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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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Is Russia exhausting itself? I’ve seen reports that their standing army right now is far large than pre war even accounting for casualties.

It depends on if you consider leadership or equipment attrition relevant to exhaustion, or just manpower numbers. Really, both are true simultaneously.

The Russian army is larger than it was before the war started both because (a) it mobilized- which the pre-war military on eve of invasion hadn't, and (b) it has been drawing cold war stocks for reactivation. If you define exhaustion as an inability to form big armies of vehicles that move, the Russian army isn't exhausted.

However, many of the assets that provided capabilities beyond raw numbers- say precision weapons to take out operationally relevant objectives at range rapidly to enable a manevuer offense, tanks with modernized sensors needed to survive well against ATGMs, strategic aircraft capable of maintaining airborn AWACs coverage to identify drone intrusions, highly trained officer corps to manage complex operations- are gone, and have been replaced by inferior, not superior, quality. Other assets for maintaining strategic endurance have also shown fraying- the Russian prison system for convict conscription is not, in fact, limitless, just as Russian economic interventions are not, in fact, costless and do not disprove impacts of sanctions, and the Soviet Union stockpiles are also not infinite.

Russia is dependent on iranian-style drone swarm attacks because it ran out of its much more capable cruise missiles stockpiles, and was using them at a relatively minuscule production rate afterwards- meaning that considerably less advanced air defense capabilities are required to shoot down considerably more attempts. Russia cannibalized its officer training corps in the first year of the war, using them in the front lines even before the first mobilization, leading to far less capable officers leading far more blunt attacks that were far more prone to artillery disruption and internal report falsification. Russia's prestige units started the war with near state-of-the-art armor which included about-as-modernized-as-possible end of the cold war tank models, and many of them have begun to adopt 1950s-eras tanks simply because those were the first that could be pushed through modernization because they didn't have need for the various 60s/70s/80s and beyond capability enhancing technologies. Russia started with the largest artillery army in the war and massive artillery advantages... and now is importing ammunition from North Korea which is substandard even compared to the aging soviet ammo that the Russians were using before, which is to say it's considerably more likely to explode on the wrong side of the barrel, or not explode on target, than what Russia started with. There are more examples to, from aircraft quantities to arms exports to it's energy export portfolio- a lot of things, while still continuing, are just worse than a few years ago.

Before the war, there was a joke that Russia had a large army, and a modern army, but not a large modern army. Now the modern part is dropped: Russia has a large army, and a devolved army, and it has a large devolved army. But it's still a large devolved army.

Does the inability to maintain quality of arms mean exhaustion? You'll be forgiven for thinking not, but it does imply things about Russia's ability to maintain effective offensive operations, hence the second and third order effects of relying on high-casualty tactics for relatively marginal territorial gains... which, as far larger and more aggressive armies than the Russians have demonstrated in the past, is a path to military exhaustion.

All of that is to say, I wonder how Russia today compares to Russia 2021 in terms of how much of a threat they are to NATO.

More in the short term, less in the long term.

In the short term, while quality has devolved, quantity has increased, and quantity has a quality all of its own when it's not matched by anything on the other side. While having late-WW2 tanks with cope cages is a national disgrace as far as military prestige goes, WW2 tanks still resist small arms fire, and while the loss of anti-tank capability by Ukraine/NATO is far overstated, volume does matter. If NATO were unwilling to fight for a long time, more immediate threat is worse than less but more capable immediate threat.

On the other hand, volume can be matched and overcome with time, and while the Russians were the first to mobilize to a war economy, the Europeans both can- and more recently have begun to- recognize themselves as in a military-industrial race which they need to compensate for being late too, and as they begin to catch up in volume, quality starts to matter more again. Comparisons to the Gulf War of the 90s aren't accurate, but aren't entirely wrong either: if the only way for Russian military units to survive is under air defense bubbles, they aren't advancing and the economic differences will start to add with yet more time.

As such, the European-NATO nightmare is that they have to face the Russian mobilized force in the near term, before they have the time to re-arm. As such, the Ukrainians are both a time and a scale buffer: if the Ukrainians give up, the Europeans risk facing the threat sooner before they mobilize, but if the Ukrainians keep fighting the Europeans both increase their time to re-arm and decrease the capabilities they have to arm against (because Ukraine will continue to attrit the Russian capabilities / wear down that Soviet stockpile / eat tens of thousands of more rounds of artillery with their trench lines).

This is a significant reason as to why the Europeans will likely keep supporting Ukraine even if the US fully ceases to (say, under Trump). Ukraine capitulating increases the risk of a threat the Europeans are less likely to conventionally match (the larger-but-devolved RUS conventional forces), while Ukraine resisting increases the European posture vis-a-vis the Russians.