This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
As I understand it, the situation in the donbas is deteriorating at an accelerating pace in favor of russia. US officials have come to the same conclusion.
In addition the number of glide bomb strikes has increased to >1000 a week, and it is too risky to deploy expensive anti air assets close to the front to counter these, as Russian ISR has improved. Shahed drone strikes are also getting through more easily due to depleted AA, Ukraine is no longer claiming 90% shootdowns as in previous months. Ukrainian desertion numbers have skyrocketed and their solution is that everyone gets 1 AWOL as a treat. Zelensky is still resisting Western calls to conscript 18-25 year olds but there may be no other choice.
Uh, does he know he’s at war? Like I knew Ukraine needed to expand their draft but I didn’t know it was that bad.
One of the dynamics of this war is that both sides are relying on mostly older age brackets. Russia honestly has a bit more youth conscription going on in that the normal conscripts are still occuring, but being used in rear-area roles and kept from the front in favor of increasingly highly-paid volunteers (and, starting recently, less-highly paid north koreans). Michael Kofman has written/spoken more on it if you're curious.
One of the bigger issues for Ukraine is that they don't have brigades-worth of spare equipment to arm more brigades of conscripts with. The prospect of sending poorly-equipped conscripts into combat is a semi-scandal in Ukrainian politics- it raises issues of why more elite children aren't in the poorly-equipped units- and so (very) relative 'equality of equipment' is/was being prioritized over 'raw numbers of bodies.' Ukraine has been deliberately avoiding the Russian 'bring out the WW2 tanks' model of mobilization, as that would be a domestic solidarity issue if they did so. (Also, they don't have a meaningful reserve of WW2 tanks.)
This has actually been occurring since the start of the conflict, including in 2022 when the Ukrainians were turning away would-be volunteers and telling them to stand by for later mobilization. Note that the 2024 Ukrainians still had sufficient 'spare' manpower to launch the Kursk offensive. It's not that they literally can't send more bodies into the Donbas pocket, it's that there's a political consideration not to. (In part because the Donbas pocket is largely unsustainable long-term, so more manpower wouldn't stop the grind, but would incur larger political costs if ill-equipped forces were rushed in.)
I knew about contract soldiers in Russia but Ukraine’s reticence to conscript adequately is new to me. I’d assumed that the unequal brigades weren’t being sent into the Donbas for reasons you describe but that they existed and that, like normal countries in existential conflicts, young Ukrainian men were in the military even if most of what they did there was make-work.
Different kind of existential threat. You are (probably) thinking of existential threat in terms of 'we are about to be overrun', but the Ukrainian perspective is more in 'this war will determine whether the next war will be our last.'
Remember this is the third continuation war since the invasion of Crimea, and that Russia's opening war-termination demands were such as to render a future-Ukraine functionally unable to resist a future attack (i.e. demanding that the Ukrainians demilitarize to a smaller tank fleet than the number of tanks they've lost since continuing to fight, limiting Ukrainians to weapon ranges that couldn't hit rear areas, allowing a Russian veto on foreign assistance to Ukraine). The Ukrainians view their prospects in a future war where they may have no allies / partners far less optimistically than continuing this one with foreign support.
There certainly are plenty of young men (volunteers), and there are definitely unequal brigades (of wildly varying equipment quality), and you aren't wrong in how the unequal brigades are being used (though 'make-work' is probably the wrong way to put it). While Russia is prioritizing efforts in the Donbas, there is a long border to be guarded, and so units of various levels are being sent there.
But for the question of drafting demographic in particular, Ukraine is taking what might be called a seed-corn approach, i.e. prioritizing future growth potential. Ukraine is aware it is a rapidly aging country, and that the youths are the future, and to the degree possible it is trying not to rely on the youth to carry the costs of combat. (Additionally, the older age brackets are far more supportive/tolerant, and thus less politically costly, for mobilization.) The loss of a young man is worse than the loss of an older man, not least because there are a lot more older men and the youth will be needed to take care of the survivors.
Note that this is similar to why women may volunteer, but also aren't being drafted. Women have more long-term value to the nation. If things were so catastrophic in an immediate sense, the state very well could and likely would draft women as well just as it started mixing molotovs in the capital at the start, as many other existentially-threatened states have in the past. But for now it doesn't perceive a need, because the existential risk isn't in the current war, but how this war sets up the next one. Ukraine is operating off of the assumption that it is going to be significantly demographically impacted regardless of how the war ends, but prioritizing the more enduring elements while trying to establish longer-term deterrence.
None of this says that the current strategy is sufficient, or superior, or best. It's not an argument that the Ukrainians aren't losing on the Donbas front. But it is a point that there was a tradeoff of costs, and that the risk perceived as greater isn't imminent military collapse existential risk.
This is one of the issues that the AWOL/foreign flight/draft dodger issue isn't as catastrophic as one may think: the ones doing it are primarily already older (though not old) men, and between expanding the draft age and simply cracking down harder on draft dodger demographics, the state would prefer the later. This is not analogous to the US experience in Vietnam, where college kids flee to Canada to get out of going to war and so spend all their most productive years benefiting another nation.
Fantastic set of posts, reported for AAQC.
Danke
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This situation is true, but implication is not necessarily what you understand. The underlying issue that a big % increase of a very small number is a still a small number, and that proportional increases don't continually scale
The theme of 2024 has been that Russia has significantly increased its rate of territorial gains in the Donbass, but 'significant' comes with the contextual caveat of 'compared to 2023.' The Russian gains in 2024 look proportionally impressive in part because the scale of the zoom-in maps was consistent for so long, but the degree of zoom-in was itself a result of how little the Russians were advancing, justifying exceptional zoom in to show differences. This was, in turn, partly because they were focused on advancing in other places (where we no longer see maps).
On a larger scale, however, 2024 has been closer to the creeping artillery campaign in 2022 where artillery overmatch allowed slow-but-steady gains elsewhere on the Ukrainian front, places which didn't receive/retain such familiar maps because they were changing faster and then lost. Unlike in 2022, however, 2024 has not also had simultaneous major Russian military operations across the front- the Russian operations have been primarily focused on the few spots being covered. This is consistent with what was observed in 2023, with the slow-but-consistent Bahkmut. Russia focuses on two-three places at a time, and presses those, and then reaches a point where it transitions to somewhere else.
In short, increasing changes in the Russian position in the current parts of the Donbas aren't themselves evidence of Ukrainian systemic collapse, but where Russia is currently focusing fires. The Russians have always been able to consistently advance when and where they chose to concentrate fires.
The rates of change of territory even lead to changes in where the territory shifts from favoring the operational defense to the operational offense. The formerly defensive high ground the Ukrainians enjoyed in some places became more advantageous to further Russia offensives when the Russians captured them, whether by increasing offensive fires range (thus allowing more concentration of artillery) or compromising other position to prompt a withdrawal of Ukrainian forces (such as has recently happened at the Ukrainian logistic node whose name I can't remember atm).
These positional advantages can even compound. The advantage Russia has gotten from partial-encirclements (approaching 3-side encirclement) is significant. It allows Russia to park more artillery for more range of fires across more of the Ukrainian front and rear. Because more of the Ukrainian rear is in range of fires, high-value-but-costly Ukrainian assets- like air defense or artillery- can't be brought in nearly as close. Because UKR artillery is denied, more Russian artillery can be brought in for further artillery overmatch, and because air defense is blocked the Russians can bring in more glide bomb aviation and helicopters to contribute. This adds up, and consistently enables things like 10-to-1 fires advantages that let the Russian forces make successful rushes for trenchwork and displace the Ukrainians to retreat to less compromised defenses.
But this is positional advantage, not strategic collapse. The artillery army is at its strongest when it can surround the foe on three sides and negate their air defense and airpower, and this position is untenable for most defenders, but there's a reason that the ideal of warfare is about encirclement and not simply flanking. The Russians put the Ukrainians in a bad position, the Ukrainians eventually withdraw, but the withdrawal is a choice to not commit further resources holding untenable positions further, not itself evidence of a lack of resources to commit. The Kursk offensive, for example, demonstrated that the Ukrainians had more combat assets to send, but that they thought there was somehwere better to use them than in the most pressed parts of the Donbas.
The issue with positional warfare analysis is that momentum advantages gradually negate themselves.
When the rate of advance depends on favorable positioning, the victor goes from advantageous terrain to neutral or even unfavorable terrain as new equilibriums are found and defenses rebuilt. If the positioning was favorable, after all, the attacker would continue attacking and advancing. This is more along the lines of 'water runs downhill' than the gallantry of a stream for following the path of least resistance.
But when/if the Russians close the 3-year old Donbas pocket, they won't have a 3-side advantage anymore, but a much 'flater' front. These means less ability to stack fires, less ADA coverage of glide bombs, etc. This means that the Ukrainians can commit more of its limited forces more easily, and more effectively, with defenses that lead the Russians to limit their exposure until they can start re-creating that 3-flank advantage. On the other hand, depending on where they make a push, they themselves may face a three-front disadvantage where a push leaves them exposed rather than able to bring in superior fires.
In other words, rather than a maneuver-warfare acceleration effect- 'Russia is increasing its rate in the Donbas; after the Donbas it will further increase its rate of advance'- positional warfare has a reset-effect. 'The Russian position after the Donbas is no longer as favorable; after the Donbas the rate of advance will slow until Donbas-like contexts can be created again.'
This runs into the separate issue, which I'll address off of your next point.
And as long as those weapons continue to work at the ranges they do, that may be bad news for the Donbas front but it's good news for the ability of Ukraine to generate strategic resistance, because the Donbas isn't where Ukraine draws its ability to fight from.
The Russian glide bombs, as effective as they are, are not what the military would consider long-range weapons vis-a-vis normal indirect fire capabilities. They are launched from behind Russian lines, with the ability to get close limited by exposure to air defense. Since high-value air defenses won't be placed in pockets in range of tube-artillery supported by short-range drones, this is why the glide bomb strikes have been able to increase to >1000 a week: the Russians have a reasonably large array of targets in a zone they can reasonably know is exposed and safe to fight in.
But this makes them, in effect, a different sort of tube-artillery. Bigger boombs, harder to counter-fire, but not a meaningful threat to critical infrastructure / major supply nodes / depots. These are trenchlines, bunkers, or buildings. This is not good for the Ukrainians, but it is not the critical threat, especially if / when / as increasing long-range fires open up attacks on Russian rear areas. The glide bombs can't range those sort of capability-generations.
Shaheds might, but this gets into the limits of a Shahed drone. In short, it's not trivial, but it's not factory-destroying either, while there are indeed less AA rockets to shoot down Shaheds with, there are other limiting factors on their effectiveness, ranging from non-missile AA (not as effective, but a baseline), protection systems (like nets, additional baseline), or just the warhead limitations of a shahed drone. These are often much closer to 'can destroy a vehicle' than 'can destroy a building' payloads. You can throw a lot of Shaheds at a single target to make up in volume, but at that point you're just recreating the narrower and narrower focus of the artillery issue.
What matters more is that neither of these advantages is actually removing the ability of the Ukrainians to generate capabilities and forces, because those capabilities aren't located in the Donbas in the first place.
Ukraine could literally lose all the Donbas, and while it would the advantages of already-prepared defenses it wouldn't lose its force generation potential. Ukraine isn't depending on the remaining settlements in the Donbas for recruitment. Ukraine isn't producing its long-range weapons in the Donbas. Ukraine isn't receiving the import of foreign supplies through the Donbas. The Donbas isn't the Death Star at the battle of endor, where when the Emperor dies the imperial navy flees the field.
The Donbas is, in effect, a political trophy. Its conquest does not win the war for Russia / render the Ukrainians unable to fight. It may shape negotiations or political calculations, most notably Putin's willingness to claim victory with a face-saving 'I own all the territory' salve, but it's not vital to the Ukrainian ability to continue resisting.
But there is a choice, which combines with the fact that the biggest limitation on Ukrainian force generation (still) isn't actually manpower to recruit from, but the gear to equip them with, and the artillery ammunition to back them up with to negate Russia's fires advantages. The former is a question of the next year of foreign supply politics, while the later is something that has been expected to take into next year regardless.
The fact that Zelensky is in a position to resist Western calls to conscript 18-25 year olds is a mark against collapse desperation, not evidence of it (which it will inevitably shift to being characterized as when/if Zelensky does proceed with expanding conscription). The Ukrainian decisions to not conscript more earlier may be the 'wrong' one (I suspect we don't have the insight as to what the priorities actually are- such as if Zelensky wants to scale conscription with western arms deliveries so as to avoid public war support issues of sending ill-equiped troops into battle), but it has been one the Ukrainians felt they could make.
Manpower is one of those information fields where I'd caution you to be very, very cautious with narratives that don't have credible comparative numbers (such as Ukrainian desertion comparisons between years, or comparisons to Russian equivalent acts, or even comparisons to other countries in other conflicts,) especially when it is a field so plagued by deliberate propaganda campaigns. 'Ukraine's army is on the edge of collapse' has been a distinct propaganda theme for years now, and if I were a betting person I'd offer a bet that we'd be dealing with the same theme in twelve months because it is one of those 'maybe it wasn't true before, but it seems credible now' indefinite narratives that can appear credible no matter how many times it fails to materialize.
Is there a name for this kind of narrative? Because it seems like a common failure mode
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Man. The 18 - 25 year old conscription ban (on basically prime warrior years) is kinda a funky choice, but I'll feel pretty bad if they lift it. I already don't think Ukraine will recover from this for a long, long time.
I am not sure if I am correct, but I think that 18-25 range is not subject to war mobilization, but they are subject to common draft as they were in pre-war times (unless they get exemption like getting education or something), so maybe changing it won't do much
More options
Context Copy link
My understanding is that contra the popular narratives on /r/noncredibledefense the Ukrainians' major bottleneck is more equipment than it is manpower, and that they are specifically trying to preserve thier youth demographic to maximize future potential.
Yes, my understanding is that the entire reason for the 18 - 25 conscription ban is to preserve the youth demographic they badly need.
It definitely seems plausible to me that they are shorter on equipment than they are on manpower, but they wouldn't have lowered conscription standards if manpower was abundant. Of course, in an existential war you can hardly have too many of either if you are losing and Russia absolutely has them beat on both fronts.
Ukraine had 2x to 3x advantage in soldiers at front in mid-late 2022
Correct, but that was two years ago. Even if the Russians still don't have front-like troop superiority, they have larger manpower reserves and have narrowed the deployed troop gap considerably.
Manpower might not matter if people do not want to fight and Russian propaganda faces much more difficult task than Ukrainian. Russia relies on increasingly large money to hire people for war. The 18-25 range is not subject to war mobilization, but they are subject to common draft as they were in pre-war times (unless they get exemption like getting education or something), so maybe changing it won't do much
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link