I don't see much "wishful thinking" in the article? It points out a surprising fact (that Russia is not using the air power to the extent that everybody expected) and posits some possible explanations: intentionally holding back (but why?), inability to pre-emptively destroy Ukraine's air defences, lack of guided munitions, etc.

I haven't read this article, but a few days ago another article was explaining how Russian air tactics are different from the US ones, and how they see the air power in a war, which is something you're not considered in your explanations.

The gist was that the US goes immediately for dominating the sky. Russia sees ground forces as the main engine of the army, and the Air Force only supports the advancement of ground forces near the border, without bombing far into enemy territory (which is a task for the army's missiles).

That wouldn't make sense though:

First as a doctrine, it would be a stupid one - they tend to use paratroopers for surprise taking of advanced positions, and air support is vital to help them keep their position until reinforcements can arrive. Point in case, the failure at Hostomel. Their doctrine emphasises anti-air defenses because air superiority against a superior enemy ( NATO) isn't certain, but that doesn't mean the Air Force shouldn't be used at all, especially against an inferior enemy

Second, they don't seem to be even doing that - there are small scale ( 1-2 planes) raids deep in Ukrainian territory, and neither their planes nor their SAMs can deal with the drones Ukraine fields, even over Russian held territory

How do they expect their ground forces to advance when Turkish drones are allowed to circle overhead? Keeping control of the skies is not unique to US tactics...

Tbh I have no idea, I'm no military expert.

I could not find the source article I read, and I guess there's a non trivial chance it might even have been based on Russian propaganda... as usual, take everything with a grain of salt. I just find it hard (and reassuring) to imagine that Russia's army and air force are in such a terrible state.

No, you're right, there has been a difference in doctrine. The Russians put much more emphasis on SAMs traditionally, to enable their ground forces to operate even if they their airforce doesn't own the sky. That's why they have everything ranging fro Iglas to S-400s. They seem to have missed developing a good counter for the Bayraktars though. :)

I don't find it hard to believe, but agree the safest option is to assume they're not incompetent and do our best to fight them off as if they were the best.

Maybe that's what parent comment is concerned about when saying "I do hope Western militaries are not counting on Russia's 'incompetence and inexperience'"

I've read many times that the major Russian military reforms over the last decade or so - successful or not - included combined arms, including air and infantry.

I think everybody has been surprised by just how bad Russia is doing. They have been overestimated by magnitudes, it seems. Their gear is in a much worse condition than anybody would have guessed, they have logistical problems all over the place etc.

This is not a reason to relax, but one can certainly observe that.

I'm surprised by how many people are unquestioningly believing every bit of propaganda the side they supports puts out. How do you know they're doing poorly? Where is your information coming from and how have you verified it is correct? Quite a bit of what is being put out by pretty much everyone with an audience is laughably not plausible. Do you believe Ukraine's story that Russia paratroopers to plummeting to their deaths in large numbers because of missing parachutes? Some of the stories are absolutely ridiculous and I'm not sure if we're meant to believe them or if they're there simply to make everything else more credible in comparison. This isn't just Ukraine doing it, it's everyone all around coming up with these stories that defy logic. Russia might indeed be doing poorly but I don't see how anyone outside of the war theater, or even most in it, have much confidence in knowing the state of things very well.

I think most casual observers, myself included, expected to see the Ukrainian government fled/killed, a new puppet leader installed and Russian tank columns occupying Kiev within a week of the invasion starting. And this seems to have been what Russia expected as well, at least if the notorious plan "leak" on Belarus state TV is to be believed.

The fact that this has clearly failed to happen indicates that the war is not going as planned.

For comparison, it took the US three weeks total from launching their invasion of Iraq to taking over Baghdad, despite there being approximately 5x more distance to cover and Iraq fielding an army twice as large as Ukraine.

Let's just not forget that the US bombed Iraq (including its civilian infrastructure!) so much during the 13 previous years, and also imposed sanctions that delayed any Iraqi recovery. Ukraine, despite its obvious problems is not in this situation. Russia would have probably been able to decapitate the Ukr gov in a week in 2014, though.

There's plenty of OSINT available ( Oryx was even mentioned in the article). Take a look around, the only "side" which doesn't make it abundantly clear the Russian advance is an objective failure on every possible front - terrible logistics, ad-hoc consumer equipment like mobile phones used for communication, poorly maintained everything, low morale, hell, even poor planning and navigation ( lots of vehicles stuck in the mud), is the official Russian government propaganda. They've been thoroughly discredited by the lying before the war, and the accidentally published article about it's successful finish ( which is further indication of what the original Russian plan was).

It has been two weeks and Russia lost 12000 soldiers and 1200 vehicles, while capturing one major city (Kherson). They have also made no gains in last week.

That is somewhat of a fiasco for someone who is supposed to have deployed order of magnitude more soldiers, tanks and airplanes than their opponent, and claimed they will win in few days.

EDIT: thanks for the correction, got the cities mixed up.

Kharkhiv hasn't been captured. It hasn't even been surrounded. [1]

You are probably thinking of Kherson (a much smaller city, population 300k, in southern Ukraine).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukrai...

And the number of injured soldiers is usually 2-3x greater. Which means that Russia potentially has up to 36,000 troops out of action - that's between a quarter and a third of their entire forces in Ukraine!

It is 12000 casualties, so that is already the sum of wounded, surrendered and dead.

Some of the stories coming out of Ukraine are implausible, yes, but I wouldn't say 'quite a bit'. We have huge amounts of on the ground reports on social media from ordinary Ukrainians, and these reports are very consistent. That would be impossible for the government to co-ordinate. My girls play internet video games and in the early days you could talk on chat servers to Ukrainian kids about what was happening.

The only way to spin a false narrative is thorough censorship and control of the internet and public media, and we just don't have that in the west. We do have high levels of surveillance, and a tiny amount of editorialising on social media compared to Russia and China, but not state censorship and suppression capable of obstructing public discourse.

OSINT + unless the Ukrainians are dressing up as Russian conscripts raiding supermarkets for food, some things are by their nature apparent.

Vehicles stuck in mud, running out of fuel, expired food, sending old buses to Ukraine, using cope cages are defense, Russian soldiers stealing food, soldiers arrested by policemen, and the interminable list of tanks and armored vehicles being towed by farmers. I've never a war in which farmers just take tanks! How incompetent are the Russians?

This seems a pretty unbiased source (although western) and they corroborate that reality didn't meet expectations. [1]

Maybe we (and the Russians) actually underestimated the Ukrainians a lot more than overestimated Russians...

[1] http://www.iswresearch.org

Both. If I would travel back in time two years and tell myself the issues one of the armies were having in the battle at Ukraine, I wouldn't have assumed it was the Russians.

So it is both: Russians doing fat worse than expected and Ukrainians are doing much better than I feared they would do.

> people are unquestioningly believing

What makes you say they are unquestioning? There's a lot of evidence of Russian military incompetence, including that they are struggling against a much smaller, much less-funded and less-equipped military.

How I know Russia is doing poorly?

Easy: The war is still going on. There is a lot information that is indeed very unreliable, but undeniable Russia has not yet won the war. A thing that Putin himself said on Russian television could be easily done within two weeks. We are now way past that and there is no end in sight.

Now if we take that indicator of bad performance seriously we can wonder what got into the way of the Russians. And there are some suggestions like badly maintained vehicles, lack of logistics (fuel trucks), vehicles that are unable to drive offroad, bad morale, lack of airsupport and so on.

Now we can take all these theories and try the ones that fit the perceived reality most — not looking at individual instances but on trends — and the theories that fit that picture best win (for now).

The fact is, that Russian explainations don't square with what can be observed long term. Ukrainian explainations are propagandistic (and sometimes lies), but they fit what can be observed if you look onto the bigger arcs of development much better.

My private theory includes that this cuts both ways. Everybody wants to continue with business as usual: peace talks with a puppet government installed, lifting of sanctions for some concessions here and there, and then go on as if nothing happened.

This state of indecisiveness wasn't anticipated by anyone. Germany did even want to skip the sanction part since the war would be over in 3 days.

Now we have to actually deal with it; and the plans on both sides are made up as we go.

But the sanctions, as they have been carried out were so organized and swift (badum-tiss) I don't actually believe the plans for this were not in some drawer and only had to be signed.

They may have logistical problems, but they are also encircling/taking major cities, now with many more civilian casualties than early in the war.

I would take the (sadly looks more like wishful thinking) incompetence over the current destruction.

> I would take the (sadly looks more like wishful thinking) incompetence over the current destruction.

You get me wrong there. The current destruction is a result of the incompetence, not an alternative to it.

If they were a well organized well maintained troup going full Blitzkrieg they would have overwhelmed the Ukrainian forces so fast they already would have taken the capital more than a week ago. This is what they intended to do.

Now if they can't get forward because the majority of their transport can only happen on roads they are definitely in dire need of air superiority, because air superiority would keep the convoys safer. They started shelling civilian infrastructure because they want to break the unexpected fighting spirit and they have no other ways to do it. But this was definitly not what the leading heads in Russia would have preferred, they thought they would go in full Blitzkrieg and after 3 days the capital would have fallen due to overwhelming force.

> The current destruction is a result of the incompetence, not an alternative to it.

Does "Fallujah" ring a bell? The mirage of the clean, surgical war was created by the Clinton administration for the first war in Iraq. Such a thing does not exist and has never been observed accept in carefully manufactured narrative.

No war is perfectly surgical, but Russia itself recently fought successful wars with all objectives achieved with minimal casualties within days (certainly Western narratives around those Russian invasions weren't manufactured to praise them). It's also currently fighting a war in which the main advances stalled because they couldn't supply their troops, and as such has resorted to artillery bombardment of cities it can't seize or in some cases even surround despite incurring more casualties in two weeks than the famously messy US conquest and occupation of Afghanistan suffered in decades.

Is there are single instance in history where a country the size of Ukraine was overthrown in less than a month? It took the Nazi army 35 days to conquer the western part of Poland. Ukraine is twice the size of Poland. Huge landmasses just have... mass.

Sure, it's not straightforward to roll tanks into Lviv. But I don't think not moving in a week whilst sustaining heavier losses than NATO sustained conquering and occupying famously difficult to conquer Afghanistan over two decades (a country which did collapse in a month after they left) was part of the original plan. Open for debate how much of the cities they originally intended to flatten but I can easily believe artillery bombardment was Plan B, with Plan A being the hope Ukraine's command structure would implode and they'd rapidly sue for peace

On the other hand, Kiev is just next to Belarus. I would not expect them to take entire control of the whole country that quickly (look at how long it takes in Syria where the insurgents have nothing like the Ukrainian military), but it was certainly possible for a competent military to blitzkrieg their way into the presidential palace.

The first Irak war (aka "Desert Storm") was not under the Clinton admin, but Bush I, but I agree that the lingo it gave us ("surgical strikes" and the rest) is mostly bullshit.

> The mirage of the clean, surgical war was created by the Clinton administration for the first war in Iraq.

Come on, now. The mirage of a clean and easy war is probably as old as war itself. Hell, just look at the media just when WWI was getting started. I can criticise American imperialism as well as anyone but this is ridiculous. Besides the fact that the first Gulf war was under Bush.

Wasn't Bush Sr the one that went to Irak for the first Gulf war? And this one was clean, at least compared with US war that followed, and way cleaner than any European war of the 90s.

I am not American, so back when surgical strikes were promised I already knew what had to be expected.

> Paired with the total sell-out of the Democratic Party to the military industrial complex in the 1990s came the demise of that thing called "pacifism". I find it grating how literally nobody seems to take that idea seriously anymore.

If there's any thing I'm taking away from this, it's that Pacifism is dead. You need serious deterrence. Pacifism is what let Putin get this bad.

Incompetent armies can still do damage

But yeah let's hope they keep like that

If the point is to take a country, competent armies minimise damage. Otherwise at the end you’re just king of the ruins and have trouble extracting all the resources you came for.

Mass bombings is almost the bluntest last-resort weapon you can use. A bloodless coup followed by a (probably quite bloody) purge would have been the best outcome for the Russians.

Supposedly because of corruption. Noone in the higher ranks wants to admit to it because it falls back to them I heard.

it makes one wonder, abstractly, if this is a symptom of Putin's / Yeltin's embezzling schemes, where stolen capital (money) would have in a less corrupt alternate reality provided more competent equipment.

Yes, (somewhat) obviously. This is the second Russian non-democracy in thirty years to get close to structural failure, and one common interpretation is that a system of this size cannot succeed without the mechanisms of transparency and accountability that are inherent to democracies.

A small dictatorship like NK can be controlled by a handful of people, often relatives. The family model also works for mafias, up to a certain size. But grow your association of lawlessness beyond a point and you’ll find yourself in desperate need for the protection of the law.

Another issue I heard about is that all the top oligarchs are in raw materials and energy. The oligarchs doing actual "complex" tech like weapons, coal extraction machinery etc, are only in the second tier at best. As you can imagine a environment where they can take your company away at any moment doesn't breed innovation (or the wish to do things particularily orderly).

> A small dictatorship of NK can be controlled by a handful of people

This is an interesting observation because it is the opposite of Alexis de Tocqueville‘s observation that democracy was well-suited to small states like Athens and Britain but large states like Russia needed autocracy.

i wonder if the distinction is that, beyond some size, it needs to be recursive?

Allocation of capital is terribly suboptimal in a badly managed state without good checks and balances.

Consider USA where there is a mismanagement problem with healthcare -- onerous regulations, rent-seeking, gatekeepers, state capitalism, crony capitalism, corrupt bureaucracies, anti-trust issues, and insufficient investment in training and development.

If healthcare is unnecessarily expensive by 10% -- then that's 2% of the American economy misallocated. Also, the lost human potential because of worse healthcare outcomes is another drain.

Now imagine if that was par for the course everywhere you look.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you write, but how do you explain the Chinese Communist Party still being in power since 1949? It's anything but transparent or accountable.

maybe they're less incompetent?

one hypothesis from the article is that Russia is saving its good bombs for a bigger war, which is troubling. but by doing so they're wasting planes, right? it doesn't make sense to me.

they are also wasting a much more precious resource than planes, pilots.

And the most precious resource of all, the purchasing power of their own currency.

Unfortunately this is being ameliorated by us paying them hand over fist for their oil and gas.

That is already gone.

energy?

I think the parent means that Russia's biggest income source is oil and gas. Now that he demonstrated to it's biggest customer (Europe) just how problematic this is, the demand is not going to go up.

Other than in the US where russian Oil is like 3% of the used oil and russian gas is basically not used, in Europe no russian gas means cold houses and problems in the industry.

Russia borders something like sixteen different countries. They have to keep in mind all of those other avenues of potential attacks which might account for some amount of holding back.

Nobody is going to "attack" Russia. Out of those sixteen neighbors there is exactly one, China, which could even begin to contemplate taking on Russia in a land war. (And they still would not, because nukes.)

On the other hand, China could try and strongarm Russia into concessions (no idea which ones) while politely performing military exercises on the other side of an undefended border.

Similarly, if NATO starts politely performing military exercises near any of the other borders of Russia, Russia needs to be able to demonstrate that they have an army guarding said border.

I'm somewhat doubtful that Russia is keeping their best equipment in reserve in case checks notes Georgia or Finland invade them.

While there has been some drunken bar-talk about retaking Karelia and re-establishing the pre-WW2 borders, It's not likely Finland will attack Russia.

It's more likely the russians are a) incompetent, or b) saving the bulk of the air force for a potential escalation of the current hostilities. One does not have to exclude the other.