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Rita Konaev Profile picture
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Jan 27 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I work on military technology and I swear if I read another article counting the number of Javelins arriving in Ukraine my head is going to explode. Here is what I want to know:
- How many viable bomb shelters do they have in Kyiv, Kharkiv & Odessa? 1/4
-How many hospitals ready for a massive influx of trauma casualties? Are they calling for blood donation? What's the doctor/nurses to population ratio?
-Are the local authorities preparing for food, fuel, clean water & medicine shortages? 2/4
-What is the contingency for mass displacement? What are Ukraine's neighbors going to do if there is a refugee crisis? Is the US getting ready to issue emergency visas to Ukrainians in high-risk of Russian targeting and/or relatives of US citizens & nationals? 3/4
Why are we treating war like a contest btwn who has more troops & equipment fought on barren land away from civilians & life sustaining infrastructure? 20 years covering AFG, Iraq, Gaza, Yemen, Syria, millions of civilian casualties, yet we're sitting here counting Javelins. 4/4

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More from @RitaKonaev

Rita Konaev Profile picture
Jan 20
Here is something I keep thinking about. Russian military posture & troop movements increasingly point toward a major ground offensive into Ukraine. Geography, politics, operational reality all suggest that it will be hard to avoid urban warfare. This is a nightmare scenario.1/8
I want be clear here - if this happens, we are going to witness massive destruction, displacement and death. I say this for 3 reasons.

1. Urban warfare is devastatingly violent, resulting in very high numbers of casualties, especially among civilians. 2/8
2. Russia’s way of urban warfare—whether besieging Grozny or bombarding Aleppo—does not prioritize precision, differentiating between civilians & combatants, or protecting civilians & minimizing collateral damage. 3/8
Read 8 tweets
Rita Konaev Profile picture
May 10, 2021
Let's pump the breaks here for a minute. I've said this many times before, but as someone who focused on urban warfare before entering the tech/AI space, I have some reservations about what high tech can and cannot do in urban environments. Some thoughts:
1. Urban environments are both congested in communications signals and at times inaccessible/unreliable. So you have to think about how you're going to keep these systems communicating w/ operators AND each other WHILE accounting for enemy interference, electronic warfare, etc.
2. Before anything else, you gotta ask-what problem is the tech solving? So here its abt identifying & targeting enemy combatants under the assumption algorithms will improve to a point where they can do that reliably. That's a huge problem & a really hopeful assumption, imo.
Read 7 tweets
Rita Konaev Profile picture
Feb 10, 2020
Everyone is busy with budget stuff, but I have thoughts about the digital authoritarianism argument so you're gonna hear them:

1. The argument that technology is better for dictatorships than democracies is a hypothesis which remains empirically untested.
2. You can't claim that tech savvy dictatorships endure longer than their pre-tech predecessors and less tech savvy peers w/out showing me a regime survival analysis. Whats the cut-off point for pre and post tech? How do you define autocracy or dictatorship?
The longest ruling regimes are monarchies which obviously aren't democratic. Is their survival due to tech? Some of the other longest ruling dictators are in sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia, not areas know for their tech savvy.
Read 7 tweets
Rita Konaev Profile picture
Oct 14, 2019
This is a very interesting article and I'm excited to see more scholarly writing on urban warfare, especially work that challenges some conventional wisdom. I have some quick thoughts. 1/
The article argues that the urban environment, just like the jungle, is neutral - it's neither good nor bad, and it manifests differently, but with equal impact, upon all sides. I disagree. 2/
First of all, what is the urban environment? I didn't see a definition in the article, but by most accounts, we're talking people, structures, and infrastructure. 3/
Read 9 tweets
Rita Konaev Profile picture
Jun 21, 2019
I see a lot of smart people and esp my fellow political scientists are in search of strategy & reason behind this latest attack/detract Iran story. I feel your pain. But for the love of all that is holy, please stop trying to find sense where none exists. 1/
These are not strategically sophisticated people. They don’t understand or care about how signaling to foreign powers works, if they did, we’d see consistency, minimal uniformity of msg, resolve, and/or directionality of some kind. 2/
Instead, the only constant is the President’s fragile ego. This means decisions are made in line w/ who/what Trump likes/dislikes at any given moment, which shifts depending on who he last spoke with or watched on TV, and who was very nice or very unfair to him. 3/
Read 6 tweets
Rita Konaev Profile picture
Jul 23, 2018
This is wrong in an endless number of ways. Here are a few:
1. Political instability & regime transitions in non-democracies increase the chances of civil war, politicide, genocide, & severe state repression.
2. Iran's geography & demographic profile are a nightmare scenario for military operations; expect urban warfare in big, crowded cities to be MUCH WORSE than Mosul or Fallujah & a rural insurgency in mountains ala Afghanistan but with MANY more fighters
3. When countries experience political instability and conflict, violence & war spread across borders (b/c of refugee & weapon flows, cross-border co-ethnics, 3rd party interference, etc). Unstable Iran is VERY likely to destabilize MENA, central Asia, and beyond.
Read 4 tweets

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