Europe War in Ukraine - Thread 4 - thread rules updated

[Gethelred]

This is the thread for discussing the War in Ukraine. Should you want to discuss the geopolitics, the history, or an interesting tangent, head over here:

Europe - Backdrop to the war in Ukraine

This is the thread for the geopolitics, history and framework around the Russia-Ukraine conflict. If you want to discuss the events of the war, head over to this thread: https://www.bigfooty.com/forum/threads/war-in-ukraine-thread-4-thread-rules-updated.1376293/page-146

www.bigfooty.com

If a post isn't directly concerning the events of the war or starts to derail the thread, report the post to us and we'll move it over there.

Seeing as multiple people seem to have forgotten, abuse is against the rules of BF. Continuous, page long attacks directed at a single poster in this thread will result in threadbans for a week from this point; doing so again once you have returned will make the bans permanent and will be escalated to infractions.

This thread still has misinformation rules, and occasionally you will be asked to demonstrate a claim you have made by moderation. If you cannot, you will be offered the opportunity to amend the post to reflect that it's opinion, to remove the post, or you will be threadbanned and infracted for sharing misinformation.

Addendum: from this point, use of any variant of the word 'orc' to describe combatants, politicians or russians in general will be deleted and the poster will receive a warning. If the behaviour continues, it will be escalated. Consider this fair warning.

Finally: If I see the word Nazi or Hitler being flung around, there had better have a good faith basis as to how it's applicable to the Russian invasion - as in, video/photographic evidence of POW camps designed to remove another ethnic group - or to the current Ukrainian army. If this does not occur, you will be threadbanned for posting off topic

This is a sensitive area, and I understand that this makes for fairly incensed conversation sometimes. This does not mean the rules do not apply, whether to a poster positing a Pro-Ukraine stance or a poster positing an alternative view.

Behave, people.

 

[jatz14]

Been watching a youtube video from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, titled, The Russia-Ukraine war and a Study in Analytic Failure.
Looking at how so much analysis was so wrong. The key point is, while analysis always involves mistakes and assumptions and errors, people were predicting, as certainties, that Kiev would fall in 4 days, and Ukraine would fall in 2 weeks. Drawing big arrows across Ukraine showing the direction Russian tank columns would sweep unstoppable across the country. This wasn't just wrong, it was fantastically wrong, it wasn't analysis that contained errors, the whole analysis was error.

Why?

1. Most analysists that had studied the militaries, had only studied the Russian military, not the Ukrainian military, so a lot of emphasis was placed on it, and the analysis of the Ukrainian military was just basically counting tanks and such.
2. The Russian military was sold as battle hardened, but Syria was basically the Russian air force bombing civilians in an uncontested airspace. Russian command had no experience doing anything remotely like invading Ukraine.
3. Russian doctrine. Fascination with Russian military doctrine meant questions such as, was it sound, could they actually implement it, would it work in Ukraine, even if they could, were never really considered.
4. The heart of most assumptions was, Russia would win quick, therefore, capacity to sustain was never considered. Replacements for troops, material, supplies, supply chain issues, sustainment issues, aren't really relevant in a 2 week war. Very relevant in a multi year war.
5. Discordant assessment. A great deal was made of corruption in Ukraine hampering their ability to fight, but little issue was made of corruption in Russia, which was far worse. The motivation of Ukrainians to fight to defend their homeland was questioned, because some of them spoke the same language, and they were really sort of Russian. Forgetting that the American civil war was brutal, and they not only spoke the same language, they came from the same country. While little issue was made of Russian motivation, to fight against a country few would have had personal issue with.
6. Much was made of the overall size of the Russian military relative to the Ukrainian military, but too little weight was given to the size of the Russian military actually directly engaged in the fight.
7. American, British and Canadian military instructors had been engaged in training the Ukrainian military for some time, and these people universally had a much more optimistic view on how Ukraine would go, based on their first hand experience of motivation and competence. But no analyst ever consulted these people for an assessment.
8. It was just assumed the Ukrainian military was just like the Russian military, except much smaller. But in training level, motivation, and even in combat experience, it was superior.
9. Equivalency with the US. The US military is a different beast than any other military, even China`s and Russia. They have multiple redundant and overlapping capabilities other militaries just do not have, even big ones. Their logistical and power projection capabilities are on order of magnitude greater than Russia's. But the view of Russia as this super power made people treat their capabilities as being like the US, just not quite as capable, but it isn't, not even remotely.

All this lead to Russia being seen as an unstoppable force, and the Ukrainian military capacity as being really irrelevant to the outcome. But, the Russian military was less powerful, less capable, less motivated, lower quality and less able to sustain combat than assumed, and the Ukrainian military was more capable, more competent, more motivated and more able to sustain combat than assumed.

The problem now is, as any number of posters on here attest is, those initial assumptions still hold sway in a significant way. The difference between the initial assessment that Russia would win in 2 weeks, and the situation now is just waved away, by those that keep maintaining that Russia would unleash the full might of its military and crush Ukraine, any day now, any day.