It appears that today might be chalked up as the day Avdiivka fell to the Russian Army. Something tells me that battle will reveal itself as a significant event in the history of sieges, and that there are particular and consequential lessons to discover from it. I hope somebody out there has been doing a careful job figuring out the mix and sequence of decisions, and the orchestration of effort and resources for the besieged and besiegers. Anybody out there know who might be in the lead right now as far as getting something trustworthy and comprehensive written?
Meta
-
Recent Posts
Recent Comments
- Geoff Demarest on Ukraine Multiform War
- Geoff Demarest on Maybe Ignorant
- George L. Humphries on Ukraine Multiform War
- George L. Humphries on Maybe Ignorant
- Holmes Oliver on Attrition Warfare
Categories
Archives
Calendar
-
I’d offer that the Ukrainians have fallen into the French trap of 1916-1917, and the over-commitment to recovering or defending territory.
Briefly stated, the German tactics on the Western front on that timeline often focused on taking a local sector, albeit briefly, and when the invariable French counter-attack would come, achieve attritional advantage via preregistered fires superiority.
Ukraine, unlike the French and Germans, doesn’t have a huge infusion of manpower and material from the US to expect. Nor are the Russians fighting a two/three front war, as the Imperial Germans were.
I think the important part is how the average Ukrainian soldier or citizen sees this. Rarely does popular sentiment matter, until its nearly uniformly negative. I wonder if the average Ukrainian sees this as the ebb and flow of combat, and while disappointing, not immediately crippling.
OK, Dude, a little bit farther below I’m including a small part of the exchange I had with Mr. ChatGPT the other day. Turns out I need a little more experience in conversing with him (or maybe Xim, I ‘m not sure). In any case, we had quite a conversation going before he revealed a data cutoff date of July 2023 for that particular issue. Wow. I then went to another of the several ChatGPTs offered with the subscription, called “Scholar GPT.” An improvement, but your answers are better than his.
In any case and to summarize, the Ukrainian government can’t raise the army it needs because of service avoidance. That’s the bottom line. All the other is contrived nuance and complexity. There is not enough national fervor for enough young men to want to go get killed in the mud. That’s it. So, “how the average Ukrainian soldier or citizen sees it” is not a mystery. We wander to easily into the fog regarding these things because we keep thinking in terms of what Ukraine thinks or what Venezuela or Poland will do. I do not think that the Ukrainian regime represents or presents the will or intention of the majority of people in the space we have mapped as Ukraine. Less so the population of young men expected to do the lift. Once we get that clear in our strategy-planning minds, the path ahead will reveal itself.
Here is some of the back and forth…
OK, wait. Because of the length of the thing, I’ve asked Holmes to post the rest of my reply on the page he set up as ‘Long Prompts’ Please go there to see the ChatGPT exchange. A lazy skim will be enough to get the drift.
The boundaries of present day internationally recognized Ukraine were completely a function of Soviet rule, for good or bad. There isn’t much reason more nuanced for why Bessarabia is part of Moldavia and Ukraine is because that was where the Red Army was in 1945, and the CPSU had drawn administrative districts and designated them states or regions according to its internal logic.
If the question of what the conditions for peace look like, it’s likely what they’ve been for awhile…when Elon Musk got in trouble for saying them.