Ukraine

This is the day on which The War To End All Wars ended. It would seem we've grown tragically inured to the irony of celebrating a wartime victory on this particular day.

Michael Clarke is one of those rare people who know their stuff so well they can explain things in ways that even a dope like me can understand.

I hope they're paying him a goodly amount.

Слава Україні

🌎🌏🌍❤️🇺🇦

Russians Speak Out

Given that it's dangerous for people to speak their minds, it would seem everyday Russians are feeling a lot more confident in voicing criticism, or maybe Mr Putin has put the word out that it's OK to shit-talk the war now - because he needs cover for when he finally calls it off.

He can say, "Look at me - I'm listening to my people - I'm doing what all great Russian rulers have always done - I'm being all wise and magnanimous and shit."

"And oh, by the way, here's a list of generals and politicians and other traitors to the cause, who stabbed us in the back - so they'll be sent to the gulags. And gosh, I hope they don't have some unfortunate accidents befall them - soon."

"There will be only Putin left in his bunker."

Ukraine

Putin is running out of options.

It's possible he ordered that stupid missile attack simply to placate his hardline pundits.

It's just as possible he did it to demonstrate how wrong those pundits are, and that he's the only one anybody should be listening to.

BTW, there's somewhere between 37 and a kajillion different scenarios/options, and ain't none of 'em good for anybody, including Vladimir Putin.

Anyway, Putin has to find a way to give himself an escape pod without looking like he's backing down and abandoning what he told everybody was a must-do thing. So he launches this stupid attack to quiet the criticism, but it does practically nothing to bolster his image.

It does deflects attention from his failures, which buys him time to throw a whole bunch more shit in the air so maybe the citizenry forgets about the problems for a minute.

It also gives him the out he needs because he can blame the whole thing on people who dare challenge him. He can throw up his hands, blame "political interference", clean house, and go back to being a general pain in the ass instead of a world-threatening menace - which gives him a chance to flip the whole thing over and proclaim himself the Great Problem-Solver who ended the war.

🤪

Ben Hodges breaks it all down.

Ukraine

Vladimir Putin has called for a "partial mobilization" of 300,000 guys that the Ukrainians can use as target practice dummies.

Another "goodwill gesture" no doubt - so thoughtful.

Draft-dodging son of top Putin aide caught exempting himself from fighting in Ukraine war

When Vladimir Putin sends soldiers to fight and die in Ukraine, it’s Dmitry Peskov’s job to explain why Russian children must be sacrificed for a war his boss started.

The Kremlin spokesman and top Putin spin doctor could now have another tough story to sell to his countrymen: namely why his very own son may have refused the call to duty despite being a prime candidate.

Popular Politics, a Russian-language YouTube channel associated with imprisoned opposition leader Alexey Navalny, released the recording of a conversation in which someone who appears to be the 32-year-old Nikolay Peskov is ordered to appear the next morning for conscription.

“Obviously I won’t be there at 10 a.m. You need to understand that I’m Mr. Peskov,” he tells the supposed military official, impersonated by the channel’s presenter, Dmitry Nizovtsev.

The exchange highlights the privileged life of those in the inner circle of the Kremlin and their offspring at a time when recruits in poor, far-flung towns are being forced to bid goodbye to their families as they are called to the front.

They allegedly called the son of Putin's press-secretary Dmitry Peskov, Nikolay, and asked him why he did not respond to the military commissariat summons 😂

Can't prove it's him but the tone of voice is really similar. pic.twitter.com/kQv2WcdcCu

— Dmitri (@wartranslated) September 21, 2022

According to the Daily Mail, Peskov junior is a former conscript in Russia’s nuclear rocket forces and would therefore be a leading candidate for conscription.

Neverthesless, he saw no need to join and pulled rank in the conversation: “Believe me, neither you nor I need this.”

This kind of deception has practice with Navalny. In 2020, he himself notably tricked one of Putin’s FSB intelligence service agents into explaining why a team of assassins both botched an attempt on his life and failed to cover their tracks before evidence of poisoning could be found.

The prank call and subsequent confession comes at a sensitive moment in the war in which Kyiv has appeared to break months of stalemate thanks in part to continued military aid from the West.

Putin’s nepotism

Ukrainian forces earlier this month gained a strategic advantage when they seized the rail junction at Kupyansk near the Russian border, cutting off a key supply route for Putin’s troops in the Donbas.

Following the rout, on Wednesday the Russian president felt it necessary to announce the mobilization of 300,000 reservists. His speech triggered a frantic search for flights out of the country before the borders were closed to military-age men.

Fledgling protests also broke out in the wealthy metropolises of Moscow and St. Petersburg, following months of social calm and outward demonstrations of popular support for the war. Dozens were arrested by Putin’s security officers in the process, and some were even allegedly served with a summons to appear at the local war office for subsequent conscription—an unusual punishment if true.

First clips coming out of Russia this morning of draftees saying bye to their families. This from a small town in Yakutsk. Credits @taygainfo pic.twitter.com/tlaVRoDgLT

— Pjotr Sauer (@PjotrSauer) September 22, 2022

Peskov junior’s apparent exemption from military duty comes only hours after another example of Putin’s nepotism emerged.

On Wednesday, the Kremlin agreed to a deal swapping prisoners from Ukraine’s Azov battalion that surrendered in Mariupol in exchange for one of the Russian president’s staunchest local allies and the father to his goddaughter—Viktor Medvedchuk.

The former leader of Ukraine’s main pro-Russian political party had been arrested trying to cross the border in April and was due to stand trial for treason.

Ironically, it was Dmitry Peskov himself that sought to distance the Kremlin’s involvement at the time, calling him a “foreign politician” rather than a Russian citizen: “Medvedchuck should have left Ukrainian territory before the beginning of the [war].”

On Thursday, Navalny spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh blasted the Putin spin doctor.

“Literally everything that Peskov says must be understood exactly the opposite,” she wrote.

Earning that kind of reputation is not going to make the job of explaining his son’s apparent lack of patriotism any easier.

RICH MAN'S WAR

POOR MAN'S FIGHT

Overheard:

The top Google search

in Russia yesterday was

"how to break my arm at home"

Sun Tzu Illustrated

Warthog Defense - Ukraine's kick-ass operation.

Some takeaways

• "Sunshine Forces"
• Whenever practicable, isolate and bypass
• Don't press a desperate adversary too hard - leave him an out

Times Radio - Putin's failures

Putin met with Xi, probably expecting China's help, if not some kind of supportive rhetoric, which he didn't get.

Putin says Xi has questions and concerns over Ukraine

SAMARKAND, Uzbekistan, Sept 15 (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday said he understood that Xi Jinping had questions and concerns about the situation in Ukraine but praised China's leader for what he said was a "balanced" position on the conflict.

Russia's war has killed tens of thousands of people and pushed the global economy into uncharted waters with soaring food and energy prices amid the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the Cold War.

At their first face-to-face meeting since the war, Xi said he was very happy to meet "my old friend" again after Putin said U.S. attempts to create a unipolar world would fail.

"We highly value the balanced position of our Chinese friends when it comes to the Ukraine crisis," Putin told Xi, whom he addressed as "Dear Comrade Xi Jinping, dear friend".

It's not unreasonable to think "balanced position" can be translated to mean "neutral", which means "Nope - you're on your own". Putin needs allies, and he's not getting them.

"We understand your questions and concern about this. During today's meeting, we will of course explain our position, we will explain in detail our position on this issue, although we have talked about this before."

- more -

And then Modi piled on:

India's Modi tells Putin: Now is not an era of war

SAMARKAND, Uzbekistan, Sept 16 (Reuters) - Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday that now was not a time for war, directly assailing the Kremlin chief in public over the nearly seven-month-long conflict in Ukraine.

Locked in a confrontation with the West over the war, Putin has repeatedly said Russia is not isolated because it can look eastwards to major Asian powers such as China and India.

But at a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), concerns spilled out into the open.

"I know that today's era is not an era of war, and I have spoken to you on the phone about this," Modi told Putin at a televised meeting in the ancient Uzbek Silk Road city of Samarkand. read more

As Modi made the remark, Russia's paramount leader since 1999 pursed his lips, glanced at Modi and then looked down before touching the hair on the back of his head.

Putin told Modi that he understood the Indian leader had concerns about Ukraine, but that Moscow was doing everything it could to end the conflict.

"I know your position on the conflict in Ukraine, the concerns that you constantly express," Putin said. "We will do everything to stop this as soon as possible."

He said Ukraine had rejected negotiations.

- more -

It grows more likely that Putin will not survive this war.

On Slavery & War

(888) 373-7888

National

Human Trafficking Hotline

Slavery and war are tightly connected – but we had no idea just how much until we crunched the data

Some 40 million people are enslaved around the world today, though estimates vary. Modern slavery takes many different forms, including child soldiers, sex trafficking and forced labor, and no country is immune. From cases of family controlled sex trafficking in the United States to the enslavement of fishermen in Southeast Asia’s seafood industry and forced labor in the global electronics supply chain, enslavement knows no bounds.

As scholars of modern slavery, we seek to understand how and why human beings are still bought, owned and sold in the 21st century, in hopes of shaping policies to eradicate these crimes.

Many of the answers trace back to causes like poverty, corruption and inequality. But they also stem from something less discussed: war.

In 2016, the United Nations Security Council named modern slavery a serious concern in areas affected by armed conflict. But researchers still know little about the specifics of how slavery and war are intertwined.

We recently published research analyzing data on armed conflicts around the world to better understand this relationship.

What we found was staggering: The vast majority of armed conflict between 1989 and 2016 used some kind of slavery.

Coding conflict

We used data from an established database about war, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), to look at how much, and in what ways, armed conflict intersects with different forms of contemporary slavery.

Our project was inspired by two leading scholars of sexual violence, Dara Kay Cohen and Ragnhild Nordås. These political scientists used that database to produce their own pioneering database about how rape is used as a weapon of war.

The Uppsala database breaks each conflict into two sides. Side A represents a nation state, and Side B is typically one or more nonstate actors, such as rebel groups or insurgents.

Using that data, our research team examined instances of different forms of slavery, including sex trafficking and forced marriage, child soldiers, forced labor and general human trafficking. This analysis included information from 171 different armed conflicts. Because the use of slavery changes over time, we broke multiyear conflicts into separate “conflict-years” to study them one year at a time, for a total of 1,113 separate cases.

Coding each case to determine what forms of slavery were used, if any, was a challenge. We compared information from a variety of sources, including human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, scholarly accounts, journalists’ reporting and documents from governmental and intergovernmental organizations.

Alarming numbers

In our recently published analysis, we found that contemporary slavery is a regular feature of armed conflict. Among the 1,113 cases we analyzed, 87% contained child soldiers – meaning fighters age 15 and younger – 34% included sexual exploitation and forced marriage, about 24% included forced labor and almost 17% included human trafficking.

A global heat map of the frequency of these armed conflicts over time paints a sobering picture. Most conflicts involving enslavement take place in low-income countries, often referred to as the Global South.

About 12% of the conflicts involving some form of enslavement took place in India, where there are several conflicts between the government and nonstate actors. Teen militants are involved in conflicts such as the insurgency in Kashmir and the separatist movement in Assam. About 8% of cases took place in Myanmar, 5% in Ethiopia, 5% in the Philippines and about 3% in Afghanistan, Sudan, Turkey, Colombia, Pakistan, Uganda, Algeria and Iraq.

This evidence of enslavement predominately in the Global South may not be surprising, given how poverty and inequality can fuel instability and conflict. However, it helps us reflect upon how these countries’ historic, economic and geopolitical relationships to the Global North also fuel pressure and violence, a theme we hope slavery researchers can study in the future.

Strategic enslavement

Typically, when armed conflict involves slavery, it’s being used for tactical aims: building weapons, for example, or constructing roads and other infrastructure projects to fight a war. But sometimes, slavery is used strategically, as part of an overarching strategy. In the Holocaust, the Nazis used “strategic slavery” in what they called “extermination through labor.” Today, as in the past, strategic slavery is normally part of a larger strategy of genocide.

We found that “strategic enslavement” took place in about 17% of cases. In other words, enslavement was one of the primary objectives of about 17% of the conflicts we examined, and often served the goal of genocide. One example is the Islamic State’s enslavement of the Yazidi minority in the 2014 massacre in Sinjar, Iraq. In addition to killing Yazidis, the Islamic State sought to enslave and impregnate women for systematic ethnic cleansing, attempting to eliminate the ethnic identity of the Yazidi through forced rape.

The connections between slavery and conflict are vicious but still not well understood. Our next steps include coding historic cases of slavery and conflict going back to World War II, such as how Nazi Germany used forced labor and how Imperial Japan’s military used sexual enslavement. We have published a new data set, “Contemporary Slavery in Armed Conflict,” and hope other researchers will also use it to help better understand and prevent future violence.

The Return Of Nuclear Winter

Carl Sagan used to talk about Nuclear Winter, but then somehow it was decided he was off, and the concept fell out of favor.

It's back. 

LSU Media Center:

BATON ROUGE – Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought the threat of nuclear warfare to the forefront. But how would modern nuclear detonations impact the world today? A new study published today provides stark information on the global impact of nuclear war.

The study’s lead author LSU Department of Oceanography & Coastal Sciences Assistant Professor Cheryl Harrison and coauthors ran multiple computer simulations to study the impacts of regional and larger scale nuclear warfare on the Earth’s systems given today’s nuclear warfare capabilities. Nine nations currently control more than 13,000 nuclear weapons in the world, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

In all of the researchers’ simulated scenarios, nuclear firestorms would release soot and smoke into the upper atmosphere that would block out the Sun resulting in crop failure around the world. In the first month following nuclear detonation, average global temperatures would plunge by about 13 degrees Fahrenheit, a larger temperature change than in the last Ice Age.

“It doesn’t matter who is bombing whom. It can be India and Pakistan or NATO and Russia. Once the smoke is released into the upper atmosphere, it spreads globally and affects everyone.”

--Cheryl Harrison, lead author and LSU Department of Oceanography & Coastal Sciences and Center for Computation & Technology assistant professor.

Ocean temperatures would drop quickly and would not return to their pre-war state even after the smoke clears. As the planet gets colder, sea ice expands by more than 6 million square miles and 6 feet deep in some basins blocking major ports including Beijing’s Port of Tianjin, Copenhagen and St. Petersburg. The sea ice would spread into normally ice-free coastal regions blocking shipping across the Northern Hemisphere making it difficult to get food and supplies into some cities such as Shanghai, where ships are not prepared to face sea ice.

The sudden drop in light and ocean temperatures, especially from the Arctic to the North Atlantic and North Pacific oceans, would kill the marine algae, which is the foundation of the marine food web, essentially creating a famine in the ocean. This would halt most fishing and aquaculture.

The researchers simulated what would happen to the Earth’s systems if the U.S. and Russia used 4,400 100-kiloton nuclear weapons to bomb cities and industrial areas, which resulted in fires ejecting 150 teragrams, or more than 330 billion pounds, of smoke and sunlight-absorbing black carbon, into the upper atmosphere. They also simulated what would happen if India and Pakistan detonated about 500 100-kiloton nuclear weapons resulting in 5 to 47 teragrams, or 11 billion to 103 billion pounds, of smoke and soot, into the upper atmosphere.

“Nuclear warfare results in dire consequences for everyone. World leaders have used our studies previously as an impetus to end the nuclear arms race in the 1980s, and five years ago to pass a treaty in the United Nations to ban nuclear weapons. We hope that this new study will encourage more nations to ratify the ban treaty,” said co-author Alan Robock, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University.

This study shows the global interconnectedness of Earth’s systems, especially in the face of perturbations, whether they are caused by volcanic eruptions, massive wildfires or war.

“The current war in Ukraine with Russia and how it has affected gas prices, really shows us how fragile our global economy and our supply chains are to what may seem like regional conflicts and perturbations,” Harrison said.

Volcanic eruptions also produce clouds of particles in the upper atmosphere. Throughout history, these eruptions have had similar negative impacts on the planet and civilization.

“We can avoid nuclear war, but volcanic eruptions are definitely going to happen again. There’s nothing we can do about it, so it’s important when we’re talking about resilience and how to design our society, that we consider what we need to do to prepare for unavoidable climate shocks,” Harrison said. “We can and must however, do everything we can to avoid nuclear war. The effects are too likely to be globally catastrophic.”

Oceans take longer to recover than land. In the largest U.S.-Russia scenario, ocean recovery is likely to take decades at the surface and hundreds of years at depth, while changes to Arctic sea ice will likely last thousands of years and effectively be a “Nuclear Little Ice Age.” Marine ecosystems would be highly disrupted by both the initial perturbation and in the new ocean state, resulting in long-term, global impacts to ecosystem services such as fisheries, write the authors.

Ukraine

Someone's 6-year-old daughter lies dead in the rubble of the house where
she was sleeping in the early morning
as Russian artillery fired on a civilian neighborhood 

This is terrorism

It will burn in the Ukrainian soul for generations

and Russia will not be forgiven

The Help Line

National Guard:

National Guard Supports Armed Forces of Ukraine

ARLINGTON, Va. – Pinned down by a Russian tank and armed with only a failed anti-tank missile, a Ukrainian soldier recently turned to an unlikely source as the most effective weapon available — his cell phone. On the other end was a member of the Washington Army National Guard. Because they had trained together in Ukraine, the soldier knew the Guard member was an expert on the system. Despite being at home in the United States, he talked his Ukrainian counterpart through the misfire procedures and 30 minutes later received a video of the destroyed tank.

Guard members continue to train the Armed Forces of Ukraine at training sites throughout Eastern Europe as part of the same mission. In addition to providing training, the National Guard has sent critical supplies and equipment ranging from hospital beds to armored personnel carriers to Ukraine and provided daily strategic and tactical counsel to Ukrainian forces.

“When events started to occur, some folks were surprised by how Ukraine performed,” said Gen. Daniel Hokanson, chief of the National Guard Bureau. “Everyone within the National Guard says it’s not a surprise to us at all because they’ve been training them, and training with them, for almost 29 years.”

That training continues in Eastern Europe with the 160 Florida National Guard members who were repositioned from Ukraine to Eastern Europe before the Russian invasion. They are part of the Joint Multinational Training Group – Ukraine. The mission of this group of U.S. Soldiers, joined by NATO allies and partners, is to participate in rotational combat training, with Ukrainians taking the lead.

They recently resumed this rotational training, with the Ukrainian forces rotating to their locations in Eastern Europe instead of them rotating into Ukraine.

“They were really disappointed about having to leave,” said Air Force Maj. Gen. James O. Eifert, adjutant general of the Florida National Guard. He said the Guard members constantly receive texts and videos from their Ukrainian counterparts when they rotate back into combat in Ukraine.

“It’s a very emotional event that they’re involved in,” said Eifert, noting that his Soldiers get to see the consequences of their training through those messages from the front lines. “They’re constantly reminded of the seriousness of their endeavor.”

In addition to relationships on the ground in Europe, the first shipment of National Guard equipment flowed two days after President Biden authorized support April 13.

The Connecticut, Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and West Virginia Army National Guard were part of a combined effort to send about 200 M-113 armored personnel carriers to Ukraine.

These APCs can move troops and equipment across battlefields while protecting from small-arms fire and artillery. The U.S. military stopped purchasing them in 2006, when the M2 Bradley replaced them, so the National Guard could provide them to Ukraine at no detriment to their mission. However, due to their size and the necessity to ensure the integrity of their armor, shipping them was a large logistical movement.

“We got short notice, the team did a complete technical inspection, and we’re able to get all these things ready ahead of time, in less than five days,” said Brig. Gen. Justin Mann, director of the Indiana National Guard’s joint staff. “So, a monumental, Herculean effort by our maintainers, doing great work and getting this equipment ready.”

The California National Guard also facilitated the shipment to Ukraine of 4,320 ballistic vests, 1,580 helmets, seven 50-bed field hospitals, and personalized care packages.

The assistance is symbolic of the bond between the state and country that goes back nearly 30 years to when Ukraine and the California National Guard became charter members of the State Partnership Program. This Department of Defense program is managed by the National Guard and pairs each state’s National Guard with a partner country in a military-to-military partnership.

This made the California National Guard uniquely involved since the very beginning of the Russian invasion, as many of its leaders and members had trained together for decades.

“Since their partnership began in 1993, they have conducted more than 1,000 military exchanges. While the rest of the world underestimated the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the California National Guard did not,” said Hokanson.

Army Maj. Gen. David Baldwin, the adjutant general of the California National Guard, said he and leaders in his chain interact with their Ukrainian counterparts daily through video conferences, phone calls and text messages. They also set up a 24-hour emergency operations center to field calls from Ukrainian military members.

He pointed to the success of the “outnumbered, outgunned Ukrainian Air Force” as an example of the benefit of the daily communication with his Air and Army Guard members and as proof of the positive impact of their commitment.

“California’s National Guard has formed an unbreakable bond with our Ukrainian counterparts, and when the call was made to provide support and aid in a time of need, we responded with overwhelming support,” said Baldwin.

This is the depth of the relationships National Guard members have built in Ukraine and throughout the world, Hokanson said.

“That’s why we are so proud of the State Partnership Program and continue to strengthen ties with our allies and partners, who provide an unmatched strategic advantage and help maintain global order.”

Today's Reddit

War is not healthy for fawns and other living things.

Ukraine

Radio Free Europe - Bombs In The Water

A few points here:

• It seems kinda weirdly "normal". Like, it's pretty much over - or at least we're not in the middle of the shit right now - so we have a little housekeeping to do. Because removing explosive ordnance from Grandpa's favorite fishin' hole is just something everybody does, right?
• War is all kinds of fucked up because it always carries implications that are much wider and much deeper than what we see on the actual battlegrounds.
• Several people in France (eg) die every year because of the bombs and the hand grenades and the artillery rounds that waited more than 100 years after the "end" of WW1 to detonate.

A Change Has Come

Elliot Ackerman - Vanity Fair:

A Whole Age of Warfare Sank With the Moskva

A fierce debate is raging within the U.S. Marine Corps about what comes next.

On March 9, 1862, the Union warship Monitor met its Confederate counterpart, Virginia. After a four-hour exchange of fire, the two fought to a draw. It was the first battle of ironclads. In one day, every wooden ship of the line of every naval power became immediately obsolete.

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. If the battle of the ironclads settled once and for all the wood-versus-iron debate, Japanese carrier-based aircraft settled the battleship-versus-carrier debate by sinking the cream of America’s battleship fleet in a single morning.

On April 14, 2022, the Ukrainians sank the Russian cruiser Moskva with a pair of Neptune anti-ship missiles. And that success posed an urgent question to the world’s major militaries: Has another age of warfare just begun? After 20 years spent fighting the post-9/11 wars, the United States military’s attention is again focused on a peer-level adversary. The Pentagon hasn’t been thinking this way since the Cold War, and it is attempting a profound transformation. Today, fierce debate attends this transformation, and nowhere more acutely than in the Marine Corps.

In March 2020, the Marine commandant, General David Berger, published “Force Design 2030.” This controversial paper announced a significant restructuring based on the belief that “the Marine Corps is not organized, trained, equipped or postured to meet the demands of the rapidly evolving future operating environment.” That “future operating environment” is an imagined war with China in the South Pacific—but in many ways, that hypothetical conflict resembles the real war in Ukraine.

The military we have—an army built around tanks, a navy built around ships, and an air force built around planes, all of which are technologically advanced and astronomically expensive—is platform-centric. So far, in Ukraine, the signature land weapon hasn’t been a tank but an anti-tank missile: the Javelin. The signature air weapon hasn’t been an aircraft, but an anti-air missile: the Stinger. And as the sinking of the Moskva showed, the signature maritime weapon hasn’t been a ship but an anti-ship missile: the Neptune.

Berger believes a new age of war is upon us. In “Force Design 2030,” he puts the following sentence in bold: “We must acknowledge the impacts of proliferated precision long-range fires, mines, and other smart weapons, and seek innovative ways to overcome these threat capabilities.” The weapons General Berger refers to include the same family of anti-platform weapons Ukrainians are using to incinerate Russian tanks, shoot down Russian helicopters, and sink Russian warships. The successes against a platform-centric Russian Goliath by an anti-platform-centric Ukrainian David have elicited cheers in the West, but what we are witnessing in Ukraine may well be a prelude to the besting of our own American Goliath.

Like its Russian counterpart, the American military has long been built around platforms. To pivot away from a platform-centric view of warfare is both a cultural challenge—what does it mean to be a fighter pilot without a jet, a tanker without a tank, or a sailor without a ship?—and a resource challenge. It asks the U.S. military, as well as the U.S. defense industry, to divest itself of legacy capabilities like, for example, a $13 billion Ford-class aircraft carrier, in order to invest in new, potentially less profitable technologies like, say, $6,000 Switchblade drones that can kill tanks.

Divestment is central to Berger’s strategic vision. Several months ago, he announced that the Marine Corps would reduce its size. Several of its infantry battalions, aircraft squadrons, artillery batteries, and every last one of its tanks would go. According to Berger, the Marine Corps is “operating under the assumption that we will not receive additional resources” and “must divest certain existing capabilities to free resources for essential new capabilities.”

As divest to invest has become the new Marine Corps catchphrase, a bevy of retired generals has spoken out publicly against Berger in an unprecedented display of disunity among senior commanders. One of the dissenters is a former commandant, retired General Charles Krulak. “You’re divesting yourself of huge capability to buy capability that’s still on the drawing boards,” Krulak told me. “We’re being painted as a bunch of old farts who want the Marine Corps to remain as it was and don’t understand the impact of technology on warfare. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

To discount Krulak’s views would be a mistake. His tenure as commandant ushered in significant innovations for the Corps. He laid the intellectual groundwork that allowed the Corps to fight in the post-9/11 world. He also acquired the V-22 for the Marine Corps, a first-of-its-kind tilt-rotor aircraft that is both a plane and a helicopter. Berger’s strategic vision is also the first of its kind; in the event of a war with China, it imagines a 21st-century island-hopping campaign in which bands of 60 to 70 highly trained, lethally equipped Marines would infiltrate onto islands in the South Pacific to target the Chinese navy with advanced missile systems and other long-range weapons. The war at sea, in Berger’s vision, would be decided by a slew of Moskva-like engagements.

Berger’s critics don’t buy it. “The assumption that Marines can get on contested islands without being detected and conduct resupply missions is unrealistic,” Krulak said. “Plus, you’re underestimating the capability of the Chinese. The belief that these forces will shoot and scoot counts on Marines moving faster than a Chinese missile flies. You’re going to lose Marines and be unable to evacuate our wounded and dead. The Navy won’t sail in to get our wounded.”

Admiral James Stavridis, who spent much of his 40-plus-year Navy career in the South China Sea, is a believer in Berger’s vision. “The Army of tomorrow will look like the Marine Corps of today,” Stavridis told me. “What General Berger is doing is critical.” A truism among Marines is that the Corps must be at its most ready when America is at its least. In the 1930s, the Marine Corps pioneered the amphibious doctrine that would pave the way not only for the island-hopping campaigns in the Pacific but also the amphibious landings that allowed the Army to liberate Europe. Innovation, according to Stavridis, remains a core Marine mission.

The debate in the Marine Corps is more profound than the internecine politics of one service branch; it’s a debate about which form of warfare will dominate in the next decades of the 21st century, a platform-centric one or an anti-platform-centric one. Historical precedent abounds for these types of debates. Before the First World War, in the opening years of the 20th century, many militaries adhered to the cult of the offense, a then-stale belief that well-trained, determined troops would always carry the day over a defending force. In the Napoleonic Wars 100 years before, this had often proved true. But up against the 20th century’s breech-loading rifles and machine guns, the offense had become the weaker form of warfare. Tragically, it took the Marne, the Somme, and countless other bayonet charges into the teeth of chattering machine guns for the generals of that era to accept that their understanding of warfare was dated.

Representative Seth Moulton, a former Marine and Iraq War veteran who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, believes that today’s dissenting generals are failing to comprehend how much technology is changing the battlefield and how quickly the services must adapt. “When you look at what weapons are on top of the Ukrainians’ wish list,” Moulton told me, “it isn’t towed howitzers. Top of their list are armed drones, anti-tank missiles, and anti-ship missiles.”

But what if Berger is wrong? What if his “divest to invest” strategy winds up over-investing the Marine Corps in a highly specific vision of warfare that never comes to pass? According to Moulton, much of this comes down to the role the Marine Corps has traditionally played as an incubator for new ideas as the smallest, nimblest of the services. “Our country can afford to have the Marine Corps over-invested in a new type of warfare that never comes to pass,” Moulton explained. “What our country cannot afford is to have the Marine Corps under-invested in a new type of warfare that does come to pass.”

Phillips Payson O’Brien: Why Ukraine is winning

Events in Ukraine seem to validate Berger’s anti-platform-centric view of warfare, in much the same way that World War I validated those who had argued that defense had become stronger than offense. Of course, no form of warfare maintains primacy forever. Krulak made this point as we finished our conversation. “We need to be careful we don’t learn the wrong lessons from Ukraine. You have a great measure. The next thing you know they come up with a countermeasure. So you come up with a counter-countermeasure.”

One of the most famous countermeasures developed after the end of the First World War was France’s Maginot Line, a physical shrine to the primacy of defense. What the French failed to account for was that in two short decades, certain developments—more advanced tanks, aircraft, and combined-arms doctrine—had once again swung the balance, allowing offense to reassume its role as the dominant form of warfare. The result was a German blitzkrieg in June 1940 that simply maneuvered around the Maginot Line.

The wager that Berger and the Marine Corps are making is that anti-platform systems won’t be an American Maginot Line, but the best way to save a generation of Americans from their own Somme or Moskva.

But what really chaps my balls is that we seem to be assuming ( if not outright insisting) that war is inevitable, even as everybody - and I mean every-fucking-body - is always lamenting the tragedy of war.

Fuck that shit. Wage peace instead. Make love, not war. It's cheaper and a helluva lot more fun.

Ukraine

The world's #2 army continues to amaze

АрміяInform

War Sucks

In spite of my silly tendencies as an adolescent to build model tanks and airplanes just for the fun of blowing them up with small commercially available explosives, I did manage to grow up being fairly well convinced of the need to place a greater value on building things up as opposed to burning them down.

So - good on you for that one, Mike.

There is something more that a bit unfortunate though about feeling a residual need to retain the ability to blow shit up, because "the other guy" seems always to be building things specifically to blow up my shit, so I'll have to blow up the shit he's building to blow up the things I'm building to blow up his shit and on and on and on.

And weirdly or not so weirdly, we took the blowing-things-up thing to what we considered the logical extreme by stockpiling nuclear weapons, which made the risks of war so horrendous that the great powers have avoided getting into direct conflict for quite a while now.

But, as a consequence of raising the risk of a world-ending nuclear exchange, we've been working overtime to come up with ways to blow shit up that carry a lower risk of escalating to Armageddon levels - or at least lengthen the time it takes to vaporize the whole fucking world.

(I was taught there were something like 44 steps to all-out nuclear war, and everybody more or less agreed to observe these rules so there were ways to interrupt what had always been a very slippery slope into total war - of course, now I can't find any good reference to that doctrine - but anyway...)

We seem to be celebrating an impending breakthrough in both mechanized warfare (ie: literally blowing up the other guy's shit), combined with all-out economic warfare (ie: blowing up the other guy's ability to buy new shit) to create the next great iteration of hybrid warfare.

And isn't this just too much fuckin' fun.

BBC - Investigation

Today's Today

Born in Trenton, New Jersey April 28, 1901 - Needham Roberts, one of the first Americans to receive the French Croix de Guerre medal.

Today's Tweet

I could sit and watch it for hours.

pic.twitter.com/TyCIvlJ8N6
😏

— Russ Castella (@RussCastella) April 14, 2022

Because War Sucks

I'm not minimizing the shittiness. No one has the right to murder.

What I will contend is that there is no equivalence here.

Russian soldiers executing Ukrainian civilians by the hundreds far outweighs the murder of four Russian soldiers in uniform by rogue Georgians fighting on the Ukrainian side.

This of course points up the weird paradox:

• thinking we can impose rules of conduct on the warriors, when war itself is a complete breakdown of rules


- and -


• acknowledging the absolute need for rules so we have some small chance to maintain our sense of humanity amid the totally fucked up inhumanity of warfare.

We have to keep reaching for better.

Meduza:

On April 6, the New York Times reported that its journalists had verified a video that appears to show Ukrainian soldiers killing captured Russian troops. This footage surfaced on April 4, amid the international outcry over the civilian killings revealed in Bucha following the withdrawal of Russian forces from the Kyiv region. Pro-Russian media outlets, which have been pushing false narratives about the atrocities in Buch being “staged” and/or a “false flag” (despite ample evidence of war crimes), already claim to have identified the Ukrainian troops seen in the video. The Ukrainian authorities have yet to confirm the authenticity of the video, but earlier promised to investigate alleged war crimes against Russian forces.

The contents of the video: 

The footage verified by the New York Times shows four Russian soldiers, lying on a highway in pools of blood. At the beginning of the video, at least one of them appears to be still alive (although badly wounded). A soldier then shoots him three times, apparently killing him. The faces of three Ukrainian soldiers are shown in the video: the person refers to one of them, a man with a beard, as Georgian. The video also shows a Russian combat vehicle loaded with supplies and marked with the letter “V.”

Where and when was the video filmed?

Both The New York Times and the Conflict Intelligence Team determined that the video was filmed on a road just north of the village of Dmytrivka, which is located along the Kyiv–Zhytomyr highway, several kilometers southwest of Bucha and Irpin (satellite towns of Kyiv). Russian troops were stationed in this area for several weeks, but began to leave in late March as part of the Russian military’s retreat from the Kyiv region.

Several official Ukrainian sources reported the defeat of Russian troops near Dmytrivka in early April. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry published videos that show the destruction in the area — including destroyed Russian military equipment — on April 1 and 2. In one of the videos, a Ukrainian soldier recounts how his unit destroyed an airborne combat vehicle and “took one as a trophy.” Captured soldiers, he says, were then “taken away.”

Oleksiy Arestovych, an advisor to President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office, spoke about a battle near Dmytrivka in his daily briefing on April 2. Recounting how Ukrainian forces were driving enemy troops from their positions in the Kyiv region, Arestovych described a “heroic episode” in which two Ukrainian tanks ambushed a “reinforced enemy tank company,” destroyed ten tanks, and forced other Russian forces to retreat.

Later, on April 3, the press service of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s Main Intelligence Directorate (the HUR) revealed some details about the operation to liberate Dmytrivka and the neighboring village of Kapitanivka. According to a HUR Special Forces Group Commander known as “Titan,” the Ukrainian side forced enemy troops out of Dmytrivka to protect the civilian population, and only then entered into a battle with the Russian side. The Ukrainian side, Titan said, consisted of eight tanks, infantry, and the special forces group — together, they took on 21 units of Russian heavy equipment. “Their [the Russian side's] losses are nine units of heavy equipment, APCs and tanks, and up to 50 infantrymen […] They all retreated. But the majority were destroyed,” Titan is quoted as saying.

Freelance journalist Oz Katerji published photos from the location of the ambush on April 2. He said that the Ukrainian side destroyed 13 Russian armored vehicles. Most of them can be seen in the video below.

“The [Ukrainian] soldiers say there were eight bodies that were left behind that they removed yesterday,” Katerji says in the video.

When exactly this battle took place and when the video verified by the New York Times was filmed is difficult to establish (these two events may not even have happened on the same day). “The killings appear to have been the result of a Ukrainian ambush of a Russian column that occurred on or around March 30,” The New York Times writes. Ukrainian officials did not specify when the battle near Dmytrivka took place. Reporting on the damage on April 2, journalist Oz Katerji said that Ukrainian forces had destroyed the armored convoy “48 hours ago” — that is, on March 31 (the Ukrainian Defense Ministry published photos from the scene that same day).

However, on the morning of March 30, the Ukrainian news site UNIAN published a short video filmed at the same time and location, captioning it: “The Georgian legion continues to help the Ukrainians in cleansing the Kyiv region from ‘liberators’.” The UNIAN video appears to show the same bearded man who is appears, close-up, in the verified video. According to the HUR’s press release, the operation in Dmytrivka began at 17:00 (5:00 p.m.) and since UNIAN published the other video on the morning of March 30, one can surmise that the video of the apparent killing might have been filmed on the evening of March 29.
The response from pro-Russian media

The video later verified by The New York Times was posted on the evening of April 4, when the topic of war crimes was being widely discussed in international media after dozens of civilians were found dead in Bucha. The video quickly began circulating among pro-Russian Telegram channels (such as “Readovka” and “Provernutye na Z voine”), alongside posts about an alleged “false flag by the Ukrainian authorities” in Bucha. Readovka titled the video “Proof of atrocities of the UAF [Ukrainian Armed Forces], who shot Russian prisoners.” The channel claimed that the Russian soldiers’ throats were slit; this was also reported by Alexander Kots, a correspondent for the popular tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, who asserted that these killings looked “exactly” like the murders in Bucha, where the dead had their hands tied behind their backs and were also wearing white armbands.

By April 5, these Telegram channels began claiming to have identified three of the people in the video: the man with the beard, as well as two other men who are shown close-up.

The channels identified the man with the beard as Teimuraz Khizanishvili, alleging that he is a “fighter” from the Georgian Legion. Journalist Timur Olevsky later reported that the Ukrainian military also identified this person by the same name. However, Olevsky asserted that Khizanishvili is not a member of the Georgian Legion, but rather part of various Ukrainian units and, allegedly, even a member of the far-right organization Praviy Sektor (Right Sector).

Olevsky interviewed the head of the Georgian Legion, Mamuka Mamulashvili, who clarified that it was not his unit shown in the video. At the same time, Mamulashvili stressed that after the events in Bucha, he decided that “Russian soldiers would not be taken prisoner under any circumstances.” This clip from the interview was widely circulated on Russian Telegram channels.

Around the same time, New York Times journalist Evan Hill and Bellingcat’s Elliot Higgins were also trying to establish the bearded man’s identity. Though they were unable to confirm his name, they noticed that he resembled a man photographed alongside ex-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili in 2017.

The Russian Telegram channels’ attempts to identify the two other men in the video did not produce results that can be confirmed independently.

The response from the Ukrainian authorities

Immediately after the video of the apparent killing appeared online, Ukrainian Interior Ministry advisor Anton Herashchenko denounced it as a “propaganda” fake: “They spilled cow’s blood, laid out actors, provided props in the form of an APC with the letter ‘V,’ but forgot to pick actors with knowledge of the Ukrainian language for the role of the ‘murderers’.”

In turn, President Zelensky’s advisor Mykhailo Podolyak told BBC News Russian that the Russian army’s “complete and obvious rejection of the rules of war” and massacres of Ukrainian civilians “create an understandable emotional backdrop in Ukrainian society and in the Ukrainian Armed Forces.” “Russia attacks our children, women, and elderly en masse and, of course, this can not but provoke a response from the Ukrainian military,” Podolyak said. “In any case, such incidents require a clear investigation pending clarification of the motives and circumstances.”

In response to earlier reports of war crimes against Russian troops (based on an unverified video that appears to show Ukrainian soldiers torturing Russian captives), Zelensky’s advisor Oleksiy Arestovych promised an “immediate investigation.” Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova also said Kyiv would investigate war crimes against Russian soldiers, so long as there is evidence. “We need proof,” she said in an interview with Sky News (as quoted by RFE/RL). “If militaries from [the] Ukrainian side are guilty, we will investigate them and take them to court.”

Kramatorsk

39 dead, including 4 kids.

SkyNews:

I try to avoid sweeping generalizations when I can.

I can't right now.

Russians are assholes.

Bookworms To The Rescue

War is a monument to ignorance - it stinks of the lowest impulses of animalistic brutality.

The proof of that is right here:

But the people we tend to ignore - the ones we kinda like to poke fun at because we regard them lightly, and with a certain disdain for being shy and unassuming - they're always there to look after the records, and to document both our glory, and our often stupidly malicious folly.

WaPo: (pay wall)

Meet the 1,300 librarians racing to back up Ukraine’s digital archives

In early March, two weeks into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Carrie Pirmann stumbled upon a website dedicated to Ivan Mazepa, a 16th century Ukrainian politician and patron of the arts. A 44-year-old librarian at Bucknell University, Pirmann had joined an international effort of fellow archivists to preserve the digital history of a country under siege, and the contents of Mazepa’s website, though obscure, seemed worth saving.

The site held a number of things: Lord Byron poems written about Mazepa’s life and a catalogue of centuries-old articles detailing his various conquests. Pirmann opened her website scraping tool, backing up the site and preserving its content.

Now, the original website is lost, its server space likely gone to cyberattacks, power outages or Russian shelling. But thanks to her, it still remains intact on server space rented by an international group of librarians and archivists.

“We’re trying to save as much as possible,” Pirmann said. “Otherwise, we lose that connection to the past.”

Buildings, bridges, and monuments aren’t the only cultural landmarks vulnerable to war. As the violence enters its second month, the country’s digital history — its poems, archives, and pictures — are at risk of being erased as cyberattacks and bombs erode the nation’s servers.

Over the past month, a motley group of more than 1,300 librarians, historians, teachers and young children have banded together to save Ukraine’s Internet archives, using technology to back up everything from census data to children’s poems and Ukrainian basket weaving techniques.

The efforts, dubbed Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online, have resulted in over 2,500 of the country’s museums, libraries, and archives being preserved on servers they’ve rented, eliminating the risk they’ll be lost forever. Now, all-volunteer effort has become a lifeline for cultural officials in Ukraine, who are working with the group to digitize their collections in the event their facilities get destroyed in the war.

The endeavor, experts said, underscores how volunteers, armed with low-cost technology, training and organization can protect a country’s history from disasters such as war, hurricanes, earthquakes and fire.

“I have not seen anything like it,” said Winston Tabb, dean of libraries, archives and museums at Johns Hopkins University. “We didn’t really have the tools before that made it even possible to undertake this kind of initiative.”

The seeds of this international effort started online. On Feb. 26, Anna Kijas, a music librarian at Tufts University, put a call out on Twitter asking if any volunteers would join her for a “virtual data rescue session” to preserve Ukrainian musical collections which could be lost in the war.

That got notice from librarians and archivists across the world, including Quinn Dombrowski, an academic technology specialist at Stanford University, and Sebastian Majstorovic, a digital historian based in Vienna. They banded together, and amid sleepless nights across multiple time-zones, they recruited, trained, and organized scores of volunteers wanting to help archive Ukraine’s historical websites.

Large parts of the Internet get periodically archived through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which partners with the organization, but SUCHO’s organizers also needed something more advanced, Dombrowski said. In many cases, the Wayback Machine can dig into the first or second layer of a website, she added, but many documents, like pictures and uploaded files, on Ukraine’s cultural websites could be seven or eight layers deep, inaccessible to traditional web crawlers.

To do that, they turned to a suite of open source digital archiving tools called Webrecorder, which have been around since the mid 2010s, and used by institutions including the United Kingdom’s National Archive and the National Library of Australia. They also started a global Slack channel to communicate with volunteers.

To archive, volunteers mostly use the Webrecorder suite, organizers said. There is Archive.webpage, a browser extension and stand-alone desktop app that archives a website as people browse pages. Another is Browsertrix Crawler, which requires some basic coding skills, and is helpful for “advanced crawls,” such as capturing expansive websites that might have multiple features like calendars, 3D tours, or circuitous links for navigating in-site. And more recently, there is Browsertrix Cloud, a more easy to use, automated version of the powerful Browswertrix crawler, which is popular with volunteers.

“It essentially tries to mimic a human browsing the web,” Ilya Kramer, the founder of Webrecorder, said. “And as it does that, it’s archiving all of the network traffic, and then all that is stored into a file … that can be loaded from anywhere.”

Over the past month, SUCHO has developed systematic, and creative, ways to go about its work. There’s a master spreadsheet where volunteers detail all the Ukrainian museums, libraries, and archives that need to have their websites backed up or ones that have been completed. To develop this list, SUCHO’s organizers receive tips from librarians and archivists across the world who may know of a rare museum in Ukraine that needs to have its work backed up.

Other volunteers have become sleuths, using Google Maps to take a digital walk down Ukrainian streets, looking for any signs that might say “museum” or “library” and trying to find out if it has a website that needs archiving.

In other cases, when a shelling happens somewhere, a group of volunteers dedicated to “situation monitoring” alert any volunteers that might be awake to look for institution websites in that region that need backing up, for fear they could go offline any minute.

“These are the moments,” Dombrowski, whose eight year old child occasionally helps archive sites, said, “that future historians will either celebrate or curse the people of our time for either doing or not doing something in a way that can enable them to tell those stories through a larger arc of history.”

In little over a month, volunteers have backed up an exhaustive array of data. According to their website and organizers, volunteers have preserved documents totaling 25 terabytes that include the history of Jewish towns in Ukraine, photographs of excavation sites in Crimea, and digitized exhibitions of Kharkiv’s Literary Museum.

For Majstorovic, the importance of the work he’s helping organize was made apparent a few weeks ago. In early-March, he happened upon the Ukrainian State Archive of Kharkiv’s website. As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was gearing up, he was worried how long the site would remain active, fearing its servers would be susceptible to cyberattacks or shelling.

He loaded the archive’s website into Webrecorder’s Browsertrix tool, and let it do its work. By early morning, it collected over 100 gigabytes of information, including the district’s census records, criminal cases, and lists of people who had previously been persecuted in the region.

Within hours, the website was gone. But still, its records remained. Looking back, Majstorovic says, that’s exactly why he is doing this work.

“If we can save these things, we prove that Ukraine has a history,” he said. “[If] they are gone forever … that just rips a black hole into the history of a place that will last forever.”