Thread by @BretDevereaux

It is interesting to see folks try to apply game logic (particularly board game logic) to try to understand the failure of Russian forces to achieve their objectives so far - assuming clever, complex ruses and sacrifice plays.

But war isn't a board game. 1/

If you drive a couple of combined arms armies on a city, including a couple dozen BTGs, draw half of your forces from an adjacent AO and support all of this with cruise missile, artillery and airstrikes...you aren't doing a clever feint.

That's just an offensive. 2/

Even if you *intended* it as a feint - and I don't think Russia did (and if they did they're even less competent than we thought) - it isn't *actually* a feint anymore, because you've committed too many troops, too much resources, too much reputational capital.

You're all in. 3/

You can see this problem, for instance, in Ludendorf's 1918 Spring Offensives - the plan was for a series of feints, followed by a final decisive blow...but L kept doubling down on tactical successes and ran out of force before the final strike.

And then lost the war. 4/

One of the major differences between chess or any board game and actual war: in chess if you sacrifice nearly all of your pieces to win...you win. The game ends, and you play again with a full set of pieces - the pieces you lost no longer matter.

War does not work this way. 5/

If Russia boldly sacrifices its army in a clever series of ruses that enable it to eventually take Kyiv or the Donbas or whatever...then it doesn't have enough force to hold that, or to hold its other security interests, and Russian power collapses.

The board does not reset. 6/

To be clear, this isn't a moral question, but a strategic one. We *should* care about the lives of soldiers, but many leaders don't but even if they don't, the fact that soldiers don't magically come back to life at the end of the war means they need to minimize losses. 7/

Ironically, this is something Paradox players, esp. @E_Universalis players know well: if you 'win' the war but break your manpower pool or crush yourself under loans, you may cripple yourself far more badly and for far longer than had you taken the L (or white peace) early. 8/

So how much of Russia's army is the Donbas worth?

Honestly - not very much at all? Even *before* all of the war blew up everything, Donetsk and Luhansk had a combined GDP per capita of around $4k (nominal) - less than half of Russia's average.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U…
9/

So there isn't actually a lot of economic activity here - the fact is, Ukraine is not a rich country. Its GDP-per-capita, adjusted for purchasing power, is below the *world* average, despite Ukraine's position in Europe (that's why they want to be in the EU so much, btw). 10/

Ukraine's gdp-per-capita peers are Sri Lank and Libya, and the Donbas isn't the richest part of the country (they are above average though) - that's Kyiv, Poltava and Dnipro. Really, mostly Kyiv.

What about raw population? c. 6m, most now hate you, many have fled. 11/

A population of 6m sounds like a lot - and it is in absolute terms - but the revenue or military force Russia can raise there is low - peak estimates for DNR/LNR forces were c. 40k and most of it low quality.

Including WIA, Russia's probably lost more than that already. 12/

Most of the economy in both regions is heavy industry, extraction and agriculture - not things Russia particularly lacks - and the Russians have just spent a ton of money blowing much of the infrastructure for the former two to bits. 13/

So to put it bluntly, if the 'clever plan' was to lose 10,000 KIA to set conditions to walk away with the Donbas, that's a stupid plan. That's winning the negotiation on a $15k car by cleverly offering an opening bid of $55k and throwing in your old car as a sweetener. 14/

Because again, remember, win or lose the board here does not reset: those Russian tanks are lost. Those trained contract soldiers are gone. Munitions fired? Also gone. Significant parts of the Russian military is going to have to be rebuilt ground-up... 15/

...and Russia is going to have to do that after weathering punishing sanctions and probably with declining contract recruitment because after all you got a whole bunch of the previous contract soldiers killed or maimed.

Workplace hazards drive up wages. 16/

I still don't think any of this was a ruse - Russian planners know all of this as well as I do. What they misjudged was what everyone misjudged: everyone assumed Ukraine would fight worse and Russia would fight better.

Stupid, hubristic mistake - but common, historically. 17/

So I don't think any of this was a ruse. But I *know* for *certain* none of it was a *clever* ruse.

Because it was really stupid! B/c taking these kinds of loses and *then* conquering all of Ukraine would have still been an own-goal. Taking these losses and *not* doing so?! 18/

Thus the conclusion: poor planning has caused Putin to catastrophically overpay for an increasingly meager bill of goods. That's why I say Russia has already lost - the open question is if Ukraine can win, or the war ends in utter mutual ruin.

But Russia has already lost.

end/

As an addendum: this is another reason, if you don't have some grounding in military affairs (be it milhist, experience, IR, etc) it is wiser to see what people who do have that grounding are saying than trying to reason from things which aren't war.

War is different, as a rule.