culminated in a repetition of the Kyiv rout, with the Russians forced out of almost all the Kharkiv region.

The current phase of the war has been characterized by the Russian recognition that its handling of the war has depleted its manpower, requiring a mobilization to replenish its army. While I'm an instinctive contrarian, there's a near consensus that the mobilization can accomplish little more than to send untrained and ill-equipped forces into confrontations that have no better prospects for success than the ones to date -- the pattern of stalemate punctuated by key Russian routs will continue until it can't.

The implications are dawning only slowly, but they're inevitable: Russia as a factor in geopolitics is simply disappearing as we watch. The one commentator who seems to be missing this is Col Reisner. His latest presentation is titled in English, Cognitive Warfare -- The Fight for your Heart and Mind. In German, it's Der Kampf um unsere Meinung.

Now, my German won't win any prizes, and the colonel's is quite good, but I did have a graduate-level course in how to translate German into English, and I don't like his English version of his German title. German Meinung is usually English "opinion", so the literal meaning of the German title would be "The Struggle for our Opinion". "Hearts and minds" is a mistranslation, since this is at best a US counterinsurgency term dating back to Lyndon Johnson's strategy to secure the loyalty of the Vietnamese against the Viet Cong -- but in subsequent years, it's also acquired a heavy irony, since the effort failed, and it carries a connotation of Johnsonian bombast. The colonel misses this. And unsere is "our", not "your"; that simply changes the meaning as well.

Why is the colonel, a sophisticated guy with a PhD, so obtuse? What I note about his three most recent YouTubes is that he focuses on the war from the Russian point of view, and even there, he omits almost any but the most optimistic takes. For instance, he focuses on the Russian threat to cut the natural gas supply and its potential for turning Western opinion against the war in the impending cold season. But this is simplistic; on one hand, this was thought to be a potential problem a few months ago, but more recently, things have leveled off:

Russia is a big player in world energy markets — not just in oil, but also natural gas and coal — with Europe being particularly vulnerable to changes in Russian energy supplies. Markets for oil and gas have been roiled since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, contributing to rising prices and inflation around the world — although energy prices are now coming down after those initial shocks. . . . the softening of prices alongside the decline in export volumes spell trouble for Russia.

The colonel doesn't mention social media, or even much Western news commentary at all, but Ukraine has actually dominated social media, both with proxy channels on YouTube that effectively portray the official line without identifying themselves as such, with independent Ukrainian YouTubers who simply speak as citizens, and with independent military analysts in any number of third countries on their own YouTube channels. The reddit /r ukraine conflict threads have an enormous international following that's almost entirely pro-Ukrainian. In contrast, pro-Russian social media is derided as amateurish and heavy-handed. The colonel either misses this completely or chooses not to mention it.

Nor does he mention the pro-Russian milbloggers who are themselves highly critical of the war's conduct, even though the Institute for the Study of War has been following the implications of what they say closely for weeks. For instance, in just its most recent report,

The quality of Russian bureaucrats and military trainers are [sic] also raising fears among the Russian pro-war crowd that the partial mobilization effort may not succeed. Milbloggers noted that employees of the military enlistment centers are unmotivated and underpaid, reducing their enthusiasm to adhere to the envisioned mobilization plan. Milbloggers also pleaded with officers and commanders in charge of preparing mobilized men for war to train them before deployment.

US generals have noted in interviews, however, that such training will almost certainly not take place. But even beyond the colonel's misreading or omission of the evidence on social media, the problem for Russia is simply that legacy media reports of missile attacks on hospitals, mass graves in the forest, or civilians shot in the head with hands tied and left unburied on the streets are bad press and will only strengthen Western popular support for Ukraine. This is another factor in the information war that the colonel simply omits, even though reports of atrocities, real or fabricated, have been key to wartime propaganda for more than a century.

For whatever reason, Colonel Reisner wants to stick to wishful thinking on Russia's ability to sustain its standing as a world power. One explanation may be Austria's continued national policy of neutrality, a Cold War artifact that realpolitik has abandoned in much of Europe for a generation -- but it may be in the colonel's career interests to endorse it, at least in his current political envioronment.

But otherwise, it's harder and harder to take him seriously.