In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

As of this morning, there's a new piece by Frank Ledwidge, Senior Lecturer in Military Strategy and Law, University of Portsmouth (UK), Ukraine: the battle for Donbas will be protracted and bloody – military expert . I found it by doing a web search on "Ukraine Donbas battle Kursk" and got a predictable result, and I think this is as good an example as any of the current respectable consensus: The next two months will bring what US defence officials have called “a knife fight” in the area the Ukrainian army call “The Joint Forces Operation” (JFO). We know this region better as Donbas. . . . After their recent defeat in the north, Russia has made some significant changes. . . . . the Russians will have a single command staff to co-ordinate and attempt to achieve a single focused and ostensibly realistic operational objective[.] Russia is desperately trying to replace its considerable losses, up to 20% of its force already. [No, more like 30-50%; even the ISW has ...

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...

Normally I check the Institute for the Study of War site once a day to get a read on the conventional wisdom -- pretty much the middle of the road opinion on when or whether the 40-mile convoy is going to get moving now, next week, or next month (they always settle on next week). So I was a bit startled this morning to find something new : The Russian military is attempting to generate sufficient combat power to seize and hold the portions of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts that it does not currently control after it completes the seizure of Mariupol. There are good reasons to question the Russian armed forces’ ability to do so and their ability to use regenerated combat power effectively despite a reported simplification of the Russian command structure. This update, which we offer on a day without significant military operations on which to report, attempts to explain and unpack some of the complexities involved in making these assessments. . . . The US Department of Defense ...

I keep an ongoing file of links on the developing narrative about alien life, or maybe more accurately the narrative about no alien life, since most reports tend to support Fermi's Paradox -- despite all the calculations of how many planets are out there in the universe that could support life, we keep not finding it no matter how much we wish we could. An exception is a new report, or maybe a rehash of an old report: Declassified Pentagon documents discuss UFOs causing "unaccounted-for pregnancies" . This covers what at least purports to be additional information from the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, the first reports of which emerged in 2017. The Pentagon documents state that people who observed unidentified flying objects frequently displayed a cluster of similar physical symptoms: Injuries consistent with exposure to electromagnetic radiation (such as burns), heart ailments, and sleep disturbances. A report speculates that...

Via Instapundit, I discovered this piece by George Friedman, How the Ukraine War Will Likely End . . . . Putin cannot stop, nor can he reach an agreement with Ukraine that he will keep. Every deal – except for surrender by the enemy – is a revelation of weakness on the part of a weak country and a weak ruler. The only alternatives are ineffective action because the force he sent to war was the wrong force from a country that didn’t have the right one. He can reach a genuine cease-fire, but if he does, he’s finished. Not being able to defeat the Ukrainians, and held in contempt by others, destroys the myth of his power. Continuing the war endlessly reveals the same thing. As this goes on, Putin’s primary task is to pretend that the defeat is not happening because anything less than victory is a defeat. Every agreement must end in betrayal, and as it happens with guerrillas, they get stronger the longer the war drags out. I think "cannot stop" is a key phrase, because ...

The text of Ukraine President Zelensky's Tuesday address to the UN Security Council is available here . As rhetoric, it's up there with the speeches that, without a text avaialble, the ancient historians would compose as the speech a statesman would presumably have given taking into account the circumstances he faced and the goals he meant to achieve. But I'm no longer sure if Zelensky has modern parallels -- Lincoln, Churchill, and Roosevelt in their wartime addresses spoke primarily to national audiences or specific groups of allies. Kennedy and Reagan apostrophized Soviet leaders, again with domestic and allied secondary audiences. In his address to the UN, as well as in individual addresses to other world legislatures, Zelensky is rallying much of the civilized world, looking not just to invigorate a base but to bring over the uncommitted. He begins by referencing the particular atrocities the Russian army committed in Bucha, but he moves beyond that to the centra...

I'm not a military analyst, but I watch the coverage of the Russo-Ukraine War. and I'm starting to see a pattern to it that I've seen since the start: the 40-Mile Convoy Syndrome. What I think is the current (and correct) military view is this one from the AP and Pentagon spokesman John Kirby: A sidelight of the battle for Kyiv was the widely reported saga of a Russian resupply convoy that stretched dozens of miles along a main roadway toward the capital. It initially seemed to be a worrisome sign for the Ukrainians, but they managed to attack elements of the convoy, which had limited off-road capability and thus eventually dispersed or otherwise became a non-factor in the fight. “They never really provided a resupply of any value to Russian forces that were assembling around Kyiv, never really came to their aid,” said Pentagon spokesman John Kirby. “The Ukrainians put a stop to that convoy pretty quickly by being very nimble, knocking out bridges, hitting lead ve...