Some would argue that this article is a statement of the obvious. Unfortunately, almost none of the people who would say that are in the US Senate, where the buffoons instead clamor for More War!
An interesting observation, though, is:
“The U.S. production rate of SM-3 interceptor missiles, for example, is twelve per year. That is not a misprint. It’s barely enough to guard one aircraft carrier, let alone a country, a continent or an alliance system.”
Which brings us back to the realities of mass production. If an entity produces only 12 of anything in a year, be it missiles or hammers or toilet seats, those 12 are going to be very expensive almost hand-crafted items. The practical choices are to produce very large numbers of missiles to bring down the per unit cost … or to build good friendly relations with other countries.
Founded in 2017 with the backing of a group of investors including Peter Thiel, Clearview initially operated in relative secrecy. For several years, it built up the world’s largest database of human faces by scraping the Internet and running them through a facial-recognition algorithm that it says can identify people with 99.85% accuracy. (Clearview’s library of images of people’s faces has grown to 40 billion—an average of five images for every person on Earth, and a 400% increase since the start of the war, Ton-That tells TIME.) By 2018, Clearview was quietly selling access to its database to a host of eager government clients, which grew to more than 600 law enforcement agencies, including U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the FBI.
“If executed decisively, Ukrainian counteractions could turn a temporary crisis into a major encirclement battle, crippling Russian forces in the region.”
If! If! If!! Ho-hum! How often have we seen Ukrainian-sourced reports which make it seem like Zelensky is almost ready to march on to Moscow … while the maps keep showing the Ukrainian side falling back. But let’s give credit where credit is due – the Ukrainian PR operation has been, and continuous to be, absolutely top-notch … from the Ghost of Kiev onwards.
As for this particular operation, it reminds me of one of Stalin’s statements, which went roughly: We reconnoiter with a bayonet; if we meet resistance, we pull back, and if we don’t we carry on forward.
Drones clearly present a new challenge on the battlefield - a very effective way of leading charges or of frustrating enemy advances. While there is a lot of discussion about different ways to deal with drones, one of the more obvious ones is to attack the drone operator instead of the drone itself – cut off the head rather than the hand.
With that in mind, a recent report from a Ukrainian source suggests this is exactly what the Russian forces have been attempting. Caution – this is relayed through a very obviously pro-Russian correspondent.
“All these [Ukrainian] losses mean that the infantry and drone operators are taking over the war. However, the number of experienced drone operators is steadily decreasing. In 2024, an experienced drone operator had a lifespan of five to 11 months, with a survival rate of 70%. Now, an operator has a maximum lifespan of five months, and the survival rate has dropped to 30%. The war is becoming more expensive for Ukraine every day, leading to a catastrophic situation.”
All these drone stories seem to me to be hyped beyond what a rational battlefield assessment would produce. That makes them well into the propaganda sector, vs factual reporting.
Drones are a relatively new aspect of weapon. They are not “suddenly appearing” on the battlefield. Our experience has, jsut as one might expect, encompassed larger “Reaper”-type drones, capable of very long range deployment and carrying significant ordnance. The Russo-Ukrainian experience is more akin to the introduction of the machine gun rather than the introduction of the cannon, to combat. They have cleat potential but significant weaknesses. Guidance more than anything seems to be an area where relatively easy jamming could produce defensive results, since none of these drones appear to use any sophisticated commo. Drone flying speed also appears to be an area that could easily yield good WWiI AA results, especially with use of proximity fusing. Canons of no more that 25mm could provide real area AA benefits with proximity-fused munitions.
While I have my suspicions (ie: Why hasn’t Russia, long ago, taken out Ukraine’s energy infrastructure?), have you been following John Robb’s reporting on optical fiber guidance and zero-day wars? This seems to change the equation regarding guidance.
I think a substantial percentage of Scanalyst contributors is getting marinated in Russian propaganda to the extent that they lose sight of what’s actually going on.
We have to give credit where credit is due – and there is no dispute that Zelensky’s post-democratic regime has won (and continues to win) the propaganda war hands down. This has been true since the non-existent “Ghost of Kiev” onwards.
On the actual battlefield, both sides have successes and failures, but the tide is clearly flowing against the retreating Zelensky regime. In the long run, reality beats propaganda.
It seems to me the retreat, while real, is an order of magnitude slower than activists (yes, activists) here suggest. Or all of Ukraine would have been overrun a year ago.
My somewhat naïve impression is that, based on the size of the military forces available, Ukraine is punching way above its weight. (While yet losing.)
Well, maybe I’m an “activist” in the sense that this loss of life among young heroes on both sides is an absolutely inexcusable situation consequent to the failure to do as I recommended at the START hearings on July 31, 1991:
But then, I discovered the real problem after trying to get the MX missile system commercialized for orbital launch in a war against space’s lifelessness:
There is a real problem here that everyone is missing and it goes beyond symptoms such as the World Reserve Currency as the Worst Resource Curse.
But, of course, that’s just me being an “activist” again, which is why I’ve backed down to simply trying to reform the social pseudosciences so we can stop arguing as “activists” for a particular social theory and start to see our real differences of interests.
That goes not just for Jews but for Germans, Ukrainians and Russians alike. We can all have our theories about counterfactual historical circumstances but so long as people refuse to support the compassion of Sortocracy.org which would prevent most wars over “living space” but even the desperate retreat to Hume’s Guillotine to discern what is the case as opposed to what out to be the case given we’re not permitted compassionate control experiments, then all I can say is a pox on all your houses.
I believe there is a serious disconnect between military skills and political skills understanding. The Ukrainian War is pretty much a civil war, even though there are organic Russian units involved in the fight. Civil Wars in particular have a high order of political components involved. The error is sending young lieutenants to fight in a political war. If my experience in RVN was any ruler to gauge by, we got sent with high degrees of military ability but pretty much zero knowledge of politics and how to play that game well.
Russia is a highly sophisticated nation with well developed political systems. Even though we know they are not efficient politico-economic systems, they are functional to some degree. So looking at the length of time and the casualties involved, one can only conclude both sides have been fighting ineptly, without real military strength or insight on either side. Russia is simply better than this, and. the Ukrainians are not nearly as good as they are made out to be. Looking from afar one can easily come to the conclusion that the Russians are fighting listlessly while the Ukrainians are fighting without leadership.
The only question remains how long old men. who aren’t IN the fight will allow it to continue. My sense is that Putin is ready to stop, but the commedian is not.
That is an interesting perspective. On the other hand, one might argue that our expectations are faulty.
Everyone knows that World War I showed the power of defense. Trenches plus machine guns were very difficult to dislodge. Then WWII seemed to show that movement – blitzkreig – was dominant. But perhaps we in the West have that perspective since the real slog of WWII was far away on the Russian front, where we now know both Germany and the USSR lost huge numbers of soldiers in slow-moving fronts while civilians were crushed. We might also note that taking territory in the East in WWII during the US island hopping campaign involved large-scale casualties on both the Japanese & US sides. Defense definitely still has the advantage.
The oddity of the war in the Ukraine has been the rather limited number of civilian deaths. Probably no military attack has caused as many civilian deaths as that Ukrainian terrorist attack on the concert hall in Moscow. One guess at why this is comes back to the “civil war” scenario – Russia sees most of the Ukrainians as fellow Slavs and is trying to minimize civilian casualties. Clearly, Russia has chosen not to use its immense advantage in rockets to destroy populated Ukrainian cities in the way that the WWII Allies used superiority in bombers to level German cities along with their civilian populations.
Among the “activists” there is a lot of criticism of President Putin for not fighting the war more aggressively, which would inevitably mean a lot more Ukrainian civilian casualties. Does this mean that the war has been fought ineptly?
