Sun Tzu versus profoundly inaccurate New York Times reporters

I missed this at the time.  From Russia’s Military, Once Creaky, Is Modern and Lethal by Anton Troianovski, Michael Schwirtz and Andrew E. Kramer.  The subheading is A significantly upgraded military has emerged as a key tool of Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy, as he flexes his might around the globe and, most ominously, on the Ukraine border.  It reads like Russian military propaganda.

This is from January 27, 2022, just a month before the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.  

To say that the journalist's reporting has not aged well would be a staggering understatement.  It is almost impossible to imagine how they could have been more wrong.  A particular concern is the possibility that their reporting reflected the assessment at that time of the American intelligence agencies.  At best, one can hope that this was not the case and that the journalists were simply Russophiles who were being unduly optimistic for Russia.  They certainly come across as Russian cheerleaders.

I came across this as a consequence of responses by people to the New York Times's editorial today The War in Ukraine Is Getting Complicated, and America Isn’t Ready basically taking a Neville Chamberlain approach and arguing that Ukraine should give up land for peace with Russia.  

Appeasement is never a good look.  Especially in the context of a media company such as The New York Times with its history of Marxist apologist and Holodomor denial owing to Walter Duranty's reporting in the early 1930s Soviet Union under Stalin.  But it is also true that the NYT journalists and editors today can in no way be held accountable for Duranty's sycophantic and profoundly false reporting ninety years ago.

But they can be held accountable for grossly bad reporting ninety days ago such as that by Anton Troianovski, Michael Schwirtz and Andrew E. Kramer.  If the editorial board believes their own false reporting by Troianovski, Schwirtz and Kramer, then their position is somewhat understandable.  As long as you also accept that the editorial board has not been paying attention to the complete refutation of that reporting in the ninety days of combat since then.

In the early years of Vladimir V. Putin’s tenure as Russia’s leader, the country’s military was a hollowed-out but nuclear-armed shell.

[snip]

Two decades later, it is a far different fighting force that has massed near the border with Ukraine. Under Mr. Putin’s leadership, it has been overhauled into a modern sophisticated army, able to deploy quickly and with lethal effect in conventional conflicts, military analysts said. It features precision-guided weaponry, a newly streamlined command structure and well-fed and professional soldiers. And they still have the nuclear weapons.

The modernized military has emerged as a key tool of Mr. Putin’s foreign policy: capturing Crimea, intervening in Syria, keeping the peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan and, just this month, propping up a Russia-friendly leader in Kazakhstan. Now it is in the middle of its most ambitious — and most ominous — operation yet: using threats and potentially, many fear, force, to bring Ukraine back into Moscow’s sphere of influence.

“The mobility of the military, its preparedness and its equipment are what allow Russia to pressure Ukraine and to pressure the West,” said Pavel Luzin, a Russian security analyst. “Nuclear weapons are not enough.”

[snip]

The T-72B3 tanks amassed on Ukraine’s border have a new thermal optics system for nighttime fighting as well as guided missiles with twice the range of other tanks, according to Robert Lee, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and Ph.D. candidate at King’s College in London, who is a Russian military expert. Kalibr cruise missiles deployed on ships and submarines in the Black Sea and Iskander-M rockets arrayed along the border can hit targets just about anywhere inside Ukraine, Mr. Lee said.

In the last decade, the Russian air force has acquired more than 1,000 new aircraft, according to a 2020 article by Aleksei Krivoruchko, a deputy defense minister. This includes the country’s most advanced fighters, the SU-35S; a squadron of these has been deployed to Belarus ahead of joint military exercises next month.

[snip]

More responsibility was delegated to lower-level officers, a degree of autonomy that contrasts with the civilian government structure in the Putin era. Defense Minister Sergei K. Shoigu said last month that all ground troop commanders, 92 percent of air force pilots and 62 percent of the Navy had combat experience.

“They showed to themselves and the whole world they are able to wage large-scale operations with precision weapons, and long-range weapons, and intelligence capability to support it,” Mr. Adamsky, the expert based in Israel, said.

Apart from the opening paragraph, virtually everything else quoted (along with most of the unquoted elements of the article) have been proven to be wrong. Simply and comprehensively wrong.  Not an error here or a misunderstanding there.  Just wrong.

The Russian command structure is as inflexible and inadequate as it has always been.  The lack of independent decision making accorded to junior officers and experienced NCOs is just as disabling as always.  The Russian logistics has proven nearly as bad as their maintenance procedures.  (Chris O thread on Russian equipment storage processes and their weaknesses.  Trent Telenko thread on Russian equipment maintenance weaknesses. )  The upgraded and technologically superior equipment has proven to be a myth.  

The supposed "mobility of the military" "able to deploy quickly " did not survive the first three days of war as convoys of ten miles and more bogged down and ground to a halt owing to blown tires and empty gas tanks.  

The supply of precision-guided weaponry seems to have been exhausted in the first month with Russia now relying almost solely on dumb bombs and traditional artillery.  Military manufacturing plants have halted production owing to dependence on Western technology components.

As for "well-fed and professional soldiers", reports are rife of Russian soldiers's conversations with loved ones at home bemoaning how ill-equipped and poorly supplied they have been.  In addition, for all the vaunted "well-trained core of roughly 400,000 contract soldiers", the invasion force has turned out to be comprised of poorly performing specialist forces many of whom were more than decimated in the opening week of war, unsupported contract soldiers, cannon fodder conscripts, mercenaries (The Wagner Group) and Chechens.  War crimes have been rife and battlefield competence rare.  

Despite those claimed "more than 1,000 new aircraft" with 92% of pilots having combat experience, Russia still has not established air superiority, leaving their ground forces at the full mercy of Ukrainian artillery and assault forces.  

The Russians are estimated to have already lost some 30% of their invasion force (55-65,000 men) to KIA and WIA in just ninety days.  In World War II, for comparison, America lost 6.8% of its total force to KIA and WIA over three and a half years.  

Interestingly, the three reporters do accurately report Russia's past failings.

A major turning point came in 2008 when a long-simmering conflict over disputed territories in the Republic of Georgia exploded into war.

Russian forces quickly overwhelmed their much smaller Georgian neighbors, but the war uncovered deep deficiencies in the Russian military. Ground troops were not in radio contact with the Air Force, leading to several serious friendly fire attacks. Communications were so bad that some officers had to use their personal cellphones. Tanks and armored personnel carriers broke down frequently.

This was true in 2008.  But it has also turned out to be true in 2022.  The "massive shake-up of the Russian armed forces" never functionally occurred.  

In 2022, Russian ground troops are still not able to contact the Air Force and indeed combined services coordination has been largely absent.  Russian field communications has been abysmal and astonishingly insecure.  Not just officers but troops still use their personal cellphones for communication.  Tank and APC losses due to mechanical failure have been punishing.  Similarly, military logistical truck losses have been so bad that the Russian have had to resort to civilian truck fleets.  

Just over a decade later, Russia’s tools of electronic warfare, which can be used to intercept or jam enemy communications and knock drones off course and out of the sky, are believed far superior to the U.S. military’s, analysts said.

“We’re playing catch-up now,” General Hodges said. “For the last 20 years, we were focused on iPhones or cellphones and terrorist networks, while they continued to develop substantial, powerful jamming and intercept capabilities.”

Just how wrong can one be?  This supposed technological prowess is certainly not evident in the battlefields of Ukraine.  Russia has taken heavy losses from Ukrainian drones and jamming seems at best episodic.  Russian communications appear to completely accessible to Ukrainian and Western intelligence services.  Russian service men's cell phones in Ukraine appear to be monitored and even targeted.  

Troianovski, Schwirtz and Kramer conclude with:

All those developments, analysts say, make it hard for the West to stop Mr. Putin from attacking Ukraine, if he is determined.

“There’s very little we can do to deny Russia’s ability to wage further warfare against Ukraine,” Mr. Boulègue said. “We can’t deter a worldview.”

As it turns out, the West has far more options than they anticipated.  The chattering class and mainstream media's fan boydom of Putin seems to have been misleading.  Maybe there is very little the West wants to do directly to deter Russian military adventurism, but the Ukrainians sure seem to be pretty good at denying the Russians the easy victory they were hoping for.  

The Ukrainians have exposed the paper tiger of the Russian Army and that of the New York Times reporting.  What we do with that knowledge is something else entirely.  We owe a great debt to the courage and resilience of the Ukrainians for calling a bluff we long shied from.  And whether it is our intelligence agencies unable to form an accurate assessment or the profoundly inaccurate and bad reporting of our most prestigious national newspaper, it is worth keeping in mind The Art of War by Sun Tzu, Chapter 13.

Now the reason the enlightened prince and the wise general conquer the enemy whenever they move and their achievements surpass those of ordinary men is foreknowledge.

Knowledge is the life blood of the classical liberal West.  In chapter 3 Sun Tzu notes,

It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.

Troianovski, Schwirtz and Kramer seem to know neither the enemy nor the West.