Why Putin's Military System Fails
An illusion wrapped in a bluff is not capable of winning the kind of war that Putin unleashed on Ukraine. And that, for all its Soviet-era stockpiles, is all that Putin's orc army has ever been.
A whole lot of fire and fury signifying nothing is a pretty good way to describe Putin’s military machine based on its performance in Ukraine. It certainly won’t feel that way on the front lines, of course. But no power with Moscow’s resources should ever have failed as badly as it has in the Ukraine War.
Putin went in visibly attempting to demonstrate what a real regime change operation looks like, using almost the same number of soldiers in February, 2022 that the US did to take down Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003. The intended message backfired as badly as Bush’s war did on him: whatever humanitarian benefit was derived from liberating Iraq annihilated once ISIS was spawned in US-run detention centers.
It’s a real tragedy that no one with access to Putin has yet seen fit to introduce a 7.62mm round to his skull. The best move would be to declare him a traitor and stooge of the west that drove russia into a trap. Then it’s time to circle the wagons and cling to power along with the portion of Putin’s inner circle willing to play ball while trying to do a secret deal with the US. Wagner took the first essential step, but its leader chickened out then wound up murdered. Whoever makes a move next won’t give up so easily, which is why Putin is presently conducting a slow motion purge of his military.
His regime is effectively an alliance between several major interest groups, chiefly the military, intelligence services, and leading oligarchs. To explain the ruscist machine’s miserable failures in Ukraine - raw propaganda never being entirely sufficient to convince anyone, only model “correct” public behavior - Putin requires a scapegoat. Virtually everyone in his system is corrupt, allowing for selective prosecutions to scare the majority into staying in line.
Being rooted in the intelligence community Putin has to play a careful balancing act with the military and economic departments. Hence his promoting the latter, a move exemplified by the recent shakeup in his national security council which promoted an economist while shifted old Shagrat (Shoigu) sideways. Now he’s using the intelligence services to root out troublesome officers, who are also probably the competent ones. Putin knows full well that a single major military district chief doing a side deal with NATO would rip apart the empire and collapse his regime, so there is an imperative to make these moves now that his “re-election” is in the bag.
The humiliating failure of the Kharkiv offensive so far has given Putin a good excuse to punish a portion of the military. Though Ukraine has shifted reserves to deal with the threat, its forces have not been substantially forced back elsewhere. Ukraine appears to have mainly committed formations that were already reasonably rested while other formerly active brigades still remain less visible than in the past, implying a simple rotation that hasn’t strained Ukraine’s forces. This could well be why Moscow isn’t pushing harder in Kharkiv or attempting to expand the incursion zone, at least not yet, along with no longer having a refuge from HIMARS - or apparently even cruise missiles thanks to the UK and France.
It is even beginning to look as if Moscow’s accumulated reserves, thought to amount to over 100,000 fresh personnel, aren’t quite as well prepared as some (myself included) had worried they might be. Nor was Moscow able to move substantial forces to the border without being detected. There’s another longstanding concern of mine resolved.
June isn’t even half over yet, but one month into Putin’s 2024 summer push his military does not appear to have solved any of its standing issues. While the orcs have attempted to adapt and had some success at the tactical and sometimes operational levels, on the whole the organism is too rigidly attached to imitating the Red Army of 1945 to fully evolve. The issue is systemic and tied to one factor above all others: lack of trust within the chain of command.
The second half of this week’s post will focus on that. I’ve written more than enough lately about geopolitics and the disaster that is American politics lately, so for now I’ll lay off poor Joe Biden and the Ivy League yes-men he surrounds himself with to compensate for his apparent intellectual inferiority complex.
For the record, I voted for the guy in 2020. I also spent years writing on social media about the danger Trump posed to American democracy, correctly predicting both that the 2016 and 2020 elections would be desperately close and that Trump would pretend that any election he lost was stolen from him.
I use the past tense deliberately. My sincere fear that Trump might be following Hitler’s path was thankfully proven wrong on January 6th, 2021. I never expected so many Americans to have the gumption or stupidity to commit an act of violence on that scale, but I also never expected that Trump would sit back and watch it play out on TV if something big began. Had this been a real coup, something planned, he’d have used the riot as an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act in a far-fetched bid to stay in the White House by bullying members of Congress and hoping the Supreme Court would somehow let this slide.
When he failed to do that his last even theoretical chance of overturning the election result evaporated. In reality, that wasn’t possible anyway - nothing Mike Pence or any rioter on January 6th could have done would ever have granted Trump a second term. You can’t coup your way into the Executive Branch- the US Constitution simply doesn’t work that way. Anyone who seriously tried it would cause the dissolution of the union. Once the states had certified their electors the prior December the election was legally decided. All that could possibly have happened after was a failure to certify Biden’s election.
This process has always been a formality; even in the craziest scenario imaginable between state-level certification of the results and inauguration day, the presidential line of succession kicks in the moment there is no president. Presidential terms have a hard end date; they can’t be extended. If for some reason there is no president, whether through death or some issue with the election, the Speaker of the House becomes acting president. The Founders made absolutely sure the USA can’t ever have a legitimate dictator for life.
US partisans who dearly want to believe that January 6th was a coup attempt and that Democrats are The Resistance to fascism in America should note that, in the universe where the January 6th rioters somehow stopped Biden’s official inauguration, Nancy Pelosi would have wound up as acting president. If she hadn’t made it out alive then whoever House Democrats voted in to replace her would have replaced Trump. Now wouldn’t that have been the very embodiment of irony?
I’m all for calling Hitler when it’s justified. Putin sure is russia’s version. But with Trump the best evidence points to him being exactly what he’s always appeared: a lousy excuse for a human being who learned how to exploit a system that enables him every step of the way. All Trump was really after was an excuse to spend the next four years playing golf in Florida loudly pretending to anyone who would listen that he wasn’t a loser. Frankly, he’s turning into a useful stress test of the American system. The Founders did not intend the president to have this much power - time to neuter the office.
As for what Trump will do in a second term - the Democrats will quickly rediscover their love of the Senate filibuster, and best of luck to any Republicans who suggest doing away with it. After complaining about the tactics of the Republicans these past few years the Democrats will adopt them all. Suddenly they’ll be the ones worried about state’s rights, too.
I just can’t see the election devolving into widespread violence. It’s a remote possibility, but far more unlikely than the US media and UK Guardian would have folks believe - unless the media triggers a nasty feedback loop. When most states are controlled by one party, most National Guard units won’t have any trouble shutting down protests that get out of hand. For swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin, however, I can make no firm forecast.
Still: fire and fury signifying nothing, to continue my assault on Shakespeare, appears to be the order of the day in politics across the globe. It’s pretty weird living through the death of the Postwar Order.
Putin’s Summer 2024 Campaign: Month One
The past month of fighting on the various active fronts offer a stark portrait of a military machine totally incapable of taking advantage of a unique chance. Moscow wasn’t going to be able to fire ten shells for every one Ukraine can muster forever when political deadlock in the USA had also halted arms supplies. Mass has a quality all its own, a truth the Red and Soviet military machines both relied on.
Yet despite Ukraine’s own personnel and ammunition shortages it has proven able to leverage drones well enough to compensate. While Moscow was the first to introduce large numbers of first-person view (FPV) drones to the battlefield, it was Ukrainians who began fielding them in concentrated groups to strike individual pieces of equipment and even soldiers. Where orc Lancet drones are aimed at either Ukrainian fortifications, armored vehicles, or artillery pieces up to a hundred kilometers behind the frontline, Ukraine’s battlefield drones operate as cheap short-range guided missiles and mortar rounds.
While Lancets are among the most effective ruscist innovations of the past few years, they can’t compensate for the dismal performance of other orc military systems. Cheap drones are proving to be an effective solution to the challenge of physical mass, and they’re also posing a challenge to the introduction of ground drones, which have to navigate more complex terrain and are invariably more expensive.
Moscow might think that it has enough bodies to throw at Ukraine to eventually win, but the more that these meet with explosives the less sustainable the exchange becomes. Ukraine supposedly has the ability to manufacture a hundred thousand drones each month - even if only one in ten hits a target that amounts to hundreds of pieces of lost equipment and thousands of lives. The situation much resembles the early years of the First World War where Britain, France, and Russia in particular learned that machine guns made dense infantry charges over open ground suicidal.
Now that Ukraine is again receiving more standard howitzer shells, rocket ammunition, and long-range missiles in addition to producing all these small drones, the orcs are having an even tougher time moving forward. That it is taking time to fully replenish all of Ukraine’s active brigades and expand the number of drone companies in its formations largely explains Moscow’s few successes over the past month.
Journalists have an unfortunate tendency to report any territorial gain as significant, as if war is a sport where very increment of ground matters. But the score in warfare is only an indicator, not the full picture, just like stacking up each side’s inventory of troops, tanks, and jets in an infographic ignores most of the factors that matter in determining how effective they prove in a fight.
Ideally, war really would be waged as a sport, anyone with a mind to sacrifice resources in a fight deploying their best brigade to Fort Irwin, California, to fight over Donovia and Atropia in a series of structured tests. Heck, they could even kill each other on live TV - awful as that sounds, it would beat towns like Vovchansk and Krynky being literally wiped off the face of the Earth.
For now, Ukraine’s efforts to minimize its own casualties by relying on drones while not clinging too tightly to territory for the sake of it appear to be paying off. Moscow is advancing slowly in multiple areas, but the pace is simply too slow and the casualties too extreme to overwhelm Ukraine’s steadily strengthening defenses.
Avdiivka - what Ukrainians are calling the Pokrovsk direction - continues to see intensive orc efforts to push west. Over this weekend they appear to have made another lunge towards Novooaleksandrivka from Ocheretyne and entered the town, indicating that Ukraine’s outer defense line here was likely pierced.
Ukrainian forces west of Avdiivka have been slowly pulling back for weeks while also rotating a couple brigades out of the sector. 71st Jager is now up in Kharkiv and 3rd Assault showed up to the north on the Kharkiv-Luhansk province border. 47th Mech seems to be dividing its time between the Avdiivka front and Krasnohorivka a bit to the south unless another brigade in the area like 80th Air Assault or 46th Airmobile received Bradleys at some point (possibly, hopefully).
Still, even with Ukraine committing fewer brigades to this front, Moscow’s pace of advance has not accelerated. And even if Ukraine can’t repel the push into Novooleskandrivka, Vozdvyzhenka (no, I probably can’t correctly pronounce any of these names) should be even easier to defend. I consider it essentially a given at this point that Ukraine’s defense plan in this sector is a fighting retreat behind the Vovcha. Two months ago ruscist forces were on the verge of their six kilometer push through Ocheretyne, and only now are they threatening to go another four beyond that. There they will face an even more challenging Ukrainian defense line, protected on two flanks by water.
South of here Ukraine is still hanging on to the high ground between the Durna and Vovcha. The orcs took a month after the fall of Avdiivka in February to reach the Durna, then spent another month failing to outflank Ukrainian forces holding the high ground on the western side before shifting the weight of the advance towards Ocheretyne. One of the neat things about UA map and Deep State Map is that you can easily go back and click through their once or even twice-daily updates to see just how long it is taking the orcs to crawl forward.
At this rate Ukraine will only fall behind the Vovcha between Karlivka and Baranivka sometime in late July or early August. During those two months this sector will probably absorb in the realm of 200-300 casualties a day if Moscow maintains the present pace. Ukraine can aspire to achieve close to a 10:1 loss ratio in this terrain given sufficient ammunition. Upwards of two thousand casualties in exchange for close to twenty thousand is a grim toll to pay, but in this war it represents a brigade being forced into the reserves in exchange for the destruction of an entire ruscist corps and almost a month’s worth of mobilized bodies.
The tale is similar in Chasiv Yar. Here too Moscow has made only slow, halting advances while suffering high casualties. For the past month the orcs have been struggling to capitalize on a push to the canal that acts as a natural barrier between occupied Bakhmut and Chasiv Yar. Finally, after four weeks of assaults supported by intensive shelling of the outlying Kanal bastion, the orcs have enveloped it and are on the verge of storming the ruins.
Here as in other sectors they’re trying everything from sending soldiers to the vicinity of Ukrainian positions on motorcycles to deploying turtle tanks largely impervious to small drones - until halted by a mine or anti-tank missile, that is. Then a drone finds a gap in the armor and that’s that. Moscow’s attacks generally seek to build up as many soldiers close to Ukrainian positions as possible while forcing them to engage, revealing their location and forcing them to use up ammunition. After blanketing the area with firepower the orcs attack, often finding that the Ukrainians pulled back in the meantime. Often they get to experience a counterattack, but over time the relentless pressure allows orc units to seep through and slowly push the line of control a tree line or street at a time.
The failed ruscist push into northern Kharkiv over the past month has proven emblematic of Moscow’s diminished military power. It’s no coincidence that Putin’s purge of the ranks intensified a couple weeks in. At least some captured orcs have indicated that the expectation was a rapid advance of up to fifty kilometers in days, something ruscist troops haven’t managed in two years. The goal was almost certainly to threaten Kharkiv with one wing of the advance then try to crash the rear of Ukrainian brigades holding the Kupiansk sector.
Predictable, detected well in advance, and halted in days, despite initial proclamations in the English-speaking press of a surprise attack that waltzed casually though Ukraine’s defenses, the orcs walked into a planned trap. Unfortunately Vovchansk getting flattened is the tragic and necessary cost, but Moscow’s apparent violation of some secret understanding with D.C. about the scope of the conflict finally pushed much of NATO to authorize Ukrainian use of donated weapons across the international border. This is a major win that will have lasting impacts on Moscow’s ability to prosecute this war.
Over the past two weeks ruscist troops have made more progress on the southern end of the Kharkiv front at the edge of the Kupiansk sector than farther north. This appears to represent another arm of an attempt to surround Kupiansk, directed against a fairly isolated area where Ukraine doesn’t have a dense concentration of troops. More flank-seeking behavior that could develop into a bigger push, but would need to be paired with new efforts in other parts of Kupiansk area or Kharkiv front in general to present a crisis.
Enemy operations in Kharkiv-Kupiansk and Avdiivka-Chasiv Yar look a lot like two separate double envelopment efforts that Putin would dearly like to have come together to form an even larger set of jaws to swallow up Donbas. As in other orc flanking efforts a crucial component are fixing operations in the middle that force Ukrainian strategists to contend with attacks from three different angles.
Moscow’s efforts to advance towards Lyman between Terny and Yampil over the past year and the renewed pushes towards approach Siversk of late are of this character. Around Bilohorivka, Spirne, and Vesele Ukraine’s 10th Mountain, 54th Mech, and 81st Airmobile brigades have been fending off some fairly substantial attacks. If Moscow substantially intensifies ops here they could be in trouble, but if forced to retreat towards Siversk they would still have a number of useful defensive positions set along a reduced perimeter.
This kind of smaller push is common on ancillary fronts, like Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, as well as the constant threat of raids into distant regions like Sumy. The main purpose of these operations is to keep Ukraine distracted, though if Moscow can take something it thinks has prestige value that’s an added bonus.
Robotyne has been largely obliterated, and lacking decent defensive positions Ukraine now uses it as an orc trap. Moscow sends troops in, Ukraine hits their vehicles on the ingress and egress, then dispatches strike teams to wipe out the survivors. Moscow might eventually occupy the place, but it won’t really matter. The same is true of Krynky along the Dnipro, where the orcs keep on launching attacks that Ukraine keeps on annihilating. So far there is no sign of Ukraine moving to expand its bridgeheads, but is likely building up supplies in the forests along the river. Fighting continues for Nestryha Island at the mouth of the Dnipro, where Moscow is rather foolishly trying to reclaim a place that’s geographically part of the Ukrainian-held side.
Moscow is also pushing up the Mokri Yali valley, retaking the town of Staromaiorske and launching massive strikes on Ukrainian positions in Urozhaine over on the other bank. These operations appeared a little bit odd until I started looking a little more into why both sides have been fighting so hard for the Vuhledar-Kostiantynivka-Krasnohorivka line for so long.
This represents a sleeper area: a zone where a Ukrainian surprise could do catastrophic damage to Moscow’s defenses across the entire Azov coast and Crimea. The key is the town of Volnovakha, just 25km from the front line where it bends from east-west to north-south in Donbas. The town is situated on high ground, but even more importantly than that it is a key junction of the ruscist rail network supplying its forces further west. To augment the flow of traffic from Rostov-on-Don and reduce the load on the Kerch Bridge and vulnerable ferry network, Moscow is almost done building a rail bypass located farther from the front lines, leaving the existing track to handle local units.
But even this new section of track still passes through Volnovakha. Aside from the threat of artillery strikes, if Moscow suffers a major defeat here the war is all but lost. The only reason that Putin has not prioritized this area for more intensive operations is that Ukraine has only a small group of experienced brigades assigned to the region, not enough to go on the attack.
If 10-12 fresh brigades arrived and could be supplied, especially if Ukraine could conduct the buildup covertly, a sudden assault could breach the front Along with pushing across the Dnipro to Crimea I see this as Ukraine’s most viable offensive option. The Surovikin Line isn’t as thick here, which is odd given the area’s importance. Moscow likely believes that Ukraine won’t be able to mount a major operation, however eliminating the potential isn’t a bad idea.
Finally, the Kherson-Crimea-Black Sea region continues to represent the soft underbelly of Putin’s empire. ATACMS, Storm Shadow/SCALP, and Ukraine’s own Neptun missiles continue to work with drones to render the region uninhabitable for major orc units.
Sadly, my dream plan for an F-16 raid using Harpoon anti-ship missiles on the orc naval base of Novorossisysk is highly unlikely to become a reality now. Whether because of this danger, the expanding threat posed by Ukraine’s naval drones, or a combination of both, over the past week it appears that the remnant of the Black Sea Fleet has relocated behind the Kerch Strait in the Azov Sea.
Of course, major ports like Rostov-on-Don are in range of Storm Shadow missiles fired from 50km behind the lines in Donbas, so even this move won’t fully protect the residual orc fleet. And by using its three remaining submarines to launch cruise missiles and pose a hazard to the maritime corridor connecting Odesa to the world ocean the Black Sea Fleet can continue to have an impact. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before Ukraine puts a decent passive sonar array and a torpedo on a drone…
Still, this is a pretty big win for Ukraine. The Black Sea Fleet is on the run, half or more of its major ships gone, reduced to being a launching pad for Kalibr cruise missiles - most are shot down, unlike ballistic missiles, which are tougher to hit - and ferrying supplies to Crimea.
Over the weekend Ukraine’s aerial bombardment campaign stepped up a notch, hitting three ruscist long range air defense systems across Crimea with ATACMS. Multiple radars apparently went offline, which in future raids will open a window for drones and cruise missiles to strike targets. Though the orcs are reportedly starting to disperse aircraft across different fields, once Ukraine begins to operate AWACS aircraft able to pick out ground targets at 400km it should be able to launch more responsive attacks to make these bases inoperable, or close to it.
Another neat though not operationally meaningful win came in Ukraine allegedly damaging or destroying two ruscist Su-57 stealth fighters in a long range drone strike. With only ten or so in service, that’s a heavy blow. They’re being kept away from Ukrainian airspace, but in theory could pose a serious threat to F-16s and AWACS jets straying too close to the front lines.
As this war drags on, the ability to accurately, comprehensively, and sustainably deliver firepower is determining each side’s relative casualty rates. Moscow’s bet on raw mass isn’t paying off any more than it did for Iraq in 1991. Aside from a few select capabilities, the orcs aren’t much better off than Saddam Hussein’s forces were. If Ukraine had remotely the same level of firepower that the US-led coalition did then, it would win back Donbas and Crimea in less than a year.
The New Red Army
Warfare is an applied science, one of the oldest. Clausewitz was correct when he argued that war is a continuation of policy. A powerful agent chooses to use force to achieve its aims and can only be prevented from doing so with countervailing efforts. These pool the efforts of individuals, sometimes numbering in the millions, in a context where the only rule is that what survives, reproduces itself. In short, war is waged by a kind of organism.
This idea has gotten people into trouble in the past. One of the biggest reasons why most systems thinking is rejected by postmodern academia is that some of the early proponents abused the useful metaphor of the human body to describe how broader society works - or rather, ought to work. They tried to say that some people and institutions were naturally suited to be like muscles and others the nervous system, the one telling the other what to do for its own good. They also held that the brain actively controlled all functions of the body to a degree that has been proven false by neuroscience.
While the nervous system obviously plays a vital role in sustaining life, they are better seen as steering and regulating rather than providing active direction. Many of the body’s natural functions are almost entirely autonomous, organs just doing their own thing until a biochemical imbalance forms somewhere that prompts part of the brain to intervene, and usually without our realizing it. Even higher order consciousness might not be as purposeful and directed as we like to believe - or at least, Buddhist thinkers certainly have strong arguments for this view.
Life is that which reproduces itself, and human communities of every size persist so long as they maintain a narrative about themselves that members identify with. This is why countries are personified in cartoons and corporations invest in branding. The human brain is primed for narrative; it’s an incredibly useful way to store and share information. One of its impressive advantages is that communities constantly update and adapt narratives, allowing for ideas to morph while retaining something of their original configuration.
For me, one of the strangest revelations of this war has been the degree to which military institutions are truly alive. Every defense organization develops doctrine, which is a kind of crystallized model policy that all members are supposed to learn and be able to apply in conjunction with colleagues. Doctrine seeks avoid unnecessary duplication of intellectual effort and generate a common language for professionals to use to avoid conflicts.
But every military institution is filled with people, and their opinions vary as much as their motivations for entering military service. This is a good thing, on the whole, because diversity of thought and experience acts as a powerful check on unrecognized bias that can and will produce lethal blind spots. However, people being people, they will always find a way to form tribes around some point of doctrine. While productive to a degree, when doctrine stops being functional in nature, bound to tasks performed and problems surmounted on a regular basis, they soon become dangerous.
It’s natural for people to want to hire and promote their friends. Unfortunately this is also the root of most dysfunction in an organization. There’s a natural tradeoff between ease of communication and breadth of opinion. Groupthink emerges to offer an illusion of unity that soon stifles creative dissent. Worse, members fight to preserve a system infected by groupthink until the cognitive dissonance becomes so severe that a small crisis triggers a catastrophic correction.
Putin’s orc military has, through generations of intellectual incest and the persistent groupthink this leads to, degenerated into nothing more than a pale imitation of what its leaders believe made the Red Army successful. I suspect that their slavish devotion to the myths of the Second World War are rivaled only by significant chunks of the officer corps in the United States.
Human organizations reproduce themselves in large part through education. Because their studies have a functional purpose - create a ranking system of graduates that purports to reflect their quality and potential - what they learn and how must be structured a certain way. An assignment or test can only be graded if there is a clear answer, something the actual applied practice of warfare will soon demonstrate is only rarely the case - or where it isn’t, the resources are lacking to do anything about it.
Most military professionals are keenly aware of the importance of education. The trouble is that they also naturally use their own as a guide. That generates an information loop that easily becomes corrupted, “truth” being seen as whatever a set of established textbook-writing authorities decreed.
And even where they are fully aware of the danger it is rarely possible to avoid some degree of structural connection with the past. The reasons that a defense force or even the organization it defends exist in the first place are always bound to cast a shadow on how its members must see themselves in order to become part of it.
The best antidote to this is a fully accountable defense establishment as bound to transparency requirements as any other government agency. Ideally, you also have a general level of defense literacy among the general public.
While the USA and most of NATO are certainly sorely lacking in either regard, they are still light years ahead of the ruscist regime. Not peeking behind the curtain of one’s own assumptions is something of a requirement for surviving in any dictatorship that concerns itself with morality. Living under an authoritarian regime requires suspending disbelief, accepting the public narrative pumped down your throat as a matter of personal security. It doesn’t help that the enemies of the authoritarians usually have ulterior motives or simply want to convert you to their own predatory nightmare.
In any society those who question the conventional wisdom can expect a degree of pushback by people who feel attached to it. That’s natural, because most of the time the conventional wisdom, if flawed, exists for a reason and serves a purpose. But odds are, if you have a population of independent minds throwing ideas out there, eventually a useful one will make it into the heads of the sort of people who develop policy. If people can’t even suggest certain things because these are taboo, you lose a check on groupthink.
This sort of basic, fundamental understanding of the nature of the world has a cumulative impact across an organization. It’s useful to consider the position of the average orc in Putin’s nightmare once in a while. Something I’ve seen more times in a drone feed than I care to count is a ruscist soldier doing something totally suicidal - up to and including literally blowing themself up with a grenade to avoid a drone killing them instead.
People in armies throughout history have always fought for one thing: the people by their side. Sure, as a group they might be motivated by king, country, faith, or simple pillage, but in the heat of a fight nobody is an individual just like nobody is an atheist or strict theist, either. Battle reduces everyone to an animal state - not some raving, savage beast (most of the time), but a living machine focused on the few things a mind can keep track of when the body is flooded with adrenaline and endorphins. Especially in modern warfare, where death is often totally random, the alienation from everything but the people you’re with is a powerful force.
Even the orcs care about their buddies - insofar as their system lets them. But basic training in Muscovite empire, whatever the incarnation, has historically been brutal and demeaning. Younger soldiers are beaten and abused by older ones; an ethic of exploitation is baked in early on. The senior privates in their turn embrace the system mistreating their juniors because that’s what they experienced.
Moscow has never build a strong non-commissioned officer corps filled with professionals who know their sphere of responsibility and aren’t afraid to stand up to an officer who makes an impossible demand. Instead, the ruscist military simply promotes soldiers who sign a contract to oversee the draftees and mobilized. Their job is not to train and develop those under them, but to keep the herd in line.
This mentality is reinforced by the officer corps, which traditionally has seen itself as a highly educated group distinct from the unwashed peasant masses. As late as the nineteenth century, when most of the modern narratives about Europe’s nations were being codified, Imperial Russia still had serfs, unfree laborers with few or no basic rights. It stands to reason that in an effort to maintain their power imperial elites in Moscow did all they could to present this situation as an enduring characteristic of the russian world. Only by proving your worth to the state can anyone not already part of the elite by grace of their birth join in the pyramid scheme - at the lowest level.
A supremacist mentality has always been impressed on native Russian-speakers throughout the different incarnations of the Muscovite Empire. They’re not all that different than mucky-mucks in places like New York City who proclaim themselves to be the guardians of “American culture,” whatever that’s even supposed to be. Moscow’s elites are merely more willing to resort to open violence instead of shame… for now.
So it’s small wonder that the orc officer class, as a group, treat their soldiers like cattle. Aside from the few truly capable smaller formations that manage to form and survive inside the thing, devaluing the lives of line soldiers is part of the job.
Hence every ruscist brigade or regiment on the front line now having an attached company of “assault troops” composed of convicts, press-ganged Ukrainians from occupied territories, and soldiers who commit infractions like questioning the logic of orders issued by officers far from the front. Behind them are placed Chechen or other paramilitary units as blocking units with orders to shoot anyone who tries to retreat. The disposables are then sent in waves to soften Ukrainian defenses so that better-equipped regulars can have a better chance at living through an assault.
The assault units are often wiped out in a matter of days, but constantly replenished -lately by mercenaries from Africa and South Asia. Often replacements have almost no training and some are outright told that they are there to die. The reasons that more don’t surrender are apparently the difficulty of surviving at all coupled to the authorities wrongly insisting that Ukrainians torture their prisoners the same way 90% of POWs taken by the orcs are. Yes, there have been incidents of mistreatment, but there always are. American soldiers did lots of bad stuff that nobody ever heard about.
But on the whole Ukrainian forces understand, just as most American troops generally have, that needless brutality doesn’t pay off. The more orcs that surrender, the bigger Ukraine’s prisoner exchange fund. And every orc that that leaves the battlefield alive and never returns is no longer an orc. Maybe some of the redeemed will soon get together and move on everyone’s true enemy in this war: Putin and his vampire clique.
Unfortunately, the orcs aren’t surrendering in droves like the Iraqis did. That’s a shame, and hopefully once supplies are cut off and radio connections to command severed more will make the smart choice. Every effort should be made to get through to those willing to listen.
The shortcomings of the ruscist military machine ought to feel familiar to anyone who has read David Glantz’ excellent works on the Soviet Army in World War Two. It’s having read many of these that makes it so starkly apparent that today’s ruscist officer corps is immersed in a mentality that views Soviet operations in the 1940s as reaching the pinnacle of military achievement. If you compare what the Soviets were capable of in 1945 compared to 1942 or the fight with Finland in 1940, the improvement looks almost miraculous.
Part of what happened was that the Soviet system out of pure necessity became more democratized. While political commissars were always around, the sheer distance involved in fighting across the Eastern Front meant that fresh ideas wound up being generated and shared. After the first six months, when Stalin finally stopped meddling in every detail after numerous self-inflicted disasters, the Soviets were so short on competent personnel that lying to themselves was no longer as much of an option. Even Stalin was ultimately forced to accept reality and adapted better than Putin ever has.
Ultimately, despite the Soviet system’s ideological domination by Lenin’s deluded vanguard concept, self-preservation forced a degree of introspection that led to radical change. It took a couple years of trial and error plus massive US support, but that along with Germany fighting on multiple fronts allowed the Soviets to turn the tide.
Nowadays it’s clear that Soviet officers have chosen to ignore everything before 1944 just like Americans usually do. This has generated a blind spot that Ukraine keeps taking advantage of.
The belief that we can repeat, that Moscow can simply out-produce and out-bleed all its foes, is pure delusion. Putin commands an economy half the size of California’s. Cold War stockpiles won’t last forever; they’re more than half used up already, and that means Moscow’s situation is even worse than the raw numbers imply.
If you’re yanking a couple hundred tanks out of storage to prep them for battlefield use, it makes the most sense to conduct an audit then pull the ones that will take the least effort to restore first. The farther you work down the list, the more intensive efforts become, meaning that the 600th tank out of 1,000 takes substantially more resources to “produce” than the 100th. In effect, the real drain on Moscow’s actual reserves is accelerating. This is likely part of the reason why it still has T-72s on the books but older T-62s and even T-54s are appearing in increasing numbers.
Once the orcs start losing combat jets at a regular clip, the otherwise deep ruscist reserves of these will decline the same way - probably faster, because a jet is generally more fragile and prone to breakdowns than a tank. Artillery systems are reported to be trending in the same direction. And the more technical the gear, the greater the chances of hitting a shortage of some critical part. Run low on any of this and Moscow’s firepower advantage decays. It’s already so imprecise that Ukrainian artillery shot is worth up to 3 ruscist ones.
What Moscow’s officer corps has apparently forgotten is that the drain on soldiers their military mentality demands nearly broke even Stalin. There are moments when many different futures are possible because old assumptions have fallen away - but they are fleeting, because the human mind abhors an expectations vacuum. We’re always trying to predict the future because the uncertainty is a source of deep concern.
To be promoted in Moscow’s military requires one thing above all else: report progress as ordered. Along with obedience comes an implicit promise made by the commander issuing the orders to protect the subordinate in the event of repercussions. To keep their job and get promoted, an orc officer needs to have a patron, ideally one with influence. Individual thinking is not favored behavior because to upset a powerful patron risks upending an entire career.
The system is essentially feudal in nature: while bonds do form between officers and their soldiers, true peership is between similarly educated men who go to the sauna to chat about important matters like career advancement off the record. You see similar behavior in any system - West Point officers have a habit of forming their own little unit-level sub-tribe - but in one like Putin’s where falling into disfavor can easily morph into becoming someone’s scapegoat it’s positively chronic.
And the rot only magnifies as it goes up the ladder because the higher the stakes the more desperate the players. One of the most critical side effects of this situation from a purely operational perspective is that the inevitable contest over patrons leads to information hoarding and other petty schemes. No one has an incentive to report bad news to their superior, and on the battlefield it’s easy enough to have people simply go missing.
The Soviet system had a long history of falsified readiness reports; it is reasonable to assume that at no point in the ruscist military machine does anyone have a solid understanding of what is going on in other parts. And even if they do, they won’t tell anyone else what they know. In a low trust environment there’s little benefit in being responsible for knowing anything your superior doesn’t want you to.
Putin is doomed to lose this war because there’s no way to develop truly effective policy no matter how powerful you are if you don’t know what you’re capable of. He has proven that the only enemy he knows are Biden and Scholz. And as Putin also doesn’t know himself, I’m pretty sure Sun Tzu would have as low an opinion of his chances on the battlefield as me.
A poorly wielded club can still do serious damage, though. And Ukraine needs a lot more gear in a hurry to transform Putin’s incompetence into outright defeat.