Ukraine War: Midsummer 2024
The shell famine is over and Moscow's latest offensive has been a bust so far. But the USA is falling apart and Europe is still getting used to the idea of history returing to life.
A Brief Note
With 2024 half gone and global tensions escalating, I’ve decided to evolve the structure of these weekly posts. Nothing too major, just an effort at improved clarity.
Last week, me, my wife, and our dog drove from Oregon to California to visit family. To get a sense of the distances involved, if you look at a map of the whole USA Portland and Sacramento are the largest cities you’re liable to spot. Our drive covered the country from a few hours north of California’s capitol to about an hour from Oregon’s biggest city, where we moved sixteen years ago. For the readers who live outside the USA to have some context, the distance is roughly equivalent to traversing England from the Scottish Frontier to the Channel, driving from Melbourne to Canberra or Sydney in Australia, or getting to Donbas from Kyiv in Ukraine.
Between the Willamette and Sacramento Valleys is a mountainous region that really ought to be its own state called Klamath, after the mountain range in the middle. The cultural identity is totally unique, signs advertising cannabis and Trump set side by side along Interstate 5 as it winds through canyons and over passes. The biome shifts from something resembling Spain or Italy on the California side to scenes straight out of rural Britain by the time you get to Eugene. An hour or three to the west is the Pacific Ocean, the same distance east lie the active volcanoes of the Cascade range.
If you’re into travel and like rural places, it’s a really neat place to check out. And eight-plus hours on the road each direction makes for an excellent chance to think.
I work to strike a somewhat delicate balance in my blog posts, linking movements at different scale levels to offer a holistic portrayal of the unfolding conflict while avoiding jargon as much as possible. I’m not always successful, but I always try to improve. A few weeks ago I was contacted by the New Voice of Ukraine news service, which apparently wants to translate portions of the blog into Ukrainian. I was deeply honored to agree, and this serves as a reminder that different audiences can get different benefits out of these posts.
To make it as easy as possible to get the key ideas across, the first section of each post will now offer half a dozen simple bullet points that summarize the piece as a whole for folks who want some simple takeaways. I’ll also start writing out more a defined conclusion section.
This should make it easier for readers to focus on what matters most to them without sacrificing quality. I picked up the instructor’s habit of repeating information in different ways back in grad school, when you need to make sure that most or all students can work out what they need to do to pass some rote assignment or test. It’s easy to forget that doing that in a narrative can cause confusion.
Key Takeaways From the Second Week of July
Putin’s troops continue to advance on several fronts, but mostly the Toretsk area. It’s slow going and led by infantry, so the costs are high to extreme.
The systematic targeting of hospitals by ruscist strategic aviation is part of Putin’s war strategy. From Grozny to Aleppo and cities across Ukraine, it’s always the same: terror inflicted simply to demonstrate power.
Ukraine has a serious problem with enemy drones calling down long range missile strikes on airfields. Moscow’s ability to get cruise missiles into the heart of Kyiv’s air defense bubble is also concerning.
Ukrainian ground forces are beginning to claim the initiative in most local fights thanks to drones and artillery, but need substantial armored vehicle deliveries to make major gains. Glide bombs continue to present a serious challenge to operations. Bad commanders do as well.
The NATO summit offered no surprises. Ukraine’s accession is inevitable, but future membership isn’t as practically useful as more weapons today. The announcement of additional air defense supplies was welcome but not news.
American political dysfunction will likely amplify in the wake of the attempted assassination of Trump. Both parties and the media are going through a ritual not dissimilar to the one invoked every time there is a mass shooting at a school. America’s inward turn is set to accelerate, leaving allies in a difficult situation.
Overview of the Fronts
Moscow’s summer campaign has not let up, its main effort constantly shifting between fronts in an apparent attempt to keep Ukraine off balance. Every now and again one of the dozens of attacks launched every day exploits a Ukrainian rotation or is heavy enough to overwhelm the first line of defense, allowing the orcs to push forward a couple kilometers.
Every time they do, they then get stuck spending weeks securing their supply lines to the new positions. After catching the spearhead at the next defense line back, Ukrainian forces nag the flanks and make it difficult to supply troops building up for another surge. Ultimately Moscow has to clear the flanks, a time and resource consuming process that gives Ukraine a chance to reinforce the target area.
Putin’s effort remains starkly similar to the failed German Spring Offensive of 1918, right down to the use of assault units that suffer extraordinarily high casualty rates. Though many of Moscow’s dead are convicts or other parts of the russian world seen as disposable, plenty of more valued veterans wind up getting taken out trying to secure or exploit a successful strike.
Meanwhile the orcs are still shuffling brigades between fronts, splitting many of them up. It’s possible that they are imitating Ukraine’s use of multiple battlegroups within each brigade, but this seems less likely than planners in Moscow just throwing units into the fray as their combat power is restored to meet immediate demands for support.
The net effect is that Ukraine is able to defeat Moscow’s forces in detail, as the military science lingo goes. Rather than facing all of Moscow’s combat power applied at once, Ukraine gets to take on more even odds during each engagement - with the flip side being that these are endless. So is the supply of drones, though, and explosives pretty much always beat flesh.
In northern Kharkiv, ruscist forces are still battling for control of northern Vovchansk and hanging on to a foothold in Hlyboke, while Ukraine is building up reserves and working to outflank ruscist positions. CDS claims that Moscow is moving in new troops to continue the operation, but like the rest of the incursion across the international border here the whole affair looks less wise by the day.
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Further south, on the Kupiansk front, Moscow has intensified its long push towards the Oskil river. CDS claims that the entire Kharkiv area, both its northern and southern wings, is becoming more important to Moscow. If true, this could be because of the proximity to air and ground bases that Ukraine can not yet strike with ATACMS because of US restrictions. These are now being portrayed as necessary to prevent the war from widening to other countries, implying that Putin’s reflexive control over Bidenworld is still strong.
To the south, between Lyman and Chasiv Yar the lines have been pretty static with the exception of the Siversk bulge, where the town of Rozdolivka fell under full orc control. Moscow continues to apply pressure here, but so far Ukraine has only had to fall back slightly in a few places.
The adjacent Chasiv Yar sector, which I see as the northern wing of the Toretsk front, has also not seen any substantial enemy gains after Ukraine pulled back from the ruined Kanal district. It is unclear whether the orcs will attempt to assault Chasiv Yar directly or bypass it to the south, though evidence pointing towards the latter might be emerging as ruscist troops push west from the ruins of Klischiivka and Andriivka.
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South of that is the rest of the Toretsk front, which has borne the brunt of Putin’s attention this week as in most of the last half a dozen or more. Moscow’s frontal assault on the established Ukrainian defense zone is being met by the 32nd and 41st Mechanized Brigades and associated Territorial Guard units. As is typical, after the initial tactical breakthrough ruscist forces are busy securing their flanks.
On the Niu York axis, Moscow’s attack closely followed the path of a rail line set at the foot of a ridge. Ukrainian forces hold the high ground to the west, which is why when Moscow eventually attacked in this area as I expected would happen I anticipated the blow falling along the road from Avdiivka. Until Moscow clears that ridge, every effort to control the opposite flank will be costly, as it is a relative lowland.
Meanwhile the assault on Pivniche is similarly stuck, Ukraine holding several terikon hills in the area that offer excellent visibility over the orc-held ground. Though it came as something of a surprise, the frontal assault towards Toretsk does not look sufficiently well planned to create a repeat of the Avdiivka scenario this spring, at least not before winter.
It will continue to evolve, however, and Moscow continues to make every effort it can to reach the Vovcha river west of Avdiivka. While Pokrovsk is not likely the primary target, especially with ruscist forces now attacking Toretsk directly, this push still threatens to secure a bridgehead that Ukraine would find very inconvenient down the line.
In addition, there are a couple spots where Moscow wouldn’t have to cross a lot of water. Prohres and especially Vozdvyzhenka are obvious targets for this reason. Ukraine is fighting hard for Novoselivka Persha and Yasnobrodivka, which are both on the eastern bank of the Vovcha, because there is a gap between reservoirs that Moscow might also target. Some bridgeheads are defensive in nature, and Ukraine holds a hilltop here that is relatively shielded from flanking maneuvers by the watercourse.
All in all, Moscow is reaching a natural Ukrainian defense line that, if crossed, will force the orcs to support and supply a front outside of the range of artillery operating in occupied Avdiivka. Rarely has this sort of thing gone well: Moscow fights for built up areas because these are where it can hide stuff that Himars operators would otherwise wipe out. In the next few weeks I expect the main orc effort to turn north, seeking to cut off the road between Pokrovsk and Kostiantynivka and push up the one between the latter and Avdiivka.
Elsewhere the only change of any note is the town of Urozhaine, which apparently fell back under ruscist occupation a year after Ukrainian forces liberated the place. No word yet on what happened, but as always the rule remains that if it will cost too much to hold a given place, Ukraine should retreat. It’s almost always much better to make the enemy pay to hold it themselves.
Finally the aviation front deserves comment. F-16s are probably in Ukraine, flying limited missions in the west and potentially Kyiv region. Moscow’s latest missile strikes have targeted two types of infrastructure - a major military plant and several hospitals in Kyiv and Krivvy Rih. Notably, Moscow used a wide range of missiles to make it hard for Ukrainian air defenders to know which was the primary attack.
Kinzhal and Iskander ballistic missiles, drones, anti-radar and converted anti-ship missiles, and finally a group of new lower-flying cruise missiles were employed. Ukraine couldn’t get them all, with half a dozen projectiles hit by air defense systems still managing to damage targets. A pair of Vipers may have to remain on duty near Kyiv at all times to help shoot down cruise missiles, at least until those Swedish AWACS jets arrive.
Austria-based analyst Tom Cooper laid out his concerns in an excellent series. Whether the level of incompetence he alleges is as deep and universal as he believes is unclear, however the number of times a Ukrainian air defense battery or jets on the ground have been caught out by ruscist strikes is now a cause for concern. Part of the issue is Moscow’s ability to almost freely deploy cheap surveillance drones up to 150km behind the front lines. Ukraine is building drone interceptors, but it will take quite a few to completely cover its territory.
Until then, Moscow will retain the ability to hit targets east of the Dnipro in a matter of minutes. This demands a high degree of dispersion, with valuable assets like jets and SAM systems never grouping close together or staying in place for more than about five minutes once an enemy drone is spotted nearby. This will prove a challenge, with ruscist drones now switching on their communications devices once over a target area. But with drone warning devices and proper drills, losses can be minimized.
Some targets will always get hit, though, and hospitals are difficult to distribute or move. It’s been more than a week since the orcs struck a children’s hospital in what was clearly a deliberate attack, but thankfully after just a few days a Russian defector gave Ukraine explicit evidence of who ordered and carried it out. As for myself, I prefer this mode of redemption for most orcs than the one involving bullets. The perpetrators of this atrocity and so many others will be hunted for decades to come, just like the Nazis were.
Moscow targets hospitals in its wars for the same reason that Israel does: to terrorize the population. Both employ a theory of war that holds the enemy’s population to represent their vital center of gravity. As Israel seeks to punish Gazans for tolerating Hamas in their midst because it can’t actually defeat the organization, so does Putin aim to make as much of Ukraine unlivable as possible to encourage Ukrainians to leave the country or sue for peace.
Ukraine doesn’t and can’t target hospitals in kind because this would destroy the credibility and legitimacy of its fight. Its revenge has to be on the battlefield, which includes the enemy’s deep rear. Moscow’s strategic bombing campaign is a derivative of American practices, which in turn basically amount to pretending as if it’s 1944 forever, though at least the US, unlike Israel, understands that bombing civilians is always a bad look.
Strategic bombing always fails. Defense infrastructure destruction, on the other hand, is a proven war winner. The former is a war crime committed because the perpetrator has run out of ideas, its proponents cloaking themselves in rhetoric of right but in truth condoning murder so long as their team is doing the killing. The latter is an application of science, something it is painfully clear that most Americans don’t even want to understand.
Otherwise a NATO summit wouldn’t be proclaimed a success for confirming what was known already: Ukraine gets to go from a pitiful 4-5 Patriot and Aster systems to 8-10. Meanwhile potentially useful ideas like developing land-based launchers for Standard missiles used by the U.S. Navy to fend off mass missile strikes languish. So does the potential for giving Ukraine several old Aegis cruisers the Navy is retiring. While their radars are apparently too outdated, a digital link between the ship and an AWACS flight can serve. Odesa and the coast of Ukraine could have been covered a year or more ago, leaving its long range SAM batteries free to protect another city.
Biden, Blinken, Burns and Sullivan dither and lie while good Ukrainians die - it’s a bitter tale as old as war itself. And unfortunately Ukraine may be dealing with some substantial leadership issues of its own.
On Scale and Warfare
Over the past few weeks, I’ve noted an increase in criticism directed against Ukrainian authorities, particularly senior military commanders. One at a very high level, Sodel, has been removed after some allegations went public. Certain brigade commanders are also being investigated after soldiers made public pleas.
Syrskyi himself is also taking flak, some portraying him as a micromanager who will only tolerate good news. It’s entirely possible that this is true. From the data visible to me, that is, georeferenced images and videos plus English-language media and blog reports, I have only detected scattered evidence of troubles which can mostly be explained by the normal churn in any military organization.
Adaptation and change aren’t easy, and what looks like micromanaging can actually be a leader trying to compensate for a problem in the middle of the chain of command. Ukraine is in the middle of working out how to adapt to the landscape that characterizes modern warfare, and the process won’t be without issues.
Putin’s forces are going through the same thing, but having only limited success. The past few months have seen Moscow manage a few adaptations that actually count as such. A lot of folks have been talking about Moscow’s ability to adapt lately without being entirely true to the spirit of what adaptation means.
Adaptation means something more than trying something new; it’s a dialog with the environment made by an organism. Resource constraints mean that adaptation involves making trade-offs; if these align well with patterns in the broader environment, the organism making them has better survival odds. But if the trade-off goes the wrong way, you have a maladaptive, not adaptive, situation.
For example: a turtle tank may be great at getting past Ukrainian drones to unload assault troopers near Ukrainian positions, but if a Bradley, Abrams, or even Javelin operator gets a shot, it’s toast. And if you’re using a tank for transportation instead of shooting, you’ve lost a capability that might be missed. Using turtle tanks or any other device is only adaptive if it achieves its purpose without damaging some other aspect of organizational efficiency. If this were not true, adaptation would have no real meaning for an organism.
Of course, this raises an interesting question: what is an organism, really? Biologically, an organism is a bundle of subsidiary parts that output to each other. Together their interactions give rise to a concrete entity that exhibits a particular set of behaviors.
In a scientific sense, though, this apparent divide between whole and parts is a trick of how the human brain works. That’s not to say that it isn’t useful - in fact, it is the foundation of most scientific reasoning. But how the divide is made and what rules are employed to define groupings can easily lead to a misconception of the parts as distinct and separate from the whole.
This is actually the root of the thinking error that produces the old mind-body divide in philosophy. It also leads to the false wall between faith and reason so popular in European “Enlightenment” thinking. Like so many other conflicts, the root of that one is political.
For now, it suffices to say that scale matters. The natural laws of the material universe force matter to clump at certain levels ranging from the subatomic to the intergalactic.
Generally speaking, if you run into a conflict when applying different theories to understand a problem, a scalar fix will usually solve it. Different ideas can be reconciled by essentially making them their own piece of a broader whole, autonomous in themselves yet outputting/interacting with others of like kind and scope.
To simplify: instead of arguing about truths, it’s usually easier to create separate spaces or times where different ones prevail. That’s already done on an everyday basis with language, where we all shift between dialects according to local rules and who we interact with. It’s how a language can have accents without one being held as the norm. This concept matters a great deal in warfare, where a vast array of highly diverse component parts have to come together in just the right way to avoid battlefield debacles like those the orcs die in every day across Ukraine.
Coming back to Ukraine’s leadership issues, there can’t be much doubt that many leaders at every level aren’t especially effective at their job. That’s normal in any organization. It doesn’t aid in understanding whether issues are becoming chronic that the people criticizing Syrskyi sometimes accuse him of micromanagement because he travels to units on the front line, but others because he expects strict obedience to the chain of command.
Any regular reader is likely familiar with my essentially anarchist take on leadership, drawn from influences ranging from Kropotkin and Mao to Boyd and Luhmann. However, this approach does not denigrate the importance of leadership: instead it focuses the efforts of leaders on their most important tasks.
The concept of chain of command will always be relevant in warfare because of the pervasive impacts of scale on, well, everything. Military formations are organized like nesting dolls because to maintain control over a broad area demands that smaller sub-groups split up to maintain the ability to spot and shoot anything that comes too close. How this is best accomplished is at the core of military science.
Two hundred years ago armies still bunched up in tight ranks and fired as one unit in order to maximize the damage they could do to an opponent. Officers and sub-officers had to maintain strict control to coordinate movements across any battlefield. Technology has made this approach suicidal; drones with grenades strapped to them are only the latest decentralization of killing power.
Ideally, the soldier of today doesn’t even need an officer telling them where to go or when to shoot. They can be so well informed about the battlefield situation, including where their allies and enemies are, and sufficiently trained to have a kind of sixth sense about how everyone else will move next. Individual soldiers can direct a phenomenal amount of accurate firepower on a target, making numbers a liability, not a boon.
What people fighting on the front lines do need are people watching over them and moving supporting resources around to assist or take advantage of opportunities that emerge. And just as the natural scale at which a given military formation changed between the 19th and 20th centuries, so as the 21st deepens it is set to shift again.
It may well be that the traditional subdivision of brigades into battalions, then companies, platoons, squads, and fire teams has become obsolete. Both Ukrainian and ruscist forces have been trying to figure out what levels of organization are natural now, with a drone strike team theoretically able to exert control over the battlefield out to five or even ten kilometers. With just a few people able to direct lethal fires against any targets they can spot, and drones allowing for better visibility of the battlefield than anyone could have dreamed of in World War Two, you simply won’t be able to imitate Second World War tactics at the same scale.
Looking from afar, it seems entirely reasonable to say that quite a few Ukrainian officers do not understand the vital importance of scale. I do not say this with any sense of superiority. American education is so terrible at teaching this concept in any serious way that I doubt most American officers would do better than nearly any Ukrainian counterpart. But that doesn’t mean that there are no Ukrainian leaders who could benefit from some deeper training in science.
I’ve been operating under the assumption that Syrskyi, just as much as Zaluzhnyi, understands the need for decentralized execution and autonomy in the field. But for these to work as intended an organization must develop a shared language and understanding of the situation. That happens through repeated interactions. And implementation can always go wrong, led astray by ego.
All organizations require a general theory of operations that allows personnel to see where they are in the grand machine and perceive how their own actions can help smooth its path. The leader at the top must be in constant dialog with subordinates not to give them specific orders, but identify why they are having trouble accomplishing tasks. A general closes an important operational loop by visiting field units and issuing corrections where required. This can easily stray into micromanagement, yet so can issuing orders from Kyiv.
It remains to be seen whether Ukrainian troops are being appropriately trained for the fight ahead. Whether Ukrainian officer education at large is teaching the right lessons or if these are being heeded as the situation evolves is one of those things that an outside observer probably can’t know. At least not without the right data.
Strategic Affairs - America In Chaos
At this point, I suppose it’s time to talk about the dumb-dumbs, to quote one of my favorite video game non-player characters. [Side note: damn you, Bethesda, for degenerating the Fallout series into a pure comic book. At least let Obsidian (or me) make a New Vegas sequel before you run the brand into the ground, Disney style, Todd Howard.]
Anyway, by dumb-dumbs I mean, of course, Partisan American pundits. As you might have heard already, this weekend the inane hyperbolic rhetoric of the past three years has led to another tragedy: some poor guy got killed trying to protect his family from a gunman who thought it would be a bright idea to try and off Trump.
The American media, of course, is beside itself with glee at having an outright assassination attempt to cover. America’s craven politicians are falling all over themselves rushing to the nearest camera to proclaim that this isn’t us and violence has no place in America. Now we’ll be treated to the spectacle of fake unity amid a supposed national trauma.
As if a quarter of American presidents don’t get shot at by some nutter. Or that American students don’t have to do active shooter drills every year. It’s a big country, and we generate more than our share of twits because this society is fundamentally broken at the national level. What’s kind of terrifying is watching the media normalize the idea that Americans are about to start slaughtering each other at any moment. That’s the one thing which could still make something so unlikely actually come to pass.
The facts aren’t all in yet, but so far the story appears to go like this. Another young man without hope in an increasingly hopeless country decided to achieve fame through self-immolation. Lacking any apparent mature political motive and enabled by the standard institutional bureaucratic incompetence that defines the modern USA at every level, this stupid kid tried to headshot an ex-president and got predictably wiped out after missing his target.
In the process, he instantly made Trump a folk hero, all but guaranteeing that he returns to the White House no matter whether Biden is still running for re-election by November. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, Trump is president-elect now. What we’ve seen from the Democratic Party over the past two weeks all but rules out the possibility of any degree of organized resistance to Trump even if he does declare himself a dictator on day one.
Biden already gave away the game in his interview a couple weeks back. If he loses, all that talk about the end of democracy fades into him meekly saying he’s okay with the result because he gave it his all. The whole Trump as Hitler thing is empty rhetoric and always was.
It’s important to understand that what just happened was not, in fact, political. The American media and political classes have gone into ritual mode, determined to portray events in a certain way to evade certain hard questions.
Like why, after almost two years of fighting in Ukraine demonstrating the power of drones, the Secret Service didn’t have a massive team monitoring drone feeds of the area. A shooter was spotted by bystanders; Secret Service agents speaking to the press say the failure to clear the site was a serious breach of protocol. What they aren’t telling anyone is why their protocols rely on physical checks at all when a single drone hovering over the event would have allowed anyone monitoring a feed to immediately spot someone crawling across a roof with a rifle.
This happens every day all across Ukraine. Yet the United States Secret Service hasn’t updated its protocols to incorporate drone overwatch - or if it has, something sure didn’t work.
Of course, in a country where fewer than ten percent of the population has ever served in the armed forces but around half have guns, odds are a would-be shooter is going to be someone stupid enough to go for a headshot. Most armed forces and police train to aim for center of mass in large part because people move their heads around more than their entire torso.
So long as fools with guns (or exploding drones) know that killing a celebrity will bring them fame in a society that worships it, stuff like this will continue to happen. Sadly, the public response will probably be another round of trying to shut down “divisive” or “violent” speech - except when Biden ultimately reverts to it.
Regardless, after Trump’s close brush with getting switched off, the American political scene looks about like his brain almost did. There are two clear winners in this: Trump and Biden. The latter, however, only gains a reprieve from being pressed to do the right thing and retire. Biden’s people are already moving to cast any continued opposition to his tottering candidacy as unpatriotic, and if successful in keeping him doing carefully scripted events until the convention in August will then turn around and insist that any effort to replace Biden after is doomed.
Quite frankly, no Democrat has a reason to oppose Biden now. Trump’s victory just went from very likely to nearly certain, and no Democrat will want to play sacrificial lamb. The party’s already flawed strategy of making politics all about stopping Trump because he’s a threat to democracy just blew up for good. Any attempt to make this case will be cast by Trump as an incitement to violence, and once he’s president again this cudgel will be routinely deployed against anyone who criticizes his actions.
Mainstream, well-off, suburbanite America just got a look at the harsh reality of politics when the system starts to collapse. As I’ve long suspected, the “Resistance” types only ever wanted to be able to call Trump Hitler and MAGA a pack of Nazis for rhetorical purposes. The very people who run around insisting that mean words are the worst thing in the entire universe are the ones who turn around and resort to rhetoric that millions of Americans naturally take as a call to action.
Americans for the past eight decades have been told that their leaders deserve to run the whole world because the USA saved it from Hitler. So when Trump is mashed up with Hitler on magazine covers what can you expect but for someone to think that means they’ll be applauded or at least posthumously celebrated if they off the guy?
The Capitol Riot of 2021 gave a certain class of American full license to pretend that they are the heroes of some grand epic. They run around talking about how scared they are of Trump and how much they worry about the future of democracy, but it’s all a sham.
American politics is pure rhetoric. If Americans truly were living out the rise of Nazism in today’s USA then the Democrats were always bound to play the role of Vichy France or Quisling Norway. All their brand is about is helping donors and voters feel good about themselves. Voting Blue is a form of moral indulgence excusing all prior acts of racism, sexism or whatever is deemed bad this month.
American liberals want to be the conscience of America, able to complain about all the nasty things those mean conservatives do while enjoying the benefits of looking cultured by comparison. So long as the Democrats can present themselves as the kinder, gentler party, they’re satisfied. Millions of American will pay to be members of a secular church that acts like every other Christian denomination. The illusion of unity is what counts, with faith and belief more important than material action thanks to the grip the postmodern worldview has on both sides of the partisan aisle.
As happens after every school shooting, Americans are being led by the media through a vapid ritual that involves finding a thousand reasons why the person who did a bad thing was too broken to redeem while lamenting the manifold failures of the system without ever fixing anything that matters. It’s a way to shed all responsibility or accountability, the Anglo-Saxon equivalent to a Muslim shrugging and saying Inshallah - as God wills.
The US media loves nothing better than to find a young person who did a terrible thing because they were supposedly lonely or had bad parents. The town criers of the American Elite adamantly refuse to entertain the notion that maybe there’s something deeply wrong with a society that the media pretends is real to make it easy to advertise overpriced junk at folks.
Decrying violence is a cheap way to avoid talking about the violence intrinsic to American society. Why do so many young people shoot up their school? Because that’s where they first experience the cruel hypocrisy of American popular culture, the sham meritocracy that sees teachers invest in those students (I was one) who come off as bright at the cost of others, usually the ones from a tougher background. America is a place where the news will portray what Israel is doing to Gaza as a kind of just punishment for Palestinians while also insisting that a politician saying that people should fight for their freedoms is inciting an insurrection.
These kids look around and know that they’ve already been pre-judged by society. Being young and lacking the experience to know that society isn’t worth worrying about, is largely an illusion anyway, small wonder some lash out. A guy like Trump took the brunt for once. Now America’s myth-makers are determined to transform him into Reagan 2.0 even if he does destroy American democracy.
A renewed effort to lock down the free flow of information in American society seems likely going forward. For years a small group of media companies have looked aghast as the internet has offered consumers astonishing freedom of choice. Writers at The New York Times, Washington Post, and The Atlantic are all flocking towards a neo-Puritan obsession with loneliness and the rise of smartphones as being the cause of all that ails the youth of today. Sites like Substack are probably in for another wave of calls for regulating free speech, something that always manages to hit the people with the least power.
Expect to see intensified efforts to restrict the internet by encouraging big companies like Google to control what people see by making “non-authoritative” sites all but disappear from search results. The misbegotten claim that foreign powers are trying to drive Americans apart will be trotted out to justify “content management” as the nation turns inward.
Allies abroad are now of only secondary, perhaps tertiary concern to America’s leaders: you can see how they reacted by treating Trump as one of their class, the slightly wounded survivor ritually wished well before we all go back to pretending that he’s the end of the Constitution itself - except now people will say it in code, and only the right people will be allowed to.
Nothing is real in American society. If you lived through the aftermath of 2001, you’ll know never to underestimate the capacity of posh Americans to do whatever it takes to preserve the illusion that life can carry on unchanged forever. Something like a million people in Iraq and Afghanistan are no longer alive today because of the madness that sometimes grips the American body politic.
In general, political violence is a boundary crossing moment where models become unreliable. It’s kind of ironic, because people killing for politics is something of a human - and American - tradition, but especially in a society that has little direct memory of war seeing it always comes as a shock. People tend to recoil, seeking something easy to blame, usually an individual.
However, the underlying issues remain unresolved, and another explosion is inevitable eventually. While both Republican and Democrat might watch what they say for a while, nothing about the nature of their fight has materially changed. It’s geographic, not ideological, and all about power.
Until July 13th, it was reasonable to assume that American partisans were all talk. Unfortunately, violence has a way of feeding on itself. Knowing this, in the short run the American political establishment appears to be congealing around a simple paradigm: the only way through the present crisis is to let Trump have his second term for the sake of national unity.
It remains to be seen how effectively this patch will hold, or for how long. The incentives pressing candidates to embrace extreme rhetoric remain. The world also just witnessed yet another glaring failure of a major federal institution. It’s now fair to wonder what else is primed to break. How effective would the Pentagon actually be in a major war? Is the apparent soft landing the Federal Reserve aimed to engineer really happening, or is this moment the calm before a raging storm?
When expectations begin to shift, strange things can happen. July 13th probably wasn’t the last major shock of 2024. Hezbollah and Israel may plunge into all-out war at any time, very possibly dragging in Iran. China could initiate a maritime quarantine of some degree around Taiwan or even blockade an outlying island group like Kinmen. North Korea might even shoot a rocket into rural South Korea, Japan, or even Alaska after being emboldened by the deepening alliance with Moscow and US fears of nuclear escalation.
In every case the USA will still be run by a Biden Administration crippled by Biden’s visible troubles staying engaged and speaking without a script. The dirty little secret of the USA is that nobody is in charge - the thing is running on autopilot and has been for some time. If the Democratic World or West or whatever you want to call the thing truly is facing an Authoritarian Axis of Evil, it’s on the road to defeat. Time to change course, or perish.
Conclusion
To sum things up, Ukraine’s fight on the ground and the skies is difficult, but still under control. Ukrainian forces are on track to start fielding freshly trained and equipped brigades in six weeks, though the inventory of equipment remains insufficient to keep the effort going all year.
The democratic world, however, is now on the clock with respect to American leadership. This can no longer be relied on; I expect that it will be the 2030s at the earliest before the USA is reasonably functional again. Trump’s new VP pick is absolutely no friend of Ukraine or anyone else. While he might be a Marine, that doesn’t mean he’s not a blazing idiot.
As a rural person I take personal offense to the tripe peddled by Vance and his kind. They are people who use the fact they happened to be born in a particular place to pretend that they represent every place remotely like it. He’s a purveyor of the rank rural Orientalism that rich Americans love to pay for, a condescending, paternalistic vision of a people oppressed by the other partisan team.
I have serious issues with the way Democrats have internalized bigotry against rural people in their worldview. But J.D Vance and his Hillbilly Elegy act is a minstrel show designed to mash all rural people into a convenient little identity group that defies what defines any rural culture: the place people live. Whatever rural identity he has a right to claim, he abandoned it in favor of acting like a clown for the cameras in D.C.
He’s a carpetbagger, plain and simple, the culmination of a generation of conservative suburbanites pretending that they’re down-home country folk. It’s an act, and he’s exploiting the very people he claims to care about.
Naturally, Vance is one of those who uses his time serving in a combat zone to justify the new conservative view that military power is only to be used in support of Israel. Back in the day the military actively trained soldiers to hate Arabs - I know, I was encouraged to shoot civilians on literally any pretext on multiple occasions in my official training. Officers sent impressionable soldiers to an evangelical church where we were told that the war in Iraq was part of a holy crusade.
I’ve been an orc. I know one when I see one. Vance is bad news for allies of America and friends of democracy. Unfortunately, he probably represents the future of America east of the Rockies. Sadly, he will likely be America’s next Vice President. And if another assassin is successful, even more.
Ukraine and its allies face the tough challenge of sustaining the fight through 2025 and into 2026. The resource exist; organization is lacking. Also, the will to win.
Joe Biden mistakenly introduced Zelensky as Putin at a press conference last week. While embarrassing, it didn’t much matter at first. But after correcting himself, Biden excused his slip by saying that he was focused on beating Putin.
This is a lie. If Biden truly wanted Putin beat, it would have happened already. All Ukraine has ever needed are enough modern weapons, people trained to use them, and the freedom to fight without restrictions beyond the Laws of War under the Geneva Convention.
Victory in Ukraine is possible, but it has been denied. And not by Trump, or Putin, but the self-proclaimed Defenders of Democracy in D.C. At home and abroad, they will reap what they have sown for decades: the whirlwind.