We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Dropped to a ten-rupee jezail A scrimmage in a Border Station —
A canter down some dark defile —
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail —
The Crammer’s boast, the Squadron’s pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!
I thought of Kipling’s poem Arithmetic on the Frontier when I saw this picture:
“Russian navy ship appears to be heavily damaged in Ukrainian sea drone attack” – Sky News.
Here and now, I am glad to see an expensive defeat inflicted upon one of Putin’s warships at little cost to the Ukrainians. But the new arithmetic of war will not always give results that I like.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
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It all equals out, in the end. The continual see-saw between attack and defense favors no one side permanently.
Ukraine has the disadvantage that they’ve not got the legacy systems Russia acquired, nor the economic mass to build a navy, however small and essentially useless. However, comma… That doesn’t mean that they don’t have advantages of their own, like the need to do something about those Russian ships, the flexibility to try new things, and sheer desperation. Which tends to concentrate the mind wonderfully…
Guarantee you two things: One, the major powers are more likely than not to treat this war the same way they treated the Russo-Japanese War, and will likely ignore all the varied and sundry lessons to be contained within it. They’ll have their excuses, I’m sure, but ignore the implications of it all? They will.
Second thing I’ll guarantee you is that the next major war fought anywhere in the world will exhibit a bunch of epic dumbassery that anyone paying attention to Ukraine could have likely predicted and prevented. Because that’s the way it works.
We were telling the Army that there would be something like the IED campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan as far back as the early 1990s. We were ignored, ‘cos “…the Army won’t be stupid enough to get into a war like that…” and “…we don’t want that capability (armored route clearance) because if we have it, then someone will expect us to do it…”
Those are literally things I was told by the Department of the Army civilians and military officers who were then in charge of the US Army Engineer school, the branch proponency agency for Engineer issues. I think the history speaks pretty damn thoroughly of what actually transpired, and who was right.
Frankly, since the first time I saw one of these hobbyist drones being played with back in the early 2000s, I’ve been predicting something like what has happened in Ukraine. You didn’t have to be a genius to see the tactical implications of ubiquitous drones and all the rest, but apparently you do need to have something that our military hierarchy doesn’t have.
Hell, I wrote a white paper up describing the challenges of dealing with the whole damn “social media” issue, right before we were getting ready to deploy the second time to Iraq. I was laughed at, told I was sticking my nose in matters I had no business involving myself in. Then, there was a bit of an issue because someone basically put out the deployment order on one of the sites (I vaguely remember it being mySpace…) and, suddenly… There were policy letters galore, directives to monitor what the troops were doing, and on and on and on. Nobody wanted to acknowledge that I’d warned them, and not one of the senior officers who’d laughed at me could meet my eyes in the staff meetings where this crap was discussed.
Military organizations are not usually full of foresight. Or, wisdom. Causality and consequence seem to be dark arts, to most inhabiting that sphere… They can’t work out the cause-and-effect chain, for most of their decisions or developments in the outside world.
I understand that the brass has been warning about this for a while. In other words that destroying big objects is cheap and protecting them expensive. This may explain why so far tanks and aircraft have done almost nothing in this war.
Mind you, I do wonder how big a loss a landing ship – as I believe this to be – will be to the Russians.
But this is the modern type of warfare. The use of cheap to destroy the expensive. It is what happened to America in the Middle east — five dollars of IED destroying a $100,000 humvee along with killing a bunch of soldiers. It is what is happening in Israel, where the Palestinians throw hundred dollar rockets and Israel has to build a billion dollar Iron Dome. It is the essence of modern asymmetrical warfare, and it is compounded by poorly trained Russian troops (or in the case sailors). Presumably Russian ships have some defense against this, but probably very poorly operated.
The US Navy has an automated gun for dealing with this kind of threat called the CIWS Phalanx. It is truly a terrifying weapon. Even here though with this “cheap” solution, the weapon fires 4500 rounds per minute and each round is either tungsten or DU with a disposable sabot, costing $30 each. Which means firing this thing for 30 seconds cost $67,500. Which is, of course, a lot cheaper than a sunk ship, but is CRAZY expensive compared to the budgets of many of the opponents it is used against.
But . . . but . . . you can’t fight modern armies with small cheap weapons!
(Which is what I’ve heard for years as I explain that our 2nd Amendment is primarily designed to make government respect us.)
Once the Kerch bridge finally ends up permanently at the bottom of the Sea of Azov, sea lift of supplies to Crimea will be the only real option. A ship that can land stuff with minimal port facility support will be a very valuable asset.
Oh & of course NAFO has issued the following…
You train to fight the last war, not the next one.
But it’s about sending a message isn’t it? If they can deploy a drone ship, have it piss about with targeting off the bow of a ship, gradually approach and explode, they can do that with any Russian ship in the Black Sea, including those threatening the grain shipments.
A polite “Back Off” from your enemy is a message that even the Russians can get through their thick heads.
Sure, but far better to force your enemy to destroy it in retreat. The optics would hit home harder. To date they seem happy to knock it out of service for longish periods.
Which is all very well when contained in a warzone, but what about when some tech savvy ex Ukrainian International Brigade veteran decides he’s unhappy with “Just Stop Oil” or ULEZ and decides that dropping a Molatov cocktail from a drone is a way of making his views felt?
One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter and all that.
Same thing happens to a third party ship carrying grain out of the black sea etc.
Limitless deniability, ukraine did it to blacken russia. Russia did it to starve the world, blah, blah, blah.
Is it just russian incompetence that might stop this?
Or do we just hear what it has been decided we should hear? (Well, that’s been a part of war since time immemorial I suppose)
Hardly know that a dam had mysteriously exploded in an act of unprecedented “ecocide” only a few months ago.
Not been hearing too much about Ukrainian blitzkriegs either.
Maybe both sides are just running out of ammunition and negotiations behind the scenes have already begun. For the first time since, what Korea, two reasonably modern armies are going head to head and very likely neither has the means to decisively deliver a knockout blow. The amounts of ammunition being used are mind numbing.
The professionals on both sides probably know this but once the bitterness and hatred reaches a certain level – well there have been enough examples of that throughout history.
But, technically is it actually a war? There have been no declarations of war as far as I’m aware. While Russia has obviously invaded, should Vlad fall, whoever is next could well claim deniability and blame it all on the evil Putler.
Imagine if stauffenberg had succeeded?
A regime of good Germans, who had only fought tooth and nail for years to implement the Fuhrer’s geopolitical desires, would have basically said “wasn’t us gov” and would then have expected the west at least to say “OK”. And essentially just stopped.
I believe the Stauffenberg clique were of the belief that they could have more or less kept the borders of the reich – in the east at least – intact and even kept fighting – defensively of course – against stalin if they (with western agreement they assumed) deemed it necessary.
And the war criminals?
They would have been tried in German courts as decency had, of course, just been restored and there would have been no need for any outside interference.
I wonder what assumptions those looking to replace Vlad are making?
Meanwhile, the Royal Navy assures us in the most transparently evasive PR-speak possible that the UK’s second aircraft carrier, The Prince of Wales (built in a location apparently chosen by Gordon Brown) and presumably to MoD-spec, is coming out swinging after last summer’s little incident of a propeller shaft breaking in the Channel on the way to the USA.
Our enemies don’t even need drones, they can sit back and watch as our navy collapses at zero cost to them.
From what I read, the drone used had 495kg of explosive onboard, so it was really a kamikaze without the potential unreliability of a pilot. Perhaps the Black Sea fleet will adopt a fleet-in-being strategy.
There are now reports of a Russian tanker ship (civil) being hit, and damaged. Reportedly in the engine room, one more point about drones is that they may be easier to target towards specific areas of a ship if they are guided in, rather than a simple ‘centre of radar image’ of the early anti-ship missiles.
The Crimea was retaken by Russia from the forces of Islam in 1783 (officially 1783 – the Ottomans had given up in 1774), it was transferred to the Ukraine, as a 20th century Soviet administrative matter, in 1954 (Ukraine was not an independent country back then – but Moscow pretended that it was, that stance has come back to bite in recent years). During the Crimean War of the 1850s it was not the position of the British government that the Crimea was not part of Russia – but now it is the British position that the Crimea is not part of Russia, and as loyal subjects of King Charles we must support the British position – I certainly do.
Mr Putin appears to agree with Perry that the bridge to Crimea is not sufficient – hence the capture of a land corridor to Crimea in 2022, which the government of Ukraine is now trying to recapture.
Given the incompetence and corruption of Mr Putin and the rest of the Moscow leadership (who are useless) it appears quite likely that the Western backed Ukrainian forces will succeed.
I would comment on the film about money and banking – but the film has not been posted on this site.
Some of you might relate to the second most highly recommended comment posted to a Reddit Europe thread that led with the now-famous picture. Someone called I_AM_STILL_A_IDIOT says,
(War Thunder is a multiplayer video game. It does indeed say that a ground forces map of Port Novorossiysk is “available in all modes”.)
Were the Russian military a competent, highly coordinated fighting force, they’d be stuck into the occupation phase in Ukraine by now and any threats to Black Sea assets would be moot.
But they’re neither competent nor highly coordinated. Worse still for a putative “superpower”, they’re sourcing drones from Iran and artillery ammunition from North Korea. Something is very rotten in the state of Russian warfighting capabilities and there is a clear element of desperation in everything Moscow does these days.
Aerial Survellance “Spy In The Sky” drones were ubiquitous in Judge Dredd in 1980. If I dig into my collection I’m sure I’ll be able to find similar kamikaze attack drones from the same era. The comparison between small, cheap, highly mobile offensive units vs large, expensive, hard-to-move units is the major plot of Starship Troopers from 1960. As soon as drones became “a thing” it was obvious that somebody would strap a handgun or a bomb to it. Hell, the Japanese were bombing California with *TOY* *BALOONS* in 1941.
JGH…
You see it. I see it. Dozens of science fiction authors saw it.
Who didn’t see it? Highly-trained military “professionals”.
I worked under a bunch of those people for most of my adult life. The “rich inner intellectual life” that most of them had? You could have replicated it with a couple of Viewmasters from the 1960s and a random selection of the material they sold with.
They had all the books on the reading list, there in their offices, prominently displayed. Were any of them ever read…?
Nope. Most of them were entirely uncreased since leaving the printers.
The root problem here is the same one that exists across all of our society: We’ve been selecting and cultivating the wrong people for most of these “elite” jobs. We also look at all of these jobs the wrong way, whether its the lowly rank-and-file type of thing, or the highly trained executive officers. There’s no particular virtue inherent to being the executive; you shouldn’t get the automatic deference and hero-worship they get, just because they’ve been elevated to those positions. One of the most disturbing things I observed around the corps-level headquarters I worked in during one phase of my career was the sycophantic “yes-man” system in place around the commanders and senior staff officers. They’d mention something, and the next thing you knew, seven different policy letters on the matter had gone out, none of them really with the knowledge of the guy who made the original comment. Occasionally, one of those new policies would blow up, the boss would get wind of it, and the question he’d ask would be “What idiot came up with that idea?” The shock that it was him, and that a casual side-conversation he’d had with someone lower on the staff was a surprise.
Wrong people. That’s what it amounts to.
One of the very real issues to contend with that comes along with the whole “credentialism” social idiocy is that even the most correct and righteous of ideas can be sidelined and ignored, if it is coming from the wrong sort of person, one without credentials.
This strikes me as something that goes all across the Western social landscape. We are conditioned to rely on “experts”, who’re often only “expert” because they’ve anointed themselves as such, or because they “went to the right schools”.
Consider the way we lend so much weight to the pronouncements of graduates from Harvard or Yale here in the US. No matter how stupid the idea, if it’s got someone from either school saying it’s a grand idea, utterly true, there will be enough people in society that will nod along with it and enact it into policy. Same syndrome is present in the UK and France; consider the absolute idiocy that the French have enacted, just because some graduate of one of the grande école schools “said so”.
Note how even the most unavoidable truth, spoken by someone lacking those wonderful credentials, will be subject to ridicule and derogation simply because of who it was that came up with it.
We’ve gone seriously off the rails across our social structure. What we’ve managed to do is leave reason and pragmatism behind, essentially reinventing the ancient Chinese system of mandarins, whose mastery of Confucian philosophy guaranteed their primacy in Chinese society. Which led to endless stagnation and damage to Chinese civilization, rendering them unable to recognize things that weren’t amenable to Confucian thought. It was the mandarin class that shut down Zheng He’s trade fleets; it was the mandarin class that chose to isolate China and fail to join with the Western nations that came trading, which led directly to the extreme disadvantage that China was at when those nations sped past them technologically.
We’re making the same mistakes, for a lot of the same reasons. When the idea is correct, it makes no difference who says it; a truth is true whether or not it is mouthed by a graduate of Harvard or someone who never entered into an “institution of higher learning”.
The fact we can’t recognize that fact is what’s killing our civilization.
Kirk writes, in what could be a Samizdata Quote for Eternity
When the idea is correct, it makes no difference who says it; a truth is true whether or not it is mouthed by a graduate of Harvard or someone who never entered into an “institution of higher learning”.
The fact we can’t recognize that fact is what’s killing our civilization.
Another thing that is not just holding us back but pulling us back is that three words thatare used by and help untalented but ambitious people in all organisations, military or civilian, public or private sector are ‘Good idae, boss,’
It also happened to HMS York in 1941…
“But the new arithmetic of war will not always give results that I like.”
A nice cheap landmine can immobilise, ie mission kill a Leopard II or Challenger as easily as it can a T54. It is not new, of course, as was proved, for example by the Sagger and RPG in 1973. It has always been the case that large and expensive mobile machinery is vulnerable to well placed and cheaper defensive technology. It has also always been true that warships are more vulnerable they closer they are to land. That was proven at the Dardanellles, off Singapore and at the Falkland Islands, among other places.