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TNG5

@TNG512

Mar 3

https://x.com/TNG512/status/1894957736871502079

@SashoTodorov1 @EmmaMAshford @ConsWahoo The continued rarity of T-72As/Urals in Russian tanks losses strongly suggests that tanks that look bad in satellite pictures really are unusable. So Russia had maybe 2300 usable tanks newer than T-62s in outdoor storage yards in January 2022.

https://x.com/TNG512/status/1894957736871502079

@SashoTodorov1 @EmmaMAshford @ConsWahoo "Usable" here having the definition of "can maybe be repaired within 3 years."

Most of the Soviet "modern" tank inheritance was already gone apart from spare parts donor hulls by 2022. More would have surely rotted into uselessness by now anyway.

@SashoTodorov1 @EmmaMAshford @ConsWahoo They had more usable BMPs, BTRs, and artillery in outdoor storage yards in January 2022, but in all of those categories they've ramped up new production and North Korea might be able to help them for a relatively small price.

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TNG5

@TNG512

Jan 25

"This is important because if AGI can fully substitute for human labor, then deploying AGI on a large scale will be equivalent to massively increasing the supply of labor, L."

Um, no. AI can only be modeled as an increase in labor if AIs become legal persons. If they aren't, then AIs are capital that makes human labor more productive.

Also, AI that perfectly substitutes for human labor can't exist if only because humans care about and desire social things from other humans, but the problem in this analysis is more fundamental.

The key difference is that labor owns things (which makes even human slaves an imperfect analogy given the many historical societies where slaves could own property). So if, for example, we get an increase in labor while an important resource such as land is fixed then the allocation of that resource per human worker will decrease. See IE classical Malthusianism where farms get split up more and more among the heirs with every generation as long as there are more births than deaths.

And human empathy and social needs mean that even in a scenario where a type of capital concentrated in very few hands is suddenly rendered extremely productive by technological advances...well, we already ran that experiment, multiple times.

Among the strongest examples is a place called the United Arab Emirates. It does have problems, but the citizens there in a material sense lead quite comfortable lives effectively trading social status with their Emir in exchange for sustenance as well as, for a majority of the population, their own status-producing makework jobs.

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TNG5

@TNG512

Nov 5, 2024

https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1507422312143990788

Or maybe they expected that Zelensky would agree to give up the Donbas well before he agreed to treaty limits on the size of Ukraine's armed forces, and had to readjust after ~week 1 when he agreed to those limits relatively quickly but insisted on a return to the 2/23 lines?

https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1507422312143990788

Given the recently released draft treaty that demanded that Ukraine just give up all of the Donbas.

I actually find myself now vaguely wondering if the 50k troops limit demand was a bluff, to allow Zelensky to claim victory despite giving up the Donbas and allowing water into Crimea and agreeing to the "reasonable" limits that Putin actually wanted. Maybe limits on missile range and they can't import Western fighter jets, or something.

Then Ukrainian reps unexpectedly offered a 250k troops limit, and Putin thought that such an offer was too good to lose. Problem was, all of their planning for the post-war had assumed that they would be in control of all of the Donbas when the shooting stopped. So they started playing a game of Twister to try to seize the land that they felt they needed in Donbas while maintaining pressure on Kyiv and continuing to hold Crimea's water infrastructure.

In this scenario, the war planners in the Kremlin would have been right that the attacks in the North and South would put a lot of pressure on Zelensky and lead him to make major concessions, but they were wrong about which specific concessions they would extract.

Read 12 tweets

TNG5

@TNG512

Oct 3, 2024

NBC News posted this map on February 10, 2022, claiming to be from US intel sources. The "US intel sources" managed to completely miss the attack on Nova Khakovka from Crimea. Furthermore, the text implies that the attack from Crimea was expected to be by air.

"Russian military helicopters would simultaneously support an air assault from Crimea."

nbcnews.com/news/world/u-s…

They also missed the direction of the attack towards Kyiv, expecting an attack on Zhytomyr.

Which should make one even more skeptical of claims that US intel was able to penetrate the Russian planning process. Far more likely, they based their projections off of the positions of Rusisan military units and so on.

"Both attacks would open with a mammoth array of artillery strikes, medium-range ballistic missiles and bomber attacks — likely at night — that would target ammunition depots, radar stations, aircraft and air defense systems, and other critical Ukrainian military sites.

Russia will attempt to take out Ukraine’s ability to defend itself in the opening hours, the assessment said. It will conduct both cyber and electronic warfare (jamming) attacks to cut off the lines of communication between Ukrainian military units stationed in different parts of the country. At the same time, the Russian military will seek to separate them physically, destroying bridges and using military troops and engineers to seize river crossings."

So they predicted not only "shock and awe" in general, but also specifically attacks on bridges, presumably including the bridges over the Dnieper to cut off supply lines to Ukrainian military forces in the East.

Read 7 tweets

TNG5

@TNG512

Sep 25, 2024

The one major genuine pre-2/24/2022 widespread analytical error that actually involved military capabilities, and not strategic decisions, is that most analysts seemed to assume that the Ukrainians hadn't improved their GBAD that much since 2014.

Here's Justin Bronk writing in February 8, 2022, in which he claims that Ukraine's S-300s (SA-10s) are "largely static due to a lack of key Russian-made spare parts." Most likely this was a genuine problem that they had in 2014 but that they fixed by 2022.

Not universal by any means, Rob Lee for one acknowledged a real possibility that the VKS might not gain air superiority, but sentiments like this seem to have been widespread.

This is an understandable mistake, given that presumably the Ukrainian government did not make their improved air defense systems public knowledge, but I wish that those analysts were more honest about this.

rusi.org/explore-our-re…

Continuing with Justin Bronk, for example, if he thought that most of Ukraine's S-300s were immobile, then it makes perfect sense why he thought in early March 2022 that "large Russian strike aircraft packages flying at medium or high altitude with escorting fighters would be able to rapidly find and strike any Ukrainian SAMs which unmasked their position by firing at them".

Buk and even shorter-ranged systems wouldn't be able to cover more than a small fraction of Ukraine's airspace, so if Ukraine's longer-ranged systems couldn't move, then yes they would be easy pickings for Russian anti-radiation missiles, and while Russian jets might be in some risk when they came in close to particular high value targets like major cities, which would have Buks and so on as point defenses, then they should have been able to easily dominate the mid-high altitudes over most of the Ukrainian countryside.

So Mr. Bronk's error here was understandable...

rusi.org/explore-our-re…

...What is less understandable is his not acknowledging this error and continuing to say that he was right about his conclusion in the above article that the VKS couldn't perform composite SEAD/DEAD missions.

Even though other documents that have been published since then, including some that Mr. Bronk co-authored, describe the VKS performing what sure sound a lot like composite SEAD/DEAD missions, albeit on a relatively small scale.

See page 16 of the link below, for example.

static.rusi.org/SR-Russian-Air…

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TNG5

@TNG512

Aug 11, 2024

Something that I hadn't noticed in this article before: confirmation that the Pentagon was behind opposition to sending both M1A1 tanks and ATACMS to Ukraine.

newyorker.com/magazine/2023/…

Overall, I see little actual evidence for the perception, widespread in pro-UA circles, that Sullivan has been a major brake on US military aid to Ukraine. The article above recounts numerous witnesses to Sullivan pressing more more military aid to Ukraine.

And also says that back in 2014 Sullivan was one of the officials who argued to Obama that he should provide lethal military aid to Ukraine.

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