Doom scrolling.
I tried to say what the press doesn't say, only to find that the press said it, systematically, after each post. But I realized that the blog was filled with adrenaline addicted people, who were looking for an opportunity to doom-scrolling, that is to fill up with adrenaline by dint of fatal news.
Yet, I have always tried to bring everything back to the simple, naked rational: if Ukraine joined NATO, and NATO put tactical missiles in it, defending Moscow would be impossible.
This is the simple, geometric, geographic rationale of this war. We can argue that Putin has put his narrative into it (as if the Western press were devoid of narratives) but the plain and simple truth is that as long as Moscow's side remains open, Moscow will try to cover it. .
It does not matter whether it is Putin or another, and it does not matter whether it is a democracy or a dictatorship: if Mexico declares a military alliance with the Chinese tomorrow and starts hosting Chinese troops and vehicles, it would end up in the same way as Ukraine.
And it has already happened with Cuba, which was the object of an invasion attempt. https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasione_della_baia_dei_Porci
Simply, the attempt failed for many reasons, and no similarities can be seen with what is happening in Ukraine.
But the point is that those who come here to doom scrolling are not looking for the rational part of the problem. Look for, more or less, a Hollywood movie that talks about weapons, strategies and field tactics.
But what changes? All the problems that plague this "invasion" have the same roots as those that made the Bay of Pigs fail.
That is, the secret services should NOT organize or direct wars.
Each body has its own culture. The secret services do NOT have a culture of war. They don't have a military culture. They DO NOT have a strategic vision in the military sense.
This seems strange because many people call "strategy" what is normally referred to as "military doctrine", they call "tactic" what is simply the armament of the army, and usually the military doctrine is not mentioned.
Let's try to understand each other:
- strategy is not something you make or invent. It is something that you read or structure, but if you have 9000 km of coastline, you cannot have a strategy other than "defending the coasts". If you have the Fulda Gap, you cannot have a strategy other than “defending the fulda gap”. If in front of you there are 6000km of plains before Moscow, it is not that the Alpine troops are sending us. And so on. And if the enemy has a lot of fortifications, don't send us the infantry to die. And so on. The strategist's task is to structure his global action in accordance with contingency, with material facts and with the immutable context.
- words like "blitzkrieg" or "blitzkrieg" refer to military doctrine, not strategy. Blitzkrieg is not a strategy. You can't decide to do it. But you have to structure your military to do it. You can't blitzkrieg if your logistics have a short umbilical cord. You can't if you don't train the officers properly.
- when we speak of "tactics" we mean what is normally confused by "strategy": to be clear, Rommel was a brilliant tactician, but he operated on a theater whose dimensions lead us to speak of "strategy". But Rommel did what his troops needed to win, he can't be considered a strategist. He was a master in applying his doctrine of warfare, (which he had practiced precisely in the battle of Caporetto), he had a very rapid reaction to events, but this in fact makes him an excellent tactician. The problem with tactics is that when it is explained in the case of the Romans, those choices that at the time were "strategy" (I put the cavalry behind, I put the archers on the sides, I move the infantry up the mountain) today are called "tactics" and they are left to junior officers.
Having said that, the point is that without an excellent knowledge of the Ukrainian terrain at this precise moment (mud, temperature, meteorology, etc) it will never be possible to talk about tactics. Knowing that cities are being bombed says little: "bombing" ranges from "firestorm" as in Dresden to "precision bombing on facilities (aqueducts, power plants, etc)", and one thing is to bomb a city with cruise missiles , and do it with MRLs like Grad.
The newspapers say that the whole problem is accuracy, because it has been since the days of Desert Storm that they have taught us that the accuracy of weapons allows us to save victims.
No.
If I release a two-ton beast in the middle of a city, I can jump through hoops on accuracy, I can hit my target with an accuracy of two hundredths of a millimeter, and it will be a killing. Accuracy is necessary, but not sufficient. And if you think that the problem is "two tons", well, consider that fifteen kilos were enough for the Bologna massacre. Which in the military world are considered a very, very, very light bomb.
To minimize the number of civilian victims it is necessary…. WANT to minimize the number of civilian casualties. And take a very long series of precautions to save their lives.
If the alarms are allowed to sound, people run to shelters. If you bomb infrequently, the alarms matter. If the alarm goes off 20 times every day, it's useless. If you don't hit the shelters, people run to the shelters. If buildings such as schools and hospitals are not hit, the population will take refuge if they cannot find other places.
A selective bombing is not just a precise bombing, it is the aerial part of a war organized around the idea of not killing civilians . If the war was not designed for this (Desert Storm was designed to avoid another Vietnam), the slaughter of civilians will happen anyway. It is unnerving all this talk of civilian deaths in relation to the accuracy of Russian weapons. Weapons are always as accurate as possible: it would be absurd to make weapons regardless of whether they hit the point to hit. Accuracy is still a requirement.
The reason why there is a massacre of civilians in Ukraine is that the war was never designed to avoid this massacre.
Russia never had its own Vietnam. When people tell me that Afghanistan was their Vietnam, I laugh. Vietnam has caused a season of protest, which we call "1968", which has transformed Western society in a very profound way.
Afghanistan has in common with Vietnam the proportion of forces, but not the effects on Russian society. Russia was already in the Perestroika process at the time, and the defeat was lost in the collapse of the USSR.
Those who say that Afghanistan was the Vietnam of the Russians did not understand the effects of Vietnam or those of Afghanistan.
When the Gulf War, the first Desert Storm, begins, the US has an urgent and historic need to demonstrate that civilian casualties are limited to the maximum. The Russians have never had the same need, and they do not have it today, because their Afghanistan has not produced any contesting effect on Russian society.
That said, let's go back to the Cuba-Ukraine analogy. In both cases the errors were due to the following:
- the need to wage war in such a way as to be almost "deniable" until things are done
- the need to keep the war a secret from the population, until things are done.
These two are NOT military needs. If even today the Russians do not know what is happening in Ukraine, and if they do, it is not from official channels, it is because this war is conceived as a "dirty" operation directed by the secret services.
At the time of the Bay of Pigs, the CIA was in charge. Today it must be the GRU, or someone from the GRU. And they both made the exact same mistakes, starting from poor logistics, to queuing up in areas known better to the enemy than to themselves, to lack of air dominance, and much more.
Now they say: "but also in Syria they did so". Precisely. But in Syria, for the sake of the economic situation, that was exactly a war conducted by the services. Few people, many mercenaries, many civilians involved, poorly trained militiamen, and so on.
But this is different, for obvious reasons.
For now, the war is being waged with the way of seeing things typical of the services. A mixture of propaganda, war, denial of reality, and much more.
Furthermore, the Russian secret services have not grown in professionalism compared to the KGB. They have structured themselves giving the same operational modality that a mafia gang has. It could be said that the secret services are the ones who sometimes play dirty, but we must understand that they are not born to play dirty: the name "intelligence" makes them more like specialists, not hit men.
But in recent years, the GRU has done nothing more than kill. As espionage they made some unattractive figures (we want to talk about the Italian affair, when they thought of obtaining military secrets from the admiralty by paying them € 5,000 each?). And not even in this war are they showing that they are intelligence: they look more like a crowd of hit men and special forces engaged in elimination operations.
Ultimately, the secret service as a service of Covert operation and BlackOps. Not exactly a promotion, or a growth. Especially if we consider that in the meantime the NSA has acquired the possibility to spy on practically the entire internet, for one thing, or in the fact that the submarines of the Italian Navy are now the arm of the secret services in the Mediterranean and are mainly used to collect data.
I personally think that we are not seeing any specific shortcomings of the Russian army. We know they have communication systems. We know they have aviation. We know they have logistics.
What we are seeing are, more likely, the shortcomings of a secret service trying to organize a war that would instead require generals. Think about it: During the Gulf War we knew that the general was Schwartzkopf. And then we found out about Patreon, and everyone else.
Tell me, who are the generals who are organizing the war in Ukraine? Why keep the generals' names secret?
Who is running the war? Who is giving the orders?
It is almost never the military who keep the name of whoever commands an operation secret. They are almost always the secret services.
Secret services that have now become a mafia clan: they are so hypnotized by the fact that sometimes "dirty" operations are carried out, that they have practically reduced themselves to doing just that.
And to delude themselves that they can lead a war.
I believe that sooner or later Putin will have to resign himself to letting the generals come into play. Even if they had taken the cities, the size of Ukraine does not allow them to claim victory. The Russians would not become masters of Ukraine, at most they would have appointed the mayor of Kiev.
The Ukrainian army is still there. There is no trace of the nearly 30,000 men capable of using NATO equipment and the rest of the 110,000 who were there anyway. They weren't killed for sure. If they surrendered en masse, Russian propaganda would be showing them.
Sooner or later the Russian secret services will have to go to Putin and tell him that with everything they have done, they have conquered cities, they have puppet mayors and puppet governments, but they do not yet control Ukraine. This is even more dangerous for Putin than Ukraine in NATO, because at least he would know who to call.
But if warlords were born, and all rural areas were taken over, the Russians would be cut off.
It is not possible to predict what Putin could do worse: the fact that he constantly mentions nuclear power plants makes it clear that he has no other cards in his hand. What we see is the best he knows how to do: after which he has only the atomic bombs left.
Locked in this pincer, it's easy to understand what the Americans want to do.
- when the sanctions will be visible to the masses (sooner or later someone, however ignorant and bumpy, will notice that the national team does not participate in the soccer world cup?) will understand that (as it has never happened before, not even in the cold war), they are telling lies. The secret service's dream of hiding the dimension of the war in order to have its hands free will soon be shattered.
- cut the Russian energy sector out of the market, leaving only the Chinese as customers. And the Chinese are BAD customers, especially when you have no alternative. They will continue the low-intensity war until, wave of sanctions after another, the Russian economy will have only China as an outlet, which however does not want to be an outlet, but a net exporter.
Yes, but what to do?
The problem is that we are witnessing a propaganda war.
At the beginning of the war, the Ukrainian president accused the West of having abandoned them, then all the sanctions (including swift) and weapons by the ton arrived.
If he now accuses the West of not setting up a no-fly zone, it is because Russian planes will soon begin to fall. If he accuses the West of not sending men to the field, it is because this "international brigade of volunteers" is probably made up of "contractors".
It will never be known, since in a phase like this, the West that says "we do not want direct clashes" and that "it will not send men to Ukraine", can mean the exact opposite.
In a certain sense it is almost Dantesque, in the sense that the use of Wagner mercenaries has always been Russian dominion, and what kind of weapons these mercenaries will have (and which Russian planes they will be able to shoot down) nobody knows. BUT I wouldn't be surprised if they have a lot more than a manpad stinger, at least in some time.
After all, as I wrote here https://keinpfusch.net/la-globizzazione-muore/ , to manage the exclusive communication and hide what is happening from the population, the Russians will disconnect their network from the rest of the internet.
And, have no illusions, if they do they will never come back.
What I mean is that this war, as it is done, is largely a series of covert operations. The appeals, the humanitarian corridors, are all things that are done to manipulate information, but they are all far from corresponding to the truth.
It is now clear to Biden that causing a nuclear war in Europe would go against his ambitions to re-win World War II. Now he has to win the third, and for this he must avoid too devastating scenarios.
The global outcome of this war is apparently still very open. I don't feel like giving the Ukrainians as winners because the disproportion is huge, but I wouldn't bet much on the Russians either.
And you shouldn't believe NOTHING of what you hear. The only certain result is this:
Which is, honestly, very depressing for the Russians.