I am registering my prediction here that the Russian invasion will be astoundingly ineffective to most analysts. I have two reasons for this, and they’re both heuristics. First:
In adversarial games, I refuse to attribute to chance that which can be attributed to malice. I feel “foreign policy experts” are now making the same mistake that quant traders make when they build HFT algorithms. The U.S. government is giving Ukraine every bit of intelligence and weaponry they have, and one should not underestimate the amount of luck the military industrial complex can give a country. The strange and unexplained Russian logistical failures will continue because they are not spontaneous accidents.
Russia’s government is one of the largest moral mazes in the history of moral mazes. People have a bias toward thinking evil, authoritarian regimes are ipso facto competent. Whatever your impressions of the DMV, it is a hundred times more efficient and well organized than the Russian military bureaucracy. Recent reports I’ve read in the media (and I know lots of it is propaganda) hint more and more at this fact.
To make it concrete, even though there is a 40km long convoy headed towards Kiev right now, I think in five years there is a 60% chance Ukrainians will largely control Ukraine, and there’s a 40% chance that Ukraine will straightforwardly repel the invasion.
Update, 03/26: I was wrong in being so pessimistic. 90% chance Ukrainians will largely control ukraine & straightforwardly repel the invasion, with the exception of Donbas which I think will be a coin flip.
You’re forgetting that the situation might be mirrored on the other side. Sure the Ukrainian army is fighting bravely and patriotically now, but that doesn’t negate years of corruption and dysfunction beforehand if that is the case.
The difference is that the Ukrainian government is very properly motivated in a way to repel the invasion that is not at all mirrored by maze-killing motivation on the other side.
I am registering my prediction here that the Russian invasion will be astoundingly ineffective to most analysts. I have two reasons for this, and they’re both heuristics. First:
In adversarial games, I refuse to attribute to chance that which can be attributed to malice. I feel “foreign policy experts” are now making the same mistake that quant traders make when they build HFT algorithms. The U.S. government is giving Ukraine every bit of intelligence and weaponry they have, and one should not underestimate the amount of luck the military industrial complex can give a country. The strange and unexplained Russian logistical failures will continue because they are not spontaneous accidents.
Russia’s government is one of the largest moral mazes in the history of moral mazes. People have a bias toward thinking evil, authoritarian regimes are ipso facto competent. Whatever your impressions of the DMV, it is a hundred times more efficient and well organized than the Russian military bureaucracy. Recent reports I’ve read in the media (and I know lots of it is propaganda) hint more and more at this fact.
To make it concrete, even though there is a 40km long convoy headed towards Kiev right now, I think in five years there is a 60% chance Ukrainians will largely control Ukraine, and there’s a 40% chance that Ukraine will straightforwardly repel the invasion.
Update, 03/26: I was wrong in being so pessimistic. 90% chance Ukrainians will largely control ukraine & straightforwardly repel the invasion, with the exception of Donbas which I think will be a coin flip.
You’re forgetting that the situation might be mirrored on the other side. Sure the Ukrainian army is fighting bravely and patriotically now, but that doesn’t negate years of corruption and dysfunction beforehand if that is the case.
The difference is that the Ukrainian government is very properly motivated in a way to repel the invasion that is not at all mirrored by maze-killing motivation on the other side.