Defending Taiwan In Ukraine
Though the crises are not directly linked in a military sense - yet - Beijing's next steps towards bringing Taiwan under its effective control will be determined by what happens in Ukraine.
The next few blog updates will come out on Fridays instead of Mondays.
Because working from home on creative projects can easily become all-consuming, I stick to my wife’s work schedule. She’s taking the first half of the next couple weeks off for some down time, so I’ll shift my weekly updates accordingly, the next after this publishing on Friday the 30th.
That leaves this post with less to cover in the way of movement on the ground because there hasn’t been much to speak of this week despite more relentless orc attacks. So far Moscow’s summer campaign is stalling out sooner and with higher casualties than Putin appears to have expected.
This is unlikely to last; the orcs usually adapt after the first two or three waves until Ukraine shifts too. But with Ukraine’s ammunition stocks slowly rising and reserves still available, the balance of power seems unlikely to shift in Moscow’s favor.
So the first section of this post will be a little different, covering some fundamental ideas in the philosophy of science - feel free to skip past if this sort of thing bores you. I refer to scientific paradigms quite a bit but I haven’t always been clear about what I specifically mean. Terms like paradigm get thrown around a lot by people trying to sound smart exactly because they can be ambiguous. Since I’m rooting my analysis of the Ukraine War in science, I have an obligation to lay out why it doesn’t conform to conventional Beltway expert wisdom.
After this section I’ll give the usual overview of what Moscow is trying to accomplish on the ground and why it isn’t working out as Putin hoped. Finally, in the third section I’ll sketch out the deepening connection between Ukraine and Taiwan in global affairs.
I am deeply critical of all efforts to blindly lump China in with Putin’s axis, properly consisting of russia, Belarus, Iran, and North Korea with China, India, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey and a few other countries acting as friendly neutrals. But the latest round of Chinese exercises around Taiwan, coming right after Putin’s visit to Beijing and the start of his summer campaign, are an apt demonstration of why the threat of war in the Pacific sadly cannot be discounted. Brutal mismanagement of the tensions in the area over the past few years, mainly for domestic political gain in both the USA and China, risk spiraling into a Second Pacific War.
And if one happens, as it presently stands the so-called “west” will very likely lose. US leaders are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy about China’s grand strategic intentions that no aspect of American society, civil or military, is in any way prepared for, materially or intellectually. They seek to combat a myth of China, not the thing itself, and so risk walking straight into Beijing’s trap.
Systems Theory At Work
I practice a kind of weekly intelligence cycle, monitoring news reports and open source mapping sites on a daily basis before spending a workday or so generating something publishable. Few would want to read my early drafts!
The plus side of a regular self-imposed deadline and 6-8k word limit (link and image density depending) is that it forces me to make choices about what to emphasize without falling into a perfectionist mode of trying to construct the perfect brief. A downside is that I’m not always able to spend enough time distilling my often clunky writing into more readable chunks - the old insufficient time to produce brevity trap that Mark Twain identified.
There is another advantage to a weekly cycle. When I decided to commit to weekly posts early in 2023 I already knew that I’d have to be very careful about getting sucked in too deep. Thanks to so much of the fighting being captured on video feeds there’s an endless stream of content to evaluate. But there’s also a limit to how much brutality a person can witness in a given span of time, even from a distance, without running the risk of becoming numb to the horror that real live people are going through because of Vladimir Putin and his sick clique.
To maintain a degree of mental balance that doesn’t lead to me becoming an extremely frustrating person for my wife to live with requires boundaries firm boundaries, which is a major reason why I rarely write outside of working hours. Human distractions (cat and dog related ones are inevitable, of course) make it harder to maintain the boundary between the “real” world of relative peace that I have the privilege to experience and the policy choices that I find myself recommending. Going from watching footage taken by a drone of people being shot, burned, and/or blown apart to reading some canned statement by a public official without losing all perspective demands a particular form of discipline. Death on screen is nothing like Hollywood; wounded humans bleeding out are as pitiable as any injured animal, even when they’re orcs. My favorite videos are the ones where they surrender.
In short, when I’m analyzing the conflict in Ukraine I’m trying to put myself in the shoes of a defense policy professional in Kyiv who is directly responsible for the lives of people on the front. This is a useful posture that helps balance the need for rigorous abstract evaluations with empathy for what people actually putting policy into action are having to experience during the course of their day. Still, an essential part of sustaining the balance is plenty of time off - An option that I fully recognize is denied to Ukrainians. Though the similarities between western Oregon away from the mountains and so much of Ukraine are sometimes hard to ignore when I’m out and about.
I’m getting autobiographical here in part to help illustrate one of the powerful benefits of a systems approach to science. It helps tremendously when dealing with complex situations to put different variables in their own natural boxes, so to speak. Contrasting truths can often be reconciled by invoking a scalar fix, allowing them to vary geographically, as is in the case with biological cells, where plant and animal cells behave very differently yet have many of the same functional effects.
The same kind of logic can be applied to understand how the world works at different levels, from the cognitive to the global and everything in between. Information is exchanged between individuals, groups, regions, and nations, but shifts form as it moves between levels. Behavior is driven by information, emergent patterns appearing at each level that quite often reflect each other even if driven by totally different processes. This is why objective truth is such a tricky thing - perspective varies depending on circumstance, sometimes even about life’s most fundamental questions.
Just because a scientist says that a thing is true does not compel anyone to actually believe it. And the way someone behaves doesn’t always reveal their true beliefs, only their strategy for dealing with power dynamics present in any group or community. A fully realized systems paradigm actually mandates being up front about the fact that there is no truly unbiased way to do science.
Now, to avoid getting lost in nuanced Socratic debates I tend to go nuclear on the first move. So here’s the philosophical hill that I’ll always die on: claims to total objectivity, lacking any value judgements, are never valid.
This might seem obvious to a lot of people, but a great many philosophers and scientists will vehemently disagree. Certain fields of social science in particular (*cough* economics *cough*).
Here’s the simple reason. The fundamental laws of thermodynamics are basically the gods of science, with entropy being the driving force in the universe. After the moment of the Big Bang the energy that appeared then for whatever reason it did swiftly expanded, in the process cooling enough to allow matter to sort of congeal. Ever since then the physical universe has been slowly degrading, becoming more disordered.
An exceptionally weird implication of thermodynamics to grasp is that life exists because it increases entropy. A given photon of light emitted at the Big Bang possesses a quanta of energy that defines how vigorously it wiggles, so to speak, on its wavelike path through space. That’s the wavelength of the photon, and ones that wiggle in the optical part of the spectrum interact with our eyes to send an electric impulse to the brain that it decodes as a meaningful signal based on a combination of instinct and experience.
Einstein’s observation that energy and mass are interchangeable essentially means that the observable material universe is a bunch of congealed fundamental particles that are like embers cooling after escaping the center of a blaze. A blue light photon emitted by a star might have carried on its merry path through space for billions more years, energy potential undiminished, had it not reached Earth with the correct energy to pass through the atmosphere and be taken up into a plant during photosynthesis. In the process some finite quantity of its original energy was absorbed, the remnant effectively degraded and re-emitted in the lower energy thermal part of the spectrum.
Even if the energy is embedded in the plant’s structure, recovered in part and used by an herbivore, then passed on to a lucky carnivore, later to be trapped in its body as it and others are compressed by geological processes into oil, energy is only gained by the Earth system, passed through various component parts. For us, where we sit within the greater thermodynamic system of the cosmos as a whole the energy gain we get from burning fossil fuels is a mirage - it’s a gain to us, but we are all part of a larger ongoing loss, entropy in action.
Every expenditure of energy is in some sense final, irreversible, with the exact configuration of matter across the universe forever changed. There are no free lunches and ultimately no life without death: that’s the most important existential truth of this universe, so far as science can say. There could theoretically be others, but they’re beyond our comprehension and likely our ability to ever access in a single lifetime.
How does this line of reasoning represent a nuclear argument in any debate about the delusion of total objectivity? In a universe full of moments that come only once while achieving anything comes at a price measurable in energy, opportunity costs can ultimately be measured in someone’s suffering.
If people are starving to death, and a scientist who could work on improving the food supply instead remains focused on building a better telescope to gaze at the stars, their failure to shift focus is materially part of the problem. Even though astronomy is fascinating and can help manage crops in the long run, the inherent opportunity cost is almost certainly lower than the personal cost to the scientist when they are elected as the first to be eaten to keep a few more kids alive.
Someone is always making a value judgement somewhere in every scientific paradigm, whether they choose to acknowledge it or not (hardcore positivists don’t). And that’s a big part of why there’s no single correct way to do science in every situation, no unifying theory that can be applied without critical thought to every scenario, no clockwork universe to discover down to its infinite depths.
The many fields and disciplines science is divided into exist because communities build up around certain ways of doing things, bundles of practices and assumptions that are best referred to as paradigms. These tend to shift as generations of scholars retire, which is why I’ll always argue that academic tenure without a mandatory retirement age is utterly self-destructive and anti-science.
Students in the US especially are mostly taught a linear scientific paradigm, what is often called the Scientific Method. It’s the model where you come up with a hypothesis, collect evidence, use control and treatment groups to test hypothesis, then evaluate, usually using basic statistics.
However, it’s really a cartoon sketch of how real science works and represents only one component of a full scientific paradigm, focusing mainly on empirical methods in the broadest possible sense. Science is about producing reliable explanations for the world’s many phenomena. Not all of these can be easily reduced into simple variables and strictly controlled in a lab - humans perhaps foremost among them for both practical (humans behave differently if they know they’re being observed) and ethical (certain practices are prohibited by custom or law) reasons. To conduct rigorous analysis requires some kind of compromise between data integrity and the broader applicability of any results.
How you go about making this compromise is the sort of question that scientific paradigms evolve to answer. There are any number of ways to divide them up and philosophers will argue, but the one that has always moved me most is broken into five distinct domains: Ontology, Epistemology, Methodology, Praxis, and Ethics, which I’ve seen referred to as Axiology, because philosophers hate to agree on anything. Many would violently object to my distillation of the topic, too, but it serves its intended purpose.
Ontology - What We Know
To do science, you’ve got to have at least two things to compare, an N and its +1. Only with at least one dependent and one independent variable can any reliable knowledge be produced. However, deciding what counts as data is the first logical step. And even about this there are many opinions. Materialism, generally speaking, specifies that we work with observable physical phenomena. Idealism prefers to reason from the position of an abstract philosophical Good or Universal and ask why the universe does or doesn’t match up. Postmodernism is happy to upend the concept of categories entirely, often centering on emotive experiences as its base “data” - no, I’m not going to pretend I hold with this view, even if postmodern thought does raise interesting points… at times, and mostly about art, its intended subjective focus.
Epistemology - How We Know
Whatever choices you make about the fundamental structure of the universe, you’ve then got to come up with a way to answer the question of how variables are formed in the first place. The questions of what is known and how we know are closely bound and often hard to separate. And the how here is distinct from the physical process of collecting and analyzing evidence, which belongs to the third domain. It refers to the logical train of thought used to justify the creation of theoretical propositions that are investigated through the testing of hypothesis. Naturally there’s a huge variety of positions; empiricist, positivist, constructivist, theist, and my favorite, pragmatist: we know because something is causing someone trouble or operating inefficiently. Problems are defined as the situation demands.
Methodology - Procedures For Knowing
Once you’ve decided what the universe consists of and what logical arguments you’ll use to ground your analysis, then you have to find a way to control for bias and outside factors to the degree you are able. This doesn’t mean eliminate them, but apply tools and techniques to qualify and constrain as much as you can. Experimental procedures are developed to aid in replication, with the same experiment conducted multiple times and giving the same range of results building confidence in the reality of the observed effect. Different fields look for different levels of certainty - social sciences are happy with 95%, physics wants something closer to 99.999999%. Methods are heavily dependent on the available data, with internal diversity within disciplines and fields usually tied to methodological preferences.
Praxis - Practice Of Knowing
This domain and the next are often neglected: people love to argue about logic and methods and the underlying nature of existence, but the gritty details about setting professional standards is less comfortable for most academics. This, however, is where fields build up a legacy over time, developing a public identity. It encompasses training new scientists and general publishing standards, being essentially the nuts and bolts of a scientific discipline as an institution. Naturally this parameter varies tremendously by field of study, and indigenous peoples across the world in recent years have been pointing out that many of their communal practices are deeply informed by scientific principles, even if not articulated in the way traditionally trained scholars expect.
Ethics - Why We Seek To Know
Last but absolutely not least, as it impacts everything, there is the ethics domain. This focuses on the inevitable value judgements that must be made to do effective science. Individualized Navel Gazing Studies has as much potential merit as an intellectual pursuit as any other, but in a world of limited resources not every group of people in every circumstance can afford to fund a professor who devotes their life to it. On some level, a choice has to be made between prioritizing medicine over areas less immediately essential to keeping people alive - a prerequisite for doing science at all. The same is true in defense affairs. Ethics are inescapable and necessary choices have real world consequences. They’re not about strict definitions of right and wrong, but ways to reason about them emphasizing logical consistency and consideration of broader effects.
Any systems paradigm is, at its core, about holistic treatment of problems instead of reducing them to a few tractable and testable propositions. It doesn’t abandon reductionist work, far from it: a systems approach simply tries to unite and relate scattered efforts. This is generally done by transforming them into modules that function according to their own internal logic, like cells in the body, while letting them output specific effects that impact their neighbors.
Following the schematic I set out above, here is the package that defines most flavors of systems theory. I’d strongly recommend Darrell Arnold’s book Traditions of Systems Theory if you’re interested in the history and philosophy of systems theory.
Ontology: Materialist, seeking physical explanations for all phenomena of interest, even cognitive.
Epistemology: Pragmatic; problems identified and conceptualized as suits the situation using the most useful theory available.
Methodology: Generate agent and network-based models with distinct components, qualitative and quantitative.
Practice: Systems work is applied and interdisciplinary; common standards for modeling and analysis of diverse scenarios are being developed.
Ethics: Knowledge is sought to minimize harm and unnecessary conflict.
As this blog hits at the junction of science and policy I feel it important to make it clear that my support for Ukraine is not solely a function of emotional attachment but a basic result of the systems science that I know. The way the world system presently operates, the level of commitment Moscow has made to the conquest and destruction of Ukraine implies that the outcome of this conflict will shape the future as starkly as the Second World War did our past.
If Ukraine is unable to liberate the lands that Putin stole, any semblance of world order or global community is dead for a generation. This will entail consequences as severe as any nuclear exchange. Ukraine can win, averting this harsh future, and within two years given the proper support.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. If global society fails to muster the gumption to preserve the precious illusion that borders are meaningful and can’t be unilaterally rewritten by anyone, it will not stop climate change. There will be no meeting the UN’s world development goals. Conflict spirals will rage out of control for years to come, and the survivors will be those who best husband their resources and invest in technology.
Food for thought, world leaders. Not all of you are so old that you won’t experience your own share of the pain. And there hasn’t been a bunker built yet that someone wasn’t able to crack.
A Half Week Overview Of The Fronts
According to Reuters, ruscist insiders are trying to convince NATO leaders that Putin is ready for peace at last. That’s a bit rich coming from a leader whose troops have spent two weeks getting absolutely nowhere with their “surprise offensive” in Kharkiv.
Some intriguing rumbles are coming from Moscow as yet another commitment of orcs turns into a bloody debacle. A number of sources have noted that Putin is moving against a number of military officers while promoting an economist to take over for Shagrat (Shoigu) in running the ruscist war economy. There’s a definite sense of Putin making moves to mollify concerns within his regime, demonstrating strength without going too far. He seems to be trying to imply that the failures on the battlefield are the fault of corrupt senior military leaders, tacitly accepting the arguments the leader of Wagner made to justify his rebellion last year.
At the same time the broader military isn’t being hit by a purge, only some disposable types. Promoting an economist is a signal to oligarchs weary of the cost of the conflict and wary of long term isolation from big chunks of the world economy - and their frozen assets being confiscated and sent to Ukraine. Moving some inept leaders to the side and arresting subordinates is a gesture to hardline supporters of the war who want it to get more intense - without going to the front themselves.
Putin is trying - a lot like Biden does, funny enough - to have it both ways. His instinct is to satisfy as many elements of the regime as possible while keeping everyone on lower rungs of the ladder fighting each other, suspicious of all potential rivals. Meanwhile Moscow continues to become ever more disconnected from the reality of its military system losing the ability to move more than ten kilometers in a single all-out push before all progress grinds to a halt.
Naturally part of this effort is Putin bluffing that he’s ready to pretend he won the war and freeze the fighting. Having failed to break Ukraine’s lines with a new attack now he’s backpedaling, dangling the prospect of a ceasefire to lock in gains he knows are about all his forces are going to be able to manage. That Putin’s forces ran a drill with tactical nuclear forces at the same time he’s signaling a desire to end the conflict is further evidence of the new Maskirovka in effect.
Moscow knows that western narratives are prone to present peace as a good in and of itself, as if peace with the Nazis in 1944 was a good idea. I’m a big fan of Tolkien, and something else Lord of the Rings (the books, not those blasted Americanized movies) got absolutely right was the fascists deploying the language of peace to make those who oppose them look like warmongers.
I use the term orc as Tolkien did - to describe what the machine of State can do to people. We were all orcs, he wrote in a letter to his son while the guy was serving in the Royal Air Force during the next war. Gandalf notably stated that he pitied even the dark lord Sauron’s slaves, another indication fo Tolkien’s stance on power politics and their effects on human beings. But Tolkien served in the First World War with honor and also volunteered to do public defense duties when his country came under attack even as he vigorously criticized Churchill and the Allied leadership, expressing deep skepticism about their true reasons for waging war.
But needs often must, and life is sometimes a choice of evils. Once this war is won attention can turn to holding responsible those who deserve to be and preventing something like it from happening again - or at least a few generations.
First the orcs of our time have to be thrown back. Putin is lying about a desire for peace - he just needs a pause to recuperate. If he can he’ll even provoke a crisis in the Pacific in the next six months. He badly needs the distraction, because if Ukraine gets support at the level it should over the rest of this year, by September Putin’s days are set to get darker than ever before.
Ukraine is on the cusp of having the full suite of modern capabilities needed to fend off russia - now it needs to work on depth. It appears that the US has finally started shipping Ukraine many dozens of ATACMS missiles, as strikes using between four and a dozen are happening across occupied Ukraine every couple days. Storm Shadow and SCALP cruise missiles are in the mix too, focusing on point targets like groups of commanders getting together for meetings - something that demands very good local intelligence.
Quite a few reports from alleged guerilla groups operating in Crimea and the other occupied territories make it out these days. Just as Ukraine periodically uncovers a ruscist plot, so do the ruscists have a serious infiltration problem that has helped Ukraine take out juicy targets like long-range radars.
Ukrainian drone strikes have continued to sporadically hit refineries and weapons factories across Putin’s empire. What amount to converted light aircraft now travel hundreds of kilometers, putting everything west of the Urals at risk. I’m not sure how they’re guided - possibly an autopilot using cell tower signals, since GPS signals are routinely jammed or spoofed. But Moscow lacks an effective counter, where in contrast Ukraine has proven very adept at hunting down Shahed drones with teams of soldiers in pickup trucks with machine guns mounted on the back.
And ATACMS strikes are now routinely smashing ruscist air defense systems, including the S-400s that ought to be able to defend themselves. Between SAMs that don’t perform as well as advertised and hypersonic missiles that turned out to be less impervious to intercept than Moscow claimed, Moscow’s ability to control the skies over the front and strike the Ukrainian F-16s set to appear in a month or so when they’re on the ground are both in serious doubt.
Missiles keep getting through to the few ships still berthed in Sevastopol Bay, too. Ukraine now has the ability to strike anywhere in Crimea, the question is only how many missiles and decoys are needed to crack through the defenses. This capability won’t win the war alone, but like every other one it nibbles around the edges, creating a new set of problems for the ruscist organism to solve.
As Mick Ryan has noted on his blog, the orcs do evolve. But the ability of any battlefield innovation to be ported across the wider force depends on institutional factors, and the higher up you go along the ruscist chain of command these become steadily more rigid. Those that are replicated, like anti-drone screens and the new turtle tanks which feature steel plates welded onto an old T-62, have a tendency to be ones that offer more of an illusion of protection than the real thing. What you gain in terms of resilience to drone strikes you lose in mobility, so Ukrainians are getting good at dropping mines in front of the things.
Ukrainian troops also notably make less extensive use of cope cages, preferring to layer their vehicles with reactive armor blocks. These little blocks explode when hit, disrupting the shaped charge effect modern anti-tank warheads go for. Moscow uses them too, but now mass-produces anti-drone cages even though these do not appear to do much to enhance survivability.
Similarly, ruscist troops are constantly evolving their tactics on the ground. The widespread introduction of dirt bikes, ATVs, and Desertcross golf carts are both an attempted solution to insufficient stocks of vehicles but also sometimes let orc troops get close to Ukrainian lines before mounting an assault. Some remotely-piloted vehicles have been tested, too, though simple drones usually knock these out.
Here again however the adaptive capacity of the ruscist military machine peters out once you get to the level of the regiment or brigade, much less division or corps responsible for a major section of the front. While officers shift between armored, dismounted, and even covert assaults, they’re still driven by an imperative to attack regardless of the cost. Moscow’s theory is that Ukraine is being worn down and its allies are tiring of offering support. While true in part, it isn’t true enough to make this strategy work unless Moscow’s enemies can be bluffed into believing that it wants real peace.
Putin came back from China and initiated tactical nuclear drills after his latest offensive fell behind schedule for the same reason he’s suddenly pretending to be ready to wind down the war. It’s all part of the game.
And he’s having to make these efforts because of the miserable performance of Moscow’s forces on the ground. Despite all the glide bombs and mass rocket barrages, in Kharkiv the orcs are already having to send in reserves in an attempt to finally seize what were probably their Day Three objectives, Vovchansk and Lyptsi.
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If you can’t move more than five to ten kilometers in two weeks of fighting, you are highly unlikely to be able to generate the net impact required to break your enemy’s operational front. Most breakthroughs happen when a hard hit or poorly equipped force is overwhelmed on one portion of the line and the enemy moves in too quickly for a line to reform. If the situation isn’t restored in a few weeks, an entire strategic theater can be in jeopardy. That’s what happened to the Germans on both fronts in the summer of 1944.
It’s fair to worry about a ruscist breakthrough when it is able to sustain its initial speed. So far in Kharkiv, just like in Avdiivka, this hasn’t happened. In 2022, when that long line of vehicles stretching from Kyiv to Belarus was much mocked on social media, most of them ultimately made it to deployment areas west of the city and supported a dangerous effort to surround it that lasted most of March. What Ukraine is dealing with now is a different beast: a bigger and more cautious one, to be sure, but also crippled.
Something that will bear much further study after the war is the question of how Ukraine managed to so swiftly deploy reserves to contain the Kharkiv incursion. Open source information always comes at a lag, but it was interesting to see the 42nd Mechanized Brigade and 82nd Air Assault Brigade both appear in Kharkiv when their latest social media posts seemed to put them by Bakhmut and Verbove, respectively.
Named along with them as reinforcements are elements of 92nd Assault, 93rd Mechanized, 71st Jager, 57th Motorized, and possibly the 36th Marine Brigades as well as the 4th and 13th National Guard and Lyut Brigades. 3rd Assault was moved to the other end of the Kharkiv front, closer to occupied Svatove. None of these units were recently shown as anywhere near Kharkiv on the open source sites that I follow, which would seem to imply a fairly large scale movement of thousands of troops.
But here’s the thing: I’ve long held that Ukraine’s brigades function like divisions do in NATO. They have too many assigned battalions to be managed as a coherent formation on the battlefield. And having brigades sit on the front for two years straight without relief is close to impossible without some kind of internal rotation system that basically means the brigade is split into three effective parts. One is on the line, another is recovering from being on the line, taking on and training new replacements, while the third is either held in reserve close to the battlefield or fully deployed.
Coming from an American background this is difficult to imagine, as geography means that you have to have one of three components basically in transit at any given time, so four are required to sustain a presence abroad without dangerously degrading the force. But Ukraine is in a difficult situation, so a 2:1 posture is probably necessary for many brigades, which are then later moved to a front where they can operate in the reverse 1:2 mode for a while.
If Ukraine is using this kind of model that would explain why ten brigades can suddenly have detachments showing up on a new front. With the number of officers capable of handling larger formations limited, better brigades might well have several others subordinate to it across an area. The density of forces that Ukraine appears to have deployed also make a serious counterattack more likely. Though I doubt it will happen, pursuit across the border into Belgorod would be a natural choice depending on how this front evolves. If one side can try to create a buffer zone, so can the other - and as ever, the prohibition on Ukraine shooting US-made weapons into russia proper is ridiculous. Good thing there are rumors of it being lifted, now that Putin has violated the apparent silent agreement with D.C. to limit the scope of the war to existing fronts.
Elsewhere Moscow has also been pushing troops into heavy attacks - every front I named on Monday is still active to some degree, though Moscow appears to be pulling back from attacks in Krynky. Signs are emerging that Robotyne might soon fall back into ruscist hands, but there’s not much left to occupy at this point. The southern end of the Donbas front has been relatively quiet, which probably means a new round of attacks is being prepared. Fighting on the Avdiivka front remains intense, and here too Moscow appears to be gearing up for another round of assaults. The 100th, 110th, and 115th are still in action north of Ocheretyne, with the 47th, 28th, and 25th Airborne to the southwest.
The other hottest sector has been Chasiv Yar, where a renewed wave of orc assaults are doing their best to push Ukraine out of the Kanal bastion. It looks like 41st Mech is running the defense here with help from a slew of light infantry battalions and doing a fine job - even if forced to retreat from the Kanal area, it will take the orcs days to consolidate and prepare for any further attempts to enter the city.
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Bypassing it to the south is an option Ukrainian analysts have suggested that Moscow might consider. Ukrainian forces retook this slope in last year’s counteroffensive, so Putin probably wants it back. 5th Assault has been fighting here for a long time alongside 22nd Mech, so they could be getting tired. But they’re both also veteran outfits more than capable of pulling back with a trail of wreckage in their wake to even better slopes.
If Moscow does have over a hundred thousand soldiers in reserve ready to deploy, they sure aren’t appearing on the front lines yet. Every time Moscow launches another push it follows the pattern predicted by the adaptive cycle - rapid progress at first until it meets Ukraine’s main defense line, at which it slowly stalls out. After pushing too far advance units generally become so weak that they are shoved back in a local counterattack, forcing Moscow to commit reserves just to stabilize the new line.
Total gains might amount to a few dozen square kilometers, but after a month hundreds of soldiers have died - an unsustainable rate. Moscow has already been throwing away lives on a pace that would require another 800,000 casualties to secure Donbas alone. Add a chunk of Kharkiv into the mix and the numbers can spike to double that. This is the military science equivalent of injecting bleach to fight off a virus. Those who advocate the practice ought to be required to go first and in full public view.
There’s a reason why in basic training one of the drill sergeants put another’s hat on a claymore mine and blew it up. Gets the desired point across to recruits as effectively as sticking them in a gas chamber and filling it with CS gas… then having them remove their protective masks and stand there reciting the alphabet. It’s the ultimate sinus cleanse. Dry shave just before for maximum effect.
Putin’s propagandists like to recite the slogan we can repeat, alluding to the Soviet Union’s victory - survival, really - in 1945. This is pure fantasy. Unfortunately a lot of world leaders want to believe it. The consequences won’t be pleasant for the rest of us.
Ukraine And Taiwan: Strategic Twins
Though the two are not identical, the crises in Ukraine and Taiwan share strong similarities and are not closely linked. It is absolutely fair to say that the latest Chinese military exercises around Taiwan, billed as another invasion rehearsal, were timed to fall now not only because Taiwan’s independence-leaning president is being inaugurated for another term.
Putin just visited Beijing as his troops stumble into another series of flailing offensives, hat effectively in hand. Unless the orcs can reduce their equipment losses in a hurry there’s no way they can sustain large scale offensive operations past 2025. The latest round of ruscist nuclear posturing is part of another diplomatic push aimed at getting China to more overtly support its doomed partner as much as scaring Biden and his team.
Xi is more than happy to see a historic rival and latent threat taken apart in Ukraine. Once a roughly equal partnership, now the thing is one of pure dependency, though with a twist: Putin can always threaten to blow up a system that has served China quite well. Despite the propaganda pushed by the Beltway set that’s always wrong about everything, China likes the status quo.
Meanwhile the absolutely dismal way NATO as a whole is responding to Ukraine’s longstanding need for more air defense systems can only encourage those in China who understand that Taiwan’s greatest vulnerability is its dependence on a US-led alliance coming to its rescue in any conflict. The way the US has treated Ukraine these past two-plus years, especially when contrasted with the direct support Israel receives, has sent a stark warning to Taiwan and every other lauded American partner and ally lacking nuclear arms.
If fear of escalation stops the USA from even setting up a limited no-fly zone in adjacent regions of Ukraine, where orc missiles and drones are known to stray over into NATO territory, who could possibly believe that it would risk an open conflict with nuclear armed China? Beijing has begun building up its land-based ICBM force for several reasons, but a principle one is the clear reluctance of US leaders to accept even a tiny risk of nuclear war despite all their bluster.
Right now, if I’m sitting in Beijing, I’m calculating that an all-out invasion of Taiwan would very possibly bog down while provoking a decisive international response even if the USA has fallen into total dysfunction and can’t respond. Taiwan is mountainous, especially on its eastern coast, so a land invasion is liable to lead to an insurgency even if it takes Taipei. The only way to stop Taiwan’s allies from supporting one indefinitely would be to cut off all air and maritime links - and if Beijing can do that, an invasion isn’t really required in the first place.
The ideal solution to Beijing’s Taiwan conundrum is a political breach between the USA and Japan, the most vital US ally in the region. Australia and South Korea are both important allies in the Pacific more broadly, but you Aussies are even farther away than Guam and Korea has the regime up north to cope with. Japan is the world’s 3rd largest economy and reliant on trade, so its Navy isn’t anything to laugh at, and Tokyo has a strong interest in preventing China from securing Taiwan, something that would allow Beijing to push claims on disputed islands and threaten Japan’s maritime links.
But if Beijing can engineer a scenario where American leaders push Japan into a corner, say during a confrontation where the US is pressing for a more active response than Japan feels the situation calls for, it might maneuver the US into a one on one standoff in the Philippine Sea. A partial maritime blockade of Taiwan with the stated intent of intercepting weapons shipments from the USA might, if the US response was inept, convince Japan to limit use of domestic bases like Okinawa in the event a conflict broke out.
Limiting the US to the Marianas and the three to four aircraft carrier groups that can be deployed at the same time evens the odds considerably. I can easily envision a scenario where China inflicts the sort of defeat on the US that Japan did on Imperial Russia over a century ago. The US can’t replace losses or even clear its existing warship repair backlog in the space of a few months, meaning that any major defeat would leave Taiwan virtually on its own. And would Japan or Australia intervene after the visible humiliation of their better equipped ally?
If something like this happens in the next few years it will come about because US leaders remain trapped in an intellectual paradigm that was obsolete after the Cold War ended. Any repeat will not go the way of the first, nor is China the same sort of opponent that the USSR was.
Unlike russia, China has a real claim to be a true civilization with a well-defined ancient history, being a region of Eurasia that’s almost a continent unto itself thanks to being surrounded by rugged country on three sides and ocean on the fourth. China is highly complex and dynamic, with all the social diversity of Europe. What effective control Beijing has over its population is a function of the social contract the regime has with its people: guarantee prosperity, and concerns about human rights can be set aside.
Historically, mass rebellions of peasants or regions, sometimes both, have upended Chinese society every few centuries. Beijing is only now bouncing back from the last period of disorder, this one exacerbated by European colonial efforts until the Second World War finished off all the old European empires except for one, which incarnated for a time as the USSR. Eventually China’s growing middle class will force political reforms, and democratic movements have long been vibrant at the local level, though mostly co-opted by the Communist Party once they gain traction.
Small wonder that the regime in Beijing uses its rising prestige abroad to offset rising frustration with the economic and social consequences of one-party rule. Claiming to defend the rights of ethnic Chinese people everywhere is part of an age-old tradition of leaders abusing ideas like ethnicity and race to expand their power.
Taiwan is important to Beijing for two reasons: geography and politics. As for the latter, the island is where Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist forces retreated after losing the civil war that followed Japan’s ejection from China. Legally speaking Taiwan is the last refuge of the legitimate Chinese government that joined the United Nations upon its founding, or would still be if the US hadn’t chosen to recognize the government in Beijing back in Nixon’s day. But as this dormant and doomed claim poses a theoretical threat to Beijing’s claim to legitimacy, the regime can’t ignore Taiwan’s autonomy entirely.
Geography is another reason why Beijing wants Taiwan and fears any move towards independence. The island wasn’t considered part of China until the twentieth century when Nationalist forces moved in. Japan had taken the place, then called Formosa, as a colony decades before, only forced out after losing the Pacific War. Before that Portuguese and Dutch interests had colonized Taiwan, though never settling it in large numbers, with various Chinese dynasties having relations with the island over the preceding centuries but never themselves taking control over it. Even Tibet and Xinjiang have closer historic ties to China.
But the waters around Taiwan have always been conduits for trade; many of the Polynesian settlers who spread across the Pacific were descended from people who had come to Taiwan after the last ice age. Today a massive proportion of China’s international trade, the lifeblood of its economy, passes through the Taiwan Strait. The development of aviation in the twentieth century transformed Taiwan from a minor outlying island to a forward base for Japanese aircraft to bomb the interior of China. So defense planners in Beijing looks anxiously at Taiwan, fearful of it one day becoming the tip of a spear that China is ill-suited to ward off because the US has contained it, threatening to cut off trade flows abroad.
American thinkers steeped in Ivy League ways of thinking about China are mis-applying the lessons of the Pacific War to cope with a continental threat, one that can be harmed from the sea but never cut off, invaded, or carpet bombed into submission - as Japan once learned to its cost. China is also not the ideological threat the USSR was - Moscow in the Cold War sowed chaos far abroad to avoid the threat of war closer to home. China’s posture is less overtly colonial, promoting stable development for allies and promising long-term relationships… with strings, of course.
China is only ever looking out for China, but the same is true of a lot of countries that strive to pretend otherwise. From reading international press reports, a similar recognition appears to be dawning on many foreign leaders who actively despise Donald Trump: he is in many ways easier to deal with than Biden. Why? Because he offers no pretense of being anything but a self-interested thug. Biden, on the other hand, is all promises and well-wishing in public, but when push comes to shove he’s the guy who sits you down behind closed doors with a ready excuse and explanation why you’re actually getting a better deal than you realize.
Biden and Putin are both trained lawyers, which affects how they lie. They take great care not to define certain terms, letting people read into them whatever they prefer. Trump lies like an American businessman, where something is only a lie if you can prove it in court. The latest Kennedy to tempt fate lies because his brain was apparently eaten by a worm, and also because a lot of people are turning their backs on linear, reductionist science but heading in the wrong direction.
Beijing’s obsession with Taiwan is a classic case of a justified concern being exploited for political gain. Taiwan is a powerful symbol for Beijing. If Taiwan ever declares independence or other countries build military bases on the island, there will be a Second Pacific War. Beijing doesn’t want to have to shed blood for Taiwan, as that destroys its domestic case for being a guarantor of order and prosperity. But it cannot allow Taiwan independence for political reasons.
This is why the situation has to be handled with the utmost care while making it absolutely clear that the status quo in Taiwan will be defended. There is still a narrow path forward that preserves the interests of all sides, and the first step is for the democratic world to accept that repelling Moscow from Ukrainian territory is a necessary demonstration of the will to save Taiwan if China invades. Failing that, the Pacific democracies need to step up in a big way - Japan, Australia, and the USA all have more land gear than they need. Japanese and American Patriot batteries sent to Ukraine can be compensated for with additional forward-deployed Aegis-equipped warships and combat jets.
If the democratic world is too afraid of nuclear war to intervene more forcefully in Ukraine, it’s not going to fight for Taiwan. Based on its allies behavior, Taipei has to assume that it too will be fed dribs and drabs of support and lots of kind words in any war with Beijing while being nudged to negotiate, perhaps surrendering a port so that China can invade with greater success in the future.
Behavior is behavior: it’s one of the few signals countries have to tell whether they will be alone or backed up in a fight. Notably, of 2,000 or so Leopard 2 tanks built across three decades, Ukraine has still only received perhaps a hundred. Much-maligned Germany has given Ukraine 3 of its 11 Patriot batteries while the USA has offered 1 of about 50. Even as Ukraine’s mobilization law goes into effect and thousands of soldiers begin training, NATO officers are busy telling the media how dangerous Putin’s military is again. While it’s good that they have shifted their tune from a year or so ago, when some appeared to believe that Putin’s surrender was imminent, the subtext here might just be that they can’t send any more gear to Ukraine because Putin might come at them next.
In undergraduate social science courses this sort of relationship is described to students as a collective action problem. Everyone knows that Ukraine needs guns, but nobody wants to be without if they’re next on the target list, or someone else’s. But countries like Greece only face a threat from fellow NATO member Turkey, Spain hosts US Aegis destroyers that could cover it if Algeria decides to attack for no apparent reason. NATO as an institution is meant to solve this problem so that when a war happens time isn’t wasted on bartering for arms.
Yet here we are, and here NATO is, while US leaders run around talking about how it and other democracies are going to save the world from those dastardly authoritarians. Who, in Iran’s case, can’t even keep from losing their brutal mullah-approved president in what looks like a pointless crash that could have been prevented if people would just respect the damned weather before going on flights.
Leaders do stupid things, just like everyone else. Sometimes out ignorance, but as often cowardice.
China and russia are not nearly as close of allies as they or Beltway types pretend. But both have the measure of western leaders. When America and NATO dither on Ukraine, Beijing sees its odds of swallowing Taiwan rising. That's a recipe for another Pacific War.