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 and photos that show distinct features—such as tail numbers on aircraft—that make sure each vehicle counted is unique.

However, that’s a long way from what the Ukrainian military says Russia has lost since the beginning of the invasion. They record over 200 more tanks, and nearly ten times as many aircraft in total (planes, helicopters, and UAVs).

The Defense Ministry also keeps a running total on something that Oryx and other sites cataloging lost hardware don’t touch: casualties. Russia, in the few occasions that it has given any count at all, has reported numbers that range from a fraction of those reported by Ukraine, to a ludicrously small fraction. Intelligence agencies in the U.S. and U.K. have also issued some sporadic casualty figures, with numbers that seem closer to—but still significantly lower—than those posted by Ukraine.

So who’s right? It’s quite likely that Russia doesn’t have an accurate count of their losses, even if they had any incentive to give it. It’s also generally assumed that the number from Ukraine overstates the results to make Russia look weaker and their own military more successful.

However, professor and author Phillips O’Brien suggests that Ukraine’s numbers, though they seem inflated, might be the most accurate of all those floating around. That’s because we have something in this war that hasn’t been available in other conflicts—open-source intelligence in the form of all those photos, videos, and messages captured by phones. While those images are the basis of the numbers reported by OSInt and Oryx, O’Brien points out that these numbers represent the absolute minimum for Russian losses. And the evidence of the last few days shows us just how badly these values can undershoot the truth.

. . . But what’s interesting is this: Intelligence estimates of how many Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine put that number at around 1,200. That means that, as verified by Oryx, over a third of those tanks are now either destroyed or in Ukrainian hands. If the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense is right on their numbers, Russia has lost over half the tanks it sent to Ukraine.

Those are the levels of losses that no military, anywhere, can sustain.

I think we can apply this as well to the current consensus for what's next in the war: the upcoming battle for Donbas. Per CNN as of April 6:

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been far costlier and less successful than most analysts expected over its first six weeks -- and experts now believe that Moscow is changing its military approach.

President Vladimir Putin's revised war strategy will now focus on trying to take control of the Donbas and other regions in eastern Ukraine with a target date of early May, according to several US officials familiar with the latest US intelligence assessments.

That makes the city of Sloviansk, more than 300 miles east of the capital Kyiv, a potentially crucial battleground in the coming weeks. "Efforts by Russian forces advancing from Izyum to capture Slovyansk will likely prove to be the next pivotal battle of the war in Ukraine," the Washington DC-based think tank Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said in its Monday update on the conflict in Ukraine.

. . . ISW expects Russian troops to begin offensive operations towards the city from nearby Izium in the coming days, a forecast that matches warnings on the ground.

It's worth noting that ISW is extremely fond of the phrase "in the coming days", as it has been pedicting the fall of Mariupol "in the coming days" since the start of the war, and that suggests that as a time span, it's meaningless. It's also worth noting that ISW is where everyone, including CNN, goes for the authoritative view. But as I noted yesterday, the ISW's current assessment of the Russian ability to do this is not optimistic:

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.

Even so, it continues farther down,

The Russians likely will make gains nevertheless and may either trap or wear down Ukrainian forces enough to secure much of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, but it is at least equally likely that these Russian offensives will culminate before reaching their objectives, as similar Russian operations have done.

So, which is it? Maybe yes, maybe no, huh? The problem is that these guys are regarded as the experts, but they're turning out to be wrong by their own admission and are now just hedging everything. But as of this morning, the ISW assessment is:

Russian forces continued assaults on Rubizhne, Popasna, and Severodonetsk in the past 24 hours but did not make significant territorial gains. The Ukrainian General Staff claimed that Ukrainian forces repelled eight attacks and destroyed four tanks, eight armored vehicles, and seven unarmored vehicles in the past 24 hours. . . . Ukrainian Presidential Advisor Oleksiy Arestovych stated on April 9 that Russian forces have begun their major offensive on Donbas, which Kyiv expects to last 2-3 weeks.

If so, this is a Russian offensive that must inevitably be using depleted units with depleted troops, well before the predicted weeks and months it would take actually to replenish and reintegrate these forces. I just don't see the mother of all battles here, and I suspect the current shooting war will end well before the current wisdom thinks. The consistent pattern throughout this war has been to underestimate and discount Ukraine.

The Institute For The Study Of War Wakes Up!

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 (DoD) reported on April 8 that the Russian armed forces have lost 15-20 percent of the “combat power” they had arrayed against Ukraine before the invasion. This statement is somewhat (unintentionally) misleading because it uses the phrase “combat power” loosely.

Whoa! In effect, they're saying they've been listening to the generals, who've unintentionally been giving them overoptimistic interpretations of Russian capability! Why would the generals do that?

The US DoD statements about Russian “combat power” appear to refer to the percentage of troops mobilized for the invasion that are still in principle available for fighting—that is, that are still alive, not badly injured, and with their units. But “combat power” means much more than that. US Army doctrine defines combat power as “the total means of destructive, constructive, and information capabilities that a military unit or formation can apply at a given time.”

Then we get into the sort of thing that sent me snoozing in ROTC classes, which is why I got thrown out:

It identifies eight elements of combat power: “leadership, information, command and control, movement and maneuver, intelligence, fires, sustainment, and protection.”

The ISW concludes well, yeah, if you include every last typewriter repairman in the Russian army, they've only lost 15-20 percent of their combat power, but the guys who actually shoot the guns are the ones who are important, and a lot more of those have gotten blown up. The report goes on for a couple thousand more words, but that's its main point.

The point it omits is that the ISW has been listening to the generals, which it admits in this morning's post. It essentially admits that it's been passing this information back to its audience, which is more generals, including the retired talking heads who cite it in their appearances on network news. The same generals then feed the same opinions back to the ISW. At some point, getting toward two months into the war, the ISW wonders if maybe something's wrong.

I think this may suggest to me why I was thrown out of ROTC. I've grown to believe in guardian angels.

As part of its reassessment, the ISW says they're doing it "on a day without significant military operations on which to report". Whoa again!

NEW: Russia is sending an 8-mi long convoy of 100s of vehicles, including armored vehicles and artillery southbound through the Ukrainian town of Velykyi Burluk.

The convoy is moving about 60 mi east of Ukraine’s 2nd-largest city of Kharkiv, as 🇷🇺 focuses on Donbas.

📷:@Maxar pic.twitter.com/4EJRHSQZvk

— Jack Detsch (@JackDetsch) April 10, 2022

While the tweet has a time stamp of 10:13 PM on April 9, the satellite view is clearly in daylight, and with Ukraine 7 hours ahead of the ISW in Washington, shouldn't the ISW have had a good part of their own working day to become aware of this development? Apparently not. In fact, this release from Ukraine says the photo dates from April 8, which makes it even less excusable that the ISW apparently isn't aware of it.

But even more recently, there's a report Kharkiv region: Ukrainian military destroyed big Russian military column on the way to Izyum. So over a period of days, there are reports, first, of a big Russian column, and then of a big Russian column being destroyed as so frequently seems to happen to big Russian columns, on a day or days when the ISW says nothing's going on.

The problem is that journalists, with the overall initiative and skill level of bright middle school students, can't be expected to ferret this out on their own. But the people in the ISW are full time paid professionals. Frederick W Kagan, the lead author of today's reassessment, is a Yalie and heavily connected to the deep state:

Kagan graduated from Hamden High School before he earned a B.A. in Soviet and East European studies and a Ph.D. in Russian and Soviet military history, both from Yale University. He worked as an Assistant professor of military history at West Point from 1995 to 2001 and as an associate professor of military history from 2001 to 2005. The courses that he taught at West Point included the history of military art, grand strategy, revolutionary warfare, and diplomatic history.

Kagan's brother is the foreign policy analyst Robert Kagan, whose wife is Victoria Nuland, CEO of the Center for a New American Security.

Frederick Kagan is married to Kimberly Kagan, the president of the Institute for the Study of War.

He and his father, Donald Kagan, who was a professor at Yale and a fellow at the Hudson Institute, both authored While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today (2000). The book argued in favor of a large increase in military spending and warned of future threats, including from a potential revival of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program. Frederick along with his brother Robert Kagan, who is a member of the Aspen Strategy Group, and their father, Donald, were all signatories to the Project for the New American Century manifesto, Rebuilding America's Defenses (2000).

Oh, I see. The ISW is but a branch of the Kagan family business, and they're all in bed with each other, Yale, the Bushes, Petraeus, McChrystal, the CIA, Robert Gates, and the whole Afghan boondoggle.

This is all gonna turn out fine.

Are Space Aliens Actually White Colonialists?

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 these could be caused by "energy related propulsion systems" and warns that the underlying technology could pose a "threat to United States interests." Additionally, in cases that would not seem out of place in an "X-Files" episode, there were accounts of "apparent abduction" and "unaccounted for pregnancy."

Another document from the cache contains a rubric for categorizing different types of seemingly paranormal experiences. If a person claims to have observed a UFO that had extraterrestrials on board, for instance, they are categorized as "CE3." By contrast, someone who says they encountered "ghosts, yetis, spirits, elves and other mythical/legendary entities" is classified as "AN3."

This strikes me as grant-funded researchers on a boondoggle doing whatever they can to stretch things out. Nevertheless, that a government project would apparently treat "unaccounted for pregnancy" as something on the border of scientific credibility does say something about space aliens and how we might approach the problem as neo-Aristotelians.

I've already mentioned here the problem that our idea of alien life is heavily colored by our Genesis-based assumptions about creation: earthlings are created in God's image, in particular endowed with reason that allows them to interpret and manipulate creation. This is illustrated most famously in the Voyager disk, a gold-plated copper LP phonograph record that was included on the Voyager space probes on what strikes me as the blithe assumption that whatever alien life might one day encounter it would use a God-given endowment of reason to decipher its quasi-scientific pictographs and reverse-engineer the mid-20th century technology of the record player.

Well, after all, wouldn't an interplanetary alien technology have been developed by creatures endowed with reason? I mean, how else do you invent warp drives?

The suggestion that it's even remotely credible that an encounter with aliens would result in "unaccounted for pregnancy" has the same difficulty. But let's accept the premise: neo-Darwinian theory suggests that x to the 28th planets exist. y to the -43rd of them are capable of supporting primeval ooze from which intelligent space aliens can evolve, given near-infinite time for this to take place. So it's no great leap to imagine that such aliens cruise by in their UFO, brush a little too close to Sadie wandering in the woods, and boom, Sadie's expecting, unaccountably.

(Don't blame me, this is in a government report.) But here's the problem. For Sadie to be expecting at all -- and I mean expecting anything, not just a fully developed earthling, or maybe a fully developed earthling-alien clone, or even some sort of alien implant that miscarries almost immediately, wouldn't this mean the aliens multiply via some mechanism fully compatible with earthling DNA? I mean, that's how earthlings multiply. (Again, this is in a government report. I didn't make this up.)

You may argue that well and good, but this is a product of evolution. Maybe the universe has evolved some sort of meta-DNA whereby it is a quality of life that irrespective of the particular form of DNA that's evolved from planet to planet, there is a universally evolved meta-DNA that is cross-compatible so that Sadie on Earth can get just as unaccountably pregnant as Euphemia on the planet SP:FQ&T if an alien brushes a little too close to either in their UFO.

But then we're back to the Genesis-based view of creation that is either teleological or meta-teleological and not random, as neo-Darwinists contend. In other words, there's either Yahweh or some Yahweh meta-equivalent (which a neo-Aristotelian would say is simply Yahweh again) guiding a meta-compatible process from planet to planet, not random combination, which would essentially be impossible if Sadie could get pregnant unaccountably from a hike in the woods where she met a UFO.

But if the space aliens who can impregnate an earthling are a product of the Biblical Almighty, as they must be in this scheme, then the whole universe is guided by the Genesis Yahweh, who is a product of the Patriarchy, which is the cause of reason, colonialism, whiteness, and everything connected with them. Thus space aliens are basically white colonialists.

I read all this in a government report, backed up by NASA's Voyager disk. The only problem is I've never been able to figure out how this could make me rich.

How Does It End?

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 war is not just a series of disconnected snapshots that can be paused and examined at will. New things are happening based on what's already taken place. For instance, there's the question of Finland and Sweden joining NATO:

Finland will clarify next steps regarding a possible decision to seek NATO membership in the coming weeks, Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto told reporters after attending a NATO foreign ministers' meeting in Brussels on Thursday.

. . . Finland, a European Union member state, shares a 1,300-km (810-mile) border with Russia. Haavisto said Russia's invasion had shown that Russia is willing to take increasing risks in its military operations, can quickly mobilise more than 100,000 soldiers against a neighbouring country, and has mooted more openly than before the possible use of its nuclear and biological weapons.

"There we come to a situation in which we may need cooperation," Haavisto said, alluding to NATO.

He added that NATO member countries have offered to help Finland with ensuring security during an application process and said they estimate it would take from four months to one year to approve the application.

Regarding Sweden,

. . . [T]he Swedish prime minister remained hesitant until recently about her country's NATO position.

In early March she said it would "further destabilise" that part of Europe and "increase tensions" if Sweden joined. But by the end of the month that position had changed, a sign of the shifting discussion within the Social Democrats and feeling some heat from Finland, with [Prime Minister Magdalena] Andersson now saying "I do not rule out NATO membership in any way."

Not mentioned in current discussions, as far as I can see, is the loss of Russian credibility when it threatens "consequences" for either country joining NATO. As a practical matter, as of today, Russia has committed the best part of its military resources to a failed invasion of Ukraine. The consensus view is that for Russia even to resume its Ukraine offensive will require reconstitution of its forces, a process likely to take months -- but this leaves out what would be needed to impose "consequences" on Finland and Sweden for joining NATO.

The Russo-Ukraine War has shown that Russia is unable to invade even a militarily weak neighbor without imposing extreme costs on itself, and in the end, it can't achieve anything like its objectives -- the best case for Russia now would be a return to something like the status quo ante. Finland and Sweden would be much harder to invade now even without the new NATO promise of security guarantees during their application process.

In fact, given the extent of atrocities coming to light in Ukraine, a negotiated outcome of the war that would include Ukraine staying out of NATO itself seems increasingly distant. Nobody wants a situation in which Russia can recover from the war and simply resume either open aggression or threats of it.

On the other hand, I don't see an extended stalemate given the history of the war so far. The move for Finland, likely followed by Sweden, to join NATO now is an indication that the myth of Russian power has already been destroyed. The threats of "consequences" even a few weeks ago are now empty.

What we've seen so far in the war, with Kyiv the best example but Odesa/Mykolaiv serving as well, is that Russian advances "culminate" before reaching their objective, followed by a period of Ukrainian counterattacks that eventually result in a Russian rout. I think equivalent conditions are building for the Russian drive from Izyum southeast toward Slovyansk and Barvinkove.

I think what we'll eventually see is a situation where Ukraine regains territory at least beyond the de facto 2014 borders, but Russia will be unable to accept conditions that acknowledge this. Meanwhile, Finland and Sweden will join NATO, Ukraine will at least continue to threaten to join, and Russia will be kept busy retaining possession of Kaliningrad and the Kuril Islands.

But this leaves out the whole issue of war crimes trials and reparations, which could put Russia at an even greater disadvantage. At that point, I think we'd be in a position calling for something like a new Congress of Vienna.

Yet More On Zelensky As Rhetorician

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 central issue:

How is this different from what the ISIS terrorists were doing in the occupied territory?

Except that it is done by a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.

It destroys the internal unity of states.

Destroys state borders.

. . . So where is the security that the Security Council must guarantee? There is no security. Although there is a Security Council, as if nothing happened.

So where is the peace that the United Nations was created to guarantee?

It is obvious that the key institution of the world, which must ensure the coercion of any aggressors to peace, simply cannot work effectively.

, , , Ladies and Gentlemen!

I would like to remind you of the first article of the first chapter of the UN Charter. What is the purpose of our organization? To maintain peace. And to force to peace. Now the UN Charter is being violated literally from the first article. And if so, what is the point of all other articles?

. . . Why did Russia come to Ukraine, tell me?

I will answer. Russia's leadership feels like colonizers - as in ancient times. They need our wealth and our people. Russia has already deported tens of thousands of our citizens to its territory. Then there will be hundreds. It abducted more than two thousand children. Simply abducted thousands of children. And continues to do so. Russia wants to turn Ukrainians into silent slaves.

. . . If this continues, the finale will be that each state will rely only on the power of arms to ensure its security, not on international law, not on international institutions.

Then, the UN can simply be dissolved.

Ladies and Gentlemen!

Are you ready for the dissolving of the UN? Do you think that the time of international law has passed?

If your answer is no, you need to act now, act immediately.

The power of the UN Charter must be restored immediately.

The UN system must be reformed immediately so that the right of veto is not a right to kill. So that there is a fair representation of all regions of the world in the Security Council.

. . . It is now clear that the goals set in San Francisco in 1945 during the creation of a global international security organization have not been achieved. And it is impossible to achieve them without reforms.

Therefore, we must do everything in our power to pass on to the next generations an effective UN with the ability to respond preventively to security challenges and thus guarantee peace.

. . . And now we need decisions from the Security Council. For peace in Ukraine. If you do not know how to adopt this decision, you can do two things.

Remove Russia as an aggressor and a source of war from blocking decisions about its own aggression, its own war. And then do everything that can establish peace.

. . . Or show how you can reformat and really work for peace.

Or if your current format is unalterable and there is simply no way out, then the only option would be to dissolve yourself altogether.

I am convinced that you can do without the third option.

He went further in a Facebook address later on Tuesday, as reported by the BBC:

"The UN Security Council exists, and security in the world doesn't," Zelensky says in his nightly Facebook address after his virtual speech to the UN panel in New York on Tuesday.

The UN, he says, "is currently unable to carry out the functions for which it was created". He goes on to blame Russia - a permanent Security Council member, for its dysfunction.

Russia, Zelensky says, "discredits the UN and all other international institutions where it still participates".

The Ukrainian president has called for Russia to be removed from the panel, where it wields veto power, saying in his Facebook address that Russia's role at the UN is "to block everything constructive and use global architecture in order to spread lies and justify the evil it does".

. . . Ukraine, he says, is preparing for visits from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the head of European diplomacy Josep Borrell in the coming days.

"Now Kyiv is the capital of global democracy, the capital of the struggle for freedom for all on the European continent," says Zelensky.

I almost think we have to go back to the classical period, to ancient Athens and Sparta, or to the Maccabees, to find this historic level of leadership and fight from small-state players. I'm still trying to absorb what this means. UPDATE: The YouTube below from Rabbi Henry Abramson, a specialist in Ukraine history, provides more historical and religious context:

Who Remembers The 40-Mile Convoy?

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 vehicles and stopping their movement.”

However, this was not the consensus as of early last month. A March 3 report in The National Interest had this take, including remarks from the same John Kirby:

Reports emerged earlier this week of a massive Russian military convoy—made up of main battle tanks (MBT’s), towed artillery units, and other armored vehicles—heading for Kiev. However, the Russian convoy has reportedly stalled in recent days. "They haven't … from our best estimates have not made any appreciable progress geographically speaking in the last 24 to 36 hours, and again nothing very significant. It is difficult for us to know with great specificity all that is going into this stall if you will," said Pentagon press secretary John Kirby on Wednesday.

Kirby offered several potential reasons to explain the apparent delay. “One, we believe the Russians are deliberately, actually, regrouping themselves and reassessing the progress that they have not made and how to make up for lost time. Two, we do believe that they have experienced logistics and sustainment challenges, challenges that we don't believe they fully anticipated. And three, they are getting resistance from the Ukrainians. We have some indications—nothing that we can 100 percent independently verify, but we have some indications that the Ukrainians have in fact tried to slow down that convoy. And we have no reason to doubt those reports, but again we can't speak to it in great specificity,” Kirby said.

Though Ukrainian units have allegedly chipped away at the convoy from the front and rear, Kiev simply does not have the capability to destroy or meaningfully degrade a force of this size.

Except that in hindsight, Kyiv did in fact have the capability to "destroy or meaningfully degrade" that same convoy, which Kirby himself confirmed a month later, "by being very nimble, knocking out bridges, hitting lead vehicles and stopping their movement".

The pattern of analysis I've begun to see throughout the war follows this model: the Russians fail to do what is predicted, e.g. to encircle Kyiv in a quick move. Various explanations are offered, all of which put forward reasons other than Ukrainian battlefield skill: mud, corruption, low morale -- or indeed, the Russians are just regrouping, in fact, it isn't a delay, it's just a strategic pause. Versions of this were being offered, even by military veterans and retired generals, up to the middle of last week: there were limited Ukrainian counterattacks in Irpin, but the 40-mile convoy hadn't weighed in yet!

I've actually come to the view that the current conventional wisdom is just a variant of last month's 40-mile convoy theory: the Russisn advance has had inexplicable setbacks and delays, but they're going to reposition and resupply and move to a new objective. Any day now. Just you wait! Thus the current line from the Institute for the Study of War, as of this morning:

Russian forces continued to reposition to continue their invasion in eastern and southern Ukraine, having abandoned the attack on Kyiv. They have largely completed their withdrawal from the Kyiv area and are reportedly redeploying some of the withdrawn combat forces from Belarus to Russia. . . . Russia has not yet committed forces withdrawn from the Battle of Kyiv back into the fighting in eastern Ukraine. . . . Belgorod continues to emerge as the primary concentration area for Russian forces regrouping and refitting after their retreat from Kyiv and in preparation for onward movement to their home stations or to join the fighting in the east

The subtext here couldn't be clearer: the words "reposition", "redeploying", "regrouping", and "refitting" all appear, in "preparation for onward movement" -- just like all the tanks and guns and trucks and stuff in the 40-mile convoy. The problem is the conflict between the consensus assumptions and other reporting, for instance in the London Times:

Russian units are suffering losses as high as 40 per cent and recruits in St Petersburg are being fast-tracked through training to prepare them for the front line, according to Ukrainian intelligence.

After six weeks of heavy fighting the Kremlin is rotating its forces out of Ukraine as it concentrates on more limited objectives including the encirclement of Donbas.

Some Russian units returning to their bases across the border are suffering from heavy losses, according to the Ukrainian defence ministry.

The difficulty is that the current conventional wisdom is that somehow the Russians are going to pull this out. Gen Milley said yesterday:

"I do think this is a very protracted conflict, and I think it's measured in years. I don't know about decade, but at least years for sure," Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley told the House Armed Services Committee Tuesday during testimony on the defense budget.

"This is a very extended conflict that Russia has initiated and I think that NATO, the United States, Ukraine and all of the allies and partners supporting Ukraine will be involved in this for quite some time," Milley said.

The problem is the pattern we've been seeing is Russia has an unexpected delay, and indeed an unexpected rout, followed by a period of inactivity that's interpreted as a strategic pause -- followed by another rout. When units lose 30-40% of their strength, they don't just regroup. It seems to me that it may take months for the Russo-Ukraine War to resolve, but it isn't going to take years. So far, nobody seems to be making serious plans for a rapid Russian collapse as a power player with an equally rapid rise of Eastern Europe as a geopolitical force.

That is, nobody but Zelensky.

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.