Zodium posted:

they absolutely are. the point is precisely that it didn't blow up over Taiwan because the process is not random or stochastic such that it could have gone either way. it blew up over Ukraine because the system phase is making inter-capitalist conflict inevitable, but China isn't capitalist and so only indirectly subject to these forces. they already have all the productive forces they need behind national boundaries. what the CPC needs to maintain stability is an uncontested source of energy and raw materials, and it's difficult to imagine a bigger prize in this regard than Russia, while stability for the western bourgeoisie requires them to break either China or Russia.

razorscooter posted:

a powerful, firm, thick rear

Zodium posted:

they absolutely are. the point is precisely that it didn't blow up over Taiwan because the process is not random or stochastic such that it could have gone either way. it blew up over Ukraine because the system phase is making inter-capitalist conflict inevitable, but China isn't capitalist and so only indirectly subject to these forces. they already have all the productive forces they need behind national boundaries. what the CPC needs to maintain stability is an uncontested source of energy and raw materials, and it's difficult to imagine a bigger prize in this regard than Russia, while stability for the western bourgeoisie requires them to break either China or Russia.

Frosted Flake posted:

Russia waging a timid war on a shoestring budget and trying to avoid headlines while being decried as committed to a genocidal total war is one of the funnier parts of all this.

Lostconfused posted:

https://twitter.com/MaxBoot/status/1590419529146204160

Frosted Flake posted:

All of that to say, as with the Russians, all of this effort is wasted if the intent, resources and execution are directed by the logic of whatever kind of society we are.

Lostconfused posted:

Either Russia will change into a country that wins this war, or it will change when it loses it.

Hatebag posted:

I think when your party leadership is as billionaire-heavy as the ccp you gotta consider that they might be capitalists

Lostconfused posted:

https://twitter.com/MaxBoot/status/1590419529146204160

Anyway, I was just searching for news because I thought someone promised a speech from Putin or someone else.

I wonder what they'll do to try and appease the patriotic fervor.

stephenthinkpad posted:

I just want to add that the biggest gain in this war to China is not Russia's going on the China side in next few decades (they were already 80% on China's side ). The biggest win to China IMO are 1) fewer and fewer US military resources flowing to Taiwan for the inevitable showdown, 2) accelerated economic connectivity between China and central asia region because Russia has to loosen her grip 3) acceleraed economic and technology collaboration between China and Germany.

Germany is EU's grow engine, the rest of Europe is becoming more irrelevant IMO. At some point the old europe countries will have less weight in reshuffled world geopolitics than the new G20 countries.

Majorian posted:

https://twitter.com/JhonatanChaires/status/1590477755262857218

samogonka posted:

Russian Twitter Guy posted:

Fast forward to the modern day - the basic needs remain the same. How does one organize an army around appropriately sized combined arms units that can take on a wide variety of tasks? For most armies, the regiment or brigade (a unit of a few thousand men) is the base combined arms maneuver unit. Russia, however, was forced to experiment due to a variety of unique factors.

Russia’s force generation model is unique, as I mentioned in my last post, utilizing a mixture of conscripts and contract professionals. This mixture, combined with fiscal austerity, creates a unique challenge. Suppose you have a brigade which is kept at only 80% strength during peacetime. Of that remaining force, a substantial fraction are conscripts, who legally cannot be deployed except to defend Russian territory. You are left with a sort of rump brigade that is actually deployable at any given moment. The solution for Russia was to create the 700-900 man Battalion Tactical Group - a smaller, derivative combined arms formation from the larger parent unit (the brigade).

This is key to understanding Russia’s performance in the war to this point. The BTG was devised as a temporary solution to the problem of being legally unable to readily deploy the entire parent brigade. The resulting formation is very high on firepower, with plenty of artillery and armor, but low on infantry. It is a powerful unit in short, high-intensity action, but it lacks the manpower to engage in protracted campaigns with full strength enemy units. A BTG will lack the ability to quickly regenerate combat power without cannibalizing other units.



What we have seen from Russia so far is entirely predictable given the type of force it generated at the beginning of the war. There has been a strong preoccupation with conserving infantry, because this is the arm that the BTG is most lacking. A unit that is overweight on ranged fires and low on infantry is not going to try to defend a tricky forward line - it’s going to pull back and impose a cost on the enemy with its fires. Is this ideal? No, clearly it would be better to have sufficient infantry so that it was unnecessary to hollow out portions of the front. However, the manpower fragility of the BTG necessitates this methodology - the BTG would prefer to retaliate with ranged fires from behind a proxy tripwire force - exactly like the national guard and militia that were manning the frontline in Kharkov Oblast. This leaves front lines vulnerable to penetration, especially when the Ukrainians use dispersed points of contact - but Russia’s tube and rocket advantage give it the ability to impose a foreboding cost when Ukraine pushes into those hollowed regions.

Why is this relevant right now? Well, Russia is in the process of a large mobilization drive which will radically alter the force deployment and organization scheme. The BTG is likely to disappear from the battlefield entirely, with mobilized personnel empowering a shift back to the parent formations (brigades and regiments) that do not have the infantry shortages that proved problematic for the BTG.

The Battalion Tactical Group was a novel attempt to solve a tricky force generation problem, which allowed Russia to keep potent combined arms formations in a ready state. They are high firepower units that proved capable of dishing out horrific punishment - but they are (and always were) temporary derivatives that are simply not designed for a war of attrition or manning a wide front. With mobilization underway, it seems that the time of the BTG has come to a close.

BrotherJayne posted:

I thought syq's were verbotten?

Weka posted:

I agree but the CCP and China are two different things.

HiroProtagonist posted:

raising the standard of living across the board for the entire country on regular cycles is going to create some disproportionate concentrations of wealth. that's just material fact. capitalism has never eliminated destitute poverty for anyone because it requires it to exist as a condition to create reserve armies of labor. socialism creates wealth for all, even if some uneven development is inevitable for a country of 1.9 billion people. and billionaires (in yuan? check the exchange rate on that too) who don't toe the line on the five year plans or abuse their status, office or resources get removed, and corrupt ones either stripped of their wealth and asset, jailed, and in some cases executed. this is also not a thing that has ever happened to anyone in the upper strata of capitalist society, ever (absent violent revolution).

the line of argumentation you take is farcical if you compare it to actual reality, but its so common because by pretending china is just another capitalist country you enable yourself to avoid confronting any actual contradictions in your worldview, such as those i mentioned above.

PoontifexMacksimus posted:

If you can get people to argue with your syq's I think it's a reversal of fortune instead

Dr Kool-AIDS posted:

I definitely think Russia missed their chance for a more decisive outcome in 2014. Obama was extremely reluctant to do anything, and Europe was far less committed to the idea that Ukraine's destiny was in the West. While Obama and Europe presumably would have felt pressured to find something to do if it had turned into something closer to a full blown invasion, Ukraine was in no position to make use of any aid they did get. Obviously Russia itself wasn't super ready, both because the intervention was a response to a surprise event and because they were still in the middle of their military reforms, but in retrospect it's hard to see what those years actually got them in terms of military reform since they haven't exactly crowned themselves in glory, while Ukraine's made far better use of the intervening years to at least cohere around anti-Russian nationalism that wasn't nearly as widespread at the time.

dk2m posted:

I think in that time, there was still some general sentiment that Russia and the west could coexist even after the 2008 incursion in South Ossetia. recall that Putin actually wrote an Op Ed around that time in the New York Times about the situation in Syria and his hope to stabilize it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/opinion/putin-plea-for-caution-from-russia-on-syria.html

there was still some level of cooperation and the Russian establishment hesitated from fully committing to outright military action. once the sanctions bit, and the ensuing collapse of oil prices in 2015, the country hardened and prepared for the moment that it would break from the west. they missed their chance and instead allowed Ukraine to bolster its defense and for Poroshenko to revitalize ukranian nationalism.

putin openly said that the west should hit them with all sanctions to “free their hand”. turns out that was both true in an economic sense as it is now fueling the resurgence of BRICS and it’s potential use as a special drawing right but false in its military sense. they are not decisive at all in this realm.

the biggest losers in all of this is DPR/LPR because they got half commitments from Russia while facing a brutal assault from their own state and all of the OUN sympathizers who signed up to play war

Dr Kool-AIDS posted:

I don't blame him for not knowing how history was going to play out (though I do think there's plenty of blame to go around for how the war's gone this year without pulling what ifs into it), I was just musing that with the benefit of history it does look like a missed opportunity. To the extent that he really ever had much faith in cooperation with the West vs just biding his time as the weaker power, the US taking advantage of the no fly zone resolution at the UN to regime change Libya really should have disabused him of that notion. I will grant that the last eight years may have provided Russia more time to prepare in a meaningful way for economic warfare than it did for kinetic warfare though.

Alpha 1 posted:

My takeaway from this debacle is that neoliberal austerity states are incapable of fighting full-scale industrial wars. It doesn't matter what resources they have on paper, because they don't have the capacity mobilize their societies for the fight or demand sacrifices from their people. As soon as Russia crossed the border, it was in the final battle to the death with NATO. Russia needed to mobilize in a way it hasn't mobilized since WW2, but these limitations forced it to fight the way America fought Iraq, with similar results.

Outside of Ukraine, this bodes poorly for America's plan to fight China over Taiwan. I doubt America's leadership can see how much their country has in common with Russia though.