Are We Heading For A "Comical Ali" Situation As Applies (Social) Media Sentiment Upon Ukraine?

 

Something which many have observed is that there is a bit of a .. dysjunction between what we might tactfully term 'enthusiasm' about Ukraine 'driving back' Russia, being able to 'win' the war, etc. etc. ... and the actual facts of the conflict as they become apparent day to day.

That is natural. People have a side that is the underdog - and everybody likes an underdog, especially if it has been attacked.

We also have a natural desire to believe 'Good News'. The Ukrainians have weaponized this (and to be sure - this is not something unique to them. Pretty much every power or group in history has done something similar even where they are winning), and put out some very, very "would make for an excellent movie" style 'information' that has later turned out to be almost unbelievable ... precisely because it actually was, as it happened, blatantly false.

Some of that may even not be deliberate - but the result of that much-invoked concept 'the fog of war'. But much of it almost certainly is, at best, 'willfully' ignorant of the actual realities being avoided in the process.

And, as I say - this is not a specific thing to the Ukrainians, it is not meant as some sui generis moral injunction against them alone. If I or anybody else was in a position of my country being invaded, and all I could do to try and keep the fire alive and enlist desperately needed foreign assistance was entirely artificially manufacture a narrative of 'we're already unbelievably winning!' - well, it is not hard to see how these things take hold.

However, as the Russian advance continues to grind from East to West, as Cities fall or are encircled in areas that were supposedly victoriously retaken by the Ukrainians - and as contemptuous remarks about Russian troops behaving like WWII Soviet Pulp depictions and/or Orcs as cannon-fodder [i.e. incapable of complex thought, tactics, and therefore victory] ... give way to what appears to be a rather impressive operational double-envelopment which cuts off Ukraine's biggest concentration of forces in the East ...

The question is left hanging: how are the people who are currently still enthusiastically cheering on Ukraine as the 'plucky little country that could!' going to react to all of this?

At present, people sharing facts about the Ukrainian military situation are easy to dismiss as 'puppets' of Putin - as Kremlin-sponsored bots, and all the rest of it. If you don't like what you hear, you simply say that it is false and malicious propaganda.

However, sooner rather than later, this conflict is going to produce its own spectacle of a 'Comical Ali' (also known as 'Baghdad Bob' - and more accurately as Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the Minister of Information under Saddam Hussein in Iraq).

Apparently, many are too young to recall this person - but we remember well the circumstances in 2003, wherein this Governmental mouthpiece would give the most outlandish briefings. Boldly declaring that American troops were dying, defecting, deserting in the hundreds if not the thousands - and that they were nowhere near cities or strongpoints which had, in fact, fallen or become the subject of fierce fighting earlier in the day or week aforehand.

This reached apexes of ridicularity when he tried the *same thing* in Baghdad - continuing to insist that the city was safe and that the invaders were / had been repulsed ... even as you could begin to see American armour appearing *literally in the background* of where he was standing.

This is where we are heading with Ukraine and the 'piquant' informational picture coming out of various people speaking about it now.

Then, as now, the side getting invaded had a very ... piquant propaganda engine dedicated to convincing people they were winning.

The major difference now is that instead of Comical Ali being ridiculed every time he gets up to speak - people are enthusiastically buying into that narrative.

We are, as it were, on the 'other side of the glass' from where we used to be.

On Recent Unwarranted Excitement About Estimated Russian Losses In Ukraine

Earlier today I saw some excitement from people in response to a US DoD assessment that the Russian military in Ukraine was, and I quote, "95% still intact" as of yesterday. This was taken by some of those commenting on the article as their having suffered 5% losses - and seemingly, thousands of Russian KIAs as a result.

The inference people drew from the headline was, perhaps understandably, that the Russians were going very badly.

Except here's the thing. That's not at all what any of this indicates.

We'll start with the obvious one - the presumption that "95% still intact" means one man in every twenty that the Russians had sent in is now dead or severely wounded. That is not the case.

Measuring the combat power of formations has never simply been an exercise in calculating how many men you've got left as compared to when you started. And the increasing saliency of hardware over the millennia has added significant complexity and nuance to proceedings.

Indeed, speaking of equipment - it is not even necessary for a tank, say, to be destroyed for it to be removed from the tally of 'intact' elements. A perhaps (un)surprisingly high quotient of Allied armour in the later Second World War was rendered combat-ineffective via mechanical problems or damage to other systems such as the main gun.

This obviously meant that it would be less- or even un-able to participate in its intended role, and therefore in that sense, sure, combat power of its parent unit is degraded.

Except there is quite a difference between a tank being destroyed outright - and a tank not being present for a phase of operations due to something which is repairable and which sees it back at the front in the not-too-distant future.

So no, no 5% of Russian combat power no longer being "intact" does not mean one in twenty Russian troops deployed to Ukraine are currently dead or wounded. Although I have no doubt that in some formations there will indeed have been significant casualties.

In fact, that's one of the things which is probably distorting the overall picture people are drawing from all of this.

Russian VDV operations in the early days of the conflict saw ... very high losses of men and material - and were, as we had remarked at the time, frankly bizarre that they had been attempted in the manner involved.

The losses during the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to seize Antonov airbase (Hostomel) at the start of the invasion are unconfirmed, but near-certain to have been significant given its recapture by the Ukrainians. A similar pattern appears to have played out at Vasylkiv; and this is before we consider the Ukrainian claim of having downed two Russian Il-76 transports, at least one of which was reportedly carrying a full contingent of paratroopers.

Why I say that these may have been 'distortionary' - is because those are ... not insignificant losses, entailing several hundred men and associated equipment, suffered in the first two to three days.

Which, if you're just looking at total figures overall, may lead to unwarranted presumptions as to how things have gone subsequent to that.

Now, the other point which is vital to make is that a 5% loss of combat power over fifteen days of intensive military operations for an attacker is ... not unexpected. Particularly given many of the current battlezones are located in and around urban areas, terrain where offensive operations are notoriously costly.

Hence, of course, the frequent preference of modern militaries to engage in sustained aerial, artillery and/or missile bombardment of such places prior to - or even in lieu of - a direct ground assault.

In this regard, the Anglo-American lead Coalition's efforts during the 2003 Invasion of Iraq may prove interestingly instructive - with, at its height, an oft-quoted figure of 1,700 aerial bombing and missile strikes in a single day carried out largely against urban-proximate targets; and sustained use of both conventional and cluster munitions persisting for days after that.

Of course, the British, American, Australian, etc. actions must be contextualized - the idea having been to minimize Coalition casualties not so much through simply producing a flattened battlespace, as both breaking the Iraqi will to resist (the crux of the so-called "Shock And Awe" doctrine) and carrying out destruction of particular targets (potentially including one Al Jazeera office in Baghdad) in ways which did not therefore (at least .. in theory) necessitate the direct involvement of ground troops.

The reason that these instances are instructive, is because they represent a fundamentally different approach to what we have seen from the Russians in Ukraine - thus far.

There have most certainly been both aerial and artillery bombardments of urban areas carried out by Russian forces.

However, these have not been at the scale and scope anticipated of them for a hypothetical 'full scale' war. Which is not to suggest that these attacks are not serious nor highly destructive - only to emphasize that the Russians would doctrinally be almost expected to be far more so in these regards (particularly in terms of the usage of artillery as a primary force vector).

One explanation which has been advanced by some Western analysts is that the seeming low scale of Russian aerial bombardment sorties is due to some alleged incapacity on the part of the Russian air force to actually carry out complex and frequent combat air operations.

This is clearly incorrect, as the relatively recent Russian record in Syria (which featured in some cases over a hundred sorties a day, and an average in the 40s) amply demonstrates.

It might be tempting to presume that the smaller involvement of Russian air power in Ukraine as compared to Syria may be due to concerns about the relative strength of Ukraine's remaining anti-air capacity - however this, too, does not feel like the full answer.

Instead, I would contemplate whether the seemingly 'scaled back' deployment of Russian air power might stem from the same reason that their use of artillery has appeared likewise to be less prominent (although steadily increasing).

Namely, that their initial invasion approach was something of an opposite one to the American-led 'Shock And Awe' ethos. Albeit, it would seem, still possessing a certain element of that same "we'll be greeted as liberators" decidedly wishful thinking.

Whether due to their own observation of the fairly direct consequences of Western militaries' enthusiasm for bombardments (i.e. - a marked uptick in the ordinary people who now have a very, very good reason to choose to become insurgents, considerably frustrating a long-term occupation effort) or out of a desire to avoid the overwhelmingly negative PR which comes with utilizing highly destructive weaponry in built-up civilian-inhabited areas, the Russians appear to have 'held back' [a very, very relative term indeed] somewhat on these approaches, in favour of the direct application of ground assets.

Something which seems to have cost them a fair amount of that 5% we started out this piece discussing, partially explicating their seeming shift toward greater employment of artillery currently.

In closing, I feel it is useful to draw attention to the two tables that I've attached here as an image. They're from relatively outdated (but still useful) US Army internal documents, and as you can see they discuss anticipated losses (both combat and otherwise) in various types of engagement and over relatively short (up to five days) and longer timescales - measured in daily and monthly casualty rates respectively.




Now, 1959 (when these were published) is a long while ago, and it can be fairly argued that warfare's changed in a number of ways over that time (in particular, improvements in battlefield medicine improving survivability ... as weighed against ever more lethal weaponry).

Further, these figures were likely the result of US analysis of the then relatively recent experiences of World War Two and the Korean War - that is to say, conflicts often characterized by 'parity' or 'near-parity' opponents ... even if specific engagements within either could be decidedly otherwise.

Yet while it can definitely be asserted that at the strategic level, Ukraine and Russia are decidedly not 'parity' opponents - in terms of the forces that were sent into Ukraine, the relative disparity in various areas between them and their opponents is arguably much smaller.

I therefore suspect that, as a very rough guide, there may yet be some probative value for its utilization here.

So, assuming that the American Department of Defense is reasonably accurate in their assessment that Russia had 'only' retained approximately 95% of the combat power it has brought to bear in Ukraine ... after fifteen days of offensive operations, I am not sure that a 5% reduction in overall combat power - which, again, does not equate to a 5% figure for casualties amidst the invaders - is actually that unexpected.

Indeed, juxtaposed against the sentiment which has seemingly taken root in some areas that Ukraine might somehow actually win this war based on how things look from tiktok videos shared to social media, it may seem seriously surprising to some that the figures are not much higher.





Concordantly, given the serious scale of the Russian invasion force, some might also suggest that even 5% of that being out of the fight (one way or another) should present a truly staggering amount of manpower and material to have been lost or incapacitated over just over a two week period.

From our individual human perspective, it almost unquestionably is.

Yet that is what modern, conventional warfare regularly entails - and more.

I would say "it is well that it is so rare, then" - except given current events both there in Ukraine, as well as the numerous smaller-scale conflicts also going on elsewhere (Yemen, for example), it is worth noting that the 'rarity' is a decidedly localized phenomenon. 

On Luxon's Muscovite Specter Speech Purportedly Haunting The Nation

Like various recent National Party leaders before him, Christopher Luxon appears to have a bit of difficulty Reading The Room.

It's a remark of general application, however in this specific case the room in question is "a modest Moscow flat".

Confused? So's he. Why? Because The Numbers Don't Add Up.

Luxon found himself in that modest Moscow flat at some point after he joined Unilever, and was touring the world meeting "management" of that company as he slowly edged his way up the soapy pole. It's possible that I (and David Cormack, whom I note beat me to the idea for this piece) am in error about this, but I somehow don't think that Luxon was in Moscow during the era of anything which might feasibly be termed "Socialism".

Most likely, considering he joined the company in 1993 and spent the first few years based in Wellington (where, to be sure, he may have wandered down Cuba Street and felt a bit lost in both time and space), he probably ventured over to Moscow when he was based out of London from 2000-2003.

Now if that's the case, then I can certainly agree that he likely encountered quite the swathe of "misery" in that town - however, with somewhere between ten and thirteen years since the fall of the USSR, and up to a decade since the associated dismantling of the Soviet economic system ... is it really fair to say that the "misery" in question was "created" by "socialism"?

I'm not so sure. I suppose it comes down to how much you blame the Soviet system for existing - and therefore providing the opportunity for undoing said system in a really, really damaging way. Which, perhaps not uncoincidentally, also saw a fairly massive-scale transfer of wealth from the state to a very small number of private citizens - whilst for ordinary Russians life got significantly worse. A bit of an interesting thing given Luxon's major theme in yesterday's speech was the apparent 'necessity' of several billion dollars of tax cuts which will only benefit the wealthy (that is - the top 3% of income earners), and which we can fairly assume to be accompanied by constraints in state support and spending.

In the five years from 1989 to 1994, average Russian life expectancy went backwards by nearly five years - that is to say, Russians died, on average, five years earlier under that phase of the Market's unfurling as compared to under the previous Soviet system. Life expectancy wouldn't recover to pre-1990 levels in Russia until 2011 - almost a full generation after the Market began to be rolled out in earnest. This compares rather unfavourably, it must be said, with the situation of the USSR from, say, 1950 to 1965 - where life expectancy relatively shot up from just over 50 through to just under 68 ... and, I suppose, comparing either of those numbers to the average pre Soviet Union, which appears to have never made it past the early 30s.

We often do not quite adequately appreciate that for all its (numerous) faults, the USSR did manage to take an expanse of what would barely be Third World conditions today, and not only put a man in space less than 40 years later but also manage to make meaningful improvements in quality of life for its citizenry as well. We often fall into something of a trap of choosing to measure Soviet (and Russian) achievements in these spheres relative to a yardstick derived from the (theoretically) most materially abundant society on the planet - America; rather than appreciating just what kind of a 'dirt floor' the USSR built itself up from. In fact, not just a 'dirt floor' - but a floor on fire, when the immense devastation of the Second World War is taken into consideration.

The point is, by the late 1990s, it had become abundantly clear that the Market had not brought the fabled prosperity promised by the modern Western economics textbook. For many it was quite the opposite. Shortly before Luxon likely arrived in Moscow, for instance, unemployment was in double-digit figures - around 13% in 1999. Going back a bit further, we'll just quote this paper from the British Medical Journal verbatim:

"The report Transition 1999 stated that suicide rates have climbed steeply too, by 60% in Russia, 80% in Lithuania, and 95% in Latvia since 1989.

But behind the self destructive behaviour, the authors say, are economic factors, including rising poverty rates, unemployment, financial insecurity, and corruption. Whereas only 4% of the population of the region had incomes equivalent to $4 (£2.50) a day or less in 1988, that figure had climbed to 32% by 1994. In addition, the transition to a market economy has been accompanied by lower living standards (including poorer diets), a deterioration in social services, and major cutbacks in health spending.

“What we are arguing,” said Omar Noman, an economist for the development fund and one of the report’s contributors, “is that the transition to market economies [in the region] is the biggest … killer we have seen in the 20th century, if you take out famines and wars. The sudden shock and what it did to the system … has effectively meant that five million [Russian men’s] lives have been lost in the 1990s.” Using Britain and Japan with their ratio of 96 men to every 100 women as the base population, the report’s authors have calculated that there are now some 9.6 million “missing men” in the former communist bloc. “The typical patterns are that a man loses his job and develops a drinking problem,” said Mr Noman. “The women then leave and the men die, first emotionally and then physically.”

So that's what Luxon was in amidst when he "[remembers] sitting in a modest Moscow flat with a couple in their late 40s on a dark and snowy afternoon."

Sure sounds like "actually created misery" - although other than the weather (it's probably a bit hard to be cheery on a "dark and snowy afternoon"), there seems a curious lack of any mention for any then-contemporary causations for the malaise Luxon observed there at the time. Probably because it wouldn't fit his narrative today.

What's that narrative? A proverbial red flag. That Labour, having steered us remarkably well (if not, it must be said, always perfectly - they are human, as are we) through a global pandemic (which we are still traversing) through the judicious use of the powers of state effectively unprecedented in peace-time ... are somehow "Socialists". In fact, more than that ... Soviet Socialists. Via inferency, aligned to "Moscow" - which, given events of this past week and a half, is a toponym which carries quite some additional 'dark' (and perhaps 'snowy') connotations to it.

Perhaps he wants to pick up from his previous big speech (curiously enough, also on the 'state of the nation') - the one in which he set out his belief that we ought to "sympathise with some of the issues being raised by protesters on Parliament's grounds without being framed as condoning illegal behaviour or siding with anti-science conspiracy theorists." I'm sure he could borrow a "Cindy Stalin" hammer-and-sickle adorned placard from some of his friends-of-friends from the fringier bits of Groundswell if he gets sick of trying to do the subtle thing with his rhetoric.

In any case, Luxon ought be careful about basing his 'reckons' for Middle New Zealand off one conversation in a Moscow flat. Polling has fairly consistently shown that a majority of Russians ... actually think the Soviet system being dismantled was a bad thing. This isn't some heavily manipulated and unreliable propaganda survey, either - other than the Levada annual polling on the question, you've also got the well-regarded Pew Research Center findings. In fact, especially according to the latter, the number of Russians who view the transition to the market system as being a good thing has been steadily declining year upon year - hitting about 38% in 2019 per Pew. Of additional interest is another pattern in the figures - it's the people who actually grew up and lived under the Soviet system that are chiefly driving the numbers there. The young generation who had no experience of the Soviet system are the ones that are most likely to say they think the new market economy was a good move - as they've never known anything else.

But we are not here to make the case for (or, for that matter, against) the Soviet Union. It was a faraway country, with a culture and a system that bore little resemblance to anything we might find here in New Zealand - even the famed 'Dancing Cossacks' of a previous National election campaign are simply a two dimensional caricature. Much like Luxon's rhetoric here, and no doubt pertaining to a great many things.

The point is a simple one. If Luxon wants to audition for the role of Prime Minister of New Zealand, he'd do a better job if the concerns he sought to represent were those of regular New Zealanders. Not 40something Muscovites some twenty-ish years ago who, as it turns out, may not have been all that representative of ordinary Russians even then.

There is a certain segment of the New Zealand body-politic - the armpit of democracy, we may perhaps call them, after the sounds they seem to make for jocularity-value upon talkback radio for puerile self-amusement purposes - who probably do, either genuinely or reasonably enthusiastically facetiously, believe that New Zealand 'runs the risk' of becoming some sort of "Communist" state. Or that there's some meaningful coterminity to be evinced between Putin rolling armoured vehicles into Ukraine and the NZ Police deploying riot shields and a fire-hose against a protest featuring a literal dumpster fire last week.

Some of those were the sort of people so unduly concerned about "Communism" here in New Zealand and a creeping surveillance state with Orwellian characteristics, that they immediately chose to go and set themselves up a commune, in public view and with extensive round-the-clock live-streaming of their every move whilst attempting to redefine reality to fit on an hourly if not minute-by-minute basis. Often whilst boldly declaring their vigorous intent to defend our democracy ... by 'temporarily' overthrowing it and potentially holding some very Soviet-Stalinist seeming Show-Trials into the bargain.

Luxon was quite rightly pilloried not all that long ago for attempting to wade into that particular 'debate' and designating 'Well Both Sides Have A Point' as an attempted 'wedge politics' against not only our Government, but also the broad majority of the people of New Zealand heartily unimpressed with that sad opposition-for-opposition's-sake spectacle recently occuring in Wellington (I mean the protest-camp here, not the National Party for a change).

He's probably - or, rather, his focus-groupers - identified a bit of a seam of disgruntlement out there in the electorate, one which is currently extant effectively as a few embers, but which his handlers hope could be blown upon to get it to grow and inflame into a more American-style political combustion with enough effort and spurious soundbitery. Something somewhat availed, for rhetorical-symbological purposes by the fact that the past week and a half's developments in geopolitics appear to have put us squarely back in the 80s in various regards.

Expect, over the next year and a half, Luxon to continue to needle along exactly these lines in various subtle (or not-so-subtle) hues.

How effective will it be?

Well, that's over to you.