Sorry, I got a bit carried away with this one. Emphasis added to quotes.
Ukrainian military commanders have changed tactics, focusing on wearing down the Russian forces with artillery and long-range missiles instead of plunging into minefields under fire.
If I were sent to the US to train and the officer in charge started telling me that I should walk through a minefield, in the open, under artillery fire, I would politely tell them to demonstrate this tactic first and if they make it to the other side, I might consider following. I have read many stories about the benefits to soldiers of playing war games like Call of Duty. Good for the reactions, I’m told. Helps to get the troops in the right frame of mind. It’s one of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard but it seems to have infected West Point. I can think of no other explanation for teaching tactics like this except that the instructor has been convinced that you respawn if you get hit.
The complicated training in Western maneuvers has given the Ukrainians scant solace in the face of barrage after barrage of Russian artillery.
“The counteroffensive itself hasn’t failed; it will drag on for several months into the fall,” said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who recently visited the front lines.
Senior fellow at the fucking what? Why would you ask him for an opinion about war, then? Anyway, he continues:
“Arguably, the problem was in the assumption that with a few months of training, Ukrainian units could be converted into fighting more the way American forces might fight, leading the assault against a well-prepared Russian defense, rather than helping Ukrainians fight more the best way they know how.”
… the Western-trained brigades received only four to six weeks of combined arms training, and units made several mistakes at the start of the counteroffensive in early June that set them back, according to U.S. officials and analysts[.]
So teach Ukrainians how to fight then, when this fails, blame the period of training and the Russians. It couldn’t be that US tactics are dogshit, could it? Is it beyond the realm of possibility that tactics developed to make arms dealers as much money as possible aren’t going to be the most effective at ending a war quickly and minimising loss of life? Further, if you can’t supply Ukraine with artillery, which appears to be the major sticking point in all this, how can you conclude that it hasn’t failed? Just because it hasn’t failed yet; if you’re not going to be able to supply it with the one thing that might tip the balance, it will fail eventually. This rhetoric is that of a gambler who’s willing to bet with other peoples’ lives and property but not their own.
Turns out that the training officer and the senior fellow are the mouthpieces of the ghouls:
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has increasingly signaled that his strategy is to wait out Ukraine and its allies and win the war by exhausting them. American officials are worried that Ukraine’s return to its old tactics risks that it will race through precious ammunition supplies, which could play into Mr. Putin’s hands and disadvantage Ukraine in a war of attrition. …
Military experts said that using newly learned tactics for the first time was always going to be hard, especially given that the Russian response was to assume a defensive crouch and fire massive barrages of artillery.
Zelensky:
added that “because we started it a bit late,” Russia had “time to mine all of our lands and build several lines of defense.”
Which means the west and Zelensky knew what Russia planned and knew that it had months to prepare its lines to execute its plans. Worse, it means the Ukrainians were never trained to win and Zelensky didn’t care. It confirms, yet again, the story that NATO plans to fight to the last Ukrainian, as a way of destroying Ukraine and of witting down Russian supplies. NATO has a choice: attrition of troops or attrition of supplies. Then it duped the Ukrainians into believing that attrition of troops was the better option. The west is making no friends in this war and Europeans should be wary of so deeply betraying a trusting next-door neighbour.
Zelensky:
“We did have plans to start it in the spring, but we didn’t because, frankly, we had not enough munitions and armaments and not enough properly trained brigades — I mean, properly trained in these weapons[.]”
Is this a slip? Was he admitting that he knew the yanks hadn’t sent enough ammo. Then his handler gave the signal and he clarifies that he meant his soldiers didn’t know how to use the ammo that they definitely did have. (Off screen, there’s a pile of six shells, which an army of thousands is supposed to share once they have been trained to use them.)
Imagine trusting an ‘ally’ to train your troops when their key proposal is that you need to figure out a way to do it with courage but without weapons, as reported in the WSJ:
When Ukraine launched its big counteroffensive this spring, Western military officials knew Kyiv didn’t have all the training or weapons—from shells to warplanes—that it needed to dislodge Russian forces. But they hoped Ukrainian courage and resourcefulness would carry the day.
Back to the NY Times article:
Biden administration officials had hoped the nine Western-trained brigades, some 36,000 troops, would show that the American way of warfare was superior to the Russian approach.
Laughable if it wasn’t so tragic. I do wonder whether Ukrainian troops have access to western articles about the war. Probably not considering how fast it would likely demoralise the troops. The NATO strategy is so fucking blatant:
Western officials championed that approach as more efficient than the costly strategy of wearing Russian forces down by attrition, which threatens to deplete Ukraine’s ammunition stocks.
This provides fitting imagery for the US war machine—here’s $44 billion worth of support but there’s not enough ammo to last the month. It’s like getting a remote control car for Christmas but no batteries. And they admit it, again and again:
Much of the training involved teaching Ukrainian troops how to go on the offensive rather than stay on defense. … When Moscow began its full-scale invasion last year, Ukrainian troops put their defensive operations into play, denying Russia the swift victory it had anticipated.
NATO knew the Ukrainians knew how to fight and instead of supporting them with the only thing they needed—weapons—they propagandised them into thinking they could win without more weapons. How much do you think the training was watching Hollywood war movies where actors win they day with their own personal grit and determination?
This is why liberalism is terminal. Liberals are fundamentally unable to consider material reality and must always fall back on idealism. Their worldview does not invite any other way of thinking. Here, that means believing a US-backed Ukraine can hope to win despite the known impossibility of providing enough ammunition to do so. There’s some military accountant in the Pentagon pleading with their superior to listen as they explain all this before they resign themselves to another day of fudging the books. More:
Ukraine may well return to the American way of warfare if it breaks through dug-in Russian defenses, some military experts said.
And just in case this death cult idealism wasn’t clear enough, from the most ironically named officer in history:
General Breedlove concurred and said he still expected the Ukrainian counteroffensive to put Russia at a disadvantage.
They won’t break through without ammunition! Why report this as if breaking through is remotely possible? (I’m not saying will always be impossible, but under current arrangements I don’t see how anything will change.) Still, the reality won’t slow down Breedlove or prevent the reporter from using his words to present a conclusion that is entirely at odds with the evidence in the article:
“The Ukrainians are in a place now where they understand how they want to employ their forces,” he said. “And we’re starting to see the Russians move backwards.”
Now the west wonders why the Ukrainians are using their own methods? Maybe they’re starting to see that NATO is more of an enemy than Russia. Hopefully this means the Ukrainians tell NATO to fuck off and the war might be over soon. I always have been optimistic, though.
This really blows my mind. Like, this is just propaganda aimed at the people, right? The higher ups don’t actually believe this stuff? The Americans weren’t really going into this thinking their way of war was inherently “superior” and that alone would mean they would win?
It’s kind of terrifying to think that these top military generals talk about war so incompetently that I feel like I could do a better job after playing a couple of Total War games.
That might be the question of our age: How much do the decision-makers understand?
Talking from personal experience: not much. I think a lot of it does come down to idealism and faulty models. There will be people at the very top who understand materialism (and class). But how far up do you need to go to get to the top? And lower down? They don’t teach any kind of dialectical materialism in universities for the most part. Almost everything taught must be compatible with liberalism.
It’s like accountants, etc. They can be as highly educated, accomplished, and as high up as you like. But for the most part, they still get it wrong. They will scream till they’re blue in the face that the company can’t afford a pay rise because of XYZ common-sense-reasons. Then the workers will strike, suddenly the money for the pay rise appears. And these accountants will just blank out – forever – the fact that they were 100% sure and yet 100% wrong; because money doesn’t work like they think it does. The reality will not deter them at all from being 100% confident and wrong next time. They’re convinced of premises that don’t match the material world and simply living through a different truth is insufficient to shake those premises.
Journalism like this is certainly propaganda. The truth is in there, but you have to dig for it and the narrative leaves the reader with the opposite impression of what is happening. I imagine the top military brass knows the reality a little more but their worldview won’t let them see it in many cases. Like the accountants, I would bet that there are generals whose liberalism simply won’t let them see the truth. No new empirical data will change the way that they fundamentally conceive of the world.
Partly, for the e.g. the general and the accountant, they won’t be able to see the truth because their material conditions won’t allow for it. If those who ‘run’ the military were to let themselves see how irresponsible it is to commodify the military, they would never agree to take their troops to war. All that many of these individuals will remember after every conflict is that they won their skirmishes, therefore the overall narrative of US superiority and exceptionalism remains true; even if the US ‘loses’ one war after another for decades.
(The US doesn’t really ‘lose’ any war even when it ‘loses’ because the point is rarely to win but to participate to make profit and destroy something that will need to be rebuilt by US imperialists.)
It’s no surprise that China, insisting on applying materialist dialectics to every problem and every solution, as did the USSR before it (for a time 😔), is racing ahead in every field. That can happen when you accept reality for what it is. Do the ‘higher ups’ believe the bullshit? That might be why the world is in the mess that it’s in.
I guess the thing that worries me the most about this idea is that if the top brass do believe their own nonsense, they might start a war with China because they’ve bought into all the anti-China propaganda they’ve made up. And when they fight that war, and don’t get the instant victory they thought they would, I’m terrified of what they might do to make sure that even if they can’t “win” they will at least make sure China “loses.”
From the leaked intelligence documents (see https://lemmygrad.ml/post/594109 ), even the military is working off of Oryx and whatever the Ukrainians tell them. In other words, the capability to properly assess their foe is already compromised by deliberate propagandizing before the usual friction that makes assessment difficult.
For the regular congress people who are supposed to hold a leash on the military, their information is most certainly from regular newspapers and think tanks who are on the slava train. It was only it became impossible to lie and obfuscate success that the newspapers and think tanks walked away from unconditional slavaing.
I don’t know if this could be considered “good news” or terrifying news. If the US has such a lack of understanding of their own capabilities, they’re likely to push much more aggressively, thinking they would automatically win. On the other hand, their lack of understanding means they would fall short in an actual war with a comparable military to their own.
Sorry, I got a bit carried away with this one. Emphasis added to quotes.
If I were sent to the US to train and the officer in charge started telling me that I should walk through a minefield, in the open, under artillery fire, I would politely tell them to demonstrate this tactic first and if they make it to the other side, I might consider following. I have read many stories about the benefits to soldiers of playing war games like Call of Duty. Good for the reactions, I’m told. Helps to get the troops in the right frame of mind. It’s one of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard but it seems to have infected West Point. I can think of no other explanation for teaching tactics like this except that the instructor has been convinced that you respawn if you get hit.
Exactly what Mearsheimer predicted, then.
Senior fellow at the fucking what? Why would you ask him for an opinion about war, then? Anyway, he continues: “Arguably, the problem was in the assumption that with a few months of training, Ukrainian units could be converted into fighting more the way American forces might fight, leading the assault against a well-prepared Russian defense, rather than helping Ukrainians fight more the best way they know how.”
So teach Ukrainians how to fight then, when this fails, blame the period of training and the Russians. It couldn’t be that US tactics are dogshit, could it? Is it beyond the realm of possibility that tactics developed to make arms dealers as much money as possible aren’t going to be the most effective at ending a war quickly and minimising loss of life? Further, if you can’t supply Ukraine with artillery, which appears to be the major sticking point in all this, how can you conclude that it hasn’t failed? Just because it hasn’t failed yet; if you’re not going to be able to supply it with the one thing that might tip the balance, it will fail eventually. This rhetoric is that of a gambler who’s willing to bet with other peoples’ lives and property but not their own.
Turns out that the training officer and the senior fellow are the mouthpieces of the ghouls:
Zelensky:
Which means the west and Zelensky knew what Russia planned and knew that it had months to prepare its lines to execute its plans. Worse, it means the Ukrainians were never trained to win and Zelensky didn’t care. It confirms, yet again, the story that NATO plans to fight to the last Ukrainian, as a way of destroying Ukraine and of witting down Russian supplies. NATO has a choice: attrition of troops or attrition of supplies. Then it duped the Ukrainians into believing that attrition of troops was the better option. The west is making no friends in this war and Europeans should be wary of so deeply betraying a trusting next-door neighbour.
Zelensky:
Is this a slip? Was he admitting that he knew the yanks hadn’t sent enough ammo. Then his handler gave the signal and he clarifies that he meant his soldiers didn’t know how to use the ammo that they definitely did have. (Off screen, there’s a pile of six shells, which an army of thousands is supposed to share once they have been trained to use them.)
Imagine trusting an ‘ally’ to train your troops when their key proposal is that you need to figure out a way to do it with courage but without weapons, as reported in the WSJ:
Back to the NY Times article:
Laughable if it wasn’t so tragic. I do wonder whether Ukrainian troops have access to western articles about the war. Probably not considering how fast it would likely demoralise the troops. The NATO strategy is so fucking blatant:
This provides fitting imagery for the US war machine—here’s $44 billion worth of support but there’s not enough ammo to last the month. It’s like getting a remote control car for Christmas but no batteries. And they admit it, again and again:
NATO knew the Ukrainians knew how to fight and instead of supporting them with the only thing they needed—weapons—they propagandised them into thinking they could win without more weapons. How much do you think the training was watching Hollywood war movies where actors win they day with their own personal grit and determination?
This is why liberalism is terminal. Liberals are fundamentally unable to consider material reality and must always fall back on idealism. Their worldview does not invite any other way of thinking. Here, that means believing a US-backed Ukraine can hope to win despite the known impossibility of providing enough ammunition to do so. There’s some military accountant in the Pentagon pleading with their superior to listen as they explain all this before they resign themselves to another day of fudging the books. More:
And just in case this death cult idealism wasn’t clear enough, from the most ironically named officer in history:
They won’t break through without ammunition! Why report this as if breaking through is remotely possible? (I’m not saying will always be impossible, but under current arrangements I don’t see how anything will change.) Still, the reality won’t slow down Breedlove or prevent the reporter from using his words to present a conclusion that is entirely at odds with the evidence in the article:
Now the west wonders why the Ukrainians are using their own methods? Maybe they’re starting to see that NATO is more of an enemy than Russia. Hopefully this means the Ukrainians tell NATO to fuck off and the war might be over soon. I always have been optimistic, though.
This really blows my mind. Like, this is just propaganda aimed at the people, right? The higher ups don’t actually believe this stuff? The Americans weren’t really going into this thinking their way of war was inherently “superior” and that alone would mean they would win?
It’s kind of terrifying to think that these top military generals talk about war so incompetently that I feel like I could do a better job after playing a couple of Total War games.
That might be the question of our age: How much do the decision-makers understand?
Talking from personal experience: not much. I think a lot of it does come down to idealism and faulty models. There will be people at the very top who understand materialism (and class). But how far up do you need to go to get to the top? And lower down? They don’t teach any kind of dialectical materialism in universities for the most part. Almost everything taught must be compatible with liberalism.
It’s like accountants, etc. They can be as highly educated, accomplished, and as high up as you like. But for the most part, they still get it wrong. They will scream till they’re blue in the face that the company can’t afford a pay rise because of XYZ common-sense-reasons. Then the workers will strike, suddenly the money for the pay rise appears. And these accountants will just blank out – forever – the fact that they were 100% sure and yet 100% wrong; because money doesn’t work like they think it does. The reality will not deter them at all from being 100% confident and wrong next time. They’re convinced of premises that don’t match the material world and simply living through a different truth is insufficient to shake those premises.
Journalism like this is certainly propaganda. The truth is in there, but you have to dig for it and the narrative leaves the reader with the opposite impression of what is happening. I imagine the top military brass knows the reality a little more but their worldview won’t let them see it in many cases. Like the accountants, I would bet that there are generals whose liberalism simply won’t let them see the truth. No new empirical data will change the way that they fundamentally conceive of the world.
Partly, for the e.g. the general and the accountant, they won’t be able to see the truth because their material conditions won’t allow for it. If those who ‘run’ the military were to let themselves see how irresponsible it is to commodify the military, they would never agree to take their troops to war. All that many of these individuals will remember after every conflict is that they won their skirmishes, therefore the overall narrative of US superiority and exceptionalism remains true; even if the US ‘loses’ one war after another for decades.
(The US doesn’t really ‘lose’ any war even when it ‘loses’ because the point is rarely to win but to participate to make profit and destroy something that will need to be rebuilt by US imperialists.)
It’s no surprise that China, insisting on applying materialist dialectics to every problem and every solution, as did the USSR before it (for a time 😔), is racing ahead in every field. That can happen when you accept reality for what it is. Do the ‘higher ups’ believe the bullshit? That might be why the world is in the mess that it’s in.
I guess the thing that worries me the most about this idea is that if the top brass do believe their own nonsense, they might start a war with China because they’ve bought into all the anti-China propaganda they’ve made up. And when they fight that war, and don’t get the instant victory they thought they would, I’m terrified of what they might do to make sure that even if they can’t “win” they will at least make sure China “loses.”
From the leaked intelligence documents (see https://lemmygrad.ml/post/594109 ), even the military is working off of Oryx and whatever the Ukrainians tell them. In other words, the capability to properly assess their foe is already compromised by deliberate propagandizing before the usual friction that makes assessment difficult.
For the regular congress people who are supposed to hold a leash on the military, their information is most certainly from regular newspapers and think tanks who are on the slava train. It was only it became impossible to lie and obfuscate success that the newspapers and think tanks walked away from unconditional slavaing.
I don’t know if this could be considered “good news” or terrifying news. If the US has such a lack of understanding of their own capabilities, they’re likely to push much more aggressively, thinking they would automatically win. On the other hand, their lack of understanding means they would fall short in an actual war with a comparable military to their own.