carpoftruth

I'm too stupid to make a good emoji out of it but I submit that we need an emoji for trump doing his jerking off two cocks at once dance

Ukraine's 2023 Spring Counteroffensive and why it's arguably the greatest military failure of the 21st century, a minor effortpost. Modified from original content, prepared to own some lib. Note that this writeup draws from media sources that don't give libs a tummy ache.

Definition of Failure

For starters, my criteria for failure is not kill/death ratio. No one can tell how many soldiers have died on either side with any reliability. If you read Michael Kofman and Oryx and the brOSINT crowd, then Ukraine is winning 10:1. If you listen to Russian telegram then it's 1:10 the other way around. Maybe in a decade or two there will be more reliable numbers but for now, I consider casualty rates to be not a good way to analyze the conflict. Speculating about casualty rates is a pointless exercise in unfalsifiable propaganda and fog of war.

A better criteria for failure is how much a failure prevents the side from achieving their actual objectives. The point of war isn't to kill a bunch of people, it's to actually achieve something (see Clausewitz's On War). Along the same lines, the stronger the state is, the less is actually at stake during a war, and the less failure actually matters. As such, my criteria for military failure is that such a failure materially changes the course of a war.

Other Contenders for Greatest Failure

A good object lesson on the latter is the fall of Kabul in 2021. The Afghanistan National Army got rinsed by the Taliban in a matter of weeks after the American withdrawal, clearly a real black eye for American prestige. However, the American military industrial complex was ready to move on anyway, the American electorate doesn't really give a shit about foreign policy, and it was the Afghanistan National Army that suffered the actual consequences, not American troops. Biden had a few weeks of bad headlines but no one even remembered this defeat in the midterms, let alone 2024. Afghanistan 2021 is an example of military failure, but outside Afghanistan it didn't affect much. Best case, the ANA would have held out for a year or so before losing to the Taliban. As such, this event is a contender for biggest military failure of the 21st century but I don't think it wins.

Another possible contender is 2006 Israel-Lebanon war as this punctured the myth of Israeli invincibility and Hezbollah walked away with a lot of credibility. However, considering the damage to Lebanon and the relative lack of damage to Israel, I think this is more of a draw.

Another contender is the early part of the Chechen insurgency after Russia fucked up Grozny. The Russians got rinsed for a few years with a number of high profile assassinations of pro-Russian politicians/appointees. However, this was mostly extrajudicial murder, which I consider different from military conflict. While this was ugly and full of awful war crimes, I don't think the Russian failures to achieve objectives in Chechnya fall in the same category as the other military failures.

Strategic Setting of the 2023 Counteroffensive

To appreciate the depth of the failure of the 2023 counteroffensive, it's useful to look at the strategic layer as it was in late 2022 early 2023.

Many factors in the Russia-Ukraine war have incentivized Russia to conduct a war of attrition. This is important because Ukrainian planners had no reason not to understand this.

• Russia is a bigger state with larger population, more materiel, more soldiers. They had/have domestic military capacity that far outstrips that of Ukraine. All else being equal, you'd expect Russia to pursue a war of attrition because they can make more stuff and handle more losses than their opponent.

• By early-mid 2023, the Russian economy hadn't collapsed because of sanctions. There weren't any signs of their economy/productive capacity being on a clock, so they could take their time.

• The Russian withdrawal from Kherson/Kharkiv region in fall 2022 didn't lead to Russia making some peace offer to lock in gains. Rather, they did a partial mobilization in Sept 2022. This indicates intent to do war of attrition.

• In contrast, Ukraine had/has much more limited domestic military production capacity, meaning they were and are very reliant on outside interests (whatever the West gives them). This puts them in a real bind: on the one hand, strategically since Russia is executing a war of attrition, Ukraine should be carefully husbanding their forces. On the other hand, politically Ukrainian politicians needed to show the West that it was worth it to support Ukraine. Fighting a war of attrition "properly" by falling back doesn't look good on the news, especially to the Western electorate which is particularly bird brained on foreign policy and can't understand anything that isn't colours on a map. Note that the political constraint on Ukrainian decision makers is critical to understand and again incentivizes you, the reader, to read Clausewitz.

Another important aspect of Western support is that many Ukrainian troops received training in the West. They weren't just being trained on Western armaments, they were being trained 'NATO style'. During the heady days of 2022-2023, how often did you hear about the difference between Soviet doctrine with its endless hordes of poorly armed conscripts, the centralized command and control military leadership that doesn't let soldiers and brigade commanders think for themselves, versus the nimble, highly trained though fewer in number NATO style forces. This description of doctrinal difference is mostly just chauvinism and racism, but there is actually a salient difference in military doctrine between Russia and NATO/America.

The biggest one is that since Vietnam (and arguably earlier in Korea), America/NATO has strongly relied on air power. Not just air power, but air supremacy (or at worst air superiority). This is a foundational aspect of pretty much all major American/NATO combat operations since the 80s. Desert Storm, Afghanistan/Iraq/Yemen/Libya - all of these were strongly driven by air power. This is reflected in NATO training and trainers. If you're a NATO guy training Ukrainian soldiers, you're going to train what you know, which is air power focused combat. The US has lots of COIN experience (including a lot of failure, but failure is nevertheless a teacher), but literally no experience in peer conflict as what the Ukrainian military is facing with Russia. To be fair, Russia doesn't exactly have peer conflict experience prior to 2022 either, but there appears to be more continuity between the Soviet military doctrine and that of modern Russia than between US/NATO in the 50s and today. The limits of this type of training can be seen in accounts by Ukrainian soldiers as reported in Western/Ukrainian press.

In any case, the key thing here is that the Ukrainian military was being taught to fight using a military doctrine that centers on air supremacy when the Ukrainian military is at best in a state of air parity with Russia, more often air incapability. Zelensky was asking for no fly zones and sweet Western jets from day 1 but he never got that from the West, just old Soviet jets as hand me downs. At no point has Ukraine ever approached the kind of air power required to implement NATO doctrine.

The last strategic thing that is important is that by the end of 2022 it is apparent that both Western and Russian ISR is really, really good. It is extremely hard to hide from either sides satellites. Mass movements of troops and staging of troops make for obvious groupings that get blown the fuck out.

Consider Desert Storm. The Coalition enjoyed a 6-month buildup period during which they were entirely unmolested before they smashed into Iraq. Nothing like that is remotely possible by either side in Ukraine. There are too many missiles, drones, satellites, AI image recognition/pattern recognition, etc. for large amounts of troops and associated logistics to gather unmolested. This was evident after the first month when Russia was driving around Kiev getting their columns bombed, but the same phenomenon persists to this day. It's really hard to do maneuver warfare when everything you do above the company level is spotted.

Strategic Summary

All of the above informs the strategic environment that Ukraine was operating in. They have limited forces against an enemy that has much more, their elite troops have been trained by trainers that don't know what it's like to not just be able to call in airstrikes at will, they are under pressure by politicians to get something done and not just fall back, and they are doubly under political pressure because in autumn of 2022 Russia did fall back from Kherson/Kharkiv, making it look to the uninitiated like Ukraine had turned the tide already.

To anyone paying attention, the battle of Bakhmut was raging all that autumn/winter, but that battle didn't change the colours on a map much so it was easy to say that it was a stalemate or that Ukraine was winning there too.

The Counteroffensive

So, because they were buckling to political pressure, hubris, or taking a calculated risk, Ukraine starts gearing up for The Counteroffensive. I'm capitalizing The Counteroffensive now, because this was a big media event.

All winter, the Western news starts gearing up about how fucking awesome it's going to be when spring arrives and Ukraine launches the Counteroffensive. Everyone is really fucking excited. Every dick in Raytheon Acres in North Virginia was perpetually turgid at minimum.

The minimal aim was of The Counteroffensive was to get to Tokmak, with the maximal aim to cut the land bridge to Crimea and retake the Zaporhizia nuclear power plant. Obviously none of that happened. Not that territory is the be all end all scorecard, but ultimately 2023 ended with Russia taking approximately twice as much territory as Ukraine re-took during that calendar year. But that's getting ahead of the story.

The Counteroffensive starts making the news in December/January, reaching a fever pitch by the spring. My favourite Western propaganda during this time was about how great the Leopards were going to be - there was that awesome meme of leopard animals jumping out of the snow with Leopard tanks. That particular meme article sticks in my head, but it was just one of many in the same vein. While I'm making fun of the hubris of UK nitwit military analysis, even the Ukrainian military/state were doing hype videos about The Counteroffensive.

Telegraphing the Counteroffensive

The Counteroffensive was unbelievably telegraphed. Even appreciating the difficulty of moving large masses of troops and armor to staging areas in secret, the Ukrainian state literally made ads for it. Naturally, the entire fall/winter Russia was building defences in depth: minefields, dragons teeth, trenches, tank traps, etc. None of this was a surprise, obviously. All this kind of shit is visible from space. The following story https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65615184 is from mid May 2023 so presumably actual military intelligence knew about the level of Russian defences earlier. Except we don't have to presume, because documents from February 2023 about how pessimistic the Pentagon was were leaked in April 2023 .

Finally, 4 months after that pessimistic assessment by the Pentagon, Ukraine stops edging and launches The Counteroffensive. Unsurprisingly, it breaks like water on rock. Who would have thought that charging headlong into the most heavily mined area on earth while under massed artillery fire when you have next to no air support would go wrong. Here we see the weakness of Western/NATO military doctrine - effective at COIN/sub-peer conflict, not effective at peer conflict.

The iconic image of the failure was the mass of burning Bradleys/Leopards, clustered together after failing to punch through a mine field. Note the comment about changing strategy to smaller groups with more modest goals, less big arrow offensives and maneuver warfare. If only there had been some way to predict that.

By September there wasn't even bluster about The Counteroffensive actually succeeding in its aims. 90 days into The Counteroffensive, Ukraine's deputy defence minister stated, "There is an offensive in several directions and in certain areas. And in some places, in certain areas, this first line was broken through." In other words, in some places the first (of 3) lines were broken through. Damn.

Outcomes

All told, the Ukrainian military pissed away its 'most elite' units chasing the high of fall 2022 for the benefit of Ukrainian/Western politicians. They did so by attempting a frontal assault against the most fortified, mined and entrenched area on earth with at best air incapability after telegraphing with literal advertisements what exactly they were going to do. They used a military doctrine that was wholly inappropriate to the type of army they had, spurred by the same Western political interests that have consistently underestimated Russia as a country and as a military (orcish gas station with nukes). The massive publicity of this failure helped drive public sentiment for a negotiated ceasefire between russia and ukraine from 57% in favour of ceasfire in fall 2022 to 70% in Feb 2024 to ~90% during spring of 2024.

Overall, despite political constraints on Ukrainian decision makers and pressure for The Counteroffensive and the need to Do Something, the choice to risk and fail at this scale was an unforced own-goal that has since eroded Ukraine's ability to act strategically even further. Since then, Ukraine pissed even further soldiers and materiel into the failed Kursk offensive while the Donetsky front has collapsed. Troops that could have been used to hold a stalemate were wasted on mines and dragon teeth, and Western opinion has turned further against Ukraine. Despite the attempted blitz into Kursk, Ukraine will never retake strategic initiative as they had it for a brief moment in fall/early winter 2022. They ground down their existing forces while degrading their ability to beg for new ones from the West. The abject failure of The Counteroffensive was clear to the general public by late summer 2023, and October 7, 2024 was the nail in the coffin for Ukraine when the bird brained Western electorate turned their skull measurement devices to Palestinians and Arabs.

This concludes my TED talk.

now that she's crapped out the elastic, she's really feeling her power level

Ladies and gentlemen, we got him

... there was one seismic change that was overlooked by every major news outlet. Which is this: every middle-aged woman I know feels, right now, kind of … fruity. Turned on. As erotic as a British woman can feel during a wet summer.

And so however it pans out, at the beginning of this new government, the fact that they seem at the outset incredibly competent is making women of a certain age very frisky.

Look at the sleight of hand in this bullshit

French Election Becomes ‘Nightmare’ for Nation’s Jews

The place of Jews in French society has emerged as a prominent theme in the election because the once-antisemitic National Rally party of Marine Le Pen, whose anti-immigrant position lies at the core of its fast-growing popularity, has been one of the most emphatic supporters of Israel and French Jews since the Hamas-led terrorist attack of Oct. 7 on Israel.

Huh weird that the ethnonationalists are on the same sids as israel

Mr. Mélenchon’s France Unbowed, by contrast, has been vehement in its denunciation of Israel’s military operation in Gaza as “genocide.”

The confrontation of an abruptly pro-Israeli National Rally, whose antisemitic founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, described the Holocaust as “a detail” of history, with a far left that Mr. Macron described last week as “guilty of antisemitism” has confronted French Jews and others with an agonizing choice.

The choice being, do I side with the group that minimizes the Holocaust and supports the current genocide, or the side that doesn't? Hmm damn what a choice

Can they really bring themselves to vote for Ms. Le Pen’s party, given its history of antisemitism and its xenophobic determination to seek a ban on the public use of the Muslim head scarf if elected, out of loathing for Mr. Mélenchon’s France Unbowed?

He argued that the campaign of France Unbowed had been based on “hatred of Israel” and cited Aymeric Caron, a lawmaker who is a member of the New Popular Front coalition that left-wing parties have formed, as suggesting Jews were inhuman.

Damn suggesting Jews are inhuman, that sounds really bad, let's read on

On May 27, Mr. Caron said on the social platform X, “It is evident that Gaza has shown that, no, we do not belong to the same human species.” He was referring to supporters of the Israeli military campaign in Gaza.

Oh, he's saying that supporters of this genocide are inhuman

Supporters of the Israeli genocide

is this Jewishness?

Think of a time when you've seen a big group of people you don't know. Maybe you enter a new class, or see a crowd at an event, or there's a team of people building or maintaining something. If you don't know them, your brain might just classify them as "the people in the class/event/construction site" and not go further. But obviously, each one of those people has their own personality, inner life, needs, desires, etc, that is occluded by a casual definition of "they're the crowd in this class/event/construction site".

The same kind of thing happens when you look at a green space that you don't know, whether it's a forest, a meadow, a garden, or just a little patch of growth. It's easy for your brain to just think "it's a forest" and not classify any further.

Naming something is an important part of recognizing it and understanding it as a distinct entity. Once you've put a name to something, it's possible to character it as a unique part of the whole. For a plant, naming it helps you understand what it likes, doesn't like, where it grows, what eats it or doesn't, it's morphology and how it varies over the season. Naming doesn't mean understanding but it is a necessary step that allows understanding.

Some dragonriders just want to watch the world Pern.

Shut it down boys, prepping has gone woke

tag yourself, I'm the living room labeled "america's living room"

I've been converting a bunch of grass yard into useful garden/rewild space for about 3.5 years now. I started with about three quarters of an acre of grass and have planted out the majority of that with a mix of native plants, food plants, and wildflowers. The yard space I'm converting was just mowed grass for about 30 years prior with a few mature trees. The soil sucked, with maybe 3-4 inches of soil followed by sand. I have no actual training and not much experience so I wasn't sure how this would go at first, but seeing things popping to life in the 4th spring here has been satisfying. I thought I'd share some bullets here because I feel what I've done has been pretty effective and cheap.

A good resource of what's actually going on in soil is all of Redhawk's soil threads. Soil isn't dirt, it's a whole world in and of itself. Soil is more a process that happens than a substance that you can scoop out and handle. Building soil means encouraging diverse life to occur in the ground. That diversity of life then helps any plants/seeds you grow take off. You want plants to move into a bustling city - that community will make them strong. If you go the other way around and try to just grow plants without good soil, then your plants are showing up in a ghost town and they'll be lonely.

The technique I've used the most for soil growth is dumping huge amounts of woodchips all over the place. I live in a place where there are lots of arborists, so I made friends with a few and asked them to start dumping chips at my place. Arborist woodchips are very good soil food for a few reasons: they include twiggy bits and leaves, so they have way more nitrogen than woodchips from a bulk material store, they are a variety of sizes so they break down at different rates, and they are someone else's waste product so you can get them cheap/free.

• Once you get chips, dump them in places you want soil in thick layers. 12" will smother grass without any cardboard or anything else underneath. 16" is fine but don't do more than that or it prevents oxygen from getting into the soil.

• don't dig woodchips in. This will fuck up your soil chemistry for a year or so and it's also way more work. Cut the grass as much as you can and then just dump the chips on top. 6" tall grass is fine, shorter is better, taller than 6" and you will have a hard time truly smothering grass, so mow/cut if needed first

• bulk woodchips look a bit stupid at first but it will compact and the colours will bleach out to brown and it looks fine within a month.

• About 1' of chips will turn into 1" of soil after 4-5 years.

• The best time of year to lay them down initially is fall/early spring because rain will help get everything soaked and will jumpstart fungus and bugs doing their thing.

• around existing plants, pile chips 6-12" high but make sure they are pulled back from stems/trunks by 6-12". Don't make mulch volcanos around trees, shape them more like a bowl with the tree sticking out of the middle.

• during the first year you can't direct sow anything into chips. After the first year you can (and should). Nitrogen fixers like clover are great to sow because the woodchip bed will be hungry for nitrogen for a year or two after you put it down. If you don't seed anything after the first full year you will get a bunch of random weeds because the soil will be decent by then. It's better to plan to fill the space with whatever you want.

• you can plant vegetable starts into woodchips after the chips are about 6 months old (as long as they've been wet and the decay has kicked off). If you plant perennials, dig the hole deeper than normal to account for woodchip settlement.

• a couple full years after chip placement, you can direct sow anything, not just easy seeds. Well not carrots or things that you want a straight taproot, but most things.

• make mushroom slurry to jumpstart decay and soil building. Collect whatever random mushrooms you can find. Wear gloves if mushrooms in the area can be poisonous to touch. Collect buckets of rainwater/pond water/no chlorinated water (or leave chlorinated water outside for a couple days, or boil/carbon filter water treated with chloramine). Blend mushrooms with rainwater into a grey/brown slurry, dilute into larger buckets, pour mixture over woodchip beds, especially in shady/wetter spots that mushrooms like. Mushrooms that grow wild will take without any fussing about. When they do, keep propagating them elsewhere.

• make aerated compost tea to boost microbial diversity. Mix non chlorinated water per above with some molasses, put a cup or so of healthy forest soil, compost, worm castings into a sock/nylon, aerate 12-48 hours with an aquarium stone, dilute the mixture 10:1 and pour around the drip line/roots of plants, trees, shrubs, veggies. This stuff doesnt last so you have to use it as you make it. By doing this you spread microbial diversity, which helps your soil health a lot.

• this should be higher up, but be mindful of dust/spores when you are shoveling chips out of a big pile. Depending on wood species, time of year, how long they've sat in a pile, wood chip piles can start decaying pretty quick because they'll heat up and bacteria generally likes the warmth. That's mostly good but when you dig into it and there's a whole shit load of dust, that's a sign that you're spreading spores. Either wait til its rainy to move them or wear a n95 mask. Some spores can cause weird respiratory illnesses or worse.

• chips get way heavier after they get soaked, so best to move them soon after they've been dumped unless you want the workout.

All the above is pretty cheap if you're in the right place. I've moved something like 750 yards of chips around here. That will turn into about 75 yards of great soil. Buying that would cost me $7500 or something, plus I got good exercise.

here's some woodchip glam shots, caption follows the picture

damn look at the mycelium here. this is about 8-9 month old chips

this material is mostly about 3 years old with some new stuff chucked on top.

this is the first bed I built about 3.5 years ago. this wasn't 100% woodchips but a lot of it was. it's now really nice looking soil.

pretty typical cutaway in a path. I dumped about a foot of woodchips originally, then added about 6" 2 years ago. making thick layers of woodchips for paths is great for a whole bunch of reasons. they prevent mud, they prevent soil compaction underneath even with mild vehicle use, and paths are a good way to grow soil next to your beds. you put down a bunch of woodchips next to a bed, let it sit a year or so, then rake off the top inch of chips and shovel what's under into your beds. then replace with fresh chips.

mycelium in a pretty new cedar bed. some people talk about allelopathy of cedar inhibiting growth of stuff and maybe it does, but it doesn't seem noticable.

strawberries fucking love these beds. they are excellent groundcover. they spread rapidly, they make delicious berries, and they're hardy. if you want more green/less berry then grow wild species like coastal/woodland strawberries. if you want the berries, buy a 6 pack of plugs from the nursery and wait a year or make friends with literally anyone with a strawberry patch and they'll give you plugs. I started with about 40 that I got from a friend 3 years ago and I don't think I could possibly give enough away to have less strawberry plants now.

wine cap mushrooms are a great thing to grow also. buy or borrow one thing of spawn for $30 or so, put it in fresh woodchips, then propagate them into other woodchip patches by either digging out spawn and spreading it around, or even easier, by picking the mushroom and pulling up some of its 'roots/the stump' and burying the roots/stump a few inches down somewhere else. wine caps are really easy to ID, they're enormous so they're easy to find, they're tasty, and their mycelium is really aggressive at spreading around so it's easy to keep them going.

This interview between the NYT and the author of 'how to blow up a pipeline' includes discussion of the social acceptability of political violence. Unsurprisingly, the NYT person flips out at the idea of property destruction and seems to bounce between 'political violence is never acceptable' and calling David Malm a hypocrite for not blowing up a pipeline during the interview. Evidently this is the kind of political violence the NYT doesn't support, in contrast to the kind of political violence they love (i.e. political violence used by the american state against property and humanity both foreign and domestic).

This is my favourite part of the interview in the spoilers.

spoiler

NYT: We live in representative democracies where certain liberties are respected. We vote for the policies and the people we want to represent us. And if we don’t get the things we want, it doesn’t give us license to then say, “We’re now engaging in destructive behavior.” Right? Either we’re against political violence or not. We can’t say we’re for it when it’s something we care about and against it when it’s something we think is wrong.

Malm: Of course we can. Why not?

NYT: That is moral hypocrisy.

Malm: I disagree.

NYT: Why?

Malm: The idea that if you object to your enemy’s use of a method, you therefore also have to reject your own use of this method would lead to absurd conclusions. The far right is very good at running electoral campaigns. Should we thereby conclude that we shouldn’t run electoral campaigns? This goes for political violence too, unless you’re a pacifist and you reject every form of political violence — that’s a reasonably coherent philosophical position. Slavery was a system of violence. The Haitian revolution was the violent overthrow of that system. It is never the case that you defeat an enemy by renouncing every kind of method that enemy is using.

NYT: But I’m specifically thinking about our liberal democracy, however debased it may be. How do you rationalize advocacy for violence within what are supposed to be the ideals of our system?

Malm: Imagine you have a Trump victory in the next election — doesn’t seem unimaginable — and you get a climate denialist back in charge of the White House and he rolls back whatever good things President Biden has done. What should the climate movement do then? Should it accept this as the outcome of a democratic election and protest in the mildest of forms? Or should it radicalize and consider something like property destruction? I admit that this is a difficult question, but I imagine that a measured response to it would need to take into account how democracy works in a country like the United States and whether allowing fossil-fuel companies to wreck the planet because they profit from it can count as a form of democracy and should therefore be respected.

NYT: Could you give me a reason to live?

Malm: What do you mean?

NYT: Your work is crushing. But I have optimism about the human project.

Malm: I’m not an optimist about the human project.