Russia in Ukraine: A Dictatorship with Problems

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) describes itself as a “non-partisan, non-profit, public policy research organization.”  One of its missions is understanding what is happening in the war between Russia and Ukraine, and making that information available to whoever is or should be interested.  It provides daily assessments of the goings on, providing detailed maps of who controls what territory in Ukraine on a given day.  For those interested in the course of the war, this is the place to go for daily updates.  It seemed to be appropriate to pass on some of the information provided in the June 18, 2023 update since the news was especially noteworthy to those who assume a dictatorship is no way to run a country, and particularly to those who believe or hope that dictatorships ultimately destroy themselves.

“Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.”

We begin with results of Wall Street Journal (WSJ) interviews with Russian soldiers who surrendered to the Ukrainians.  It provides a sense of what it is like to be a human being in Putin’s Russia.

“WSJ amplified the statements of three unidentified Russian POWs who voluntarily surrendered to Ukrainian forces during Ukrainian counteroffensive operations near Velyka Novosilka, on the administrative border between Donetsk and Zaporizhia oblasts. The POWs reported widespread fear of a Ukrainian counteroffensive among Russian forces on the frontlines. The POWs indicated that the Russian military command sees Russian conscripts and penal recruits as expendable, and claimed Russian officers order injured personnel deemed unfit for service back to the front line and use “barrier forces” to prevent penal recruits in ‘Storm-Z’ units from retreating. Barrier forces are specialized units that threaten to shoot their own personnel either to prevent retreats or to force them to attack, and unverified social media footage recently circulated depicting Russian barrier troops shooting retreating Russian forces in Ukraine. The POWs also indicated that Russian forces struggle to supply and staff their units, including struggling to crew tanks and armored vehicles. The POWs expressed concern about returning to Russia in a POW exchange due to Russian laws prohibiting voluntary surrender to the enemy.”

Putin seems to have encouraged people to set up private armies to support his initiatives.  The most famous and presumably the largest is the Wagner Group of Yevgeny Prigozhin.  Prigozhin has claimed that his men were responsible for the taking of Bakhmut and has bellowed loudly and frequently that the Russian Army leaders in the Ministry of Defense (MoD) are a worthless disgrace to his beloved country.  He is apparently trying to create greater influence for himself by trashing everyone in power but Putin.  The MoD responded by demanding all these private armies to institute contractual arrangements with the MoD in order to gain supplies and equipment.  Prigozhin has stated that he will refuse to obey.  Here are a few comments from this day’s assessment of the state of affairs.

“Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin continues to compete with the Russian MoD and portray Wagner as more disciplined than regular Russian forces. Prigozhin claimed that 32,000 Russian convicts completed service with Wagner and returned to Russia.   Prigozhin claimed that these recruits have a 0.25 percent recidivism rate and that this rate is 80 percent lower than the recidivism rate among Russian prisoners in total. The Russian MoD notably blocked Wagner’s penal colony recruitment and began its own penal recruitment efforts in winter 2023.   Russian President Vladimir Putin similarly claimed on June 13 that Russian convict recruits, likely referring to those recruited by the MoD, have a recidivism rate of 0.4 percent as compared to the regular recidivism rate of 40 percent, and Prigozhin is likely altering and amplifying this claimed statistic.  Prigozhin suggested on June 17 that Russian MoD will prevent volunteers from ever completing their military contracts after the Russian military command assumes official control over irregular formations and is likely attempting to promote Wagner forces against the backdrop of the Russian MoD’s formalization efforts.” 

One of the more interesting sources for IWS are Russian bloggers who report on military activities.  Some are embedded with the troops in combat zones, and a few can be considered reliable sources.  They are referred to as “milbloggers.”

“Some Russian ultranationalist figures are concerned that the Russian MoD’s efforts to formalize volunteer formations will trigger command changes and degrade combat effectiveness. Russian milbloggers claimed that the Russian MoD previously replaced the experienced commanders of Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR) people’s militias with ineffective and inexperienced commanders.  The milbloggers claimed that the timing of the MoD’s recent order formalizing volunteer units during a Ukrainian counteroffensive is worrisome, and that the MoD may worsen these volunteer formations in the same manner the MoD worsened the DNR and LNR militias.”

The inability of Russia to provide logistical support to its troops has become almost laughable.  Here is a comment related to that topic.

“Some Russian commanders are reportedly withholding nongovernmental military aid from frontline units. Russian milbloggers amplified footage on June 18 showing bullet holes in vehicles that Russian military personnel purchased with their own money for military purposes.[45] The milbloggers claimed that the commander of the Russian 103rd Motorized Rifle Regiment (150th Motorized Rifle Division, 8th Combined Arms Army, Southern Military District) - allegedly “Colonel Kutaev” - deliberately shot the vehicles likely because he did not want to Russian servicemen to accept military supplies or equipment outside of official MoD provisions. The milbloggers noted that there are Russian commanders who refuse to leverage support from nongovernmental organizations dedicated to helping supply Russian military units with equipment, drones, and vehicles.”

Putin has long claimed that there is no Ukraine, the region is just a portion of Russia, and the natives are merely more Russians.  He seems willing to show this principle by treating them like regular Russians.  If it serves the Leader’s purpose, they will be left to die. 

“Russian occupation officials are continuing to prioritize medical treatment for Russian military personnel in occupied Mariupol, reportedly significantly increasing the civilian mortality rate in the city. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on June 18 that the civilian mortality rate in Mariupol from ‘natural’ causes significantly intensified to a peak of 400 deaths per week – 2.6 times higher than Ukraine’s national mortality rate during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that Mariupol has no functional medical system because all medical facilities are treating Russian military personnel. Russian forces have consistently used civilian medical infrastructure in occupied Ukraine for their own needs, and are struggling to compensate for the resulting shortage in available healthcare personnel and beds.”

This is not the first time Russia tried to destroy Ukraine.  Stalin purposely starved millions of Ukrainian agricultural workers to death in the 1930s because they irritated him.  Putin seems to be repeating Stalin’s behavior.  His progress reminds one of the Karl Marx remark: “History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a farce.”

On Defense Spending and Price Gouging

 It is inevitable that another article will soon appear comparing the price the Department of Defense pays for a simple object on a weapons system with the price a supposedly similar object costs at a local hardware store.  A quick glance suggests that the military, and we taxpayers, are being price gouged by greedy corporations.  While there is certainly the opportunity for such to occur, we are rarely provided anything more than a hasty glance at the situation.  We should realize that components that are sufficient for typical commercial or residential activities are not necessarily capable of performing as reliably as necessary in a high-priced critical asset in a time of war.  A $5 valve from Home Depot is not likely to be found on a multimillion-dollar jet experiencing huge temperature and pressure variations and high-G maneuvers, while having failure probabilities of less than a part per billion.  And if one is in a system where the price of an entity is expected to be equal to the cost of the components, strange numbers will appear.  Consider any bill for a stay in a hospital.

It can be extremely misleading to compare what happens in a competitive consumer market with what happens in the limited marketplace that the military has created for itself.

Consider what happened when the military got into the nuclear weapons business.  The development of nuclear explosives technology was the task of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in New Mexico.  Los Alamos would function as a national laboratory under civilian control in the postwar period and be assigned to provide designs of nuclear explosives that could be weaponized for nuclear war scenarios.  It quickly became clear that nuclear explosives were going to be assigned more complex performance requirements and more severe safety and security demands.  The military was operating in a business where market competition was impossible.  They had only one source for what they needed, and they were headed in a direction where the technology at hand was getting more complicated.   They decided they needed to provide a kind of market-like competition by creating a competitive counterpart to Los Alamos.  That would become the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) which was formed in 1952.

So, the military now had two captive sources for what it needed, and in creating them as competitors, they made sure that each Laboratory would try to outdo the other.  This approach provided the military with new and improved designs in terms of performance, safety, and security.  However, it nearly doubled the cost of servicing military needs by maintaining duplicate arrays of scientific and engineering experts and their needed resources.  It is important to recognize that these Laboratories did not just provide what the military asked for.  They also possessed people who both understood the military’s needs as well as what technology could provide.  A good defense contractor will tell the military when technology can provide it more than they knew to ask for.  To provide that kind of support, the Laboratories, or other defense contractors, must be able to perform internal research and development that may or may not lead to any application.

It has been a long time since a new nuclear warhead has been required.  Yet the technology and infrastructure to do that has been maintained at almost the same level.  The focus has shifted from production to maintenance.  Nuclear warheads age like any other complex construct.  The delivery systems for nuclear warheads also age and must be replaced.  A new delivery system can impose new constraints or new environments in which the warhead must perform as intended.  New types of warheads may never be needed but replacement copies of existing warheads might be required.  The capability to make that call and produce the equivalent product must be maintained indefinitely.  Continuing that funding via the national laboratory system has not been a problem for such a unique capability.

The postwar market for conventional, nonnuclear, projects was much different.  There were many commercial firms involved in defense work.  Perhaps, too many.  As the major acquisition targets became more complicated, the demands on the defense contractors increased and the number with the resources to compete diminished.  In addition, those that remained always had the option of focusing on more general commercial projects, where the economic reward might be greater.  At some point, the Pentagon seems to have decided that its needs could be better met with fewer, but bigger contractors.  The ideal situation would be a number of captured corporations for which the Department of Defense could provide enough work to keep all fed and motivated to continue to focus on the technologies required for the ever-more-complex weapon systems being sought.  This defense market would contract, mostly though mergers, to five major contractors.  Whether this number was by design or happenstance is not clear.  This source provides the major defense contractors as of 2021. 

Lockheed Martin Corp.; Obligations: $40.2B 

Boeing Co.; Obligations: $22.1B

Raytheon Technologies Corp.; Obligations: $20.7B

General Dynamics Corp.; Obligations: $17.8B

Pfizer Inc.; Obligations: $13.3B

Northrop Grumman Corp.; Obligations: $12.9B

Pfizer is only here because of the DoD participation in vaccine acquisition and distribution during the recent pandemic.  General Dynamics is the only one of the other five that was not formed from the merger of similarly large defense contractors.

There are a number of potential difficulties, or failure modes, with such a marketplace.  The foremost is the relationship between buyers and sellers.  In a volume-driven market where well-defined products are needed the buyer is in a strong position to control price and quality.  When the market is technology-driven, much of the leverage resides with sellers often promising they can do something that has not been done before.  Whereas the captive contractors in the nuclear warhead community are essentially government employees, those working on conventional systems belong to profit-making corporations whose incentive is not to make inexpensive items, just items less expensive than those of a few competitors.  In fact, there is an implied agreement that the military will provide enough revenue to keep the captive contractors healthy financially as well as technically.  This can lead to allocating resources in such a way as to balance workload rather than reward the best proposal.  The experts best able to evaluate the technical feasibility of project proposals often reside in the contractor community, and military personnel are aware that cushy jobs are available in the contractor community after they leave the service.  Cost-limiting disincentives abound.

The manner in which new projects lead to inevitable product delays and cost overruns suggests that the defense contractors have too much leverage in the system.  It is not a perfect way to acquire military products, but it could be worse.  Consider the current state of Russia’s once vaunted military machine.  A bit of waste in procurement is better than the massive theft of a kleptocracy.

 

What Did We Do to the Neanderthals?

Edward O. Wilson is a well-known entomologist whose specialty was ant species.  In his later years he concluded that he was also an expert in evolutionary anthropology.  He wrote a book titled The Social Conquest of Earth in which he made the following claims.

“Our bloody nature, it can now be argued in the context of modern biology, is ingrained because group-versus-group was a principle driving force that made us what we are.  In prehistory, group selection lifted the hominids that became territorial carnivores to heights of solidarity, to genius, to enterprise.  And to fear.  Each tribe knew with justification that if it was not armed and ready, its very existence was imperiled.  Throughout history, the escalation of a large part of technology has had combat as its central purpose.”

“It should not be thought that war, often accompanied by genocide, is a cultural artifact of a few societies.  Nor has it been an aberration of history, a result of the growing pains of our species’ maturation.  Wars and genocide have been universal and eternal, respecting no particular time or culture.”

Perceiving our history as one being decided by the actions of blood-thirsty males is a popular conception within the ranks of male anthropologists.  Female anthropologists tend come up with conceptions that are much less dominated by male violence.  Recorded history contains plenty of data both for and against Wilson’s viewpoint.  But what about prehistory?  He claims “wars and genocide have been universal and eternal,” but could that be true? 

One of the most intriguing mysteries about human history involves the exact interactions characteristic of our species, Homo sapiens, as it encountered other human-like (hominin) species both as they evolved in Africa and after they spread across the world.  What we know is that we were latecomers to the vast Eurasian land mass.  Other hominins had lived in those areas for hundreds of thousands of years before we arrived.  It would take tens of thousands of years, but eventually all traces of the other hominins would disappear as we became the dominant species.  What explains this development?  Were we culturally superior in some way, or did a propensity for violence play a role?  While our recent history includes plenty of examples of war and genocide, are those behaviors the result of cultural effects or, as Wilson suggests, are they inherent in our biological makeup?  If so, one might expect frequent and early violent interactions between our species and the differing hominins they would encounter.

The best hope for understanding this interaction involves the fate of the Neanderthals who had a long history in Eurasia prior to the arrival of our species.  A surprising amount has been learned about these people in recent years.  Rebecca Wragg Sykes provides a comprehensive picture of them and their society in her book Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art (2020).  We will also delve into conjectures on the Neanderthals’ fate by Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens: A Brief history of Humankind (2015), and Jonathan Kennedy in Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues (2023).

We will use Sykes’ dating convention: 1ka means one thousand years ago; 1Ma means one million years ago.  There were numerous hominin groups that evolved in Africa with some traveling to the Eurasian continent as long as 1-2Ma.  A branch would develop that around 500ka would split off to three specimens that are most associated with the population of that region: Denisovans, Neanderthals, and Sapiens (us).  Neanderthals would spread across most of the continent and reside for about 3-400 thousand years.  The Denisovans appear to be most common in Asian areas.  Sapiens left little record of inhabitance until 70-60ka.  The three groups were similar enough that interbreeding was possible.  Neanderthal-Sapiens breeding was most common in European regions, Denisovan-Sapiens breeding more common in Asian regions.  After about 40ka, evidence of Neanderthal existence disappeared. 

Harari postulates that Sapiens dominated all others because it underwent a ”Cognitive Revolution” that allowed it to develop into larger groups and with this increase in number came more rapid introduction of new capabilities. 

“The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, constitutes the Cognitive Revolution.  What caused it?  We’re not sure.  The most commonly believed theory argues that accidental genetic mutations changed the inner wirings of the brains of Sapiens, enabling them to think in new and unprecedented ways and to communicate using an altogether new type of language.” 

This was an hypothesis, and the credibility of this claim of a cognitive revolution has not held up well.  And the more we learn about Neanderthals and contemporary Sapiens, the more similar they become in terms of capabilities.  Harari suggests Neanderthals might have disappeared because Sapiens could out-compete them for resources, or that the dominant Sapiens could have implemented their first example of genocide.  Yet, if two sides are to be locked in conflict, tens of thousands of years is a long time for that to finally be resolved.  And resolve itself without leaving a trace.

Rebecca Wragg Sykes provides a detailed description of all that has been learned about Neanderthals and makes comparisons between their ways and those of the Sapiens.  Just since Harari produced his volume, our understanding of these creatures has surged, greatly assisted by the availability of genetic analyses.

“While there has been a lot of back-and-forth debates over this, today it appears that Neanderthal vocal chords could make pretty much the same range of sounds as ours.  There were perhaps some subtle differences in vowels…but their breath control wasn’t appreciably poorer, giving them the ability to utter lengthy sound combinations.  Moreover, though their inner ear shape was slightly different, it was similarly finely tuned to sound frequencies generated by speech.  If this anatomy in humans is regarded as specialized for language, then the Neanderthals cannot have been so different.  The same thing is true of brains: in your head right now, Broca’s area is busy understanding the words on this page, and it was also well developed in Neanderthals, with neurons that would have lit up as well-practiced hands knapped a Levallois core, or even when children watched elders butchering.” 

The understanding of Neanderthals has been hindered by a form of Sapiens supremacy theory.  They compared well with Sapiens when it came to stone-age technology.

“The enduring myth that Neanderthal technology was stuck in some kind of cognitive mire, bogged down by minds unable to innovate, is false.  These were neither unsophisticated nor fixed and unvarying people…Elemental boundaries—what the geology made possible or prevented—surely imposed constraints, but thanks to technical mastery and a laser focus on what they wanted, creative responses were possible.  As routinely as breathing, Neanderthals paid attention to their rock: selecting the choicest types, playing with novel ways to fragment, shifting concepts and skills as needed.”

When Sykes considers the disappearance of the Neanderthals, she points out that they were a considerably less robust society than Sapiens.  Perhaps they had a lower sex drive, or maybe they tended to be introverts rather than extroverts.  Though they had lived for hundreds of thousands of years and survived many environmental challenges, they mostly confined themselves to small, relatively isolated groups with not a lot of genetic mixing.  In fact, their population had been in decline for some time when Sapiens arrived.

“Though some Neanderthal lineages were less genetically isolated than others, overall the wider population had been slowly withering for hundreds of thousands of years.  For all their cleverness, flexibility and resilience, the archeology does suggest they had weaker and smaller social networks made up of small groups that rarely came together in large gatherings.  Long-distance lithic movements get more extreme and more common as the Upper Paleolithic develops, and crucially, things other than stone begin to be carried far.  Shared symbolic networks reflecting connections with far-flung communities are what define the post-Neanderthal world.  Being welcomed at the fires of friends many valleys away might make the difference between infants getting by on milky dregs, or tiny hollow bodies being laid down in cold crevices.”

“Small tragedies over thousands of years could ramp up as localized genetic pools became cut off and sluggish.  In contrast to long histories of genetically small worlds and within-group reproduction visible (but not universal) in Neanderthals, so far no early H. sapiens genomes point to similar processes.”

“Climate meltdown, plus a much more crowded continent, could have provided the stage for our persistence and the passing of the Neanderthals.”

Since Sykes was writing her book during the Covid pandemic, it did occur to her that a severe disease that hit the continent could have contributed to the end of the less socially robust specimens.  That brings us to the view espoused by Jonathan Kennedy: if there was conflict between Sapiens and Neanderthals it was waged by the pathogens each brought to the battlefield.

All species harbor microbes that can cause disease.  Those that survive the infection will gain immunity and continue on.  The disease will become endemic in a given population as new members are added (generally through birth) and become infected.  Wherever a given population goes it will carry its pathogens with it.  The Neanderthals living in Eurasia for hundreds of thousands of years in a colder climate and low population density would have developed a set of pathogens to which they were immune.  Sapiens, emerging from tropical Africa where the density of species that could transfer pathogens to them was much higher, would carry with them a much higher pathogen burden.  There are many instances in recorded history in which the peoples with the most complex microbial burden dominate over those with the less powerful microbial array who then can become extinct.  Think of the European invasion of the Americas.

Kennedy suggests that Sapiens and Neanderthals interacted at a border region where pathogens were exchanged, and interbreeding allowed the exchange of genes developed to aid immunity.  Sapiens, with the greater pathogen burden would gain immunity to Neanderthal pathogens faster than that species could respond to Sapiens diseases.  Once significant numbers had gained immunity, Sapiens could penetrate into Neanderthal territory and encounter peoples with no immunity to them and decimate the population.  It would take many thousands of years for Sapiens to distribute itself through the vast areas inhabited by the Neanderthals, but the end result was inevitable. 

Each of the three viewpoints could have played a role in the Neanderthal demise.  It is likely to never be understood in detail.  However, it is encouraging that none demand violence as an explanation.  While it’s appropriate to be disappointed that wars and violence have played such a huge role in our societies, it is unnecessary to conclude we have always lived that way.

Sykes’ suggestion that the Neanderthals created a society/culture which was not designed to survive certain changing conditions is intriguing.  Perhaps it is something we should be concerned about as our societies face new threats arriving at an accelerating rate.