Radio War Nerd EP #416 — The War-se, The Warse-er: 2023 Review, Part 2

On the topic of Ukraine's counteroffensive and John's comment along of the lines of "this isn't Kursk and it's not the 1940s"; Personally I've been struck by the similarities. At Kursk the Red Army had time to prepare multiple dense and complex defensive lines for an expected attack. Immense minefields were laid - sited with artillery and AT guns - to halt and channel German attacks, and they even employed mobile mine-laying units to lay fresh minefields directly in front of German advances. In the southern sector of the Kursk salient (where the Germans would eventually make the most progress) the 'technologically superior' Panther tanks' debut near Cherkasskoye (sp.?) was bogged down in mud and mines and blasted by artillery. This somewhat brings to mind the fates of many Challenger 2 tanks in Ukraine's counteroffensive, as described in the podcast. Kursk has been remembered in the general consciousness as a 'tank battle' but in my own estimation the landmine and artillery piece reigned supreme. How could anyone be surprised - or offended(!) - that Russia would employ the same unglamorous but effective defensive measures as was used in 1943? If anything the war in Ukraine this year has been a reminder of how many things have stayed the same in regards to this type of warfare, despite what hopefuls or fantasists may believe about the capabilities of a small number of 'hi-tech' weapons.

“It’s just like Flanders was. Not Ned, the place.” y’all are champions. Happy new year!!

Hi Mark. You said that the war “united the Ukrainians.” Does that include the population of the western part? I mean, the original civil war and anti-Russian sentiment from those citizens of the western part was the origin of this war. Thus, I do not see how it “united” Ukraine.

What are the Russian war aims at this point?

Re: your genocide tourism tweet from December 26, that is almost exactly the same as the world building scenes in The Purge movies of rich foreigners traveling to the U.S. to go on safari during Purge Night. The Purge, a famously apolitical non-allegory …

Hello my friends, would you kindly direct me towards the episode that features weapons used by Iran and other proxies, thank you.

Any DRC stuff soon? I didn't hear how the election turned out.

I would really like to see John Mearsheimer on RWN.

"Hamas loves watching Palestinians die" wow sounds like Israelis have something in common with them. Maybe they can bond with each other killing civilians for sport!

Always enjoy when M+J sit back to analyze the kreigswelt and read the pundit receipt. Best wishes to John, Mark, Brendan, and the RWN friends and family.

Some aspects of this episode were disappointing. For example, Ukraine is less “patriotic” or “nationalist” than “f-wordist.” I was there in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s and each time it became more and more palpable. Especially in the east. Even in the 90s I remember distinctly thinking, “what is going on here? There’s something that feels wrong.” I heard seemingly normal people talking about “Jews” and “mongols.” You could hear drunken people shouting in the streets after dark “Ukraine” (Ooo-cry-een-yeh!) and “Slava Ukraini!” Originally it just struck me as strange but then my Ukrainian friends told me what was going on. They didn’t mince words. “Our country is becoming like Nazi Germany!”

Would love to hear some more thoughts on Yemen. Their population has been through so much. The Houthis Tiktok game is on point, but I’m worried about what the blowback will look like for wider Yemen.

America only wants and plans for a fast food war, in and out. Russia doesn't do that. Ukraine could never win this, but think the US would save them!? is just ahistorical insanity.

Great to hear the reference to the Falls the classical song

This was a good high-level overview of the war. One thing that I didn't hear was an admission that "Russian military is a joke" was the worst assessment RWN made in its 8-year history. Sorry, I'm not bringing it up to somehow gloat. There's nothing in this terrible war to gloat about. It is very sad. I just think that the basic intellectual honesty requires one to admit his major mistakes. If even Kofman can do it. There's nothing to be ashamed of here. Just requires one to step over his ego. The reality is and was, even if not obvious at first, that it's NATO military that is a joke. It cannot fight without air superiority, cannot produce hardware and munitions, has near zero air defense, and is too arrogant to learn from others and to adapt. There were enough people out there who were able to clearly see this a long time ago. Some even before the war has started. For example, Martyanov is probably a quirky guest to handle, but he wrote a series of books years ago that made the case for what we are witnessing now. @moonofalabama is a German ex-tanker with very grounded assessments. I could list others. It's the selection bias of guests that I think prevented RWN from having a realistic view of this war for too long. Some guests were outright frauds like Jack Murphy and Ben Aris (remember him talking unironically about Russians importing washing machines for chips in missiles?), some were just DC hacks like Sam Bendett. Of course, Mark's disdain for the Russian authorities, however misplaced, didn't help. Why am I writing this? Not to say, "told you!" even though some of us tried, unsuccessfully, to point to the flaws in the analysis. Please don't "this is just a podcast" at me either. I guess I'm just curious at this point if John and Mark are capable of it. I'm forever grateful for how much I learned from them over the years. But this issue is like a splinter under my fingernail making it painful to listen to their analysis of other events.

The ending had me laughing out loud- Happy New Year!

Great Episode Re ukranian boxers i think looking at uysks history is interesting. He's the current holder of three heavyweight belts- although he started out as a cruiserweight. Much more exciting fighter than the klitskho brothers. I believe he is russian speaking ukranian and before the war he would say stuff in interviews when asked about crimea (where his wife is from) like "lets just say crimea belongs to god." Honestly the dudes a cypher I'd imagine for a lot of russian speaking ukranians in terms of shifting views (he's almost used as a proganda piece at this point for the ukranian armed forces and at one point joined a terretorial unit along with the former lightweight champ loma).

Recently I absent-mindedly clicked on a YouTube video called "How to Avoid Pickpockets on the Paris Metro", thinking, yeah, whatever.... I like the Bresson film, let's see some Parisian subway tips & hacks for 2023. By and large it was bog-standard stuff, but around 5 minutes in he has this aside where he says "And, you know, you hate to say it but a lot of them are Eastern European types". And this wasn't, to my eyes, a "How to Racist" primer video that I expect you find around various YouTube corners, it was entirely a normie travel vid, very square. Reflecting on it, I can't quite sort out whether that aside would or wouldn't have stuck in my craw 2+ years ago, or it's a "sign of the times" kind of thing. And I'm not trying to cite it as Ukraine/Russia-related; the French have enough of their own deeply etched racism/xenophobic hangups without additional help from me. But once you start noticing the festering racism (anti-Slav or otherwise) under the veneer of polite society we're expected to take on faith, no matter how bad things get, it's tough to stop noticing it.

I'm also a war on the rocks listener. I enjoy Koffman but would definitely agree that he gets shit wrong and the rest of the rand corp hosts and guests on there i find disgusting. Just standard chicken shit warhawk crap with a sheen of DNC democracy talk. i've hate listened to a few of their other podcasts on stuff like turkey, china containment, latin america and they really have some moronic ghouls on from time to time. I do remember Koffman mentioning at some point that if the counteroffensive went like the offensive in Kherson it would be largely a failure- as that was not a successful offensive in terms of the grinding attritional losses the Ukrainians suffered- he seemed to move the goal posts a couple of times though after that and said at one point in august 2023 that "the counteroffensive was going like the Kherson one but was "succesful" in terms of the attritional battle" which just seems entirely absurd. Alot of the foreign policy academics in the restrainer camps of IR theory like Barry R Posen seem to have sensible takes on russias capabilities at this point https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2022-07-08/ukraines-implausible-theories-victory

I still see Kauffman as one of the most reasonable pro Ukrainian commentators, he always hedged his commentary and was honest about how hard the war would be, he warned his audience that the western militaries were trying to push Ukraine to fight a style of war they were not equipped to fight, he said the material aid provided to Ukraine was inadequate, and that quality of the Ukrainian units was mixed, and finally he did note that on the ground Russians were learning and a very dangerous opponent. I felt like if you listened to Kauffman and RWN you got a balanced perspective tho I agree that RWN was absolutely correct in saying early on that the Russians would adapt both tactically and strategically and bring their material advantages to bear. The whole war is a terrible tragedy and Ukraine is going to have to sue for peace and make territorial concessions that will probably create serious political instability, and maybe even push them into state failure. What a terrible catastrophic waste in every sense and NATO and Putin are mutually responsible for the whole mess.

There’s a dogshit WW2 series that was recently added to Netflix, and as usual it is full of Wehrabooism and Soviet invisibility. (BTW, the autofill for Soviet on my phone is straight out of nato). A reviewer on Reddit who actually teaches military history noted how little Germany was mechanized at the start, and certainly not onward as it ran out of gas. However, I am struck by how the Russian armor strategy (as it were to start) seems so similar to American then where however impressive the Leopard or Tiger or whatever was, we had more tanks than they had shells. Since Russia can take out their logistics once it’s inside Ukraine, their ability to deliver and ability to destroy major Ukrainian logistics makes this a pretty dire situation unless somehow Russia stops having the industrial capacity that it does, I don’t see an ending where Ukraine isn’t fucked.

What about spinal tap: jazz odyssey? That was after the airbase

Dr. Dolan has been making big strides these last few episodes, in his riffing game. I commend the hard work he has been putting into his podcasting

Most western commentators’ talking points seem to be projection instead of actual analysis

In the wonkspace, Dara looks like she could be a light 7, probably a mid-to-strong 5 on the general scale

On balance I've found Kofman and Lee's analysis to be sufficiently hedged and generally pretty helpful as a guide for understanding the conflict. e.g. over a year ago, I recall hearing them highlighting potential risks to any future offensive associated with the Ukrainian commitment to hold Bakhmut. The sense that I got in the run up to the offensive was that Ukraine was likely to face a slog that was more similar to the grinding warfare in Kherson in the summer/fall of 2022, rather than a collapse of Russian forces as happened Kharkiv counter-offensive in the Fall of 2022. There was zero certainty of success. Kofman has also continually invoked the idea that things with the Russian military generally start "shambolically", but they don't always end that way.

It's been obvious to me since early on that Kofman is a terrible analyst because he only ever talked about Russian weaknesses, real or imagined, virtually never considering their strengths. That's critical analysis 101 and it was completely lacking from his public discourse. But as you point out the political space in msm didn't exist for ANYONE to do that (including your good selves btw, esp early on). Even now the western elites still think they can get a draw like a conflict freeze that they can dress up as a victory. That possibility has passed, Russia is going to win this brutal war of attrition because they have more weapons, industrial capacity and population, and the Russian population largely thinks this is an existential issue.

The War on the Rocks analysis was well thought out and one of the more emotional recent “media crit” segments. I’ve treated WOTR as a kind of null hypothesis (or the opposite, I didn’t ace stats) for Ukraine and other conflicts but I gotta ask myself if I would’ve acted differently with that incentive structure.

Merry Christmas! Thanks for the episode guys

Great episode! It’s hard not to feel sorry for Ukrainians- they’re learning the hard way that NATO is not what it’s cracked up to be. Y’all have noted this before, but one of the most striking unspoken narratives of the war has been how well Russian procurement has adapted to the conflict (with the help of fellow sanction laden “pariahs near collapse” like Iran and North Korea.) This was has been a blow to the smug self confidence of the US and European defense industries- why pay top dollar for a few gold plated stealth planes, when you could buy a much larger arsenal of Shaheds, or variants of existing eastern bloc weapons platforms? So much for the “arsenal of democracy.”

Merry Christmas and Happt New Year! Thank you for the great year.

Omg merry Christmas. I was thinking I wish I could listen to some more. Thank for a great year of shows.