War in the era of twitter and tiktok is kinda weird to me. I assume that information like this would have been available to military leadership in past wars and battles. But now it's available to every civilian with an internet connection. I don't know if this is good or bad or neutral. But it feels very different.
In the past the fog of war was thick. It may be weeks or months before knowledge of certain battles would make its ways to civilian sources and militaries had much more control over what the press published.
Now we can even see some battles live streamed, but at the same time (counter)-intelligence operations can be directly viewed by the end user. As always the question of what we are seeing being spun with a false narrative or is it even real at all remains.
Unfortunately, I don't have any sources to back this up, only this anecdote from attending US elementary school during late 90s and middle school during the early 2000s. Teachers told us that during the age of muskets at least there were often crowds of civilian spectators on the sidelines during various western-European and American battles up until WW1. I suppose the emergence of chemical weapons and other 20th century WMDs had a big role in curbing that. If it's true, then it's a small parallel to what we have now.
The First Battle of Bull Run / Manassas Junction in the American Civil War is infamous for the spectators that came down from Washington, DC and clogged the Union forces' path of retreat when they were routed.
It’s really just long range weapons. When most weapons had an accurate range of only a hundred metres or two, and masses of troop moved at walking pace, you could spectate relatively safely from a distance.
However conflict tourism is still a thing even today.
Yes, much harder to use small detached flanking forces in a densely populated areas.
They get TikToked, countered within minutes, and then hunted down with long range weapons.
This is especially powerful against battaglione sized units, since their detachments are too small to bear the damage from few lost vehicles. If a convoy loses its sole fuel truck to ATGM, it's bye bye for them in such a wast flat open country like Ukraine.
> But now it's available to every civilian with an internet connection. I don't know if this is good or bad or neutral.
I'm glad it is. In the early 90ies I was in SriLanka watching a genocide unfold in the South East that never went reported until mid 2000 where the Sinhalese killed Tamils most of them children and women. When they were done with them they shoved the dead bodies into stacks of truck tires and lit them on fire. You could smell the burning rubber miles away but despite the smell the purpose was getting rid of the evidence. (I thought it was strange because surely people would smell. Hell I was in the next village jumped onto my bike to understand what is happening. Everyone was in the streets - how would they cover it up in any case?)
There were billboards ever few km showing a dead tiger (pun to the LTTE) with an army boot stomping on its throat. It looked childish almost because it was hand-painted and badly so (typical of billboards you see in poor countries). The billboard read "only a dead tiger is a good tiger".
After this I went to buy newspaper nearly every day and couldn't believe none of this was ever reported. I asked people back in my home country if they had seen any news but nobody had. They did ofc always report hear about the horrific bombing by LTTE in Sinhalese territory, they talked about the horrors of these children who are so "brainwashed" to go to school and blow up a class full of Sinahlese kids. Western countries immediately issued a travel warning. but not a single page acknowledging what happened to the Tamils.
Personally I'd rather live in a world where I have the opposite problem: getting drowned by propaganda and needing lots of time and visiting many rabbit-holes sifting through the data just to get a vague idea of what might be happening: That's a lot better than the absolute dystopia of smelling burning flesh and tires but nobody who is interested in it. And even years later when you finally coped with it not being 100% sure if it actually happened. Like it was all in your head.
If my brother wouldn't have seen the same thing to confirm that it actually did happen I probably would have gone insane thinking my mind made it up.
A high information climate reduces the effectiveness of maneuver warfare; this is easily demonstrated when I play a multiplayer first-person shooter and my enemies are employing ESP cheats. They can simply rush my position without any other strategy, which is profoundly different from how an experienced player would behave without that info.
What that means at the scale of real war is that populations, even informal militia, have a much greater ability to resist professional armies using similarly simple strategies. Cyberwarfare matters to this, too; and Ukraine is a particularly dangerous foe in this regard given the strength of their IT sector. In effect, it's become quite hard to do anything much with military offensives other than intimidate opponents and bomb some stuff.
It's astonishing to look back on reviews of battles from WWII and see how many costly blunders and accidental successes were made because of poor information and coordination. But that quality is also why "blitzkrieg" succeeded as a doctrine.
What is even weirder to me is that what I would consider confidential information is basically broadcasted online, for example soldiers/convoys positions, plans, various activities like what equipment is being shipped from EU to Ukraine and through where... and so on...
Public material support is signal both toward own citizens (who often see Russian conquest as danger to themselves in the long term) and toward Russia.
I wonder, what happens with all that captured equipment? I see a lot of videos of seemingly undamaged anti-air systems, artillery, tanks.. can Ukrainians readily use them or there are some locks etc. that prohibits it?
I heard someone on Japanese TV hypothesising that it could be used to spread the fake news that Ukraine had a secret program to build nuclear weapons. I guess of that were true, that would already have happened?
It’s a strategic location with tons of radioactive material. Ukraine closed all of the exclusion zone a few days before the invasion.
At this point I think it’s about securing the site so material cannot be used in dirty bombs. If this war were go to nuclear the world has no choice but to get involved.
Or so that it can be, as part of a false flag attack. Alternatively, Russian troops could sabotage it, just to create a (bigger) ecological disaster to punish Ukraine for resisting invasion.
Dirty bombs don’t seem like a thing you would even want to mess with. The types of materials you would need are heavy and very dangerous to handle and transport in the concentrations needed to add them to a bomb. The resulting package would be tremendous heavy and probably have to be transported by truck. The whole operation could kill anyone involved in building and transporting it.
On top of that, it wouldn’t be very effective. Most of the radioactive material would be heavy and fall out of the air quickly. Anyone covered in the dust however could shower and probably be totally fine. One the dust is dispersed it’s unlikely to be radioactive enough to form an exclusion zone.
On top of all of that, the whole world now thinks you’re a godless monster, and you might wind up in The Hague. It’s a loser of an idea.
NPR reminded me this Saturday about suspicious bombings of Russian citizens in Russia in 1999 (300 killed) which propelled Putin into power. There's some evidence that it was a false flag operation.
But why though? Surely winning a the war quickly would be in their best interest (blitzkrieg), and that usually means using your best gear, as every extra stalemate day means insane financial losses from the sanctions and time for your opponent to get reinforcements and beat you.
Maybe the Russian army is just poorly equipped after all, and all that gear flashed in the red square during the national parade was just for show.
I’ll grant that’s a decent opinion and shows an appreciation of history but let me ask why would someone be sending a four generation old tank onto the battlefield at all?
It's a super strange context. One of those two things seems to be true.
Either Russia's military is badly dilapidated, possibly with a lot of their supposed upgrade funding having been siphoned off by the klepto state. Putin may not even know just how bad it is, they certainly would avoid telling him if they could. So the invasion force is representative of their normal military capabilities, which are apparently mediocre.
Or they sent in the weaker forces first, including the younger conscripts (which keep showing up getting captured) and inferior hardware, as perhaps a draw-out maneuver.
It's possible Putin didn't want to put his best gear and soldiers at risk initially if NATO decided to launch a counter attack in response. I assume Putin is quite paranoid and delusional to an extent; he may not believe NATO would attack, but he also might not want to fully bet his military on that guess. He may have been wanting to see what moves would be made against him by NATO / EU / US first, before committing further to load his best into Ukraine and put it at high risk. Those forces would be very exposed moving into Ukraine. That would just be prudent conservatism on his part, thinking that Ukraine couldn't put up much resistence and he might have believed the weaker initial wave would be enough to take Ukraine regardless (supposedly he's quite upset about the rate of progress, so either way he underestimated Ukraine if that's true).
First thing that struck me is how many Chinese made weapons are being used by Ukraine and some by Russia.
Looking them up seems some were first designed in Russia by now made in China?
Is it really that much different than the large amount of arms made by the US? The fact that China tends to be very price competitive on manufacturing costs I'm sure will have a massive effect here.
Now, more speculation on my part, it seems very likely that China could subsidize weapons manufacturing to bolster the manufacture of weapons in its own country, and to be part of the feedback loop on what is effective and what is not and not have to be directly involved in the battle itself.
