Pretty bold. Lot of bloviating with little actual technical analysis. I made a note to return to this in 4 months. I strongly suspect you will be proven incorrect.
He also failed to mention that Ukraine's top general, Zaluzhnyi, is either incapacitated or dead. Bakhmut has fallen. Russia's "winter offensive" wasn't a failure, because they never started one. It was more efficient for Russia to let NATO throw troops and equipment into Bakhmut and just grind them down with artillery. I seriously doubt there will ever be a Ukrainian offensive, because Ukraine is now a hollowed out force, while Russia is at nearly full strength.
Yes, the war you've been watching on the Western mainstream media is mostly fiction and propaganda. See Col. Macgregor's analysis. The Russian casualties have been consistently about 1/7th the Ukrainian casualties over the same time period. Russia has completed its first mobilization, and is now underway with their second mobilization. While, Ukraine has had three full Western-trained and equipped armies get completely destroyed. Ukraine is now drafting women, children, and elderly, while Russia has barely scratched the surface of their draftable population.
Russian casualties have been about 50,000 at this point, counting the 20,000 Wagner fighters killed and wounded. Russia's active duty military is currently estimated at 850,000, with 250,000 reserves, as of May 2023. That puts Russia's strength at 96%.
Also, Russia has not committed their best armor and infantry units to the operation in Ukraine, as they have been saving them to deal with a direct war with NATO, which they foresee to be likely. Thus, like the West, Russia has been throwing their mothballed armor into the Ukraine conflict in order to get rid of it.
Russia never began the much anticipated Winter Offensive. They are fully aware that large red arrow maneuvers require a 3:1 advantage in numbers and tend to be very costly in men. By allowing Ukraine to throw all their reserves against Bakhmut and other points of the defensive line in Donbass, Russia has enjoyed the 3:1 advantage in their own favor. Thus, they are simply allowing the Ukrainian army to throw themselves into the jaws of death. At some point in the relatively near future, Ukraine's military will be so completely hollowed out, that only then we might see some big red arrow advances by the Russian Army. Then we will find out what the Russian troop strength really is.
After all these months it's safe to say that the verdict is in.
You, along with the "vocal minority" of "America First" types that the author heaps sneering derision on in this piece were right and the author was about as wrong as it's possible to be.
"The US has almost 7,000 Bradley fighting vehicles sitting in storage. It spends money maintaining them and plans to scrap them eventually. Bradleys can kill anything on the battlefield pretty easily and ferry a squad of infantry around while doing it, protecting them from artillery shrapnel. When the Biden administration slaps a price tag on them, ships them to Ukraine, and lets them kill Russians without Americans dying, it’s not actually spending any money. We could give a thousand Bradleys to Ukraine and not notice they were gone."
Such a low IQ take on multiple levels.
1. It's complete broken window economics nonsense. Destroying goods to justify creating new goods still entails new costs.
2. The Bradley was officially phased-out decades ago but there's no large-scale production replacement that has actually been rolled out yet. If anything at best this is just an excuse to give bidding defense contractors even bigger checks when we inevitably decide that our nation's armored vehicle supply is too low.
3. When the Chadley does finally roll into American bases, it too will collect dust and require regular maintenance like the Bradley (maybe more!). How is that not obvious to you?
4. It is blatant and dishonest cherry-picking to only highlight that one specific aspect of the program while ignoring the many other costs, which have collectively cost nearly $100 billion by the figures I'm seeing. Insulting America Firsters is not a rebuttal to their arguments.
5. You still fail to explain the actual material benefit of our involvement in the war. Invading Mexico and paying them for half of their land had an obvious material benefit. Maintaining a monopoly over the Americas by destroying an insurrection government had an obvious material benefit. Destroying the Spanish Empire and stealing their colonial possessions had an obvious material benefit. Winning WW2, creating a duo-polar world in which the wealthier half was dependent on American goods and dollars had an obvious material benefit. The first Gulf War, to protect a trade ally and our access to their oil (which they substantially repaid) had an obvious material benefit. What's the end-goal of this war and how does it benefit us?
Have to wonder if all the war-specific minutiae is as inaccurate and fallacious as that one passage (I don't have confidential military information and am not arrogant enough as a spectator to take any specific stories regarding the war at face value).
FTFY: " 'The largest money laundering operation for a President and the MIC in the history of the world.” Why has the windup been so long? The answer is pretty simple: Ukraine is waiting for more cash." If you are so confident in this counteroffensive, head to the front lines and help them retake Bakhmut. This piece sounds like the regime promising that Kabul would not fall and the Taliban was not advancing in Summer 2021. Keep fighting until the last Ukrainian!
... but I will believe in the counteroffensive when I see it succeeding. I have little to no hope it will.
Senator Angus King recently called Ukraine’s preparation for its impending counteroffensive “the longest windup for a punch in the history of the world.” Why has the windup been so long?
Wasn't it supposed to ba spring offensive? And now spring is almost over? I am not holding my breath. It feels like a promise that will never materialize Maybe it will be a summer offenseive now. But I think it will be a nothingburger.
According to Ukrainian nationalist ideology the people of the Donbass are insufficiently racially pure -- their slavic blood has been contaminated and they are therefore untermenschen to be eliminated and cleansed from the land. Which, apparently a lot of people in the US are totally down with! I’ve never been so blackpilled for the future of humanity than to see half the country suddenly go all in on straight-up blood and soil Naziism just because Joe Biden snapped his fingers. We are well and truly fucked.
A bold prediction, somehow against the current tide... If you will be shown right, chapeau! But, if wrong, I guess this substack will have to fold, or at least rename to "Center for the Promotion of NATO Partisanship and Ideology"
"Some fear the war may bog down into indefinite static trench warfare that accomplishes nothing but draining resources and lives on all sides — a view I’m sympathetic to, though I don’t think we’re at that stage yet" Fuck off and go back to MSM ghoul. Good men, women and children are *DYING* on all sides and you, a supposed PhD of Philosophy, is "sympathetic".
This guy believes the claims of a Kinzhal shootdown based on photos of a sewer pipe. I guess this article is what happens when someone with no military or technical knowledge also doesn’t understand how wartime propaganda works (to be fair, he might not have been around for the Iraq shitshow) and believes everything the MSM and US Government tell him.
I half-expected a paragraph about the strategic implications of Sam Hyde AKA The Ghost of Kiev being trained on F-16s. On the positive side, he’a not a bad writer, just badly out of his depth here.
So far virtually every point you predicted has been proven false or has yet failed to come true.
You got the direction of the attack wrong, suggesting UA would go for lightly defended areas to the East/North East so they could score a political win. Wrong. They went south directly into the main defensive line, the opposite of your prediction. They also then got crushed.
You instead predicted they would push into Luhansk. A complete failure of a prediction as UA hasn’t attempted a push there at all in the course of the last two months.
You predicted that Bradley Fighting Vehicles would literally be able to destroy anything that it came across on the field of battle. Wrong again. There is not a single video documenting a single Bradley vehicle kill so far, months into the offensive, and yet there are multiple videos of half a dozen burnt out Bradley’s in different spots.
You predicted that air power was a scratch and the Ukrainians just need more armor. Wrong. The biggest obstacles to Ukrainian advances has been the mine fields, which, once stuck in, turn into shooting galleries for the Russian attack helicopters who are sniping tanks and Bradley’s from 10 kilometers away essentially uncontested. This is because Ukraine lacks air defenses and air superiority.
Speaking of which, you predicted that Ukraine would receive F-16s in the coming months. Wrong. Biden said they will get them some time next year, if at all. Vague but still a wrong prediction.
You also predicted that the Russian offensive power was exhausted. Wrong again. Russia has actually created its own push in the Lyman area and have moved up to the Oskil river. This in the midst of the famed UA “counteroffensive.” Clearly Russia has the capacity to commit to offensives where they want to.
Finally, your only semi-correct prediction was that the US would send more Bradley Fighting Vehicles, but you got the scale way wrong. Instead of sending hundreds more then sent a few dozen if that.
I’m sure I am missing a lot of stuff and the counteroffensive has not yet ended, but Ukraine hasn’t even penetrated the first line of defense and is still trying to pass the crumple zone on the Southern front. Though that is virtually zero progress, it amounts to the most success that UA has seen in the last two and a half months.
You predicted the exact opposite of what would happen. The offensive in fact DID turn into a bloody slugfest in the south, the thing you doubted most. You doubted this because a failure would cause massive damage to the political will to fund Ukraine.
“We have Patriots reliably shooting down hypersonic missiles, which no one predicted...” That’s one way to describe it. Technically in November 1963, JFK intercepted a bullet with his skull.
'But the weather has gradually warmed over the last month, the rains are becoming less frequent in Luhansk, Ukraine is launching probing counterattacks along the front line, its strikes on Russian supply lines are picking up, and the ground is beginning to dry.'
'But maybe not: as I write,...'
'Since Ukraine is likely to make a major move within the next month or so'
What
<Reads words. Gets to the end.>
'Maybe Ukraine will do something completely different. Probably it will.'
What
Anyway, great article. Looking forward to the coming shock and awe of the Ukrainian cake walk!
Bakhmut was a meat grinder for the Ukrainians not the Russians. You have the kill rations backwards.
Russia is holding back so much. Focusing on kill ratios and not territory.
In a week, Russia could take out every bridge over the Dnieper, and every highway and railway coming into Ukraine. As well as all power production and petroleum hubs.
NATO is also much sparser on equipment and ammunition that you portray. Yes, they could supply some, but they already have meager supplies themselves, so no really enough to spare.
Completely misses the fact that Russia could go on the attack and make gains while the AFU's main force gets bogged down. Ukraine to have any success needs to put all its eggs in one basket. That's why the suicidal lunge in the South is most likely. Also missing in this analysis is that the 300k reservists haven't been noticeably deployed and there are probably another 100k volunteer reservists on top of that and ~30k in Belarus. They've had plenty of time for refresher training. So any fast maneuvers by the AFU need to be backed by infantry and they just don't have the numbers, especially moving into new territory like Lugansk without fortifications and without air support. Running around fast in IFV's might initially look exciting but it isn't a long-term strategy for securing and holding new territory.
Thank you, Chris; very informative. But can you elaborate how America is getting a "good deal" by sending its Bradleys to Ukraine? So we don't have to pick up the cost of scraping them?
Pretty bold. Lot of bloviating with little actual technical analysis. I made a note to return to this in 4 months. I strongly suspect you will be proven incorrect.
He also failed to mention that Ukraine's top general, Zaluzhnyi, is either incapacitated or dead. Bakhmut has fallen. Russia's "winter offensive" wasn't a failure, because they never started one. It was more efficient for Russia to let NATO throw troops and equipment into Bakhmut and just grind them down with artillery. I seriously doubt there will ever be a Ukrainian offensive, because Ukraine is now a hollowed out force, while Russia is at nearly full strength.
Nothing screams full force than having half your modern tech destroyed so that you have to resort to whipping out 70 year old tanks
"while Russia is at nearly full strength"
lol, which war you been watching?
Yes, the war you've been watching on the Western mainstream media is mostly fiction and propaganda. See Col. Macgregor's analysis. The Russian casualties have been consistently about 1/7th the Ukrainian casualties over the same time period. Russia has completed its first mobilization, and is now underway with their second mobilization. While, Ukraine has had three full Western-trained and equipped armies get completely destroyed. Ukraine is now drafting women, children, and elderly, while Russia has barely scratched the surface of their draftable population.
Russian casualties have been about 50,000 at this point, counting the 20,000 Wagner fighters killed and wounded. Russia's active duty military is currently estimated at 850,000, with 250,000 reserves, as of May 2023. That puts Russia's strength at 96%.
Also, Russia has not committed their best armor and infantry units to the operation in Ukraine, as they have been saving them to deal with a direct war with NATO, which they foresee to be likely. Thus, like the West, Russia has been throwing their mothballed armor into the Ukraine conflict in order to get rid of it.
Russia never began the much anticipated Winter Offensive. They are fully aware that large red arrow maneuvers require a 3:1 advantage in numbers and tend to be very costly in men. By allowing Ukraine to throw all their reserves against Bakhmut and other points of the defensive line in Donbass, Russia has enjoyed the 3:1 advantage in their own favor. Thus, they are simply allowing the Ukrainian army to throw themselves into the jaws of death. At some point in the relatively near future, Ukraine's military will be so completely hollowed out, that only then we might see some big red arrow advances by the Russian Army. Then we will find out what the Russian troop strength really is.
After all these months it's safe to say that the verdict is in.
You, along with the "vocal minority" of "America First" types that the author heaps sneering derision on in this piece were right and the author was about as wrong as it's possible to be.
Ditto
Spot on. Ukraine is done. Get to the negotiating table.
the longer this absurd conflict goes on the greater the chance of direct US/NATO involvement, which would be a catastrophe.
We've already been there for months. Russian mouthpieces have been saying this repeatedly since January.
This article is a fantastic text that could be used to study Partisanship and Ideology. A great example of how ideology clouds judgement.
"The US has almost 7,000 Bradley fighting vehicles sitting in storage. It spends money maintaining them and plans to scrap them eventually. Bradleys can kill anything on the battlefield pretty easily and ferry a squad of infantry around while doing it, protecting them from artillery shrapnel. When the Biden administration slaps a price tag on them, ships them to Ukraine, and lets them kill Russians without Americans dying, it’s not actually spending any money. We could give a thousand Bradleys to Ukraine and not notice they were gone."
Such a low IQ take on multiple levels.
1. It's complete broken window economics nonsense. Destroying goods to justify creating new goods still entails new costs.
2. The Bradley was officially phased-out decades ago but there's no large-scale production replacement that has actually been rolled out yet. If anything at best this is just an excuse to give bidding defense contractors even bigger checks when we inevitably decide that our nation's armored vehicle supply is too low.
3. When the Chadley does finally roll into American bases, it too will collect dust and require regular maintenance like the Bradley (maybe more!). How is that not obvious to you?
4. It is blatant and dishonest cherry-picking to only highlight that one specific aspect of the program while ignoring the many other costs, which have collectively cost nearly $100 billion by the figures I'm seeing. Insulting America Firsters is not a rebuttal to their arguments.
5. You still fail to explain the actual material benefit of our involvement in the war. Invading Mexico and paying them for half of their land had an obvious material benefit. Maintaining a monopoly over the Americas by destroying an insurrection government had an obvious material benefit. Destroying the Spanish Empire and stealing their colonial possessions had an obvious material benefit. Winning WW2, creating a duo-polar world in which the wealthier half was dependent on American goods and dollars had an obvious material benefit. The first Gulf War, to protect a trade ally and our access to their oil (which they substantially repaid) had an obvious material benefit. What's the end-goal of this war and how does it benefit us?
Have to wonder if all the war-specific minutiae is as inaccurate and fallacious as that one passage (I don't have confidential military information and am not arrogant enough as a spectator to take any specific stories regarding the war at face value).
FTFY: " 'The largest money laundering operation for a President and the MIC in the history of the world.” Why has the windup been so long? The answer is pretty simple: Ukraine is waiting for more cash." If you are so confident in this counteroffensive, head to the front lines and help them retake Bakhmut. This piece sounds like the regime promising that Kabul would not fall and the Taliban was not advancing in Summer 2021. Keep fighting until the last Ukrainian!
great, well-written article
... but I will believe in the counteroffensive when I see it succeeding. I have little to no hope it will.
Senator Angus King recently called Ukraine’s preparation for its impending counteroffensive “the longest windup for a punch in the history of the world.” Why has the windup been so long?
Wasn't it supposed to ba spring offensive? And now spring is almost over? I am not holding my breath. It feels like a promise that will never materialize Maybe it will be a summer offenseive now. But I think it will be a nothingburger.
The offensive has been delayed because even Zelensky hesitates to murder that many of his countrymen.
No he doesn't. They've been bombing the Donbas for 9 years now. Get out of here with that nonsense.
I don’t think Z considers the people in the Donbas his countrymen. Of course the real problem is not him. It is us.
According to Ukrainian nationalist ideology the people of the Donbass are insufficiently racially pure -- their slavic blood has been contaminated and they are therefore untermenschen to be eliminated and cleansed from the land. Which, apparently a lot of people in the US are totally down with! I’ve never been so blackpilled for the future of humanity than to see half the country suddenly go all in on straight-up blood and soil Naziism just because Joe Biden snapped his fingers. We are well and truly fucked.
This is what happens when a culture loses its values. I might even go so far as to say this is what happens when a country loses its religion.
People need a transcendental purpose so they will find something to believe in. Better Jesus than Stalin, I think.
The fall offensive will commence as soon as the mud clears up
maybe
maybe not
Fall offensive? Maybe that was humor or perhaps just a typo but in the event you may just be right.
A bold prediction, somehow against the current tide... If you will be shown right, chapeau! But, if wrong, I guess this substack will have to fold, or at least rename to "Center for the Promotion of NATO Partisanship and Ideology"
Is this supposed to be satire, if not it still made me laugh.
"Some fear the war may bog down into indefinite static trench warfare that accomplishes nothing but draining resources and lives on all sides — a view I’m sympathetic to, though I don’t think we’re at that stage yet" Fuck off and go back to MSM ghoul. Good men, women and children are *DYING* on all sides and you, a supposed PhD of Philosophy, is "sympathetic".
This guy believes the claims of a Kinzhal shootdown based on photos of a sewer pipe. I guess this article is what happens when someone with no military or technical knowledge also doesn’t understand how wartime propaganda works (to be fair, he might not have been around for the Iraq shitshow) and believes everything the MSM and US Government tell him.
I half-expected a paragraph about the strategic implications of Sam Hyde AKA The Ghost of Kiev being trained on F-16s. On the positive side, he’a not a bad writer, just badly out of his depth here.
So far virtually every point you predicted has been proven false or has yet failed to come true.
You got the direction of the attack wrong, suggesting UA would go for lightly defended areas to the East/North East so they could score a political win. Wrong. They went south directly into the main defensive line, the opposite of your prediction. They also then got crushed.
You instead predicted they would push into Luhansk. A complete failure of a prediction as UA hasn’t attempted a push there at all in the course of the last two months.
You predicted that Bradley Fighting Vehicles would literally be able to destroy anything that it came across on the field of battle. Wrong again. There is not a single video documenting a single Bradley vehicle kill so far, months into the offensive, and yet there are multiple videos of half a dozen burnt out Bradley’s in different spots.
You predicted that air power was a scratch and the Ukrainians just need more armor. Wrong. The biggest obstacles to Ukrainian advances has been the mine fields, which, once stuck in, turn into shooting galleries for the Russian attack helicopters who are sniping tanks and Bradley’s from 10 kilometers away essentially uncontested. This is because Ukraine lacks air defenses and air superiority.
Speaking of which, you predicted that Ukraine would receive F-16s in the coming months. Wrong. Biden said they will get them some time next year, if at all. Vague but still a wrong prediction.
You also predicted that the Russian offensive power was exhausted. Wrong again. Russia has actually created its own push in the Lyman area and have moved up to the Oskil river. This in the midst of the famed UA “counteroffensive.” Clearly Russia has the capacity to commit to offensives where they want to.
Finally, your only semi-correct prediction was that the US would send more Bradley Fighting Vehicles, but you got the scale way wrong. Instead of sending hundreds more then sent a few dozen if that.
I’m sure I am missing a lot of stuff and the counteroffensive has not yet ended, but Ukraine hasn’t even penetrated the first line of defense and is still trying to pass the crumple zone on the Southern front. Though that is virtually zero progress, it amounts to the most success that UA has seen in the last two and a half months.
You predicted the exact opposite of what would happen. The offensive in fact DID turn into a bloody slugfest in the south, the thing you doubted most. You doubted this because a failure would cause massive damage to the political will to fund Ukraine.
That’s the one thing you got right.
“We have Patriots reliably shooting down hypersonic missiles, which no one predicted...” That’s one way to describe it. Technically in November 1963, JFK intercepted a bullet with his skull.
Three consecutive paragraphs:
'But the weather has gradually warmed over the last month, the rains are becoming less frequent in Luhansk, Ukraine is launching probing counterattacks along the front line, its strikes on Russian supply lines are picking up, and the ground is beginning to dry.'
'But maybe not: as I write,...'
'Since Ukraine is likely to make a major move within the next month or so'
What
<Reads words. Gets to the end.>
'Maybe Ukraine will do something completely different. Probably it will.'
What
Anyway, great article. Looking forward to the coming shock and awe of the Ukrainian cake walk!
Bakhmut was a meat grinder for the Ukrainians not the Russians. You have the kill rations backwards.
Russia is holding back so much. Focusing on kill ratios and not territory.
In a week, Russia could take out every bridge over the Dnieper, and every highway and railway coming into Ukraine. As well as all power production and petroleum hubs.
NATO is also much sparser on equipment and ammunition that you portray. Yes, they could supply some, but they already have meager supplies themselves, so no really enough to spare.
Completely misses the fact that Russia could go on the attack and make gains while the AFU's main force gets bogged down. Ukraine to have any success needs to put all its eggs in one basket. That's why the suicidal lunge in the South is most likely. Also missing in this analysis is that the 300k reservists haven't been noticeably deployed and there are probably another 100k volunteer reservists on top of that and ~30k in Belarus. They've had plenty of time for refresher training. So any fast maneuvers by the AFU need to be backed by infantry and they just don't have the numbers, especially moving into new territory like Lugansk without fortifications and without air support. Running around fast in IFV's might initially look exciting but it isn't a long-term strategy for securing and holding new territory.
Thank you, Chris; very informative. But can you elaborate how America is getting a "good deal" by sending its Bradleys to Ukraine? So we don't have to pick up the cost of scraping them?