Shorting The Conventional Wisdom
The Russo-Ukraine War continues to reinforce my contrarian nature. I noted yesterday that the Institute for the Study of War seems to have grown skeptical of its own neoconservative outlook and recognized it's running a feedback loop, with the generals giving its analysts opinions, which the analysts publish and implicitly endorse, and the generals then cite these opinions as authoritative in talking-head news interviews. These are all carefully modulated in a middle of the road between reified extremes, with Ukrainian claims of Russian casualties discounted on one hand and Russian claims of their own losses also discounted on the other. A recent article in the Daily Kos raises questions about this view , and I'm essentially in sympathy with it: As of Tuesday morning [April 4], Oryx had cataloged more than 2,400 major piece of military equipment lost by the Russian armed forces, including some 400 tanks and 52 aircraft. These are confirmed losses verified by videos a...