Adaptive Cycle Management And The War In Ukraine
Moscow has initiated its winter bombardment campaign with massive missile and drone attacks. This year, Ukraine is able to strike back.
While ruscist (russian fascist) forces continue to mount costly and mostly futile meat grinder assaults on numerous fronts, the air war is escalating. Over the past week each side has traded attacks that most analysts would classify as part of a strategic bombardment campaign. Which, in their usage, means trying to attack deep in the enemy’s rear.
Ukraine at least targets only military and government related sites, unlike Moscow, which routinely wields inaccurate but destructive weapons like S-300 air defense missiles used in a ground attack mode. Flying at very high speeds after reaching the apex of their trajectory, S-300s along with Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missiles, repurposed Kh-22 anti-ship missiles, and Iskander ground launched weapons can typically only be intercepted by Patriot or SAMP/T air defense systems that generally have to be well within 100km of the intended target.
In response to Ukraine sending Storm Shadow cruise missiles to destroy a landing ship in occupied Crimea, despite the place being protected by an advanced S-400 air defense system, Moscow replied with a massive missile raid. I say reply though this isn’t strictly accurate - it’s clear that the attack had been in the works for some time and intended as part of a broader campaign.
For two months Shahed drones have been put-putting (they apparently sound like a flying lawnmower and don’t travel much faster than a car) across Ukraine in an apparent bid to map out Ukraine’s air defense network. A few small scale strikes with missiles were mixed in, and analysts are reporting that ruscist strikes have been using ever more devious routes - including over Poland recently - causing F-16 fighters to be scrambled.
After a large - and mostly repelled - mass strike on Ukraine with Shahed drones the night after Novocherhask’s load of ammunition scattered its remains across Feodosia, Moscow launched another smaller strike with Kh-22 and Kinzhal missiles in areas where Ukraine doesn’t have Patriot batteries. The night after that came the biggest combined ruscist raid yet, over a hundred missiles of all types and dozens of drones coming from multiple directions in a dense wave.
There were dozens of civilian casualties across Ukraine, but few important targets were struck. Most of the drones that penetrated the interior of the country on this and subsequent nights were destroyed and the vast majority of the 90 cruise missiles fired by ruscist Tu-95 bombers were likewise swatted down. Most of the damage was caused by ballistic weapons, with Moscow using multiple types of missiles along with drones in an effort to overwhelm Ukraine’s air defenses.
Ukraine’s response was swift and far more efficient: drones ranged deep inside ruscist territory and the border city of Belgorod, where Moscow routinely launches S-300 missiles at Kharkiv, was hit with rockets and missiles aimed at the launchers. At least one key electronics factory was hit by drones at the same time. Unfortunately, as has proven the case on several occasions in Ukraine, debris from air defense missiles fell in civilian areas and killed a couple dozen people.
This is why Ukrainians across the country are instructed to head to shelters when even a single Mig-31 Kinzhal missile carrier takes off. You can never know when a raid warning will turn into an active engagement, and even a successful intercept of a missile often leaves both its parts and the air defense missile’s booster falling to the ground. Fuel or even a full warhead can survive to blow up in the ground with terrible effects.
Moscow never takes humiliations lying down - Putin always punches back. The first reply came in the form of more strikes on western Ukraine and Shahed drones active both deep in Ukrainian territory and, in an apparent attempt at deception, along the front too. Then, just last night, Kyiv was targeted by another concentrated strike with most of the weapons in Moscow’s arsenal - the majority, as usual, shot down by the capitol’s potent air defenses, including a full ten Kinzhals, every one Moscow fired.
Ukraine is certain to strike back soon. The tit-for-tat can go on as long as each side has weapons, though in Moscow’s case its failure to destroy Ukraine’s infrastructure during last year’s campaign likely dooms this one. Now, Ukraine’s air defenses are much improved. And though Moscow has accumulated a stockpile of missiles sufficient to mount a dozen major attacks in a short period of time, that is not going to be decisive or alter Ukraine’s strategy one whit if 80-90% (or more) of the incoming missiles are consistently taken out by air defense batteries.
With the fighting on the ground very intense in places but territorial control little changed, much of this week’s post will be dedicated to using a core concept in ecological systems science to map out the broader strategic context that drives so much of the Ukraine War. The second section will go into more detail than most readers probably want on how Adaptive Cycle Theory can be applied to understand where the Ukraine War truly stands, though I’ll make the overview of the science as brief and straightforward as possible.
Ukraine’s ground war has entered a metaphorical winter in the wake of the challenges that led to the curtailment of the planned summer campaign. Expectations of rapid progress dashed, Kyiv has been forced to reboot its rhetoric to help Ukrainians through a difficult season, physically and metaphorically.
Fortunately, Ukraine’s leadership has been savvy enough to evade the fatal trap of trying to do more than it is safe to attempt and becoming over-extended as a consequence. Putin’s orc generals were obviously hoping that Ukraine would be forced by political pressure to push its operations harder than was wise - just like they are by their master in the Kremlin.
Ukraine’s ground forces and people may be rebooting their expectations about how quickly the war can end and what tactics have to be developed to ensure frontline fighters have the best possible odds of survival, but when it comes to Ukraine’s physical military resources the situation is not as bad as grim media pronouncements make matters appear. Most of the modern equipment like Leopard tanks and Bradley infantry fighting vehicles that Ukraine received is still operational and much more could still be sent from partner stocks, particularly American and French.
Who has contributed how much to Ukraine relative to their population is illustrative, with the USA sending 0.3% of its GDP while the UK is at .4%, Germany is at .5%, Poland .7%, and Denmark, Norway, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia all over 1%. With the USA spending close to 4% of its GDP on defense, its lack of contribution on a population adjusted basis is notable considering how much of the Pentagon’s budget is geared towards deterring Moscow.
There’s a lot more financial and military firepower Ukraine’s allies can invest in this fight. Moscow’s economy may be resilient, but it can’t outproduce the entire democratic world even if the USA is left out. And those able to read a map can see the benefit both Japan and South Korea see in reducing the threat Moscow poses to the world.
Kyiv' is preparing some big surprises in the coming months. In the meantime, its best option is to let Moscow continue to burn through its remaining combat power in a winter of costly attacks that allow Ukraine to pull back slowly to ever-better defensive lines, as appears to be happening where appropriate.
The one exception is Kherson across the Dnipro river, where Moscow’s increasingly desperate efforts to eliminate the bridgehead near Krynky are now much more difficult thanks to Ukraine eliminating its ability to safely launch dozens of KAB glide bombs. Without helicopters launching guided missiles from 15km out at armored vehicles and waves of inaccurate but still very dangerous 500kg bombs (and double or even triple that in newer versions Moscow aims to field), Ukrainian troops will regain much of their ability to use armored vehicles in a close support role.
With Moscow unable to mount an effective assault as it is, the arrival of even a small number of tanks and troop carriers would let Ukrainian forces expand their perimeter. This is why it was very interesting to see a couple geoconfirmed Lancet strike films recently released by Moscow show Stryker and possibly Leopard 2 or similar NATO-standard tanks in Kherson.
It is unclear what units they are with or whether Ukraine is starting to field large numbers of decoys. The footage is pretty grainy and difficult to be certain - most NATO tanks look similar from above thanks to adopting rectangular turrets instead of the circles that define most Soviet designs.
But Strykers aren’t used in a lot of Ukrainian brigades yet so far as I’m aware. And the crack, well-equipped 82nd Air Assault Brigade, fighting near Verbove on the Orihiv front since August, went quiet in December. Drone footage released on brigade social media channels have proven to be a useful way to see what formations are operating where, though obviously Ukraine’s troops can time releases to deceive anyone using this method for a time. “Wild Division,” the 82nd’s drone company, was active into late November, but the aggregation sources I rely on (Geoconfirmed, Ukraine Control Map, UA map) don’t show anything attributed to this formation since.
The 65th, 33rd, Mechanized and 117th Mechanized - the latter recently losing several soldiers as POWs who the orcs then executed - along with the 14th National Guard brigade seem to be the ones holding the line here now. The Ukraine-based Center For Defense Strategies sees a strong possibility of Kyiv having to abandon all of this summer’s gains if an ongoing ruscist offensive towards Robotyne gains steam. While painful, this could be necessary to preserve Ukraine’s forces here if the foothold the 82nd and others hacked into the Surovikin Line this summer is too difficult to hold with supply lines from Mala Tokmacha and Orihiv under constant threat.
Moscow has been upgrading its drones with night vision and thermal cameras, making the hours Ukraine has generally used to resupply frontline units more dangerous to operate. The long-term impact of this against the countermeasures Ukraine will develop are unknown at this stage, but reinforce the need for substantially more electronic warfare support and some kind of hard-kill anti-drone weapon that can be mounted on armored vehicles.
In any case, I could be totally wrong about the 82nd, but it would not be out of the realm of possibility for it to be given Leopard 2 tanks to augment its Challenger 2s ahead of joining an effort to expand the Krynky bridgehead. These tanks can in many cases shoot accurately across the Dnipro thanks the the topography of the area, offering Ukrainian troops on the far bank additional prompt fire support.
I continue to evaluate the lower Dnipro and occupied Kherson as the critical focal point for Ukraine’s operations over the next six months, when a renewed and intensified counteroffensive thrust towards Melitopol and/or Berdiansk will start up. Here is where the geography of the area creates an opportunity for Ukraine to transform western occupied Kherson into a logistical island, seizing everything up to the Crimean canal. This would open up the northern Crimean coast to raids and a possible landing by autumn if defenses inland can be suppressed.
War is politics, and the quickest way to force a crisis in Moscow bigger than anything Putin can hope to control is to demonstrate that he cannot defend his precious Crimea. The alternative is a long slog in Donbas that closely resembles the horrific Iran-Iraq war, Washington D.C. using its leverage over NATO to maintain a dribble of aid that keeps Ukraine in the fight forever but lacking any real hope of final victory.
Managing Through The Adaptive Cycle
While a fair few Western sources are predicting that 2024 will see Kyiv retrench and prepare for a decisive 2025, I do not agree. Neither side can take the risk of the other being the first to work out a solution to the technology-induced quagmire ground operations have become.
Moscow thought that its traditional resort to using ethnic minorities and poor people from rural places as cannon fodder would let it physically overwhelm Ukraine’s defenders, but this isn’t working any better than it did in 1916. Explosives beat flesh. Leaders who haven’t felt an explosion in their vicinity or bullets pass overhead never understand.
Putin will keep coming at Ukraine with as much force as he can muster as soon as he can get it in the field because he, like Ukraine, faces limits on how much support can be sourced from abroad. China doesn’t want Moscow coming out of this conflict stronger than it was and prioritizes its relationships with European countries who it needs to send exports to. North Korean ammunition will run out too.
Something that most of the media and appointed experts in the Western world also don’t understand is that by pulling its punches this summer Kyiv, is in a position where its capabilities are improving relative to Muscovy’s. Putin’s military system is capable of adapting, but at the cost of becoming even more rigid and vulnerable than it has so far proven to be in multiple key dimensions.
Resilient to loss of people Moscow might be, at least until the interest on that debt comes due as it always does in the form of civil unrest. Moscow is not, however, resilient to public demonstrations of weakness. And more of these are coming.
The balance of power between Kyiv and Moscow, each backed by a constellation of allies, is on a trend that already pits a 1990s-level military system against one that is increasingly stuck in the early 1970s. Domain by domain, Ukraine is developing counters to each of the advantages Putin’s russian fascist empire held in February of 2022.
Over time, this ends badly for Moscow even if the US component of financial support for Ukraine’s defense fades after 2024, as it probably will no matter who wins the presidency. The ruling paradigms embraced by elites in D.C. and Moscow since 1945 are crumbling, the sick dance both nuclear powers have played for half a century finally falling apart.
The concept of the Adaptive Cycle is useful for understanding the trajectory of the Putin’s war on Ukraine as well as the ongoing collapse of the Postwar Order around the globe. The traditional graphic isn’t perfect in terms of translating the thinking into a digital simulation, as I prefer, but it gets the basic idea across.
In the Adaptive Cycle, a system is said to be in one of four phases: spring, summer, fall, or winter. During the spring phase, a system is growing and changing rapidly along a fast-evolving trajectory. Summer brings slower, more linear and predictable growth where niches and efficiency rule the day. In fall/autumn growth reverses, the system changing quickly again as it unravels until everything plateaus over a winter that can last a short or very long time. When spring comes again, growth accelerates, and possibilities multiply.
The pattern is apparent across a great many systems, human and natural. In nature, Earth’s axial tilt produces shifting patterns in energy availability that drive the behavior of all living organisms subject to shifts in the availability of vital resources. Human systems are most strongly driven by the expectations of the people in them, which though impacted by material factors can stray from reality until a test proves the disparity and the need to resolve it.
Humans are like this because our brains allow us to be strategic: as a cognitive system the mind can develop a sense of possible futures and take action to make preferred ones more likely. This is the one cognitive trait that appears to truly distinguish humans from other living beings, though only to a degree: elephants are among several species known to mourn, an act implying an awareness of the distinction between the states of life and death. That may well be the philosophical - or at least psychological - root of all science.
A system is anything made up of separate interacting parts. A thermostat is a simple system, an almost purely cybernetic loop allowing a sensor sensitive to temperature to control the on/off function in a heater or cooler. The human brain is a dramatically more complex system that manages to decode the operations of billions of neurons as they pass electrical impulses back and forth.
The modern world wouldn’t be possible without systems theory and science. Part of the reason why is that classical science doesn’t work at every scale of the universe - or when dealing with people.
Scale is a vital concept to keep in mind whenever you’re using a systems frame. Everything in the cosmos is composed of smaller things that, once they come together in a particular arrangement, tend to exhibit collective behavior that isn’t reducible to the movements of individual parts.
That’s an academic way of saying that the sum of many parts often creates an entirely new arrangement, an object with its own characteristics way of behaving. Atoms come together to make molecules, with the fact that a pair of hydrogen atoms like to bond with an oxygen one and this chemical arrangement is highly stable in a molecular sense but deeply unstable if compressed or heated in a fixed volume setting many of the basic conditions for all life as we know it.
In a similar way, a body is composed of multiple mostly independent organs. Complex organisms made up of lots of organs generally have one, a brain, dedicated to keeping the others in balance. When and if it can’t, life disappears.
This idea, which systems scholars term emergence, sets systems thought apart from most traditional Western thinking. Western thought, by and large, is stuck in a linear trap. Certain core philosophical assumptions render it a secular version of Christianity, a civic faith that relies on the education system to perform a church-like service: designating public truths all faithful are expected to uphold and obey. The reason prominent Westerners like to insist that the West’s origins lie in a combination of Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian values is that this myth gives a small group of people determined to imitate the imperial habits of classical tyrants a whole lot of power.
Part of their ideology is a firm belief in the illegitimacy of any other worldview. The West conceives of itself as a shining pillar of all good things standing amid a sea of chaos and woe brought about by the depredations of barbarians - a term that boils down to anyone who acts against publicly accepted norms of behavior and speech. Despite claiming to be all about free expression, the West in fact uses speech to erect a class system based on what people say they believe.
This is why it has an apocalyptic obsession with all things “Eastern,” a term that has evolved over the years but now refers mainly to Islam and China. With respect to Ukraine, Western thinking particularly despises the Russian World not because of the thing’s commitment to utter brutality, but because it is the Western World’s evil twin, its global shadow, the half of the West that insists it can do the imperial thing more effectively and without all the irritating, high-minded rhetoric.
The irony of the West is that all the fanciful presumptions of a noble heritage stretching back to Caesar and Socrates are an old lie designed to separate Europeans living a thousand years ago from the traditional ways and beliefs of their ancestors. These, contrary to modern thinking, were no less advanced or freedom-loving than what the Romans or Greeks came up with.
Vestiges of the Roman Empire lived on after the thing’s political demise, eventually coming to an arrangement with the new political power in Europe: the assortment of Germanic tribes that had migrated into Roman territory as it collapsed, guided by warlords who had been Rome’s best generals for generations.
Roman elites’ way of life and the economic system it entailed required that they live in dense settlements - villas and cities - to ensure control over slaves who, unlike the thralls common to most European cultures, had no real hope of social advancement. They also over-exploited their lands, depleting soils in an effort to generate the profits required to sustain a proper Roman lifestyle.
The semi-nomadic warrior bands and their families who made up the great migrations towards the end of Rome’s political power relied on different lands to survive than Roman elites. Instead of the Roman Empire’s fall driving Europe into misery and chaos, what really happened was vast tracts of underutilized land becoming open to settlement and productive use.
What was called the dark ages was only so if you rely on written records made by elites who longed for the glory days. It took time for the Germanic tribes to adopt the Latin script, not originally needing more than oral history and law augmented by runes carved on wood or stone to manage their affairs. Accumulations of static wealth are what demand the development of intricate records to manage and fight over the hoard.
From a strictly elite perspective Rome’s fall was a true apocalypse, one lamented to this day by those who feel a connection to the tyrants of old. Only those able to cope with the new political system survived, the wise ones rapidly consolidating social power in their communities by taking over the Christian belief system their slaves and servants had mostly adopted - then purging territories under their control of so-called “heretical” strands of belief.
This soon led to political chieftains joining the endless raid that constituted medieval feudal society, their positions being more and more military in nature as time passed where originally their core obligation had been to look after the health of their community. The peculiar institution of Kingship emerged in the age of Charlemagne: a deal allowing Church and State their separate domains to exploit, a system built on the labor of the majority who became peasants effectively owned by their lord.
From this system emerged the many European sovereign states that later moved the locus of sovereignty from divinely ordained rulers to some variety of elected government. Of course, even as the ancestral elites of Europe’s royal families lost their ability to ruthlessly exploit their domestic population - except in time of war, naturally - they were now able to extract astonishing amounts of wealth taken from colonies abroad.
That long raid only ended in the mutual apocalypse of the World Wars and the onset of decolonialism, a process still underway to this day. Ukraine’s war is part of it; so is the endless fighting in the Middle East. Only in the Western Pacific are the causes of the likely conflict to break out there not entirely rooted in colonialism, yet even there its legacy casts a dark pall, creating the fount of legitimacy the Beijing regime relies on to stay in power.
Western thought generally traces out this sad history of cruelty and malice on the part of an empowered few as a story of progress ever thwarted, a society moving towards utopia but hindered in its quest by mindless barbarians, little better than zombies. They are never allowed their own identity or given a chance to state their case on equal moral grounds because by definition anyone who doesn’t accept the presumptions of the Western viewpoint lack reason and deserve no quarter.
This is why Western thinkers are unable to grasp the full power of systems theory and science. It, following Einstein, relies on the concept of frame of reference to understand how different ways of thinking may produce different lifestyles, yet most people everywhere are after the same things.
Concentrations of power are the real problem with modern society, not the existence of unbelievers in our midst. The Western solution to unbelief is conversion, which soon enough degenerates into repression when the targets prove stubborn.
How does this factor into Ukraine’s fight for freedom? Because the resources it has to have to defend itself from Putin’s malice will always have to come from allied countries. Ukraine’s economy is a fraction of the size it needs to be to fight alone.
But despite Ukraine’s erstwhile partners together having more than enough power to utterly smash Putin’s genocidal invasion, under the Biden Administration’s leadership they have consistently dithered. Ukraine is now blamed for not following Western advice in the conduct of its counteroffensive operations in 2023 when everyone knew it lacked the depth of resources needed to fully overcome the defenses Putin had in place at the start of the year, not to mention all that was built in the next six months.
Now the mucky-mucks in D.C. and the Pentagon are preaching that Ukraine has to go on the defensive for a year or even consider a ceasefire to give it time to recover. That Putin would do the same and likely regenerate his combat power faster than Ukraine’s allies are willing to up-arm Kyiv after such a deal is apparently beyond their comprehension.
It’s 2024, so the time has come to admit the truth about Western support for Ukraine: it perceives any risk of a nuclear weapon being used by a power perceived as a peer as the apocalypse. This justifies failing to fulfill the West’s obligations to Ukraine.
This fear is ironic, because what the Greeks called apocalypse and the Norse Ragnarök was conceived by pre-Christian Europe as a natural cyclic process. Change happens: it is necessary. Nothing can last forever, not even America or russia.
But, as the Eddaic poem Völuspá lays out in painful detail, few if any of the old elite or the things they care about survive some kinds of change. Ragnarök has come many times to Europe over the millennia, from the Bronze Age Collapse that led to the emergence of classical Athens straight through the World Wars that killed off most of Europe’s vestigial monarchies - not that the dictatorships which too often replaced them were always much better.
The end of the Postwar Era has been in the works for decades. It will be recalled as one of the greatest tragedies of history that the opportunity of the 1990s descended into the pointless - and still ongoing - War on Terror. Now the scions of the West are determined to push a new Cold War pitting a group of supposed democracies against a malevolent authoritarian axis.
It’s the same old story: powerful people fear change, so they drive the system into collapse rather than accept painful reforms. One of the oldest patterns in world history is an elite-dominated culture killing itself and something more democratic arising in the aftermath.
The Adaptive Cycle is more or less a theory that explains why any system goes through distinct phases of rising and falling. The underlying mechanics are identical to the ones that drive shifts in nature as seasons come and go despite humans in theory having the ability to change course.
It can be leveraged as a powerful management paradigm that accepts the inevitability of change and focused on ways to dampen the impacts - or take advantage of opportunities. As warfare is the primary laboratory for any social science worthy of itself, it only makes sense that you’d see both combatants experiencing the natural consequences of change during a conflict lasting this long. Though I suspect that both Moscow and Kyiv, rely on systems thinking, as is proving the case in the Western mindset Moscow is unable to leverage its full potential because of how the Russian World ideologically views people.
Individuals are categorized according to their utility to the state, which is why Muscovites are spared from reservist callups at a higher rate than rural people - that and being more able to evade conscription in the first place. Moscow wants its soldiers and people to be little automatons, probably because the one area ruscist engineering has always been a leader is in automation, ordinary soldiers, aircrew, and sailors just inputs expected to perform their job and nothing more.
Probably thanks to the fact that Ukraine is a deeply pluralistic, diverse country, it hasn’t gone down this road. People are valued, with everyone having a role to play at some level of Ukraine’s defense.
In fact, Ukraine values people more than standard Western thinking. Though Western thought talks a big game about individual liberties and freedoms, these - like the idea of democracy itself - always come with a hidden asterisk. Only those who accept the precepts of the West are granted full rights, which is why when elites divide over matters of basic truth the entire arrangement blows up.
Human systems are defined by the paradox of being an individual living in a group. Nobody is an island, because throughout life there are times where having allies is a massive benefit for a person’s individual survival. What’s more, close bonds between individuals is also highly adaptive: by our nature, humans are wiling to sacrifice their own security and happiness to help others in our community.
The flip side is a tendency to be utterly ruthless towards those who aren’t and seek justifications for treating them as subhuman. Western thought produced Nazism and ruscism, these being the natural outlets for groups mobilized by an elite that perceives greater benefit in breaking the system than working within its bounds.
Expectations are what drive most shifts in human systems. Humans go through life making constant choices about where to invest their limited energy and attention. Having to rationally think through every dimension of any problem is taxing, so most of us rely on simple rules, heuristics. These are generated by our life experiences, which are strongly affected by social and cultural values we encountered.
That these drift over time is a key reason why generations experience tension, along with the fact anyone at the end of their career is more likely to have wealth. Because people are free to believe whatever helps them get through their day, humans tend to herd, and so their expectations about the future are impacted by what their fellows’ believe.
Individuals come together to form families that are defined by a set of lived truths particular to how they go about their lives. Families join together in communities and tribes. These in turn unite on larger geographic scales in societies, which because of their size have to rely on abstract values like nationalism and patriotism to generate a sense of togetherness. At each scale jump the level of abstraction increases, making it susceptible to direct manipulation.
Those who can try to influence how these sorts of ideas are perceived by the general public. They will interpret all truths in such a way that their interests are protected, which ultimately generates inequality among the various tribes within a society. Every turn in the Adaptive Cycle can easily lead to some groups losing out bit by bit even as many gain power.
To glibly sum up Adaptive Cycle Theory so far as it applies to human systems: so long as enough people expect their lives - or at least those of their children - to materially improve, they will keep calm and carry on. Once enough expect otherwise, behavior shifts and the state of the system will too.
As an example, every economic recession is the same in general terms even if the specific causes shift: after obtaining information they believe indicates a deterioration in conditions, people start behaving as if bad times are coming. This in turn causes others to behave the same, collapsing demand and triggering the downturn everyone fears. The situation turns around only when enough people start to expect better times and make more speculative investments again.
What’s key is that moments of shifting expectations open the door for the system itself to transform. Unless a rigidity trap caused by inequality prevents reform from starting or a poverty trap leads to inadequate resources to promote growth again, the system will shift after a collapse and rebirth. It might look in most respects identical to the old, yet the movement of internal elements will always have an effect.
Democracy is supposed to work the same way. Leaders turn over every few years to ensure that nobody gain enough power to break the thing. In the USA, the partisan system has destroyed democratic accountability and subverted the Constitution. So the stage is set for America’s next go around the eternal loop.
Failure to understand and cope with the reality of the Adaptive Cycle is a good way to lose a war. Western thought, if you look closely at its guts, cannot handle change or social relativity, leaving it uniquely vulnerable to the systems destruction warfare Beijing has adopted.
And pulling this back to Ukraine, it has and will continue to offer the wrong prescriptions for moving forward. Western thought is incapable of seeing that Ukraine must repel Putin’s assault because if Kyiv fails Moscow will keep pushing a West he knows will trade pain suffered by the less fortunate for elite comfort any day of the week.
This is why NATO has always been far less powerful of an alliance than Putin pretends. There was never any chance of a US-led NATO pursuing regime change in Moscow; that’s just an excuse Moscow gives to avoid admitting that it needs its people to feel abused. NATO is capable of overthrowing a tin pot dictator like Libya’s and leaving the country mired in a civil war - that’s all.
From a systems perspective, what’s really happening in the world order is that the corrupt federal systems in Moscow and D.C. are coming apart. Neither accepted the end of the Cold War, both are dominated by military-industrial-media complexes that pump out rank propaganda to sustain spending on military systems that are almost certainly obsolete.
We’ve got two complex, nuclear-armed federal political entities with pretensions of global power in the middle of a truly epic mutual fall. China, meanwhile, is entering its long summer after a twenty-year spring, growth rates slowing and pushing Beijing to adopt a more militant posture abroad that could easily turn into an adventure around Taiwan when the time is right to teach the Americans a lesson.
Europe and the UK, by contrast, are both working through a tough winter phase thanks to the war in Ukraine and Brexit. The rest of the Anglosphere is in flux, unable to alter the trajectory of the main players and divided over whether Moscow or Beijing poses the greater threat.
However, the UK’s flirtation with making England the 51st US state hasn’t gone well, so the timing may be right to keep the UK from breaking up by taking it back into the EU after the upcoming elections. It would be fitting if Putin’s war on Ukraine demonstrated the limits of American power and in the process provoked a renewal of the European project.
With US politics degenerating, NATO’s ties to the EU are becoming more important than its subservience to the Pentagon. As Europe mobilizes to support Ukraine its need for American backing will decline. In the long run a more independent Europe and stable China could anchor the global economy until russia and America are done falling apart, after which China’s lack of democracy will have no foreign threat to give Beijing an excuse for any foreign adventures.
There is a pathway forward that isn’t as grim as present conditions make the future out to be. It starts with the world’s true democracies stepping up to ensure that Ukraine wins.
Unfortunately, right now a lot of powerful people in the English-speaking world are desperate to sell a bill of goods about the USA leading an alliance of democracies against the forces of authoritarianism against all evidence. This narrative is dangerous and self-destructive - while many people worried about the expansion of government power during the pandemic, it is a new era of global conflict that anyone who cares about freedom ought to worry about. It is wars that give governments their best opportunity to take away rights in the name of security, the threat of malevolent foreign threats held over the people’s heads until they surrender to the long war the State has always waged against them since its formal adoption by elites four centuries ago.
The American foreign policy community and its allies are on the road to starting a war that they aren’t prepared to win. Unlike the 1940s, the supposed good guys lack the industrial capacity to beat China off its home shores once the initial engagements shock the military establishment and leave it without most of its kit, just like Pearl Harbor did. Back then the US foreign policy and military establishment could adapt - I seriously doubt this is true now, especially with virtually every member now steeped in counterinsurgency logic and not being the insurgent.
The key to Adaptive Cycle management is to accept that the seasonal shifts are inevitable, but the magnitude of the collapse scales with the effort put into preventing it from happening. Too much resilience leads to rigidity traps, which evolve into poverty traps if a cohort of powerful people fight to preserve an unsustainable status quo too hard for too long.
This, thanks to human nature, is all too common. Self-awareness is sorely lacking among the wealthy, popular, and authority figures, which is the main reason history is a record of one great crash and reboot after another.
Every system is comprised of sub-components whose interactions might be dynamic but still have a generally predictable structure. When too many parts fall into the same phase at once for whatever reason, the stage is set for a cascade failure that can open the door to radical changes in how the broader system operates.
A simple way to think of this is how a traffic jam can form thanks to a minor incident. People are always going to rubber-neck, leading to confusion that interrupts the smooth flow of traffic. Once movement slows, everyone’s adjustments compound the problem because the situation is suddenly uncertain. And if someone doesn’t adjust, say a truck carrying a heavy load whose driver is tired after a long trip, tragedy can ensue.
That’s pretty much how the First World War happened. It took years for leaders to adjust to the reality that winning a decisive battle or two would not be enough to break an opponent geared to invest its entire strength in the war effort. It took decades and another horrific war for European leaders to understand that total war didn’t work either unless you wanted to wind up with the foundation of the world economy shattered forever.
Adaptive Cycle management isn’t a world of absolutes, but grey areas and partial movements that add up over time. The key is to recognize what phase you are in and understand that while you’ve got to react to events as they occur, it is also necessary to plan for the inevitable shift to a new phase.
Strategy, in a systems sense, is about perceiving a set of possible futures and developing plans to bring one about. The goal of strategic management of Adaptive Cycles is to dampen the magnitude and impacts of crashes to the degree possible in order to preserve resources for a rapid burst of new growth once time is right.
During summer you hoard and in autumn you hold; during winter you ration and in spring invest. The pattern is the same whether you’re managing an ecosystem, economy, a household, or a war. It can be applied at multiple scales, from the cognitive to the global.
A war effort is broken up into campaigns because the Adaptive Cycle concept implies that progress can never be continuous. There are always turns in fortune and circumstance that require a reboot. What some military professionals now call the adaptive fight is an ongoing process of adjustment wherever and whenever the need arises.
At the global level, the world system is composed of interacting countries, each constantly going through its own Adaptive Cycle at its own pace. The actions of every player do alter the environment for everyone else, however, so enough chaos in one part of the planet will eventually drag in others. That’s why isolationism never works, but neither does conquest - there are always limits to power in space and time, and ignoring them only makes the collapse more epic when it comes, like tectonic plates storing up energy between massive quakes.
I suspect that Ukraine, whether intentionally or by accident, has been employing the techniques of Adaptive Cycle management throughout this war. That’s why even as individual campaigns don’t play out as hoped - it’s forgotten now, but the eventual ruscist retreat from northern Kherson came as a surprise, as Ukrainian troops were having a lot of trouble piercing Moscow’s defenses.
And the successful Kharkiv counteroffensive too was not planned exactly how it happened. Ukraine made multiple attempts to breach Moscow’s front in the area throughout the summer of 2022; it was the sudden collapse of Moscow’s forces that first revealed how badly damaged Putin’s military machine was. This prompted partial mobilization and the first real unrest within the ruscist empire that has prevented Putin from pushing mobilization even further.
The course of the conflict as a whole has taken a clear trajectory since 2023. Despite setbacks, Ukraine is now dramatically better able to defend its territory and take the fight to the enemy than ever before. The costs have been atrocious: Ukraine will be grieving its losses for the rest of this century.
But in the spring of 2022 Ukraine was fighting with Soviet-era kit backed by hobbyist drones and a smattering of Western small arms like Javelin anti-tank missiles and Turkish surveillance drones. With ruscist forces invading on multiple fronts, Ukraine managed to totally repel the invasion of the north and its coastline as well as slow the assault on Donbas and the Azov coast. By the middle of 2022 modern artillery had made any large-scale ruscist advances like those that began the war suicidal, forcing Moscow to literally saturate the ground ahead of its surviving legions with artillery fire in order to advance.
In late 2022 Ukraine finally started receiving the modern air defenses it is now using to whack Moscow’s most advanced missiles from the sky over Kyiv. Soon F-16s will take to the skies, further enhancing Ukraine’s air defenses as well as allowing Ukraine to selectively shut down the airspace near parts of the front, making offensive actions more feasible.
Modern armored vehicles give Ukrainian ground forces more punch than their opponents and let them survive damage that would otherwise leave crews dead. Improved training at home and abroad allows the average Ukrainian soldier to have more of an impact in a fight than even elite orcs of the murderous VDV. And though Moscow has been quick to procure thousands of attack drones, Ukraine is keeping up, aiming to pump out a million in 2024, reducing the need for artillery ammunition. And at sea Ukraine’s drones and missiles are slowly reducing the Black Sea Fleet to scrap.
Simply put, Ukraine continues to get stronger as Putin grows ever more feeble. If it weren’t for the danger of Moscow managing to cope with the strain of the wider mobilization Putin certainly has planned in the wake of his rubber stamp re-election, holding off through 2024 might be wise.
But the reality is that Ukraine has generated several key vulnerabilities in Moscow’s military system that Zelensky and Zaluzhnyi will strike hard in 2024 before they can be fixed. The war will likely drag on longer than that, but there is still a very real chance of ending it before the new year is out.
It’s an opportunity that Ukraine and its true allies can’t afford to miss.