Tyler Cowen pointed to >this< post by Gilbert Doctorow on The Russian Way of War, a title that alludes to Hanson’s seminal work. Doctorow is a convincing writer and has a corpus of work that builds a defense of Putin’s position. I admire his intelligence and flair as demonstrated >here< in melding Bulgakov with American paranoia following 9/11. Doctorow makes interesting points and writes with authority.
Let us start with the Russian Way of War (Part Two), which asserts Russia has been prosecuting the war with “one hand tied behind its back” and that the restraint is purposeful. His premise is that Putin wants to resolve this with minimal loss of life and thus the Russian Way of War:
This approach does not inflict death on huge numbers of civilians, does not count on a ‘shock and awe’ initial attack to demoralize and overrun the enemy. I said at the time that the overriding considerations on the Russian side were the traditional ‘brotherly’ relations between Ukrainians and Russians, who were extensively intermarried and had relations on both sides of the national frontiers.
At face value, this seems emotionally logical and provides a rational reason for Russia’s failure to meet its military objectives. Wait: When was the last war waged by combatants of “brotherly” relations? The Civil War. The single most brutal and bloody conflict in U.S. history. And why? Because those families were virulently opposed ideologically. The fact that the combatants were intermarried did not abate the violence of the war’s prosecution.
So I had to dig deeper.
He published with prescience given his December 8, 2021 assertion “The United States pushes Russia to the brink” which outlines actions that do appear to place some responsibility on the West for the current conflict.
My admiration for his analysis was short lived.
Who is Gilbert Doctorow? A corporate expatriate turned self-styled public intellectual. Former regional manager with UPS, later a marketing consultant in Russia, and eventually an independent scholar and public speaker. I certainly do not hold his “independent” scholar status against him, but I must point out the hubris of his LinkedIn profile (cited in full with spelling errors):
I have purblished four collections of essays in the political science field, beginning with “Great Post-Cold War American Thinkers on International Affairs” which was and remains a breakthrough book …
As a breakthough author, I assume you have spell check?
My ad hominem poke at his spelling notwithstanding, I am sure his experience and intelligence are more than sufficient basis for well-conceived positions and opinions. He published on antiwar.com and I am highly supportive of their ideals – a libertarian principled organization. However, Doctorow also publishes heavily in the Monthly Review, which is ideologically socialist. I can see a plausible path to link these two perspectives for a Russophile like Doctorow.
He knows war is bad, so writes positioned papers on why it is so, and believes in a social equality where everyone gets to summer in Scandinavia like he did. And the hubris demonstrated in his description of his own published work drives it home for me. He is a member of the moralizing intelligentsia, the “Anointed,” in Sowell’s useful phrase, who believe their compassion grants them superior insight. Worse, Doctorow portrays Putin as a reluctant aggressor “pushed into a corner” by the West. History tells us that cornered tyrants bite hardest.
After a short fall down the rabbit hole (because Cowen linked to it and Doctorow’s analysis sounded cogent – at first read), my convictions are bolstered by climbing out.
My concerns on Russia’s aggression remain both personal and ideological. Personal because I am concerned this ill-conceived war could escalate to a more direct confrontation between Russia and the West. Ideological because, while I am a Libertarian, I am a flawed one. I cannot follow Murray Rothbard to all his logical conclusions and especially when we scale to international politics. I know that the human experience is universal and that human action should be free of external constraints, but there are in fact constraints; self-imposed, culturally conditioned, historically inherited, and morally imposed.
I know that war is the health of the state because the aftermath of every war is an expansion of state power over its citizens and broader control over the economy. But I cannot follow Rothbard to the idea of non-intervention, there are times when it is necessary and morally just to intervene. Unfortunately, there remains only one means to succor violent aggression. It is indeed a slippery slope and one we Americans have been pushed down all too often. Yet history shows me that as dangerous and hypocritical as it may be to be a hegemonic power, there will always be one. The question thus distils to who will be in control? Our police actions and projections of power have been and will be used for selfish purposes and inconsistently. I can envision worse uses of power. I just pray we don’t have to use it.
___________________
UPDATES
5.15.22 – the Independent reports that Putin may have suffered a loss of 1/3 of the forces initially committed to the Ukraine invasion.
4.28.22 – the Economist Apr 30th 2022:
“Vladimir Putin uses warfare to make up for Russia’s weaknesses. That is why he is so dangerous
The might of the modern Russian army was supposed to show the world that President Vladimir Putin had restored his country to greatness after the humiliation of the Soviet collapse. Instead, poor progress and heavy losses in Ukraine have exposed deep flaws within Russia. For those threatened by Mr Putin’s aggression, a diminished army is a relief. Unfortunately, it also leaves a nuclear-armed power with a point to prove.
So far, the invasion of Ukraine has been a disaster for Russia’s armed forces. About 15,000 troops have been killed in two months of fighting, according to Britain’s government. At least 1,600 armoured vehicles have been destroyed, along with dozens of aircraft and the flagship of the Black Sea fleet. The assault on the capital, Kyiv, was a chaotic failure.
Leon Trotsky wrote that “the army is a copy of society and suffers from all its diseases, usually at a higher temperature”. Fighting in the east and the south of Ukraine over the next few weeks will not only determine the course of the war, but it will also determine how much the Russian army can salvage its reputation—and the reputation of the society it embodies.
Our briefing this week sets out just how rotten the army has been. Russia’s defence budget, of over $250bn at purchasing power, is about three times that of Britain or France, but much of it is squandered or stolen. Mr Putin and his top commanders kept their invasion plans from senior officers, reflecting a crippling lack of trust. Disaffected troops, fed on out-of-date rations, have deserted their vehicles. Units have tortured, raped and murdered only to be honoured by the Kremlin. Russia has failed to win control of the skies or combine air power with tanks, artillery and infantry. Wallowing in corruption, unable to foster initiative or learn from their mistakes, its frustrated generals abandoned advanced military doctrine and fell back on flattening cities and terrorising civilians.
Ukraine’s highly motivated forces are a rebuke to these Russian failings. Despite being less numerous and less well armed, they resisted the invading army by passing decision-making to small, adaptable local units given up-to-the-minute intelligence. Even if the Russian campaign, now under a single commander, makes gains in Donbas, it will do so chiefly thanks to its sheer mass. Its claim to be a sophisticated modern force is as convincing as a tank turret rusting in a Ukrainian field.
For Mr Putin this is a crushing setback. That is partly because, although he controls a formidable propaganda machine to help drown out his critics, the loss of face threatens his standing at home. It is mostly because the use of military force is central to his strategy for making Russia count in the world.
Russia may be vast, but it is a medium-sized polity that still yearns to be a superpower. Its population ranks between Bangladesh and Mexico, its economy between Brazil and South Korea and its share of global exports between Taiwan and Switzerland. Although Russia enjoys some sympathy in non-aligned countries like South Africa and India, its soft power is ebbing—hastened by its display of incompetence and brutality in Ukraine.
To fill the gap between its power and aspirations—and to resist what he sees as America’s encroachment—Mr Putin has repeatedly turned to the only sphere where Russia can still purport to be world-class: military force. In the past 14 years he has invaded Georgia and Ukraine (twice) and fought in Syria. His mercenaries have deployed to Libya, the Central African Republic, Sudan and now Ukraine. Mr Putin is a global bully obsessed with his country’s inadequacies. Contrast that with China, which also has ambitions, but has so far been able to get results using its growing economic and diplomatic heft.
Humiliation in Ukraine weakens Russia’s last claim to superpower status. The war may yet drag on, and while it does Russia will not be able to mount big operations elsewhere. Equipment, ammunition and manpower are being used up fast. Restoring Russia’s forces to full strength and training them to avoid the mistakes in Ukraine could take years. Should sanctions remain because Mr Putin is still in power, the task will require even longer. Russian missiles are chock-full of Western components. The flight of talented, outward-looking Russians will weigh on the economy. All the while, the less that Russia can project military power, the less it will be able to disrupt the rest of the world.
That will be welcome. Yet, the invasion of Ukraine also holds lessons that are less comforting. For one thing, it shows that in pursuit of this strategy Mr Putin is willing to take risks that to many others—including many Russians—make no sense. Further decline in Russian power could lead to still more reckless aggression.
Ukraine also shows that in future wars if Russian forces cannot prevail on the battlefield, they will resort to atrocities. A weaker Russian army could be an even more brutal one. For those around the world facing Russian aggression, that is a terrible prospect.
Ultimately, weakness may lead Russia to the last arena where it is still indisputably a superpower: chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. From the start of this war, Mr Putin and his government have repeatedly brandished the threat of weapons of mass destruction. Mr Putin is rational, in that he wants his regime to survive, so the chances of their use probably remain slim. But as Russia’s armed forces run out of conventional options, the temptation to escalate will surely grow.
The message for the wider world is that Mr Putin’s military opportunism in Ukraine must be seen to fail by his own officers and strategists, who may then temper his next headstrong scheme. A stalemate in Donbas would merely set up the next fight and it could be even more threatening than today’s.
Yet, even if Mr Putin is defeated, he will remain dangerous. The message for nato is that it needs to update its tripwire defence. This rests on the idea that a Russian attempt to take a bite out of, say, the Baltic states may succeed at first, but would trigger a wider war which nato would eventually win. That defence involves the risk of miscalculation and escalation, which are more fraught than ever if Russia’s conventional forces are weak. Better to have a large forward force that Russia would find hard to defeat from the very start. The best way to be safe from Mr Putin and his rotten army is to deter him from fighting at all.”
3.4.23 – The Economist reports on Russian demography – which echoes Peter Zeihan:
Ademographic tragedy is unfolding in Russia. Over the past three years the country has lost around 2m more people than it would ordinarily have done, as a result of war, disease and exodus. The life expectancy of Russian males aged 15 fell by almost five years, to the same level as in Haiti. The number of Russians born in April 2022 was no higher than it had been in the months of Hitler’s occupation. And because so many men of fighting age are dead or in exile, women now outnumber men by at least 10m.
War is not the sole—or even the main—cause of these troubles, but it has made them all worse. According to Western estimates, 175,000-250,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded in the past year (Russia’s figures are lower). Somewhere between 500,000 and 1m mostly young, educated people have evaded the meat-grinder by fleeing abroad. Even if Russia had no other demographic problems, losing so many in such a short time would be painful. As it is, the losses of war are placing more burdens on a shrinking, ailing population. Russia may be entering a doom loop of demographic decline.
The roots of Russia’s crisis go back 30 years. The country reached peak population in 1994, with 149m people. The total has since zig-zagged downwards. It was 145m in 2021 (that figure, from the un, excludes the 2.4m people of Crimea, which Russia seized in 2014 and incorporated into its national accounts). According to un projections, the total could be just 120m in 50 years, if current patterns persist. That would make Russia the 15th-most-populous country in the world, down from sixth in 1995. According to Alexei Raksha, an independent demographer who used to work for the state statistics service, if you look just at peacetime years, the number of births registered in April 2022 was the lowest since the 18th century. April was a particularly cruel month, but it was a revealing glimpse of a chronic problem.
Population decline is not unique to Russia: most post-communist states have seen dips, though not like this. Their declines have been slow but also manageable. Russia’s population in recent decades has seen a precipitous slump, then a partial recovery (thanks to a period of high immigration from parts of the ex-Soviet Union and more generous child allowances after 2007), followed by a renewed fall.
According to the state statistics agency, in 2020 and 2021 combined the country’s population declined by 1.3m; deaths outstripped births by 1.7m. (The un also shows a fall, but it is shallower.) The decline was largest among ethnic Russians, whose number, the census of 2021 said, fell by 5.4m in 2010-21. Their share of the population fell from 78% to 72%. So much for Mr Putin’s boast to be expanding the Russki mir (Russian world).
All this began before the war and reflects Russia’s appalling covid pandemic. The official death toll from the disease was 388,091, which would be relatively low; but The Economist estimates total excess deaths in 2020-23 at between 1.2m and 1.6m. That would be comparable to the number in China and the United States, which have much larger populations. Russia may have had the largest covid death toll in the world after India, and the highest mortality rate of all, with 850-1,100 deaths per 100,000 people.
If you add pandemic mortality to the casualties of war and the flight from mobilisation, Russia lost between 1.9m and 2.8m people in 2020-23 on top of its normal demographic deterioration. That would be even worse than during the disastrous early 2000s, when the population was falling by roughly half a million a year.
What might that mean for Russia’s future? Demography is not always destiny; and Russia did for a while begin to reverse its decline in the mid-2010s. The impact of population change is often complex, as Russia’s military mobilisation shows. The decline in the number of ethnic Russians of call-up age (which is being raised from 18-27 to 21-30) will make it harder for the armed forces to carry out the regular spring draft, which begins in April.
Such complications notwithstanding, the overall effect of demographic decline will be to change Russia profoundly—and for the worse. Most countries which have suffered population falls have managed to avoid big social upheavals. Russia may be different. Its population is falling unusually fast and may drop to 130m by mid-century. The decline is associated with increased misery: the life expectancy at birth of Russian males plummeted from 68.8 in 2019 to 64.2 in 2021, partly because of covid, partly from alcohol-related disease. Russian men now die six years earlier than men in Bangladesh and 18 years earlier than men in Japan.
And Russia may not achieve what enables other countries to grow richer as they age: high and rising levels of education. Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographer at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, argues that the country presents a peculiar combination of third-world mortality and first-world education. It has some of the highest rates of educational attainment among over-25s in the world. But the exodus of well-educated young people is eroding this advantage. According to the communications ministry, 10% of it workers left the country in 2022. Many were young men. Their flight is further skewing Russia’s unbalanced sex ratio, which in 2021 meant there were 121 females older than 18 for every 100 males.
The demographic doom loop has not, it appears, diminished Mr Putin’s craving for conquest. But it is rapidly making Russia a smaller, worse-educated and poorer country, from which young people flee and where men die in their 60s. The invasion has been a human catastrophe—and not only for Ukrainians.
Protective Arts 