Russia is contributing new material to a war history chapter on how to lose, according to some experts.

“It’s stunning,” said military historian Frederick Kagan of the Institute for the Study of War, who says he knows of no parallel to a major military power like Russia invading a country at the time of its choosing and failing so utterly.

Incompetence seems to be the operative word.

The Russians were ill-prepared for Ukrainian resistance, proved incapable of adjusting to setbacks, failed to effectively combine air and land operations, misjudged Ukraine’s ability to defend its skies, and bungled basic military functions like planning and executing the movement of supplies.

“That’s a really bad combination if you want to conquer a country,” said Peter Mansoor, a retired Army colonel and professor of military history at Ohio State University.

[…] Mansoor says the Russians underestimated the number of troops they would need and showed “an astonishing inability” to perform basic military functions. They vastly misjudged what it would take to win the battle for Kyiv, he says.

“This was going to be hard even if the Russian army had proven itself to be competent,” he said. “It’s proven itself to be wholly incapable of conducting modern armored warfare.”

Being “incapable of adjusting to setbacks” is a key concept in predicting failure of threats, which I’ve been repeatedly emphasizing on this blog.

Russia’s drone-like top-down model is putting on display some dangerous assumptions within a “driverless” industry for what they are: serious vulnerability to trivial counter-attack.

The article briefly mentions an aborted US helicopter assault on Baghdad from March 2003 as foreshadowing. Air Force Magazine later that same year even called it “one of the most controversial” Cold War-era tactics, which Russia seems to have ignorantly repeated in 2022.

…critics of the multimillion dollar chopper view the Najaf retreat as the Apache’s “Little Big Horn” — proof that it is too vulnerable to survive modern combat. They argue that the Apache is a relic of Cold War planning that failed at its primary mission — deep attack.

Perhaps most notable, counter-measures back then were documented as crowd-sourced light-arms resistance based on simple forward observations — similarly highly effective in Ukraine two decades later.

… Wallace, the V Corps commander, told reporters that an Iraqi two-star general in Najaf had used a “cellular telephone to speed-dial a number of Iraqi air defenders” and tell them to prepare for a helicopter raid. […] Apache pilots know they never could have flown over Iraqi cities if fixed-wing fighters and other weapons hadn’t neutralized Iraqi air defenses and friendly ground troops hadn’t secured the territory beneath them… [because of this forced shift in tactics] the March 24 retreat at Najaf might turn out to have been one of the most productive defeats in modern warfare.

A productive defeat would be for someone who learns and adapts. Instead it serves as a giant warning ignored by Putin’s puppets who have proven themselves afraid of the truth — in a governance model that forces them to be unable or unwilling to think.

Here’s the initial RAND memorandum (RM-3420-PR), as prepared by Paul Baran in August 1964 for the USAF.

…one in a series of eleven RAND Memoranda detailing the Distributed Adaptive Message Block Network, a proposed digital data communications system based on a distributed network concept. […] Various aspects of the concept as reported in this Memorandum were presented before selected Air Force audiences in the summer of 1961 in the form of a RAND briefing (B-265), and contained in RAND Paper P-2626, which this Memorandum supersedes.

(RM3420 PDF)

Saying “be nice” is nothing like saying “be kind”. The two phrases are worlds apart.

First, consider how a British man living in Holland says the Dutch seem “rude” (to him the opposite of nice) because of what he deems an egalitarian approach (data sharing) to risk management.

The constant need to defend against flooding also had a profound impact: with one person’s land at risk if another failed to maintain their dikes, it was essential that decisions be made collectively.

That’s not really accurate. Armies have constant need to defend, yet decisions do not need to be made collectively. It wasn’t a need to defend against water that led to a Dutch “directness” against lying and cheating, also known as holding people accountable.

Others have tried to put a humorous spin on the real reasoning, related to a sense of justice and equality:

Apart from cheese and tulips, the main product of the country is advocaat, a drink made from lawyers.

A freedom to speak the truth or even just detect and document what is happening was a method to resist attempts at denial (non-repudiation), which were early integrity controls related to Dutch distaste for Spanish religion-based rule 1556 to 1581.

Calvinist religion had a large impact on national identity because the Dutch associated Catholicism with Spanish oppression. From that moment on, “Calvinism dictated the individual responsibility for moral salvage from the sinful world through introspection, total honesty, soberness, rejection of ‘pleasure’ as well as the ‘enjoyment’ of wealth,” writes Breukel in an article on Dutch business culture published on her website.

Everyone speaking their mind (a methodology of truth-seeking as offensive measures) enabled popular resistance to a form of top-down management where an autocrat could never be wrong (never be brought to justice by lawyers) because even the laws were autocratically controlled.

This is the philosophical split between a set of inherited rights versus controlled rights, an ancient ethics distinction which I often refer to in my talks about why artificial intelligence can be so unsafe.

The real product today of the Beeldenstorm of 1566 (Iconoclasm) is that the Dutch aren’t very religious.

The British by comparison tend to lean on the concept of being “rude” as a social enforcement mechanism.

Everyone in England is supposed to be trying to pull together on a collective goal (e.g. winning against adversaries, staying in a queue during WWI or WWII) as a different form of resistance to imposed authority. There’s actually less divergence between the two cultures than implied just because Holland dealt with Spanish inquisition while England… dealt with its own set of threats.

Second, while being “nice” is an act of self-erasure supposedly in the interest of others — whether society or a single authority — it’s the opposite of what’s being discussed above in terms of risk and information sharing. It’s literally a form of ignorance.

Nice didn’t always mean what it means today. “Nice” comes from the Latin nescius, which literally means, “not-knowing” (from ne, “not,” and scire, “to know.”) Even centuries later, when the word found its way into Middle English, that meaning more-or-less remained the same: “nice” still connoted ignorance. If you were “nice,” that meant you were simple, foolish, daft—an idiot.

This all begs the question whether people think of others in terms of an actual greater good (e.g. lowland flooding) or simply erasing themselves at the behest of random request to not have independent thoughts. Holland is the former and Texas is a great example of the latter (e.g. it’s not “nice” to talk about real history such as a racist state founded to perpetuate and expand slavery alone). Did you know in 1836 that America used an official “Gag rule” to deny Americans the right to speak the truth about slavery?

In fact, Texas and Florida history clearly shows they are states with a total lack of accountability and an idealized model of business profit and ascent to power. They are doing statewide what has been celebrated in popular American spectator events that reward niceness (lying) like NASCAR and Football. Being nice in America may mean peddling catchy “know nothing” ignorance as a means of privileged profit by doing harm to others, which also explains why the unkindness of “tipping” is still a thing.

In other words, if you desire to prevent power shifting to liars and cheats try to practice integrity (honesty) and be kind, even when it’s not nice (rude).