Jim's Blog

About eight months ago I said that the Ukraine was starting to crumble, and the war would likely end in summer.

Well, summer is over, and the Ukraine still stands, but is now crumbling a whole lot faster. Hat tip Defense Politics Asia:

Russia is still fighting a war of attrition, and will probably continue to do so, for whenever they try war of manoeuvre, get hammered. But war of attrition is spontaneously turning into of war of manoeuvre.

The Russians attack over a broad front. On some parts of the front they successfully advance. On some parts the Ukrainians hold their ground. Where Ukrainians hold their ground, they are apt to find themselves cut off, because to their right and their left, Russians have advanced. Conversely, advancing Russians can get cut off. Often both happen simultaneously, which commentators like Defense Politics Asia tend to interpret from their armchairs has clever planning by Russians and clever counter planning by the Ukrainians, but looks to me more like fog of war and chaos of war, ignorant armies clashing in darkness. So far, war of maneuver looks less like a plan than just what happens.

Because the Ukrainians are collapsing in a disorderly way, the Russians are apt to advance in a disorderly way, which leads to high Russian casualties — though obviously vastly higher Ukrainian casualties. Overall, Russian casualties have much diminished due to the massive decline in Ukrainian capability, but advancing remains a dangerous business.

Now it used to be that no one ever got cut off, because days would go by in gaining a single ditch, a single tree, and a single building. Everyone knew exactly where the enemy was. Now Ukrainian brigades just keep vanishing. They are sent to defend some spot, and never heard from again, and no knows what happened. All dead? Some dead some captured? Discovered they could not get to where they were being sent under penalty of death if they did not go, and all ran away instead?

Because of the chaos of war, Ukrainian casualties and disappeared are rapidly and massively increasing. Thus, for example, the Ukrainians did not successfully retreat from Ugledar, a fortress city that was key fortress holding the front line, equal in importance to the fortress city and officially unofficial Nato base Avdeevka. That they have lost both strong points anchoring their front line is a problem. That they have lost the men holding the Vugledar section of the front line is a considerably bigger problem.

We are hearing contradictory information that the Ukrainians are abandoning their Kursk adventure, and that they hastily rounding up new forces to hurl into Kursk. I suspect that both things are true simultaneously.

Attrition has greatly diminished the Ukrainian capability to fight, and thus attrition is now happening a whole lot faster.

This is likely to end in an Afghan style debacle. Lots of people are talking peace plans, but our rulers are too many and too incohesive. The Russians have no one to negotiate with. Trump promises to end the war in a day, but the Ukraine will probably have collapsed before his inauguration, and if it is still around, he might well find himself in an Emperor Hirohito situation.

Emperor Hirohito claimed that as emperor he had inherent right to make peace without the consensus of Cabinet, which he indisputably did. Some of the government disagreed. Strongly. Lots of bullet holes in the imperial palace ensued, and he had kill quite a few high ranking Japanese before his inherent right to act in matters of war and peace without cabinet consensus was accepted.

But obviously he inherently had that right. That is the fundamental reason for having a sovereign. If you don’t have a sovereign, or your sovereign is unable to make peace and enforce that deal on his own people, then you will have war, and likely an ill chosen war, or a war that was never consciously, intentionally, and rationally chosen. And if you go into an ill chosen war, and you are unable to make peace, very bad things will ensue.

World War I was such a war. Serbia was making both war and peace on Austria. Austria demanded that Serbia remake itself into a state capable of choosing between war and peace. It refused, objecting that this was a gross violation of its sovereignty, which surely would have been if they had had a real sovereign. Limited war ensued, or was about to ensue. The German army, without the consent of the Kaiser, invaded France through neutral Belgium. Total war, the first world war, the greatest war in History, ensued. Serbia started the war though lack of cohesion, and Germany vastly expanded the war through lack of cohesion.

World war two, on the other hand, was a war of choice. Hitler rationally and reasonably wanted German reunification, and thought he could get it. The allies rationally did not want German reunification, and thought they could stop him. So they went at it. Which in retrospect looks like a terrible mistake by both sides. A war is always a terrible mistake by at least one side. And because the Global American Empire has approximately a Dunbar number of despots ruling it, and these despots know neither the enemy nor themselves, the Global American Empire is apt to make terrible mistakes.

Five months ago I said “Ukraine begins to crumble” and said it has about six months or so of men and material left, but cautiously qualified that incautious prediction by adding that I am endlessly surprised by the Ukraine’s ability to scrape up more men and material.

Well, it is now crumbling considerably faster, but does not look like it is going to fall in a month.

Russia has been fighting a war of attrition, while the Ukraine has been attempting to fight a war of maneuver. In a war of maneuver, the side with the greatest willingness to sacrifice men and material has a substantial advantage. In a war of attrition, not so much.

All things being equal, in a war of attrition, one’s casualties are roughly inverse to ones numbers. If one has half as many men, one has twice as many casualties. If the enemy has twice as much men and material, one has twice the casualties. So as a war of attrition draws to a close, the losing sides casualties mount faster and faster, and the winning side’s casualties mount slower and slower. The Ukraine is now suffering casualties about twice as fast as it was five months ago, Russia about half as fast.

So the Ukraine is probably going to last longer than a month. But not a whole lot of months.

In Kursk, the Ukraine had a big success, in that it was able to attain war of maneuver, grabbing a whole lot of land without having to shell every farmhouse, ever ditch, and every grove of trees, without men dying for every ruin, every ditch, and every tree. But war of maneuver does you no good, unless you can grab what the enemy cannot afford to lose. The Ukrainian Kursk offensive resembles the German spring offensives of 1918. Realising they were losing the war of attrition, the Germans attempted to resume war of maneuver. And succeeded. But the maneuvers did not actually reach anywhere that mattered all that much, so that a decisive tactical victory for the Germans was also a decisive strategic defeat for the Germans.

Exactly four months after the end of their 1918 spring offensives, the Germans agreed to hand over their heavy weapons and disband their army. And they agreed to that because they were losing their heavy weapons and their army was disbanding itself. Since the Ukraine is run from Washington and Massachusetts, there will probably be no armistice. Rather, its army is just going to vanish.

The Russian response to the Kursk offensive was to create a defensive line alarmingly close to Kursk, and alarmingly far from the Ukrainian border, effectively conceding a very substantial amount of ground to the Ukrainians, allowing the Ukrainians a big tactical success, but ensuring a strategic Russian victory. The line would have put Kursk and the nuclear power plant potentially within range of Ukrainian artillery, but cities and nuclear power plants can soak up a whole lot of artillery.

The Kursk offensive was a big black eye for the Russians, but Putin did not allow it to distract him from the goal of eliminating Ukrainian military capability.

The there are a number of proposals for Nato escalation, for more direct Nato involvement, which are likely to lead to Russian measures to escalate against Nato — for example by Russians launching Russian missiles against American ships and bases from the territories of Russian proxies. Sweden and Blinken seem to be trying to start World War III, while Poland and the Pentagon are screaming “Stop!”

The Neocons insist that Russia must be defeated and seen to be defeated, in order that Russia can be color revolutioned, but a nuclear power cannot be defeated, merely forced to accept an unsatisfactory stalemate. Attempt to defeat a nuclear power, the nukes will fly. Something like the Minsk accords is a reasonable stalemate outcome, but the problem there is that Washington is not agreement capable, so I doubt that something like the Minsk accords are possible, even if everyone agrees that they are less bad than the alternative. Regardless of the outcome in the Ukraine, the drift toward World War III is likely to continue.

War is easy, peace is hard, in the sense that falling off a cliff is easy, climbing a cliff is hard. Large scale cooperation is difficult.

To accomplish peace, need a leader who can say “peace with the outgroup”, and everyone is at peace with the outgroup, and anyone in the ingroup who is unpeaceful gets sent to the outgroup, possibly in pieces. and who can say “war with the outgroup”, and everyone is at war, or hangs as a traitor.

The west lacks that kind of leadership. If Kamala is installed she will no more be the leader than Biden was. If Trump is allowed to be elected, it will be difficult for him to become the real leader short of sending numerous members of the elite to the Pacific in black helicopters for long distance swimming lessons.

Wars happen because some people expect one outcome, and others expect a different outcome. So prediction is hard, for if it was easy, the war would likely have been avoided, though as the war goes on, and on, and on, becomes easier.

Due to fog of war, hard to know what is happening now, or has happened recently, But after a while, it becomes obvious what did happen, which gives some indication of what will happen.

It has long been obvious that the west is run by demon worshippers, and with the opening of the Paris Olympics a couple of days ago, this should now be obvious to everyone. Demon worshippers want you dead. Well, they want everyone and everything dead, including themselves, but you first. The tactics and strategy of this war becomes a lot more intelligible if one understands that one side is commanded by people who believe themselves to be serving demons, or perhaps actually are serving demons.

The war started off with war of movement, as did World War I, but, as in World War I, both sides quickly became very good at shutting down the other side’s movement, and, since then, like World War One, it has been war of attrition.

The rationale for the Greatest Ukrainian Counter Offensive was to regain war of movement. Nato wonder weapons, Nato training, and all that. Of course Nato has not fought a peer war since World War Two, so have no idea.

Plus, Nato is completely structured about keeping commissioned officers nice and safe in nice safe bases, where they send grunts and non commissioned officers out to die.

I have long said that if you have one man in your army that does not fight, pretty soon you will have no men in your army that fight. Nato organisation is all about having no commissioned officers that fight. The left does not like warrior armies. Finds that it needs warrior armies, but has concluded it does not need a warrior officer corps.

This is partly the managerial state, the triumph of unaccountable bureaucracy over people who do actual things, and partly the leftist state. The left is priestly, and priests and warriors always conflict. So now we have a full priestly officer corps, which is a protection for the left against coups, but not a protection against insurrection, invasion, or conquest.

Ukraine, however, inherited from the Soviet Union a warrior army, plus the forces that made the Maidan coup were the Nazis, and a core part of their ideology is to have a warrior army and rule by warrior-priests. Nato looked down their noses at this insufficiently holy and progressive organisation, and has been re-organising them.

The plan for the Greatest Ukrainian Counter Offensive was to probe all along the front for weak points, then charge through at the weakest point, cutting off Russian forces to the west, thus regaining a vast swathe of territory to the west, without having to fight for every ditch, every tree, and every house.

The weakest point turned out to be the low ground between Russian controlled high ground. Ukrainian progress through the buffer zone in front of the Russian defence lines was very slow, and very costly, and when they finally reached the first line of defence, and occupied it, they had to bring troops and materials to it through a long and winding gauntlet along the low ground between Russian strong places on the high ground on either side. They got to the first line of defence, but were never able to get beyond it, for whenever they stuck their heads above the fortifications that they had managed to seize, their heads got blown off. The Russians had prepared their first line of defence to be indefensible against attacks coming from their second line of defence. The “weakest point” was a killing field, and the first line of defence was a death trap.

The Ukrainians lost an army, except for their retreat blocking brigades, and had to conscript a new army.

The interesting and extraordinary thing was the West’s stubborn persistence in a strategy that had turned out to be horrifically bad and entirely disastrous. Why did they just keep pumping more and more men into killing fields and death traps?

Partly it was the managerial state. The mid level managers are focused on on next week’s power point presentation, and demand that the low level managers supply them with with good bullet points for that presentation. The high level managers look at the good bullet points, and all is well, so issue orders to keep doing what you are doing, so the system as a whole tends to mindlessly pursue a short term, high time preference strategy, while generating meaningless numbers showing highly successful pursuit of a long term, low time preference strategy. The Russians on the other hand, tended to focus on winning the war, hence actually did pursue a long term, low time preference strategy, where they sought to conserve their resources for the final battles, brave men being the most important resource of all.

Partly it was demon worship. Those organising this war want Russians to die, but also want Ukrainians to die. The people who organised the Maidan coup are Jews with family reasons for wanting Ukrainians dead and the Ukraine destroyed.

The managerial state reinforces leftism, because being in contact with reality is a bad career move, and leftism reinforces the managerial state, because leftists do not like people telling them that reality is real, and both of them reinforce demon worship, because demon worshippers are fine with actual reality going to $#!&. All three depend on lies, each of them provides a different reason for lying, but a lie promulgated for one reason finds support from the other two reasons. The bureaucrat wants the right bullet points regardless of whether the bullet points meaningfully represent reality, the leftist does not believe that existence exists, that reality is real, and the demon worshipper just likes lies and lying. The confident inversion of truth is the demonic equivalent of prayer.

The Greatest Ukrainian Counter Offensive eventually petered out, due to lack of men, and lack of weapons. Nato is out of ammo. Nato troops have been disarmed.

In order to continue attriting the Ukrainians, the Russians were forced to go on the offensive. Since the objective is attrit the enemy, rather than gain turf, there are no big arrow offensives. Every ditch, every tree, every ruin, is gained at enormous cost to both sides.

It looks to me that when well trained, well equipped, highly motivated, battle hardened, experienced, Russian troops attempt to take a village from well trained, well equipped, highly motivated, battle hardened, experienced, Ukrainian troops, they suffer very high casualties and frequently fail.

Fortunately for the Russians, most of the well trained, well equipped, highly motivated, battle hardened, experienced, Ukrainian troops died in the Greatest Ukrainian Counter Offensive.

Increasingly the battles consist of experienced and highly motivated Russian vets versus barely trained reluctant Ukrainian fresh meat. The death rate among inexperienced Ukrainian troops is vastly higher than the death rate among Ukrainian vets. The number of Ukrainian vets continues to shrink. Fresh Ukrainian conscripts do not seem to be becoming vets, but corpses — in part due to a commissioned officer corps that is grossly out of contact with reality. If you want your fresh meat to survive to become vets, you need to issue retreat orders in time.

The Ukrainians have a troop rotation policy that should in theory result in fresh meat becoming battle hardened veterans, but this does not seem to be actually happening in practice all that much.

In part the bubble of delusion around the Ukrainian commissioned officer corps is a result of the managerial state, the triumph of unaccountable bureaucracy over functionality, the Natoization of the Ukrainian military. In part it is the result of leftism, for leftism inherently tends to solipsism. And in part, demon worshippers just like human sacrifice.

A few weeks ago I reported that the Russians were taking one or two villages every one or two days. Now it is one to four villages every day. Because the Ukrainians are out of everything, and most of all, by far, they are out of men.

This is reminiscent of the hundred days phase of World War One.

At the current rate of advance, it will be a very long time before the front line changes significantly, but the exact position of the front line does not matter. What matters is how much army and government the Ukraine has left. And the accelerating rate of Russian advance reveals that the Ukraine has considerably less, and that what it does have is shrinking every faster.

So the questions are:

1. Will the Ukraine make the concessions the Russians are asking for?

Probably not, because everyone in the Ukraine dying cannot possibly happen for the managerial elite, cannot happen and is unimportant for the left, and is a positively delightful outcome for the demon worshippers.

2. If they don’t make the concessions, when does the Ukrainian muppet government disappear?

Never, because the muppet government is located in Washington and Cambridge.

3. OK, when does the muppet government lose the ability to hold photo ops in the Ukraine?

And that is what is hard to know. Could be tomorrow, could be years. The sooner it happens, the more Ukrainians there will be left in the Ukraine. I hope for November, by analogy to the hundred days that led to the end of World War One.