Will þe Ukrainian Army Hold in Its East?, &
BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-04-25 Mo
FIRST: Will the Ukrainian Army Hold in Its East?
A very nice piece by Mark Hertling on why we should have hopes for the Ukraine Army during its current turn in the Inferno:
Mark Hertling: ’A few folks suggested I’ve been “bold” in some of my predictions accompanying the analysis I’ve provided on CNN regarding this conflict. Beyond tactical assessments, there are two primary reasons I’ve said Ukraine would win this fight. Here’s… why…. Reason 1: Conventional joint and combined arms operations are hard. Real hard. Exceedingly hard…. Doing so takes intense training of individuals in their specific skills, exercises that build the capabilities of interprofessional teams who pull those skills together, the understanding of complex equipment & doctrine, communicating intent…and great leadership…. All this takes time, determination, and repetitious training… develops develops teamwork, trust, loyalty, and camaraderie. Good militaries understand all this, and good military leaders ensure it happens…. Less-than-good militaries put conscripts under arms, field equipment with inherent faults, and allow corruption…. The second reason I’ve been bold is because I had the chance to see how seemingly small things contribute to big failure…. I was assigned as the Commander of the Operations Group… at our Army’s National Training Center… fight[ing] mock battles against a tough opposing force for a couple of weeks…. Good units polish their good things, fix their bad things, and the battle resumes. After three weeks units and their leaders are darned good. Not-so-good units don’t accept critiques, don’t fix broken processes, repeatedly allow small issues to turn into big problems, and don’t reflect on their own leadership failures…. A few years after serving at the NTC, and after a combat tour, I was assigned as a new Brigadier General to command the Army’s European training center at Grafenwoehr Germany…. U[kraine ]A[rmy] trained there & soon had their own training center at Yavoriv…. The few times I observed the R[ussian] army in training and exercises, or talked to their leaders, they didn’t seem to be “good units.” Comparing the 2 armies-even w/ seemingly different quantity of equipment-the expectations seemed obvious…. I’ll again be bold in saying Ukraine will persevere. I hope that isn’t seen as hubris, it’s just an assessment based on my bias about who will best face the challenges of combined arms warfare & which is the learning Army…
LINK:
I had a brief piece on the complexity of war-as-a-profession two months ago:
Ibn Khaldun called it assibayah: understanding that it is your group, that you have a job to do in order for it to properly perform, and that your job requires the right kind of coordination. For most of history, a commander with assibayah handled logistics, inspiration, and delivered soldiers to the right battlefield; and soldiers with assibayah knew how to handle their weapons while protecting those standing next to them. And with assibayah, soldiers supplied who trusted their leader and found themselves on the right battlefield were nearly invincible. F——— phalanx. F——— legion. F——— knights. F——— longbowmen. F——— pikemen. And, above all (usually), f——— horse-archers.
But then, with the coming of personal firearms, it all became more complicated. It turned into rock → paper → scissors. Cavalry rode down musketeers. Musketeers rolled over pikemen. Pikemen drove off cavalry. And artillery was a joker that could break up the pike phalanx and disorder the other arms to render them combat ineffective—unless and until it was itself overrun. Tactical victory required combined arms, and the right kind of combined arms, so that their cavalry faced your pikemen, their pikemen faced your musketeers, and their musketeers were ridden down by your cavalry. As time passed, things became more complex.
And in all of this, (fewer) professionals could easily defeat (more) amateurs. And professionals could be defeated by better professionals who understood the principles of combined-arms warfare better. How is it that Arthur Wellesley could win at, consecutively, Roliça, Vimeiro, Oporto, Talavera, Buçaco, Fuentes de Onoro, Salamanca, Vitoria, the Pyrenees, Bidassoa, Nivelle, Toulouse, and Waterloo? (Note, however, that his siege efforts were often unsuccessful.) As von Clausewitz wrote: “war is very simple, but the simplest thing is very difficult”.
How much does the Ukrainian Army really know what it is doing? And how much of that knowledge can be transmitted quickly to replacements? We can hope.
Note: The best single thing I have read on all of this is: Daniel P. Bolger: Dragons at War: 2-34 Infantry in the Mojave <https://archive.org/details/dragonsatwar234i0000bolg/>
One Audio:
Lyndon Baines Johnson: October 9, 1964: Speech at the Jung Hotel, New Orleans <https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/october-9-1964-speech-jung-hotel-new-orleans>
One Picture: The English Throne from Edward III Plantagenet to Henry VI Tudor:
Blue lines are lines of “legitimate” succession. I have included Richard Duke of York because he was, briefly, a regent of a sort. And Henry VII Tudor appears in two places—as the son of Margaret Beaufort and Edmund Tudor Earl of Richmond, and as the spouse of Elizabeth of York.
Very Briefly Noted:
Matt Levine: The Stability of Algorithmic Stablecoins <https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-19/the-stability-of-algorithmic-stablecoins>
Timothy B. Lee: How Walmart & Google’s Wing Jumped Ahead of Amazon in Drone Delivery: ‘Drone delivery could be poised to take off in the United States… <https://fullstackeconomics.com/walmart-wing-amazon-drone-delivery/>
Duncan Black: Finally An End To The Woke Baquet Era: ‘I have no idea about the new guy, but I’d bet the biggest criticism from upstairs is that he did too much 1619, not enough Ohio diner safaris: "New York (CNN Business)Joe Kahn, the managing editor of The New York Times, will succeed Dean Baquet as executive editor in June… <https://www.eschatonblog.com/2022/04/finally-end-to-woke-baquet-era.html>
Pascal Michaillat & Emmanuel Saez: Figuring Out Efficient Unemployment <https://voxeu.org/article/figuring-out-efficient-unemployment>
Nicole Narea: The Michigan GOP Wants to Be Pro-Trump & Win the Midterms. Can It Do Both?: ‘Michigan is an early test of the political potency of Trump’s election lies… <https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23035549/trump-michigan-republican-convention-deperno-karamo>
Carl Bildt: What NATO’s Northern Expansion Means: ‘Although the outcome of Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine remains to be seen, it has already fundamentally changed the European security order. For the previously neutral Nordic countries, formal membership in NATO, long viewed as a strategic option for a later date, has become an urgent existential imperative… <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/sweden-finland-nato-membership-expanded-european-defense-capacity-by-carl-bildt-2022-04?barrier=accesspaylog>
Mohamed A. El-Erian: The Growth Engines Are Sputtering: ‘As important as these 2022 effects are… we also must pay attention to the IMF’s 2023 outlook… a medium-term… lost potency of growth models worldwide… <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/imf-world-outlook-revision-growth-models-failing-by-mohamed-a-el-erian-2022-04>
Twitter & ‘Stack:
Aaron Rupar: An Essential Insight About Propaganda: ‘Liars should be labeled as such, not amplified…. The Putin regime lies as easily as is breathes…. Yet there’s still a tendency among some in American media to treat what the Kremlin says as a “side” of a debate, and to take it seriously… LINK: <
Aaron Rupar: Trump’s 2019 Meeting with Zelensky Was Disgraceful at the Time & Seems Even Worse Now: ‘Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine hasn’t shaken his position that the onus is on Zelensky to capitulate…
Andrew Prokop: ’Somebody borrowed $1B in crypto to steal $182M in crypto, probably profited $80M in crypto, laundered it through the crypto money laundering service. Also this is about “beans.” I love crypto…
Corin Faife: Beanstalk Cryptocurrency Project Robbed After Hacker Votes to Send Themself $182 Million: ‘The attacker used a flash loan to obtain a controlling stake in the project… <https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/18/23030754/beanstalk-cryptocurrency-hack-182-million-dao-voting>
Duncan Weldon: What Were Central Banks Supposed to Do?: ‘I would also rather inflation was not as high as it currently is. But I’m equally clear that hiking rates to 5–6% would be a mistake…. I’m left wondering what the supposedly better counterfactual looks like?… A high Bank Rate would not have eased… energy… prevented… Covid-related supply chain disruption… eased the post-pandemic reshaping… away from services…
Paragraphs:
I am not so sure about what James Fallow calls the “brave effort” of May 26, 2004. It concludes: “We consider the story of Iraq’s weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation, to be unfinished business. And we fully intend to continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight.” That seems to have been an unkept promise. And not-keeping this promise has led to a New York Times that for four years assured me, several times a week, that Jared and Ivanka were horrified and were working diligently to save us all:
James Fallows: Two New Possibilities for the ‘Times’: ‘In May, 2004, barely a year after the U.S. invaded Iraq, the paper ran a major editorial-page statement titled “The Times and Iraq.”… People could differ about this or that aspect of the Times’sinternal reckoning. But no one could doubt that it was a brave and serious effort. Bill Keller, executive editor at the time of the review, had earlier come out in favor of the Iraq invasion. He oversaw this report as part of personal and institutional accountability for the role the paper had played…
LINK:
People say that Kahn is not nearly as divorced from reality as Baquet was. But he is under the same institutional pressures—those that generated five years of “Jared and Ivanka are horrified, and are working diligently to save us all” stories…
Suppose nothing systematic distinguishes workers from each other and jobs from each other other than their completely idiosyncratic matching values with jobs and workers, respectively. And suppose that workers searching for jobs and jobs searching for workers are symmetric. Then it is easy to see how this very nice result from Michaillat & Saez drop out. But do we really believe in these symmetries? And what non-symmetries do we think are important in determining what the efficient point on the Beveridge curve is?
Pascal Michaillat & Emmanuel Saez: Figuring Out Efficient Unemployment: ‘The unemployment rate is inversely related to the vacancy rate…. Servicing a job opening costs about as much as one job in terms of resources…. The labour market minimises waste when the unemployment rate equals the vacancy rate. It is too slack when the unemployment rate is higher and too tight when it is lower. Consequently, the efficient unemployment rate is simply given by the geometric average of the current unemployment and vacancy rates…
LINK: <https://voxeu.org/article/figuring-out-efficient-unemployment>
And then there is the big question: what does thinking seriously about these asymmetries lead us to, in the way of policies to shift the Beveridge curve in a good direction?
Adam Davidson gives history’s judgment on Dean Baquet’s system to make the New York Times’s “reporting” the opposite of objective in order to better position himself for what he thought would be the future Hillary Rodham Clinton presidency:
Adam Davidson: ’Dean Baquet and the N[ew ]Y[ork ]T[imes]… used] power to OVER emphasize minor Democratic issues and to UNDER emphasize major GOP issues…. Historians will remember this period in US history as a time in which a muscular anti-Democratic ethnonationalism emerged and sought to eliminate the country’s fundamental values…. [And during this] the N[ew ]Y[ork ]T[imes’s]… lapel-grabbing, attention shaping power has, largely, been used to focus the world’s attention on nothing issues, like her emails. Worse… Baquet has been explicit: if we report on things in such a way that more on “the left” consistently like and more on “the right” consistently don’t like, then we have failed… independent of the actual facts on the ground. This has directly impacted the day-to-day journalistic decisions of the N[ew ]Y[ork ]T[imes]…. Say Baquet had announced that the NYT’s role is to pay close attention to important issues and to cover them factually, accurately, and fearlessly, with appropriate context…. [Then] nearly every front page, every hero block on <http://nyt.com> for the last four years would have been different. The articles would have been different. Sharper. Better. More accurate…
LINK:
The world is now much worse as a result of Baquet’s “leadership”. And Dean Baquet cannot dare admit to others—and perhaps not even to himself—how profoundly he betrayed his people, and his profession.
Very nicely put by NYU Law Dean Trever Morrison:
David Lat: Dean Trevor Morrison Speaks Out About Anti-Semitism Controversy at NYU Law: ‘Dean Morrison…. "As members of a common educational community, we owe to one another duties that, in some respects, go beyond what we owe to the public at large. In particular, we are obliged to refrain from saying or doing things to other members of this community that entail “threatening, tormenting, mocking, intimidating, maliciously or inappropriately ridiculing another’s work or comments beyond the scope of scholarly inquiry”… treat fellow members of this community with respect…. The Coases thread at the heart of this controversy did not consistently live up to that standard…. Vigorous debate, disagreement, and dissent is vital to a university community…. But within the NYU community, such debate can—indeed, must—be conducted in ways that demonstrate mutual respect, and that affirm that we all deserve to feel safe as fully fledged members of this community…. Part of doing better is striving to find effective and respectful ways to have difficult, even painful conversations with those with whom we disagree…. The Coases listserv may itself be part of the problem here…. The administration may well choose to consider alternative communications platforms…. In the meantime, I would urge that the use of Coases be limited to the kinds of simple informational exchanges for which it was initially intended…
LINK:
I keep trying to write something about how a university needs to balance its role as a place where ideas are generated and put forward, a place where ideas are evaluated and assessed, and a place where scholars are trained and supported. I keep failing. Dean Morrison looks to be doing a better job than I do.
The Times is torn between two primal urges: to fellate power, and to preserve its gentility. The Post has the same problem on its op-ed page, but their reporters care less about gentility, at least.
Did you read the Isaac Chotiner interview of Joel Rayburn? "A bad army was ordered to do something stupid", is how he put it. His point that more realistic strategic objectives will do nothing to repair the logistical and moral deficiencies of the Russian army is persuasive. And they have already suffered significant losses ...