The difference between Putin's Army and Stalin's Army is Putin's Army doesn't have a battalion of NKVD secret police troops behind every frontline unit, charged with summary execution of anyone who tried to retreat or who didn't advance fast enough. Units that were unsuccessful were taken out of the line and the officers and leading NCOs…
The difference between Putin's Army and Stalin's Army is Putin's Army doesn't have a battalion of NKVD secret police troops behind every frontline unit, charged with summary execution of anyone who tried to retreat or who didn't advance fast enough. Units that were unsuccessful were taken out of the line and the officers and leading NCOs were then shot and the troops sent to penal battalions where they performed such duties as minefield clearance in the next attack - by running across the field ahead of the advance and "clearing" the mines. It was "perform or die" 77 years ago.
As to today's 11th Circuit decision, Joyce Vance observed at her Substack that "whoever wrote this decision enjoyed their work."
In the study of battles, it's commonly observed that in each battle, there comes a time - despite whatever hard effort remains - where one side cannot lose and the other side cannot stop losing. I think maybe, perhaps, possibly, today is that day in our war with Trump. As Napoleon observed at the Battle of Austerlitz, "Never interrupt an enemy who is defeating himself."
Please accept usual “sizzlin” as well as additional praise of brilliant.
It’s has been so valuable to me to have military historian insight into the many battles being waged. And then add Professor Richardson’s uncanny ability to link historical relevance to present day.
Both insights giving a window to solutions.
Grateful every day for Substack authors. And the forums created.
Yeah, the two best armies Russia ever put in the field was 1812 and World War 2. Overall the best was 1812, which had good leadership as was shown in the fights from then to Waterloo.
Wonderful book, full of real people, not invented characters. But then, many of them are based on members of Tolstoy's family. Boris' wedding proposal, unveiling the painting before Moscow, Kutuzov reviewing the prisoners -- classic scenes!
Hmmm - please elaborate! One thing is for sure - there has been no reporting what so ever as to exactly why he took these documents. If I know Trump, it was for nefarious reasons.
(no negative intended personally): can we stop using the term "conspiracy theory"? These are not theories.
In everyday use, the word "theory" often means an untested hunch, or a guess without supporting evidence. But for scientists, a theory has nearly the opposite meaning. A theory is a well-substantiated explanation of an aspect of the natural world that can incorporate laws, hypotheses and facts.
So can we call them "conspiracy hunches" or "conspiracy guesses", or best of all "fictionalized bullshit"?
Let's stick with the scientific definition of the word.
As in little old ladies yacking over the fence as they hang the days laundry out to dry in the sweet fresh air you could actually enjoy breathing on the newest retractable clothesline of the 1950's!
I agree that the scientific sense of "theory" and it's standard of evidence supporting confidence rather than case-closed certainty, needs way more public exposure and understanding. That said, I think the word "theory" as speculation is OK so long as as we don't let speculation does not get ahead of itself. I have zero evidence of what Trump may have been up to except echoing James Wheaton above, he has proven abundantly that he is irresponsible as hell, and tends to press his own selfish interests over that of the common weal; which is pretty much the modern orientation of his whole party. That's my theory.
😳 that thought crossed my mind when it happened! Did they do an autopsy? Or do you suppose that’s why she was buried on a golf course so exhuming the body would be more difficult ? Yikes!
Well he wouldn’t want actual truths to be revealed would he?! tfg has just been one nightmare after another! I long for the day we no longer hear his name or hear his idiotic versions of the “truth”. 🙏
Great insight today and brilliant quote about Austerlitz.
But from the beginning of this latest Russian fiasco I have marveled at Putin’s demonstrations of the brilliance of Sun Tzu’s “Art of War.”
The Dictator has missed every requirement for victory of the ancient advice. The summoning of Ill prepared troops is the frosting on the cake.
But Putin obviously used poor Intelligence to plan the invasion, devised terrible supply chokepoints, created animus in the Ukrainians by destructive artillery / rocket attacks, had superannuated battlefield tactics and insufficient armaments all of which point to continuing self destruction.
I’m sure Clausewitz’ warnings can add layers of derision on this war but for all the destructiveness of the war the Trump wannabe certainly provides a mountain of rich material for the students of war.
Putin's war against Ukraine now and his efforts to get Russian men to fight as detailed by historian Timothy Snyder.
'Putin knows that most Russians do not really care about Ukraine, except in the sense of enjoying a war on television. But the war is going so badly that the television version is getting hard to sustain. Putin needs some Russians to get up from the couch and fight, and has announced a “partial mobilization.” To convince Russian men to fight, and families not to rebel, he has altered his characterization of the war. It was once a “special military operation” that was to destroy Ukraine in three days. Now it is a grand struggle to defend civilization, etc. But a defensive war must be fought on Russian territory.'
'Ergo, Putin must present Ukrainian territory that the Ukrainians are taking back as Russian territory; and ergo, he must have a media exercise to pretend that “referendums” have taken place, and that people in Ukrainian regions want to join Russia. Presto-chango-russo: a tyrant’s wish, a few lines of script on Russian television, a few lines of code on Russian media websites, and territories become Russian! This quavering postmodern improvisation will convince no one beyond Russia, and it might not even convince Russians. But now that Putin has decided, the media exercise to support his magical thinking must go forward.'
'At a certain moment, Russian media will just declare that (something like) 97% of the people of Donetsk region want to join Russia, 96% in Luhansk, 86% in Zaporizhia, 80% in Kherson. These numbers will be invented, made up. They are already in a file somewhere. There will be no more reason to report those numbers in a sentence with the word "referendum" or “vote” in it than there would be to report my claim, made here, that 97% of the inhabitants of Brooklyn wish to join Mississippi.'
'It is beside the point to say that such numbers are implausible, because they will just be invented. When we already know that something is made up, we don’t usually stop to think whether we might have believed it anyway. But yes, the fictions provided in the media exercise will be implausible. And deliberately so. The way Russian electoral propaganda works is to tell a lie that everyone knows is a lie, and then to show by force that there is no alternative to living as though the lie were true. So we will get North Korean numbers, because that is how the system works.
So this Russian media exercise is ludicrous. But it is not funny. It is obscene.'
'What about the dead? What about the more than 100,000 Ukrainian the Russians killed in Mariupol? How should we think about their “votes”? What about the more than three million Ukrainian citizens whom Russia has forcibly deported, many of whom are now in camps? In the regions where the media exercise will be applied, Russia has destroyed city after city. Everywhere Russia occupied territory, it leaves behind mass graves. When I was in Ukraine a couple of weeks ago, I visited one of them, as well as the homes of people who had lost family members. While I was in Ukraine, the Ukrainian army liberated much of Kharkiv region, and now we know of more mass graves, for example in Izyum.'
'That is the world in which the media exercise is undertaken. When Russia claims that huge majorities of Ukrainians want to join Russia, they are claiming that Ukrainians like death pits, that Ukrainians like torture, that Ukrainians like deportation, that Ukrainians like to have their homes destroyed and their cities obliterated.'
'The ongoing Russian media exercise ("referendums") is an obscenity. When Russian media announces the invented “results,” Moscow will be claiming that Ukrainians wish to celebrate their own ongoing genocide by joining the country that is perpetrating it. Such an attempt at public humiliation is despicable. The Russian media exercise is nothing more and nothing less than an element of ongoing Russian war crimes.' (TimothySnyder, Thinking about...)
Ironically, Napoleon apparently forgot that advice when he invaded Russia.
That said, the closer Putin and Trump come to destruction, the more dangerous they become. Putin is calculating and Trump is just off the rails, but they're both narcissistic sociopaths who clearly care for nothing aside from their narrow self interest and nobody other than themselves. They're both capable of destroying everything around them in a final petty act of revenge.
Yes, old Napoleon ended up proving his own aphorism.
And yes, there's a well-known story about Putin's "Yard Punk" childhood where he chased a rat in the apartment complex and cornered it, and then it bared its teeth, leaped out and chased him. He says it was the most important learning experience he ever had.
Trump is not interested in winning what is obviously the inevitable predictability of his well-deserved trouncing’s of all his various court battles, (envision him hanging from a tree in the middle of oblivion, his mushy belly jiggling upon the adipose flap of his “muffin-top”, his eyes just beginning to pop out as the noose of rough oversized rope he has been knitting for his last seventy years nearly comes to his inevitable castigated betekenis, popping, snapping, squeaking…Oh! Wait…that painfully vented cacophony actually might have been his last pronouncement most generously bequeathed unto us in the form of a series of disgusting off-tune staccato-like flatulent exclamations), he just wants to prolong his farce judicialnesses until the repugnacious “Calvary” saves his big fat lily white bigoterd ass this November
Thank you for saving me trouble of recounting Stalin’s efforts to stiffen the Red Army, which were aided by the fact that the German invaders were foreign, and incredibly (in the true sense) brutal.
Poor rump and putin, the laws of physics are catching up to them. Permanently etched in my mind in the early reign of rump was the spectacle of both of them strutting together like swollen cocks, drenched in their glory, backed by their positions of power. Ironically, both chumps are presently experiencing the law of nature as it pertains to the slowly boiling frog. If thrown in a pot of boiling water the frog instinctively jumps out. However, if the frog is placed in cold water and the heat is slowly but continuously turned up, the frog will ignore the increasing heat and boil to death. What's happening to both of them is truly biblical....
A common problem with criminals of all types is that if they manage to get away with their crimes for long enough, they start to think of themselves as invulnerable. At which point they get sloppy and the slope starts to get slippery.
Putin still has his finger on the largest nuclear arsenal in the world....and just what was tfg doing with all those highly classified nuclear documents???
Well, yes, those are the nightmare scenarios I mentioned in another comment. A narcissistic sociopath is at their most dangerous when they see the ground is collapsing underneath them.
Putin's army does not have NKVD backstop units -- yet -- but it should be noted that there are some reports that on the Kherson front rear units are taking positions on the left bank of the Dnipro to keep Russian units trapped in Kherson from retreating across the river. So, no NKVD troops yet, but I suspect they will be resurrected soon.
The difference between Putin's Army and Stalin's Army is Putin's Army doesn't have a battalion of NKVD secret police troops behind every frontline unit, charged with summary execution of anyone who tried to retreat or who didn't advance fast enough. Units that were unsuccessful were taken out of the line and the officers and leading NCOs were then shot and the troops sent to penal battalions where they performed such duties as minefield clearance in the next attack - by running across the field ahead of the advance and "clearing" the mines. It was "perform or die" 77 years ago.
As to today's 11th Circuit decision, Joyce Vance observed at her Substack that "whoever wrote this decision enjoyed their work."
In the study of battles, it's commonly observed that in each battle, there comes a time - despite whatever hard effort remains - where one side cannot lose and the other side cannot stop losing. I think maybe, perhaps, possibly, today is that day in our war with Trump. As Napoleon observed at the Battle of Austerlitz, "Never interrupt an enemy who is defeating himself."
Morning TC.
Please accept usual “sizzlin” as well as additional praise of brilliant.
It’s has been so valuable to me to have military historian insight into the many battles being waged. And then add Professor Richardson’s uncanny ability to link historical relevance to present day.
Both insights giving a window to solutions.
Grateful every day for Substack authors. And the forums created.
Unita. 🗽
And that's what Mikhail Kutuzof must have been thinking as Napoleon's army rolled merrily into Moscow.
Yeah, the two best armies Russia ever put in the field was 1812 and World War 2. Overall the best was 1812, which had good leadership as was shown in the fights from then to Waterloo.
According to Tolstoy, the Russian army did best when it _didn't_ fight, but just watched the French army disintegrate.
Am reading War & Peace right now - about 300 pages in.
Ah, I have not read this in a while. This is an appropriate time to pick it up again! Thanks for the reminder.
Wonderful book, full of real people, not invented characters. But then, many of them are based on members of Tolstoy's family. Boris' wedding proposal, unveiling the painting before Moscow, Kutuzov reviewing the prisoners -- classic scenes!
I am loving it but afraid to read the comments - I'm only 300 pages in.
“Umm, Pardon’ General, when do we get to eat?”
Am reading Peter the Great right now. About 225 pages in. So much in common with what's going on today.
See Edward Tufte's poster "Napoleon's March" https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters
It tells the story of the War of 1812 in one page.
A book I must read!
TC,
If Trump sold what I think he did to Saudi Arabia, he has WAY more to worry about than the DOJ.
And, I think he already received his heads up........his ex wife.
: -) How is that for good Conspiracy Theory?
Hmmm - please elaborate! One thing is for sure - there has been no reporting what so ever as to exactly why he took these documents. If I know Trump, it was for nefarious reasons.
James,
In the NY Times, at one point, they raised the possiblity that (other countries) Nuclear Capability had been pilfered by Trump.
As soon as I read about that I thought about the $2 Billion that Jared, a never even tried it before "investment manager" received from the Saudis.
Saudi Arabia has long sought details of Israel's nuclear capability all of which came from the US.
IF Trump sold out Israel, then, based on Israel's history, Trump won't last long.
His ex wife was already found at the bottom of a long stairwell in apartment she had lived in for many years with no incident.
ALL of this is conspiracy theory based on a one time NY Times speculative article.
Interesting speculation.
(no negative intended personally): can we stop using the term "conspiracy theory"? These are not theories.
In everyday use, the word "theory" often means an untested hunch, or a guess without supporting evidence. But for scientists, a theory has nearly the opposite meaning. A theory is a well-substantiated explanation of an aspect of the natural world that can incorporate laws, hypotheses and facts.
So can we call them "conspiracy hunches" or "conspiracy guesses", or best of all "fictionalized bullshit"?
Let's stick with the scientific definition of the word.
I vote for “fictionalized bullshit.” The term “conspiracy theory” is a gross (in every sense) glorification of its intended meaning.
TCinLA
GOSSIP
As in little old ladies yacking over the fence as they hang the days laundry out to dry in the sweet fresh air you could actually enjoy breathing on the newest retractable clothesline of the 1950's!
https://www.grainger.com/product/15V286?gucid=N:N:PS:Paid:GGL:CSM-2295:4P7A1P:20501231&gclid=Cj0KCQjwj7CZBhDHARIsAPPWv3eOf8IhJaAcRCpSf7jA4wKBGbLX8HQTMMMFqQtJdNjj0h9Zrf_jDOQaAvXuEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds
"Conspiracy narrative" is probably more accurate, IMO.
I agree that the scientific sense of "theory" and it's standard of evidence supporting confidence rather than case-closed certainty, needs way more public exposure and understanding. That said, I think the word "theory" as speculation is OK so long as as we don't let speculation does not get ahead of itself. I have zero evidence of what Trump may have been up to except echoing James Wheaton above, he has proven abundantly that he is irresponsible as hell, and tends to press his own selfish interests over that of the common weal; which is pretty much the modern orientation of his whole party. That's my theory.
That would be good, yes. The anti-science crowd loves to misuse the word "theory" for their own ends.
james wheaton (Jay)
FOLLOW THE MONEY, Eh!?
Yes - especially with Trump.
Always!
😱 I’ve been wondering who pushed her!
😳 that thought crossed my mind when it happened! Did they do an autopsy? Or do you suppose that’s why she was buried on a golf course so exhuming the body would be more difficult ? Yikes!
And not just any golf course, but his golf course.
Cecile Thomson
Replacing a really big divot may get ugly, Eh!?
I'm curious as to what you mean when you refer to the above . . . he’s received his heads up …. his ex wife?
Yes. Exactly. A little heads up of what is in store for him.
There are several ways to “read” this - hopefully Justice will prevail!
Well he wouldn’t want actual truths to be revealed would he?! tfg has just been one nightmare after another! I long for the day we no longer hear his name or hear his idiotic versions of the “truth”. 🙏
Debbie Danks
Or show photos/videos...YIKES!!!!
Great insight today and brilliant quote about Austerlitz.
But from the beginning of this latest Russian fiasco I have marveled at Putin’s demonstrations of the brilliance of Sun Tzu’s “Art of War.”
The Dictator has missed every requirement for victory of the ancient advice. The summoning of Ill prepared troops is the frosting on the cake.
But Putin obviously used poor Intelligence to plan the invasion, devised terrible supply chokepoints, created animus in the Ukrainians by destructive artillery / rocket attacks, had superannuated battlefield tactics and insufficient armaments all of which point to continuing self destruction.
I’m sure Clausewitz’ warnings can add layers of derision on this war but for all the destructiveness of the war the Trump wannabe certainly provides a mountain of rich material for the students of war.
Putin's war against Ukraine now and his efforts to get Russian men to fight as detailed by historian Timothy Snyder.
'Putin knows that most Russians do not really care about Ukraine, except in the sense of enjoying a war on television. But the war is going so badly that the television version is getting hard to sustain. Putin needs some Russians to get up from the couch and fight, and has announced a “partial mobilization.” To convince Russian men to fight, and families not to rebel, he has altered his characterization of the war. It was once a “special military operation” that was to destroy Ukraine in three days. Now it is a grand struggle to defend civilization, etc. But a defensive war must be fought on Russian territory.'
'Ergo, Putin must present Ukrainian territory that the Ukrainians are taking back as Russian territory; and ergo, he must have a media exercise to pretend that “referendums” have taken place, and that people in Ukrainian regions want to join Russia. Presto-chango-russo: a tyrant’s wish, a few lines of script on Russian television, a few lines of code on Russian media websites, and territories become Russian! This quavering postmodern improvisation will convince no one beyond Russia, and it might not even convince Russians. But now that Putin has decided, the media exercise to support his magical thinking must go forward.'
'At a certain moment, Russian media will just declare that (something like) 97% of the people of Donetsk region want to join Russia, 96% in Luhansk, 86% in Zaporizhia, 80% in Kherson. These numbers will be invented, made up. They are already in a file somewhere. There will be no more reason to report those numbers in a sentence with the word "referendum" or “vote” in it than there would be to report my claim, made here, that 97% of the inhabitants of Brooklyn wish to join Mississippi.'
'It is beside the point to say that such numbers are implausible, because they will just be invented. When we already know that something is made up, we don’t usually stop to think whether we might have believed it anyway. But yes, the fictions provided in the media exercise will be implausible. And deliberately so. The way Russian electoral propaganda works is to tell a lie that everyone knows is a lie, and then to show by force that there is no alternative to living as though the lie were true. So we will get North Korean numbers, because that is how the system works.
So this Russian media exercise is ludicrous. But it is not funny. It is obscene.'
'What about the dead? What about the more than 100,000 Ukrainian the Russians killed in Mariupol? How should we think about their “votes”? What about the more than three million Ukrainian citizens whom Russia has forcibly deported, many of whom are now in camps? In the regions where the media exercise will be applied, Russia has destroyed city after city. Everywhere Russia occupied territory, it leaves behind mass graves. When I was in Ukraine a couple of weeks ago, I visited one of them, as well as the homes of people who had lost family members. While I was in Ukraine, the Ukrainian army liberated much of Kharkiv region, and now we know of more mass graves, for example in Izyum.'
'That is the world in which the media exercise is undertaken. When Russia claims that huge majorities of Ukrainians want to join Russia, they are claiming that Ukrainians like death pits, that Ukrainians like torture, that Ukrainians like deportation, that Ukrainians like to have their homes destroyed and their cities obliterated.'
'The ongoing Russian media exercise ("referendums") is an obscenity. When Russian media announces the invented “results,” Moscow will be claiming that Ukrainians wish to celebrate their own ongoing genocide by joining the country that is perpetrating it. Such an attempt at public humiliation is despicable. The Russian media exercise is nothing more and nothing less than an element of ongoing Russian war crimes.' (TimothySnyder, Thinking about...)
Oh!
Fern!
You win!
Congratulation for the longest and most unoriginal comment today...why not just post the link that you copied from, Eh!?
Your presumption that we do not read almost seems you may be projecting a message upon us?
Your mouth to God's ears in respect of the failed insurrectionist.
Ah, Nappy Darling, “food for my horses, mud and snow for my men”
Another difference worth noting is that Ukrainian forces are a little gentler with Russian POWs than the Nazis were with the Soviets.
Ironically, Napoleon apparently forgot that advice when he invaded Russia.
That said, the closer Putin and Trump come to destruction, the more dangerous they become. Putin is calculating and Trump is just off the rails, but they're both narcissistic sociopaths who clearly care for nothing aside from their narrow self interest and nobody other than themselves. They're both capable of destroying everything around them in a final petty act of revenge.
Like President Clark in "Babylon 5": scorched earth. https://youtu.be/6k-d7-l5v3A
Yes, old Napoleon ended up proving his own aphorism.
And yes, there's a well-known story about Putin's "Yard Punk" childhood where he chased a rat in the apartment complex and cornered it, and then it bared its teeth, leaped out and chased him. He says it was the most important learning experience he ever had.
Apparently Vlad forgot his lesson as well. He put Ukrainians in the same position as that cornered rat. And then was unprepared to be bitten.
TCinLA
A Napoleonic augmentation observation...
Trump is not interested in winning what is obviously the inevitable predictability of his well-deserved trouncing’s of all his various court battles, (envision him hanging from a tree in the middle of oblivion, his mushy belly jiggling upon the adipose flap of his “muffin-top”, his eyes just beginning to pop out as the noose of rough oversized rope he has been knitting for his last seventy years nearly comes to his inevitable castigated betekenis, popping, snapping, squeaking…Oh! Wait…that painfully vented cacophony actually might have been his last pronouncement most generously bequeathed unto us in the form of a series of disgusting off-tune staccato-like flatulent exclamations), he just wants to prolong his farce judicialnesses until the repugnacious “Calvary” saves his big fat lily white bigoterd ass this November
George,
Umm.....well written for sure. No doubt. But,...... just a bit too grisly for me.
And, I am a long time Steven King reader.
:-)
BWAHAHAHA!😂😂😂
Thank you for saving me trouble of recounting Stalin’s efforts to stiffen the Red Army, which were aided by the fact that the German invaders were foreign, and incredibly (in the true sense) brutal.
The economics term Escalation of Commitment / sunk cost fallacy / over commitment comes to mind.
Poor rump and putin, the laws of physics are catching up to them. Permanently etched in my mind in the early reign of rump was the spectacle of both of them strutting together like swollen cocks, drenched in their glory, backed by their positions of power. Ironically, both chumps are presently experiencing the law of nature as it pertains to the slowly boiling frog. If thrown in a pot of boiling water the frog instinctively jumps out. However, if the frog is placed in cold water and the heat is slowly but continuously turned up, the frog will ignore the increasing heat and boil to death. What's happening to both of them is truly biblical....
A common problem with criminals of all types is that if they manage to get away with their crimes for long enough, they start to think of themselves as invulnerable. At which point they get sloppy and the slope starts to get slippery.
Putin still has his finger on the largest nuclear arsenal in the world....and just what was tfg doing with all those highly classified nuclear documents???
Well, yes, those are the nightmare scenarios I mentioned in another comment. A narcissistic sociopath is at their most dangerous when they see the ground is collapsing underneath them.
that may yet happen
Yikes. Thanks for this. So much to learn in the world. So much under the radar
Putin's army does not have NKVD backstop units -- yet -- but it should be noted that there are some reports that on the Kherson front rear units are taking positions on the left bank of the Dnipro to keep Russian units trapped in Kherson from retreating across the river. So, no NKVD troops yet, but I suspect they will be resurrected soon.