The Trans Conundrum

Here's what I can't figure out. President Biden, facing some of the lowest poll numbers of any president ever at this point in his term, has made transsexualism a signature issue, notwithstanding it's deeply unpopular even with people who are same-sex attracted:

“There is a large body of silent opinion among gay men and many lesbians that deeply believes in [biological] sex differences, cherishes and celebrates the male and female bodies, and does not see gayness as connected to transgender experience,” gay rights author Andrew Sullivan wrote. “Gay happiness depends on our owning our own [male or female biological] sex, not denying it.”

. . . The transgender ideology insists that government should deny the importance of biology in shaping people’s politics and personal lives.

Instead, transgenderism asserts that government should champion each person’s chosen sense of “gender” — which is defined as their sense of feeling male or female.

. . . The focus on feelings also gives status-seeking K-12 teachers a righteous excuse to groom an effeminate young boy or an insecure girl (who may or may not grow up to be gay or lesbian) towards a transgender identity, complete with a lifetime of sterilizing drugs, surgeries, loneliness, and poor health.

The transgender view also creates a lucrative opportunity for drug companies, doctors, and surgeons to feel virtuous about reshaping children’s or teenagers’ bodies to mimic the appearance of the opposite sex, regardless of the trauma and damage being done to children.

This suggests the actual voters and financial support for transgender aren't young teens who may be struggling with identity -- after all, they're too young to vote -- but a growing culture of elites who profit from a problem they themselves create, indeed by telling the children and young teens what their problem is. By the same token, the movement to conceal from the parents of the children and young teens that they're being counseled to transition, and indeed may be receiving medical treatment for a perceived condition without the parents' consent, is an indication that there is nothing spontaneous or voluntary about transsexualism. It's programmed by people with a hidden agenda.

What's the underlying agenda? It probably isn't actually related to pedophilia or same-sex atrraction; the point being made by gay and lesbian activists is that they happen to be attracted to members of their own sex for sexual reasons, however disordered that may be from the standpoint of natural law. Gender dysphoria is being sold as an entirely different problem with an entirely different solution.

In fact, the solutions appear to be different based on the age of the patient. Post-pubescent men, even if they undergo hormone treatments, almost always retain their full sexual equipment and frequently appear to continue to have sexual relations with women; witness the trans men who sue to be incarcerated in women's prisons and then get the women inmates pregnant.

On the other hand, a prepubescent boy who is convinced by his teachers and counselors that he's trans is a candidate for puberty blockers and further treatment, including castration. Why?

Clearly the motivation behind this isn't being fully examined given the current state of the public dialogue. I would imagine that some part of the agenda is depopulation, but this would require a significant number of young males to be sterilized, and it's far from clear that even the most enthusiastic campaign of mass grooming can accomplish this.

But if the object is vastly to increase the number of castrated men, this could also have implications simply for keeping the overall population docile.

Another motive couid be antifeminism, to erase any idea of a separate female identity by in effect making females a version of males and perhaps eventually wiping them out once a more controllable means of reproduction can be devised -- recall that in the TV series Fringe, the Observers, technologically enhanced humanoids from the future, are an all-male race that is able to reproduce in an unspecified way. The fantasy, if nothing else, is out there.

The most we can say is that one of the least popular presidents in US history has made transsexualism a signature issue and claimed transsexuals are made in God's image. As battles in the Plebe War go, this is going to turn out about as well as the encirclement of Kyiv.

Defeat In Detail

I'm scratching my head. Throughout the Ukraine war, the phrase "defeat in detail" has been more or less entering my random thoughts before I fall asleep at night, proobably because I've always assumed it was generally recognized as a key to Ukraine's strategy in the current war. A quick and easy definition is at Encyclopedia.com:

DEFEAT IN DETAIL. In the correct military sense—in the twenty-first as well as in the eighteenth century—this term means "the defeat in turn of the separated parts of a force." To avoid "defeat in detail," a commander keeps all his units within "supporting distance" of each other.

The standard examples (as the one in the video above) include Napoleon's Piedmont campaign and the 1914 Battle of Tannenberg. Another less-cited example, which might be better from my point of view, would be Washington's overall strategy in the Revolution (which I believe Cornwallis himself conceded was a success using that term). But one that fits the definition in Encyclopedia.com even more closely is the current Ukraine strategy in the war with Russia.

The conventional wisdom so far has been that Ukraine's victory in the Battle of Kyiv is an entirely different matter from the putative upcoming battle in Donbas, in which the Russians will be (and this is never completely clear) either Gen Manstein or Gen Zhukhov and smash Ukraine with overwhelming numbers of tanks. Whichever, it's gonna be a big Russian victory or something.

This is in spite of what strikes me as the completely uncontroversial conclusion by the Institute for the Study of War that the forces Russia is trying to recommit to eastern Ukraine "remain degraded, and Russian forces will face challenges integrating units from several military districts into a cohesive fighting force".

In addition, the separate assessments at the Militaryland.com site contain remarks like, "The convoy of Russian army have been moving towards Izium for the third day, and it’s kinda a déjà vu to the Kyiv one." In general, the Russian strategy, insofar as a coherent one even exists, hasn't changed since Kyiv, and in fact, what we're actually seeing on YouTube videos and other press reports is a steady stream of small battles in both the Donetsk and Kherson regions like this one:

Military personnel of the Joint Forces successfully repulsed 6 attacks by the Russians and terminated 15 units of military hardware belonging to the aggressors on the Donetsk and Luhansk fronts on 14 April.

"On 14 April, Ukrainian defenders destroyed 4 tanks, 6 armoured personnel carriers, 4 infantry fighting vehicles and one artillery system belonging to the enemy."

Footage from what may be either this encounter or any number of similar ones on YouTube indicates that this sort of action, taken against a single column of Russian vehicles, amounts to destroying the combat effectivenss of an individual battalion tactical group, apparently dispatched independently and without supoport from others. Estimates of the number of BTGs in eastern Ukraine are from 35 to 50, and as the ISW keeps pointing out, these are already understrength and degraded. The Oryx site continues to catalog the destruction, abandonment, and capture of dozens of tanks, armored vehicles, and weapons each day. As of this morning, its number of such on the Russian side is 2899, and there's apparently a backlog in counting. The Russians are repeating the same failures but expecting a different result.

What we're actually seeing in eastern Ukraine and Kherson is simply a continuation of the Ukrainian strategy we saw in Kyiv, which is misreported as a "stalemate" punctuated by minor skirmishes -- until, unexpectedly, the Russians collapse and retreat in disorder.

Ukraine has so far been able tactically to push back the Russian invasion in detail, in effect a battalion tactical group at a time. Strategically, it's generally acknowledged that the Russian invasion relied on multiple separated parts of a force that were in fact not in supporting distance of each other, which so far has enabled the Ukraine resistance on both small scale and large.

I did a web search on "Ukraine" and "defeat in detail" and came up with only 534,000 hits, most of which date from before the current war. They threw me out of ROTC.

The Sinking Of The Moskva

News reports confirm that the Russian missile cruiser Moskva in the Black Sea was hit by Ukrainian anti-ship missiles and heavily damaged; other reports on Twitter say that it has sunk. Meanwhile,

Rumors are swirling in Russia about Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu having suffered a massive heart attack.

Leonid Nevzlin, a former co-head of the oil giant Yukos, claims that Shoigu is in critical condition.

He also says that 20 top generals have been arrested. pic.twitter.com/9kOJ1Ba0dx

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) April 14, 2022

The Institute for the Study of War site has made no mention of the damage or sinking of the Moskva, nor has the Militaryland site, although I first saw references to this in the middle of yesterday afternoon. The Oryx site, however, has already confirmed the damage, though not the subsequent sinking. It's hard to imagine that this is not a significant blow to Russian prestige: in response to Sweden and Finland moving to NATO, the Russian response was to threaten them with naval forces:

#Russia will strengthen its borders in case of #Sweden and #Finland join #NATO and will deploy "significant naval forces" in the waters of the Gulf of Finland.

This was stated by Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev. pic.twitter.com/nEQaZU3l1K

— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) April 14, 2022

The most complete coverage is at the Red State blog, which itself is a surprise, as US independent media hasn't had much interest in Ukraine. I think the story there has made a correct call:

The politics of the sinking of the Moskva will be seismic. The Moskva is the ship that called upon Ukrainian troops on Snake Island to surrender during the early days of the war and received the memorable response “Russian warship…go f*** yourself” and had a Ukrainian postage stamp designed in honor of the event.

I'm inclined to wait for other developments.

So, Are The Neocons Back?

I've been more closely following retired Gen Jack Keane, a frequent Fox talking head, since I discoverd he's the Chairman of the Institute for the Study of War, which I've been discussing lately. The ISW is pretty clearly a neoconservative think tank, and while its assessments of the Russo-Ukraine War have been remarkably obtuse, there can be little question that it's in frequent contact with generals who are in the Pentagon policy loop. But now Gen Keane in the video above is suggesting the Pentagon policy loop isn't necessarily the White House policy loop. In response to sound bites from Pentagon spokesman John Kirby saying, "We want the Ukrainians to win this war". Keane says,

... really the first time we've heard that from the administration, I'm actually convinced, I mean that's where the Pentagon leaders actually feel, but Secretary Blinken avoids the subject, the national security adviser does the same, and certainly the President of the United States does the same. I was very encouraged by the prime minister of the UK going to Kyiv this weekend . . .

Oddly, this is echoed by a story on Summit News:

A French journalist who returned from Ukraine after arriving with volunteer fighters told broadcaster CNews that Americans are directly “in charge” of the war on the ground.

The assertion was made by Le Figaro senior international correspondent Georges Malbrunot.

Malbrunot said he had accompanied French volunteer fighters, two of whom had previously fought against ISIS.

“I had the surprise, and so did they, to discover that to be able to enter the Ukrainian army, well it’s the Americans who are in charge,” said Malbrunot.

Adding that he and the volunteers “almost got arrested” by the Americans, who asserted they were in charge, the journalist then revealed that they were forced to sign a contract “until the end of the war.”

“And who is in charge? It’s the Americans, I saw it with my own eyes,” said Malbrunot, adding, “I thought I was with the international brigades, and I found myself facing the Pentagon.”

Citing a French intelligence source, Malbrunot also tweeted that British SAS units “have been present in Ukraine since the beginning of the war, as did the American Deltas.”

Russia is apparently well aware of the “secret war” being waged in Ukraine by foreign commandos who have been in the region since February.

Both the United States and the UK have publicly asserted that there won’t be “boots on the ground” in Ukraine, but apparently there has been a US-UK military presence since the start of the war.

Certainly we've seen a resurgence of neocon opinion recently, with the ISW the most prestigious source of Russo-Ukraine war analysis, however obtuse, opaque, and noncommittal it may be; Eliot Cohen a marquee writer at The Atlantic; and even Francis Fukuyama, 30 years after declaring history ended, inexplicably giving it and his career a jump start. Let's step back to Wikipedia's discussion of neoconservatism:

Neoconservatism is a political movement that was born in the United States during the 1960s among liberal hawks who became disenchanted with the increasingly pacifist foreign policy of the Democratic Party and with the growing New Left and counterculture of the 1960s, particularly the Vietnam protests. Some also began to question their liberal beliefs regarding domestic policies such as the Great Society. Neoconservatives typically advocate the promotion of democracy and interventionism in international affairs, including peace through strength, and are known for espousing disdain for communism and political radicalism.

. . . Many of its adherents became politically influential during the Republican presidential administrations of the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, peaking in influence during the administration of George W. Bush, when they played a major role in promoting and planning the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

. . . The Bush Doctrine was greeted with accolades by many neoconservatives. When asked whether he agreed with the Bush Doctrine, Max Boot said he did and that "I think [Bush is] exactly right to say we can't sit back and wait for the next terrorist strike on Manhattan. We have to go out and stop the terrorists overseas. We have to play the role of the global policeman. ... But I also argue that we ought to go further". Discussing the significance of the Bush Doctrine, neoconservative writer Bill Kristol claimed: "The world is a mess. And, I think, it's very much to Bush's credit that he's gotten serious about dealing with it. ... The danger is not that we're going to do too much. The danger is that we're going to do too little.

. . . Barack Obama campaigned for the Democratic nomination during 2008 by attacking his opponents, especially Hillary Clinton, for originally endorsing Bush's Iraq-war policies. Obama maintained a selection of prominent military officials from the Bush Administration including Robert Gates (Bush's Defense Secretary) and David Petraeus (Bush's ranking general in Iraq).

. . . Several neoconservatives played a major role in the Stop Trump movement in 2016, in opposition to the Republican presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, due to his criticism of interventionist foreign policies, as well as their perception of him as an "authoritarian" figure. Since Trump took office, some neoconservatives have joined his administration, such as Elliott Abrams. Neoconservatives have supported the Trump administration's hawkish approach towards Iran and Venezuela, while opposing the administration's withdrawal of troops from Syria and diplomatic outreach to North Korea. Although neoconservatives have served in the Trump administration, they have been observed to have been slowly overtaken by the nascent populist and national conservative movements, and to have struggled to adapt to a changing geopolitical atmosphere.

Biden's precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan must certainly be seen as a final rejection of Bush-era neoconservative and interventionist policies -- except that it's not hard to conclude that Biden's implicit rejection of those policies encouraged Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

So is the Pentagon reverting to neoconservatism? Are the lizard people running the country reverting to a containment consensus more like Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Reagan, and the Bushes, sponsoring proxy wars against the successor to the Soviet Union? They and the Pentagon are likely running an implicit version of the 1980s Reagan-Thatcher alliance in Ukraine, with the Thatcher surrogate in the UK, but so far without Biden playing Reagan. Biden, though, is preoccupied at best.

My bet is Gen Keane is in the loop, but President Brandon is not.

I Still Don't Believe It

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 moved away from 15-20%.] Those efforts will make little difference. The conscript troops and reactivated reserves called up recently will not be ready for months. Nonetheless the force the Russians will amass will be formidable, and with shorter and better established supply lines into Russia they may be able to avoid some of the appalling foul ups which have characterised their war so far.

These forces are pitched against Ukrainian defenders deployed in several salients or “bulges” – areas surrounded on three sides by Russian-backed separatists. Throughout military history these have offered the possibility of trapping enemy forces in “pockets”. Military historians will recall the Ypres Salient (1914-1918), Verdun (1916), Kursk (1943) and of course the Battle of the Bulge (1944-45) as the most prominent examples of this.

The tone of that last graf is a bad sign: he's talking down to us. Wow! Salients! Verdun! Kursk! Never heard of those, Mr Senior Lecturer! Thanks for bringing it down to our level! He concludes,

Above all the ravages inflicted upon them by the Ukrainian armed forces have cut away at their manpower, equipment and morale. The next battle will begin within the next two weeks. Attempting to predict its precise course is ultimately futile, not even the opposing generals know that. It may well be that the Russian army’s fate has already been sealed in what is likely to be a long war.

Here's a tweet I found yesterday along the same line:

The #BattleofDonbas likely to be biggest tank battle in Europe since 1943 Battle of Kursk; may prove decisive in determining who comes out on top of #RussiaUkraineWar. Here's why https://t.co/Tku8QQOVbl @defpriorities @19_forty_five

— Daniel L. Davis (@DanielLDavis1) April 10, 2022

The points again are that the battle is yet to come, it's days or weeks away, and it's gonna be another Kursk. But my view is in this unnoticed passage from Sunday's ISW summary that I quoted yesterday:

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.

So the big new Kursk has already begun? It's not gonna start next Thursday? Think of that! But where is it? Where are the massed formations of tanks and infantry slugging it out? Where's the knife fight that's depicted in the Kursk battle painting above? I think the answer is what we're already seeing, for instance in the drone footage below taken over the weekend, released by the Ukraine military:

Although it's identified as in Donbas, it's very similar to video released on March 10 from a Ukrainian ambush of a Russian column in Brovary, east of Kyiv, subsequently characterized as a battle. The scenes there depicted Russian tanks reversing in panic as they were picked off by highly accurate Ukrainian artillery, precisely what we now see in this video. The Brovary battle in hindsight was a major factor in stalling the Russian attempt to surround Kyiv. It destroyed most or all of a battalion tactical group and killed its commander. (You can see an analysis of the Brovary battle from the Austrian military academy here. My German's pretty good, but you can also turn on subtitles for translation.)

The Donbas ambush in the video above appears to have been even more effective in blowing up Russian tanks than the one in Brovary. If you followed the anecdotal reports at reddit r/ukraine conflict over the weekend, there were several ambushes like this one, not all as big, as well as major explosions at Russian ammunition depots. Frank Lewidge in the piece I linked above misses his own point:

Ukrainian commanders fully and completely understand from bitter experience the risks of being surrounded. They have demonstrated the qualities of agility and tactical innovation required for this kind of battle. Even better, they know what is coming. Nato air and space reconnaissance and surveillance as well as Ukraine’s own intelligence capabilities will ensure that there will be no surprise attacks.

No surprise attacks? Wouldn't the ambush in the video above qualify as one such? How about the ambush in Brovary? I guess the problem is that all the experts are expecting another Kursk, and the surprise attacks would be comiing from the Russians, while in fact the Ukrainians have figured out how to avoid something like that. They're ambushing the Russian units before they can form up for a battle they expect, while the Ukrainians are fighting the battle they want. (By the way, there was no surprise at all on either side at Kursk. Mr Ledwidge has dawn a false analogy here.)

This also raises questions yet again about those maps that have solid red areas under Russian control, like the experts at the ISW do. Comments on the Donetsk ambush in the video above draw an entirely reasonable conclusion that the column was attacked somewhere behind Russian lines, that is, in a solid red area on this kind of map. But it looks like the Ukrainians had to move artillery close enough to the road the column was traveling to hit those tanks and likely moved infantry close in as well to hit them with missiles. The reality of the solid red areas is that they consist only of thin thread-like lines along roads, and Ukrainian forces operate freely elsewhewre in those areas and can stage ambushes effectively.

The Battle of Donbas is under way, and it will look much more like the Battle of Kyiv than Kursk.

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.