Why Bean counting failed in the Russia-Ukraine war. Overlooking endemic corruption plus fake narrative warfare, leads to false conclusions
Here is the central part of the article. What the author does not understand is that Putin is not operating as a rational actor.
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Although a “bean counting” of Ukrainian and Russian military equipment on hand at the time of Russia’s full-scale invasion would have shown a?stark contrast?that heavily favored the Russians,?military?aid?that has been provided to Ukraine since has gone a long way in narrowing the material capabilities gap. Where masses of material capabilities have failed in terms of predictive capacity for the future, they hold immense explanatory capacity for the present. In Ukraine, Russia’s material advantages should have produced battlefield outcomes heavily in its favor, and the fact that they did not shows that a range of other factors that degraded Russian military effectiveness needed to be accounted for. But by flipping that around, we can see that all of those other factors were also mitigated by Russia’s material advantages.
What other force could have executed its campaign as miserably as the Russians in the early days of their full-scale invasion and still be in the fight today? Indeed, the Russian military?arguably?still has a chance of winning the conflict, though we can debate what winning means in this context given Russia’s undeniable?geopolitical losses. Setting the question of combat performance scorecards aside, what can better?explain?the periodic operational pauses in the war so far than shortages of personnel, ammunition, and equipment?
Materially False
To be sure, quantitative measures of complex phenomena can fail us
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What the author is not taking into account
A. The incomparable stupidity of a situation in the Kremlin where those whom tried to give accurate information to Vladimir Putin would be many times KILLED
I.e. his spies could not breach the feel good narrative, and to this DAY Putin can not rely upon accurate reporting
B. The move of a 40 kilometer column to Kyiv early 2022, in the biggest turkey shoot of the entire war was largely due to abysmal failure of C cubed I architecture which was largely due to the Russian military having most of its precision equipment riddled with corruption effects, i.e. bonus points for 30 year old MRE food kits given to starving Russian soldiers in 2022
C. The periodic operational pauses are due to, at times material shortages, but in MANY cases due to supremely incompetent battlefield leadership which has to be changed in the middle of several distinct battles, due to initial BOZOS being replaced due to wholesale slaughter of their soldiers
Bean counting works if you have rational actors at play,. We do not see rational actors in the Russian invasion of Ukraine
The fallacy is due to off the chart corruption and stealing of supplies, of leadership rewarded initially due to their willingness to LIE to Vladimir Putin, and also the wholesale use of human wave attacks, in Bakhmut in particular
If The Russian Military were run by rational actors, the bean counting approach would have been to the point. In this case that assumption is a laughable fantasy
And the narrative warfare doctrine of Russia is so defective that it fails to act as a force multiplier. It is laughable. Only Greene and Tucker Carlson in the USA swallowed the bait. Too many have rejected it.
D. Also this is absolutely essential: NO PLAN B.
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Which leads to fact No. 2: Putin never had a Plan B. It’s now obvious that he thought he was going to waltz into Kyiv, seize it in a week, install a lackey as president, tuck Ukraine into his pocket and put to an end any further European Union, NATO or Western cultural expansion toward Russia. He would then cast his shadow across all of Europe.
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This idiot mind set is why there are over 200,000 Russian Federation dead and wounded
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N DEFENSE OF BEAN COUNTING: WHY MATERIAL MEASURES OF NATIONAL POWER MATTER
Collin Meisel?| 05.11.23
The rack and stack of Russian and Ukrainian forces prior to Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine left?many analysts, myself included, convinced that by this time last year Putin and pals would be celebrating under a white, blue, and red flag in Kyiv’s Independence Square. This isn’t the first time that a material-based understanding of national power has failed.
Many military professionals and analysts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries attempted to quantify the battlefield and also largely failed. From?Lanchester’s laws?of relative military force strength to Dupuy’s?Operational Lethality Indices?to the US Army’s?weapon effectiveness index?/ weighted unit value?metric and beyond, many creative attempts to quantify military power have successively been championed and abandoned.
Now, the pendulum appears to have swung in the opposite direction, with analysts?heeding?the “alchemy of combat effectiveness” and?dismissing?comparisons of equipment and personnel counts as “bean counting.” Today’s critics of material measures of power have a point—if?the goal is to measure combat outcomes. As military analysts Michael Kofman and Rob Lee often?remind us, combat is contingent upon a myriad factors, some of which involve pure chance, even luck.
But material measures continue to offer an important guide to measuring power at the national level. In a more limited sense, they continue to be informative on the battlefield, provided such measures are assessed within broader situational contexts. Put simply, materials—and?mass—still matter.
Mass in the Donbas
The war in Ukraine has been one of?innovation,?inspiration, and?intrepidness. It has also been one of?surging?and?dwindling?inventories of?ammunition,?equipment, and?personnel.
Although a “bean counting” of Ukrainian and Russian military equipment on hand at the time of Russia’s full-scale invasion would have shown a?stark contrast?that heavily favored the Russians,?military?aid?that has been provided to Ukraine since has gone a long way in narrowing the material capabilities gap. Where masses of material capabilities have failed in terms of predictive capacity for the future, they hold immense explanatory capacity for the present. In Ukraine, Russia’s material advantages should have produced battlefield outcomes heavily in its favor, and the fact that they did not shows that a range of other factors that degraded Russian military effectiveness needed to be accounted for. But by flipping that around, we can see that all of those other factors were also mitigated by Russia’s material advantages.
What other force could have executed its campaign as miserably as the Russians in the early days of their full-scale invasion and still be in the fight today? Indeed, the Russian military?arguably?still has a chance of winning the conflict, though we can debate what winning means in this context given Russia’s undeniable?geopolitical losses. Setting the question of combat performance scorecards aside, what can better?explain?the periodic operational pauses in the war so far than shortages of personnel, ammunition, and equipment?
Materially False
To be sure, quantitative measures of complex phenomena can fail us. As sociologist William Bruce Cameron?cautioned, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” By focusing only on the easily measurable, we can become like the drunk searching for his keys under the lamppost because that is where the light is.
Quantifauxcation—or the “practice of assigning a meaningless number, then concluding that because the result is quantitative, it must mean something,” as?defined?by statistician Philip B. Stark—is another potential pitfall. The remainder of Stark’s quote, that “if the number has six digits of precision, they all matter,” describes the distinct but related problem of false precision.
Unfortunately, assessments that are fully divorced from the quantitative realities of our world fail too. Deeply ingrained cognitive biases lead us to be drawn in by vivid, tidy stories that communicate a clarity, consistency, and certainty—tending, as intelligence analyst Richards Heuer?observed, to “disregard abstract or statistical information that may have greater evidential value.” In contrast, the “strict grammar” of mathematics, as political scientist John V. Gillespie?wrote, allows for broad-based and?objective comparison of alternatives?and, in our case, national power.
The solutions to the problems of quantification include making an earnest attempt to measure previously unmeasured factors, and when numbers are assigned, to avoid assigning meaningless numbers. For example, the US intelligence community regularly uses the terminology of probability, including phrases such as “likely” and “probably,” even though their assessments are rarely if ever based on probabilistic statistical models. The phrases are meaningful, however, because analysts use these words with reference to a?common scale?of their best guess of a probability, where for example “likely” and “probably” communicate a 55–80 percent chance.
Of course, one cannot know with exactitude whether 55–80 percent is the correct likelihood, but it is far better than a shoulder shrug and disclaimer that anything is possible. And the intentionally broad range communicates that it is an inherently imprecise estimate.
Heuristics, Not Predictors
In a recent effort to quantify military power, political scientist Mark Souva created the?material military power?measure, which combines data across militaries’ land, air, sea, and nuclear capabilities. While far from perfect—as any coarse-grained measure will fail to capture important distinctions in specific contexts—Souva’s measure accurately predicts the outcome of 80 percent of the thirty-six wars between 1865 and 2007?cataloged?by the Correlates of War project.
Across a broader set of?instruments of national power, the?Global Power Index—a composite measure of countries’ demographic, diplomatic, economic, military, and technological capabilities—has successfully tracked and?forecasted?the rise of the Global South. Its account of the widening and then narrowing gap in the distribution of power in the international system offers a measurement of the United States’?unipolar moment. In the line graph presented?here?in Figure 6, that period was roughly 1991 through 2009—an era bookended by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Great Recession.
The?Formal Bilateral Influence Capacity Index?has successfully?tracked?geopolitical influence in nations’ bilateral relations as well as among networks of international interactions. For example, in a forthcoming report from me and my colleagues with the Stimson Center, we note that the Middle East appears to have permanently left America’s sphere of influence in favor of its own or a more China-oriented sphere. Beijing’s latest diplomatic coup,?reestablishing Saudi and Iranian ties?with one another, and Saudi Arabia’s?deepening ties?with the Chinese-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization are but two early indicators of this development. Long-term structural transitions—including shifts in global oil demand, with US demand peaking and Chinese demand?forecasted?to continue to grow substantially—will continue to push trends in this direction.
An index that will be more familiar to readers,?gross domestic product?(GDP), also offers a useful if imperfect general measurement of national power. As economist Paul Krugman?illustrated?earlier this year with a simple column chart, the vast disparity in GDPs for the United States and European Union relative to Russia goes a long way in explaining why Western-backed Ukraine has been so successful in resisting Russian domination (a fact that does not diminish Ukraine’s extraordinary and?unexpectedly successful?resistance). And, as political scientist Jacek Kugler and others?note, GDP is particularly useful for “longer-term assessments because of [its] simplicity, availability, and forecasting potential.”
These measures are heuristics, not predictors. In the?theoretical framework?of political scientist Alexander Wendt, they speak to the “rump materialism” underlying international interactions. While the immaterial is important, the distribution of material capabilities, their sophistication and diversification, and their positions in the world (i.e., geography) conspire to constrain outcomes—independent from, though often in connection with, ideas, norms, and other immaterial factors.
Remaining Tensions
To some extent, measuring power means reifying a fundamentally relational concept. Beyond the difficult-to-measure features of a fighting force—intangibles such as the will to fight—power is an idea that emerges from “processes of social transactions.” In other words, in the language of quantitative social science, it is not a variable. To the extent that we can think of it as something concrete, it manifests in the connections between variables.
In plain language, power is not something that can be measured directly. It can only be measured by proxy. All measures of power, then, are abstractions that are necessarily divorced from some, though certainly not all, realities.
For attempts to predict the outcome of battles—where contextual factors such as?morale?and?operational art?dominate—material measures of power have proven too abstract, too imprecise. In predicting overall war outcomes, their predictive abilities are imperfect, though considerably better. (The 80 percent accurate prediction of war outcomes is far better than a coin flip.)
However, material measures of power are most useful for providing a general understanding of the grand strategic situation in which countries and their national leaders find themselves. A country’s global share of GDP is far from a perfect predictor of any outcome, but it provides a fairly accurate sense of that country’s power status in the international system. Composite measures of economic, political, and security-based capabilities will miss much, but they also have proven capable of tracking our transition from a bipolar to a unipolar to a multipolar world order.
Context, of course, remains important. So too do materials and mass, even if these measures are inadequate for drawing policy-relevant conclusions when considered in isolation. Rather than choosing one over the other, material measures of power offer objective starting points for scientific analyses—leaving room for some alchemy thereafter.
Collin Meisel is the associate director of geopolitical analysis at the University of Denver’s Frederick S. Pardee Center for International Futures at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies. He is also a geopolitics and modeling expert at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, a Netherlands-based security and defense think tank.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit:?Petro Poroshenko
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and now for the Friedman article, NO PLAN B
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领英推荐
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Vladimir Putin Is the World’s Most Dangerous Fool
May 9, 2023
Opinion Columnist
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I have not written much about the war in Ukraine lately because so little has changed strategically since the first few months of this conflict, when three overarching facts pretty much drove everything — and still do.
Fact No. 1: As I wrote at the outset, when a war of this magnitude begins, the key question you ask yourself as a foreign affairs columnist is very simple: Where should I be? Should I be in Kyiv, the Donbas, Crimea, Moscow, Warsaw, Berlin, Brussels or Washington?
And from the start of this war, there has been only one place to be to understand its timing and direction — and that’s in Vladimir Putin’s head. Unfortunately, Putin doesn’t grant visas to his brain.
That’s a real problem because this war emerged entirely from there — with,?we now know, almost no input from his cabinet or military commanders — and certainly with no mass urging from the Russian people. So Russia will be stopped in Ukraine, whether it’s winning or losing, only when Putin decides to stop.
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Which leads to fact No. 2: Putin never had a Plan B. It’s now obvious that he thought he was going to waltz into Kyiv, seize it in a week, install a lackey as president, tuck Ukraine into his pocket and put to an end any further European Union, NATO or Western cultural expansion toward Russia. He would then cast his shadow across all of Europe.
This leads to fact No. 3: Putin has put himself in a situation where he can’t win, can’t lose and can’t stop. There’s no way he can seize control of all of Ukraine anymore. But at the same time, he can’t afford to be defeated, after all the Russian lives and treasure he has expended. So he can’t stop.
To put it differently, because Putin never had a Plan B, he’s defaulted to a punitive, often indiscriminate rocketing of Ukrainian towns and civilian infrastructure — a grinding war of attrition — with the hope that he can somehow drain enough blood from Ukrainians, and instill enough exhaustion in Kyiv’s Western allies, that they give him a big enough slice of Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine he can sell to the Russian people as a great victory.
Putin’s Plan B is to disguise that Putin’s Plan A has failed. If this military operation had an honest name, it would be called Operation Save My Face.
Which makes this one of the sickest, most senseless wars in modern times — a leader destroying another country’s civilian infrastructure until it gives him enough cover to hide the fact that he’s been a towering fool.
You can see from Putin’s Victory Day?speech?in Moscow on Tuesday that he is now grasping for any rationale to justify a war he started out of his personal fantasy that Ukraine is not a real country but part of Russia. He claimed his invasion was provoked by Western “globalists and elites” who “talk about their exclusivity, pit people and split society, provoke bloody conflicts and upheavals, sow hatred, Russophobia, aggressive nationalism and destroy traditional family values that make a person a person.”
Wow. Putin invaded Ukraine to preserve Russian family values. Who knew? That’s a leader struggling to explain to his people why he started a war with a puny neighbor that he says is not a real country.
You might ask, why does a dictator like Putin feel he needs a disguise? Can’t he make his people believe whatever he wants?
I don’t think so. If you look at his behavior, it seems that Putin is quite frightened today by two subjects: arithmetic and Russian history.
To understand why these subjects frighten him, you need to first consider the atmosphere enveloping him — something neatly captured, as it happens, in lyrics from the song “Everybody Talks” by one of my favorite rock groups, Neon Trees. The key refrain is:
Hey, baby, won’t you look my way?
I can be your new addiction.
Hey, baby, what you got to say?
All you’re giving me is fiction.
I’m a sorry sucker, and this happens all the time.
I find out that everybody talks.
Everybody talks, everybody talks.
It started with a whisper.
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned as a foreign affairs writer reporting from autocratic countries is that no matter how tightly controlled a place is, no matter how brutal and iron-fisted its dictator, EVERYBODY TALKS.
They know who is stealing, who is cheating, who is lying, who is having an affair with whom. It starts with a whisper and often stays there, but everybody talks.
Putin clearly knows this, too. He knows that even if he gets a few more kilometers of eastern Ukraine and holds Crimea, the minute he stops this war, his people will all do the cruel arithmetic on his Plan B — starting with subtraction.
The White House?reported?last week that an estimated 100,000 Russian fighters have been killed or wounded in Ukraine in just the past five months and roughly 200,000 killed or wounded since Putin started this war in February 2022.
That is a big number of casualties — even in a big country — and you can see that Putin is worried that his people are talking about it, because, beyond criminalizing any form of dissent, in April he rushed through a new law cracking down on draft dodging. Now anyone who doesn’t show up will face restrictions on banking, selling property, even getting a driver’s license.
Putin would not be going to such lengths if he was not fearful that, despite his best efforts, everyone was whispering about how badly the war is going and how to avoid serving there.
Read the?recent essay?in The Washington Post by Leon Aron, a historian of Putin’s Russia and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, about Putin’s visit in March to the Russian-occupied Ukrainian city of Mariupol.
“Two days after the International Criminal Court charged Putin with war crimes and issued a warrant for his arrest,” Aron wrote, “the Russian president came to Mariupol for a few hours. He was filmed stopping by the ‘Nevsky microdistrict,’ inspecting a new apartment and listening for a few minutes to the effusively grateful occupants. As he was leaving, a barely audible voice is heard on the video, crying out from a distance: ‘Eto vsyo nepravda!’ — ‘It’s all lies!’”
Aron told me that the Russian media later scrubbed “It’s all lies” from the audio, but the fact that it had been left in there may have been a subversive act by someone in the official Russian media hierarchy. Everybody talks.
Which leads to the other thing Putin knows: “The gods of Russian history are extremely unforgiving of military defeat,” Aron said. In the modern era, “when a Russian leader ends a war in a clear defeat — or with no win — usually there is a change of regime. We saw that after the first Crimean War, after the Russo-Japanese war, after Russia’s setbacks in World War I, after Khrushchev’s retreat from Cuba in 1962 and after Brezhnev and company’s Afghanistan quagmire, which hastened Gorbachev’s perestroika-and-glasnost revolution. The Russian people, for all their renowned patience, will forgive a lot of things — but not military defeat.”
It’s for these reasons that Aron, who just finished a book about Putin’s Russia, argues that this Ukraine conflict is far from over and could get a lot worse before it is.
“There are now two ways for Putin to end this war he cannot win and cannot walk away from,” Aron said. “One is to continue until Ukraine is bled dry and/or the Ukraine fatigue sets in in the West.”
And the other, he argued, “is to somehow force a direct confrontation with the U.S. — bring us to the precipice of an all-out strategic nuclear exchange — and then step back and propose to a scared West an overall settlement, which would include a neutral, disarmed Ukraine and his holding on to the Crimea and Donbas.”
It’s impossible to get into Putin’s head and predict his next move, but color me worried. Because what we do know, from Putin’s actions, is that he knows his Plan A has failed. And he will now do anything to produce a Plan B to justify the terrible losses that he has piled up in the name of a country where everybody talks and where defeated leaders don’t retire peacefully.
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Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Op-Ed columnist. He joined the paper in 1981, and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award.?@tomfriedman???Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on?May 10, 2023, Section?A, Page?22?of the New York edition?with the headline:?Putin Is the World’s Most Dangerous Fool.
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Andrew Beckwith, PhD