Finland’s Prime Minister, Sanna Marin, has now traveled to Kyiv to meet face-to-face with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. She wasn’t only in Kyiv, either; she visited Irpin and Bucha.
Where in the world is President Joe Biden (D)? Hiding out in DC or in Delaware.
Is Russia running out of military age bodies to feed into the barbarian furnace that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has lit off with his invasion of Ukraine? Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin:
Today, especially, we need to strengthen the armed forces and help the Ministry of Defense. Our Supreme Commander is doing everything to ensure that our armed forces win, and we need to help[.]
Then the Duma moved to raise the upper age limit on military service from the erstwhile 40 years to…no limit at all.
This age pyramid, from the CIA’s World Fact Book, illustrates one facet of Russia’s problem:
The prime age group for Russia’s army—the blocks from 20 years old to 29 years old—is the smallest set of blocks on the pyramid that are younger than 65 years old. It’ll be five years, at least, before that changes—and that change is temporary: below10 years old, the population blocks shrink again. Russia’s birth rate just isn’t there.
President Joe Biden (D) said Monday (Tokyo time) that the US would intervene militarily if the People’s Republic of China attempted to invade and conquer the Republic of China (though Biden referred to the nation as “Taiwan”).
The president was asked if the US would get involved militarily in response to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan after declining to send American troops to Ukraine to fight Russia’s invasion.
“Yes. That’s the commitment we made,” he said.
Then prove it, Mr Biden. Get out of the way of arms sales to the RoC, stop slow-walking them. Do more, in fact—accelerate both the sales and their delivery.
As an aside, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin promptly came out and said Biden didn’t really mean what he said. Such public undercutting should get Austin summarily fired. But it won’t.
Now he’s “advising” the Swedish government that if they join NATO—or merely apply to join—it’ll be too bad for their nice little country:
Sweden’s accession to NATO will inflict considerable damage to the security of Northern Europe and Europe as a whole. The Russian Federation will have to take response measures, both military-technical and others, to curb the threats to its national security which arise in this context.
Because moving to defend itself against a threat is itself threatening. Putin is projecting. If he truly has no designs against Sweden (or Finland, come to that, or Europe), then there is nothing to fear from an alliance that is defensive in nature.
And this implied threat:
[M]uch will depend on the specific conditions of Sweden’s integration into the North Atlantic Alliance, including the potential deployment of strike systems of this military bloc on its territory[.]
Attempting to dictate the domestic military policy of a sovereign nation: “no foreign troops or systems on your soil are allowed by me.”
Putin continues to demonstrate clearly why a defensive buildup by free and sovereign nations is necessary.
But ratios of what? A simple ratio of three attacking soldiers vs 1 defending soldier is too narrow and dangerously misleading, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is demonstrating.
Soldier equivalents of a number of other factors apply, also, and “force ratios” of the following, at the least, must be included in developing the operational force ratio:
All of that disregards the nature of the terrain being defended/attacked, but terrain merely informs the level of required force ratio: 3:1 to 7:1, the upper bound of what’s nominally considered attackable or worth the cost to attack, or somewhere in between.
It may be that a 3:1 ratio of attackers to defenders is a valid minimum ratio for a successful attack. However, all of these factors have to be converted into their own weights on force-on-force—however hazily the estimated conversions might be—and included in the ratio calculations.
It’s especially critical, too, that cold-blooded, wholly objective estimates of the quality of one’s own soldiers vs the enemy’s be made. “The enemy is ten feet tall,” or “We are,” serve only to get friendly soldiers killed, and the attack likely defeated, regardless of the other factors incorporated into the final force-on-force estimate.