My attention for the last few months has been very much occupied by Vladimir Putin's war on the Ukraine. Like many, I have come to feel a deep admiration for the bravery, resource, intelligence and dogged persistence of the Ukrainian people and military in the defense of their country.
It has also been extremely gratifying to see European nations put aside their internal differences and full-heartedly support the Ukraine in their hour of need.
I have also been struck by the contrast between what we have traditionally thought of Russia's military power and what we are actually seeing unfold in front of our eyes today -- over a million casualties in a war that was intended to last at most a few weeks, but has dragged out over more than four years with no end in sight. We are seeing the hardware of war being destroyed in colossal numbers by drone warfare -- tanks and artillery vehicles in their thousands, entire air defense systems wiped out, even the flagship of the Russian navy, the Moskva, destroyed, and the entire Black Sea fleet forced to flee to a distant place of safety.
The topic that I would like to discuss today is one that has been on my mind for some little time now. The general unpreparedness and weakness of the Russian military apparatus has been as source of surprise and wonderment to anybody paying attention to this conflict. And the decay of this once-feared military power contains some vital lessons for us today. Autocracy and demagoguery are at the heart of the failure of the Russian military, and the Russian government.
The tl;dr of this essay is that we handed the reins of our government over to the same brand of autocracy and demagoguery in our most recent presidential election. And unless we stamp it out it, root and branch, it will destroy us just as it has hollowed out Russia.
Corruption and sycophancy
The fall of the Soviet Union brought hope to many that a dangerous, powerful evil had been eliminated and that the oppressed peoples of that former empire would emerge from a terrible darkness into freedom and liberty. Many have. Look at the Baltic nations of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. Look at Poland and the Ukraine. All of them embraced the notion of government by the people for the people, and they have come to thrive.
But other nations have not. Russia, after a brief springtime of hope, fell back into the clutches of an autocrat promising safety from the "Evil West", and cheap gas and eggs. A cabal of oligarchs rapidly took over, and dragged the nation back into feudalism. KGB-trained Putin has surrounded himself with sycophants and yes-men who tell him what he wants to hear. And when someone does try to voice an option he does not like, that person is very likely to be imprisoned, or to come to an end by some unfortunate poisoning or defenestration.
The result of this is that the entire country has become a fragile hierarchy where the great mass of the people live in third-world squalor, completely in thrall to a tiny number of very rich elites. Entry into the halls of power is almost impossible. And survival in those rarefied heights is only found in never, EVER contradicting Dear Leader.
And here is where two huge effects of autocracy have completely sabotaged Russia's efforts.
The first is corruption. This has shown up everywhere in the Ukrainian conflict. Russian soldiers have body armor containing plastic instead of Kevlar. Where did the money go for that expensive body armor? Into the pockets of a some general tasked with overseeing the procurement. Russian tanks are equipped with reactive armor that is supposed to help defend against incoming artillery by exploding out and detonating the artillery before it hits the tank. But the armor doesn't work. The reactive armor looks real, but it doesn't contain important parts. Money was allocated for those parts, but only ended up enriching a person high up in the chain of command. And so troops - the common people - go into battle completely unprotected in important ways because spending had long been diverted due to endemic, systemic corruption.
The second problem is Putin has consistently surrounded himself with sycophants and has ruthlessly punished and destroyed all dissent, no matter how trivial, to his will. The result is that Putin lives in a fantasy world where he commands a powerful military, where Ukraine is weak and about to fall completely, and where righteous justice is completely on his side. He lives in this world because it is certain death to suggest anything to the contrary to him.
Conclusion
We are on the same path as Russia. We have only just put our feet on that path that Russia has trod almost to its end. We have elected a demagogue who gained favor by promising safety from Evil, and cheap gas and eggs. Our Evil is "The Left", or "Wokeness", or "Immigrants", or "Islam", or whatever else he can think of to dangle in front of the eyes of voters to distract them from a voracious kleptocracy stealing their democratic republic out from underneath them, gutting the government institutions that defend the interests of the people, stealing their healthcare, buying up all the homes so that eventually no one owns anything, and who knows what other terrible things.
Up to this point, our military has seen through this as we observed in The Parade as soldiers shuffled out of step in silent protest, and in the mass meeting of all the military brass sitting silent when summoned. But the government by oligarchs is trying desperately to reshape the military for obvious reasons.
Our best hope in defeating this unbelievably potent Evil is in our states who have the power to keep the evil from gaining power too fast before we can kill it. But we are in an unprecedentedly dangerous place right now. And unless we act decisively and soon, we will follow in steps of Russia, and eventually come to the same end.
Resources
Much of my information has come from these people:
Comments