Updates: The Game Has Changed

But the Players Haven’t Figured It Out

Simply to bring everyone up to date on the various developments in Ukraine and the Middle East—mostly the latter. Aside from the abrupt collapse of Syria, on the surface, it looks like we’re in a period of relative calm. I say calm, but it would probably be more accurate to speak of a general paralysis caused by the sudden collapse of the Assad regime.

As I’ve remarked before, the problem with history is some events happen very slowly, others happen abruptly, and we never know which way it will be. The fall of Assad is in the latter category, as it took exactly eleven days. So not only was just about everyone caught by surprise, but now all the major players, regionally and globally, are having either to re-calibrate or reset. Assad was being propped up by Russia and Iran. Their failure to keep him power is thus a major blow.

Not only is adjusting to this astonishing event difficult, requires time, but the risk is that not everyone is paralyzed, and in the case of Syria, both the Israeli and Western militaries immediately responded. As the HTS coalition reached Damascus, the IDF began a series of strikes on Syria’s massive arsenal. There were around 400 such strikes, and the current estimate is that 80 percent of that arsenal has been destroyed.

At almost the same time coalition forces took the opportunity to strike ISIS bases in Syria. I use the C word but I don’t know exactly what countries were involved. But both France and the United States definitely seized the opportunity.

So while everyone was adjusting to new regime, trying to figure out if they could stabilize the internal situation in Syria, what the implications are for the current Iranian conflict, these hundreds of strikes changed the situation still further.

In order to be either a threat or an influence, a country has to have an army with advanced weapons. To pretend it doesn’t is to live in a fantasy world. Otherwise known as Europe.

When You’re Out, You’re Out

Iran spent decade after decade acquiring armaments and distributing them to its proxies and allies. So when the October attack on Israel began, its enemies had enormous stockpiles that were the result of decades of production, as well as lavish support from Moscow.

This was the same as with Moscow’s enormous tank depot.

So everyone assumed that in both cases (Iran and Russia), these enormous stockpiles not only gave them a great advantage, but essentially meant they’d win. There was no way Ukraine could prevail against the thousands of tanks (and guns and armored personnel carriers) Russia had at its disposal. Similarly, the thousands of missiles of all kinds that the Iranian alliance (for want of a better word) controlled, would simply overwhelm whatever defenses Israel had if Israel didn’t back off.

And reasonable estimates of the numbers in both cases were so high that for all practical purposes, no one considered the basic question: what would happen if they ran out?

The question was off the table, largely because no one had raised an even more fundamental question, which I’ll phrase very casually: what if they had put all their eggs in the wrong basket? That is, one side had thousands of tanks and missiles, but what if it turned out that those weren’t the decisive weapons everyone assumed they were?

Or—and this was an even worse possibility: what happened if a new weapon emerged that transformed the battlefield, a weapon that one side wasn’t prepared for?

And clearly, in both wars the failure to pursue those two questions had serious consequences. Specifically, Tehran thought their missiles gave them a decisive advantage, failed to understand how effective anti-missile systems were. Moscow never imagined the impact of unmanned aerial and oceanic vehicles.

Another Way of Looking At Failure

Now I’m sympathetic to the people who failed in this area. Anyone who accepted the highly misleading and in some cases flat out wrong claims about the two world wars was at a disadvantage in trying to predict future conflicts like the Ukrainian War.

At the same time, there was no reason why men concerned with military matters would necessarily understand economics or the social sciences. But as I’ve posted about that before, first in the “Wolfgang Pauli Was Right” essay and then again in my essay on China, I won’t go into details.

It seems to me the failure is actually an example of the Bandwidth Problem.

OK, probably not very helpful unless you understand the reference. The term refers to ability of a connection to transmit large amounts quickly. Consider two kinds of hoses: the kind you hook up to a faucet in your yard, and the kind fire departments connect to hydrants, The amount of water—and its velocity in a fire hose is way higher than what your three quarter inch hose can deliver.

We only use bandwidth in electrical engineering, but hopefully the analogy helps, and in reality, it doesn’t make any real difference if we’re talking about water, electrons, or information; whether we’re referring to cables, or hoses or direct transmissions.

If the metaphorical hose is too small, the flow is restricted. Obviously! But there’s another problem. It’s easy to control a garden hose, but not a fire hose. So to return to the concrete: as bandwidth increases, the amount of data being transferred simply overwhelms us.

And being human beings, we tend to respond by simply ignoring a lot of it, because a good deal of the data consists of information we don’t know how to use. Mostly that’s because in the last couple of centuries, higher education has compartmentalized all the various data streams. Students interested in the so-called humanities (literature, language, philosophy and so forth) not only don’t do much in math and the sciences (and vice versa), but to a great extent the degrees are structured so both groups are blocked from the experience through degree requirements and prerequisites.

But enough about that! Here’s how this relates to warfare. As warfare has become both increasingly technological, and increasingly entwined with a nation’s economic and industrial development, key factors become increasingly harder to grasp, to incorporate into the decision making process.

So, to use two examples from the Ukrainian conflict. For some time, Kiev has concentrated not only on the use of drones on the battlefield, but increasing their range so they can strike targets vital to the Russian war effort. That is, they’re slowly starving their opponent’s soldiers of the resources they depend on to continue the war.

So trying to judge who’s “winning” by territory gained or won is largely irrelevant, since in both cases success is being measured in very small increment of territory.

The other example relates to the failure to grasp the complex relationship between a country’s losses, the size of its labor force, and the nature of its economy. Observing that Russia has a population much bigger than Ukraine, so it can afford to lose more soldiers, ignores the two most important elements involved.

The first, although very crude, is this: if the ratio of disabled Russian soldiers to Ukrainians is greater than the ratio between the actual populations, then Russia’s supposed advantage is an illusion.

Sure, the difficulty is ascertaining the actual numbers, But as best we can figure out, that’s what’s happening.

But when I said the measurement was crude, I didn’t mean we were just guessing at the numbers. What I meant was that those calculations overlook a fundamental relationship, the one between the number of soldiers a country can theoretically use and the size of the labor force it needs to keep its economy going. And that ratio is determined by all sorts of specific factors, such as the efficiency of the economy, and so forth.

And this is like the other pieces of data I’ve mentioned. It’s not hidden, is in the data stream, and of you’re looking, you can get snapshots, or glimpses of that. In the current case, all the information we have suggests that the Russian economy is getting closer and closer to a collapse.

But unless you already know the questions that need to be answered, you’re simply overwhelmed by all the data.

Nowadays the bandwidth is so wide that nearly all the requisite information is out there, but there is so much information available that on the one hand it’s overwhelming the users, and on the other hand, a great deal of it requires levels of technical expertise that the key users don’t have. Nor is there any reason they would have that expertise.

So in both cases, what was missed was that the enormous missile stockpiles Russia and Iran had, like Russia’s enormous tank park, was the result of decades of work, that once it was gone, it couldn’t be quickly replaced. So was the idea that as Moscow’s losses began to approach one million men, depleting the labor force required to support the population was having a significant negative impact on the state’s ability to support its population.

Finally

In other words, concerns about the stability and intentions of the new Syrian government, or Iran’s intentions, is mostly irrelevant. So is worrying that if Putin is in some way balked in Ukraine, he’ll invade the Baltic.

In saying that I’m well aware of the fundamental problem. You can get a pretty good idea of what’s happening by interpreting key elements in the data stream that for various reasons others have missed, doesn’t mean squat as far as predicting outcomes.

So although it definitely looks like Russia is inching towards collapse, as are both Iran and China, that doesn’t mean we can necessarily quantify it. The most we can do is prepare for the probability it will happen.

But that gets tricky, because the same kind of information that suggests those countries are getting close to collapse suggests that Germany and the United Kingdom are in pretty bad shape. Yeah, that last doesn’t seem possible, right?

Unfortunately, the step from failing to consider a possibility to outright refusal to admit its existence is not only a very short one, but there’s a lot of it about.

It makes predictions damn near impossible. A probably apocryphal answer made by a Hungarian statesman in the nineteenth century sums it up perfectly.

How would I know? I can’t possibly predict the stupidest course of action.