War matters, so promoting this conversation to a post.
Mister Grumpus asks:
> The narrative is shifting to the Russians managing to muddle through anyway, and the blue-and-yellow Ukraine flags have all but vanished from Twitter.
Ukraine has been attempting World War I tactics, which worked great for a little while, but they are starting to run out of troops willing to fight. Currently it is World War I, which is a horrifyingly costly and destructive way of waging war, and the cost is biting both sides hard, but seems to be costing the Ukrainians worse.
The problem with World War I tactics is that they rely on the fact that frightened troops do not flee artillery bombardment, they dig in. Which prevents attempts to advance no matter how much artillery the enemy applies. But when you try to move those terrified troops from the location where they were being bombarded, to a new location, they are apt to dig in their heels once they have been removed from the old location on the front, where the enemy has become become tired of attacking, and are ordered to go to a new location on the front, where the enemy is, despite the great cost of World War I tactics, advancing. So the Russians are having success by endlessly, unpredictably, and unexpectedly, switching from one segment of the front to another. The Ukrainians are trying to reuse troops, which neither side was very successful in doing during World War I. World War I tactics use up, consume, and exhaust your army.
We are now seeing very large numbers of mutinies by Ukrainian grunts. We are also seeing a deep reluctance of officers to go to the front.
> Has Has the steady grind of Russian artillery fire and Ukrainian logistical disappointment undermined their Info Epoch Warfare? Pulled the plug on it somehow?
> What I no longer see is video of tanks driving around. That must still be way too dangerous with all those man-portable missiles out there.
> Maybe Info Epoch Warfare is still the winning ticket, unless your opponent (Russia) is happy to just shoot many thousand artillery shells and advance X yards per day, and can safely resupply themselves via a fully protected highway.
The Russian computer network penetration effort has failed. Their state level hackers just don’t seem very good at it. Compare and contrast the immensely successful network penetration by American Military intelligence.
Last time the I knew anything about what state level actors were doing, the US had massive penetration of everyone’s computer network, and the Chinese were starting, barely starting, to have some success in excluding them. The Chinese were not even trying to penetrate other people’s networks, though maybe they are now. I see no sign of it. They demand companies insert of obvious spyware in their networks, which is quite useless because if you know where the spyware is, you feed it bullshit and bypass it for what really matters, and they send spearfish emails, which get the same treatment if you try to spearfish someone with half a brain. Russian state networks were, and recently still were, wide open. If you cannot defend your computer networks, you probably cannot attack other people’s networks, because you cannot identify vulnerabilities. Russian response to identified vulnerabilities has been foolish and self destructive, covering them up rather than addressing them. One should pay the hacker if he shows you how he did it and helps you to do it to other people, and prevent other people from doing it to oneself, attempt to find him and harm him if he does not.
Russia has been vigorously attempting human penetration of Ukraine human networks, with surprisingly disappointing success. I am now coming to the conclusion that to do human penetration, you need a shared faith.
Stalin had a live state religion, so had immense success in penetrating human networks. Russia is making an effort to revive its state religion, but in the Ukraine, nonetheless has had poor success. Failed to properly utilize Old type Christians, who are being vigorously and murderously persecuted in the Ukraine. The Jesuits had and have immense success in penetrating human networks, though their inner religion now appears to be serpent Christ. The Alawites also had immense success, with an outer religion of Mohammedanism, a middle religion that has syncretic layers of Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and at its center, the inner religion, the innermost religion, a mysterious faith whose nature is alleged to be pagan, but who knows? Only them and God. The Alawites have been doing this for a very very long time, since at least anno Domini 1100, and the touch of Zoroastrianism hints that they may be descended from a faith immensely older. They have good human penetration and immensely good human security.
Looking at efforts at human penetration, look faith based. And because human penetration requires lying, demonic faiths have an advantage in penetration, though they have a disadvantage in preventing penetration. I don’t see any obvious demonic symptoms with the Alawites, but given their very good human security, I would not. Maybe their inner religion has good distinction between lies that can be told and lived without moral compromise, and lies that cannot. Or maybe it does not. Hard to know.
During two millennia of attempted, and sometimes successful, hostile entryism against Christian state religions, entryist groups concocted ever more elaborate systems of ideas and rationalizations so that they could say the right things, in a sense truthfully, but with the deliberately wrong meanings. Which seems odd. Why not just plain lie? Why do creeds and shill tests work? Why have they gone on working for millenia?
Just lying works for the individual, but for the group, not so much, because your agents are apt to become double and triple agents. The best liar believes what he says, so you need a lie that is fundamentally incompatible with the enemy faith, but whose fundamental incompatibility is subtle.
Information Epoch warfare worked great for Trump. It has not been working for Russians, but they are trying. Maybe they will get better. War is a stern teacher.
> Maybe the Bayraktar drones really can find and disable artillery pieces all day long, but Uncle Sam refuses to buy more because Turkish Man Bad. Heck if I know.
Drones are costing the Russians a lot, costing both sides but mostly it is not autonomous drones, but simply dumb drones in line of sight of their controllers, and for moderate range often directly above their controller at altitude (the Ukrainians claim to have a very substantial advantage in distance drone vision) looking down on artillery battles from above. The huge advantage of autonomous drones is that they extend the battlefield all the way, which advantage no one except Turkey has utilized. In the Information Epoch, the battlefield will soon be everywhere. In the Armenian war, the Azerbaijanis gained a huge advantage by extending the battle field all the way throughout the entire disputed territory. Well, time to dispute the enemy capital. Which the Russians have been trying to do, without a lot of success.
Both sides have autonomous long range drones, though I heard some whining from the Ukrainians that they are mighty hard to use autonomously. Autonomous drones had immense impact in the recent Armenian war. Maybe in this war both sides are finding them hard to use. Needs better UI, and better mission controllers.
In the Information Epoch, the military needs high IQ warriors. Maybe neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians have them.
