Pretty much everyone has concluded that this war is almost over IF the US does not provide another massive cash and equipment boost. And since Israel is first in line due to their lobby in the US being far stronger than the Ukraine lobby, and since Israel depleted its military stocks by sending them to Ukraine at the US' request, it's fairly certain that Ukraine won't be getting much more.
The general assessment is that Ukraine can't last more than a few weeks without constant US assistance, both in terms of government funding and in terms of military logistics. Scott Ritter continues to say the Ukrainian army will collapse by end of the year. And I continue to stand by 3-6 month to collapse, although now it's closer to 2-4.
I should note that I suspect when the collapse comes, it won't look like a collapse initially. It will look like a hole in the lines. I think that is what the Russians are waiting for: a hole they can pour 100,000 troops and tanks and artillery through, reinforced by air power and standoff weapons.
Russian doctrine, as I understand it, is based on "reward success, not failure." Say you have 3 battalions right, left and center. Left is being mauled by the enemy, center is holding and right is having some success. US doctrine is send the reserves to the left to reinforce the mauled battalion. Russian doctrine is "fuck the left, they failed, send the reserves to the right and maybe take some from center, too, and go, go, go!" They push through the right, flank and surround and annihilate the enemy.
So one hole big enough in the Ukraine lines, while Russia is pressuring Ukraine all along the rest of the front so Ukraine can not divert forces to reinforce that hole, and the bulk of the Russian reserves will plow through it, out-flanking the Ukrainian entire line. Then the roll-up of the line will begin, forcing Ukraine to retreat back to the Dnieper, taking heavy casualties all the way. That will be the collapse.
Ukraine might try to build a new defensive line on the western side of the Dnieper, but Russia by then will have the capacity to either cross the Dnieper in Kherson - Marat reported some Russian units had already taken some islands in the middle a couple weeks ago - or pivot around in Belarus and come down on the western side. That will force the Ukrainians to wholesale retreat back to Kiev.
Kiev itself is no problem. Russia will have the troops needed to cut off the city from reinforcement, food and water, then send in recon to locate resistance points, then send in Chechens and Wagner to degrade resistance, then wait for the city to fall, like Mariupol. Doesn't matter what the Ukraine government officially does then - flee to Lviv or Poland, declare a government in exile, who cares? With Kiev and all the government buildings in Russian hands, the war is effectively over. Then on to Lviv and the Polish border, no matter who else says what. Everything else is cleanup, which might well take some months, if not a year.
Thanks for the excellent summary Rob. News about Ukraine has disappeared since the outbreak of hostilities in Israel and Gaza. It is amazing to me how quickly this silence has emerged. Looks like a lot of the Western Leadership and their media courtiers are keen to move on to a different story as the sad tale of Ukraine has for them, a bitter ending that becomes more obvious by the day.
It surprised me how Ukraine news simply shrank overnight and I've had to wade through all the middle east stuff in order to find news on Ukraine. It is more time consuming. Cheers.
Full marks to your perseverance and dedication Rob. It's not as if everything has stopped in Ukraine, in my view it is the opposite as Russia starts to press all along the Line of Contact before the rains in preparation for offensive actions in winter. It is still on a vast scale compared with Israel and Gaza and for news to dry up as you say is just extraordinary. More grist for the mill for those who think that Western media is there to shed darkness rather than light. Cheers
Oct 16, 2023·edited Oct 16, 2023Liked by Dr. Rob Campbell
The U.S. is having big issues with selling their debt. Primary Dealers, who don't want to hold any more depreciating (losing face value) American IOU's are being required by their "special status" to mop up auctions, which would otherwise fail.
CogDis. Do I take a bullet to the chest now and hope to survive, or a bullet to the head and lose my Primary Dealer status/privileges. Market Value of Old Debt is approaching $1 Trillion losses in the U.S. alone. Europe is hoping no one notices the hole in their Debt bucket.
Total Debt sales/purchases of New and Roll-over Old Debt in the next 12 months is approaching $6,000 Billion/$6Trillion. All those eager buyers of the past with fists full of newly printed Fedbucks have scampered back with the cockroaches.
If the U.S. Federal Reserve buckles and starts buying debt, directly in the market, or indirectly by financing buyers, then Hyper Inflation is next on deck.
It is comforting to know that intellectual Giant Biden is at the helm.
Kam - do you have a reference to some source that provides this analysis. I have a section on debt in the latest Update and would like to include some of your discussion but I need a link.
Good one, thank you. Very valuable to have it all put together for us like that.
'Dima believe a cauldron is in the making...' I wouldn't pay too much attention to Dima's beliefs about things military. His tracking of actual facts and placing of current frontlines, unit positions, etc. is excellent, but his opinions are strictly off the cuff layman stuff. He is not a military analyst. None of them are. He is a reporter.
We need some military analysts, we have virtually none I think.
Ritter and Macgregor are held up as virtual paragons in precisely that sphere I think? Such is the paucity of acumen at large. Neither of them give any real analysis of anything military. They each simply pronounce the same mantra, each his own and both very similar, which is that Ukraine is losing and must lose.
Eventually they will be shown to be right. Of course. Having actually contributed nothing to it.
Or, rather, very probably contributed much to making it last longer.
For their prognostications and endless dire warnings that 'Ukraine' (meaning Kiev Ukraine of course - the 10 million Donbas Ukrainians utterly discounted) is badly in need of this that and the other, continually for months, well over a year, will doubtless have often been used one way or another to promote the cause and stress the urgency of sending more 'aid' to Kiev Ukraine.
That's about all the 'military analysis' we have.
Delighted to discover I'm wrong if anyone can show that I am.
Thanks Arthur - good to be appreciated. No one divides opinion like Dima who I have been following for about 16 months or so (along with about six other Sitreps). He sometimes irritates with his click bait headlines and his speculation but he also provides some good detail if you want that. I used to watch the others (e.g. Ritter, MacGregor, Johnson, Duran, Berletic etc.) but I am finding that I don't get much out of them now. Alexander Mercouris uses similar sources to myself so I'm finding that I have already written about the stuff he discusses: the same applies to some others. However, Mercouris is good for political stuff: being very astute in that regard. But his videos are too long. I am spending too much time on the Update so I am looking for shortcuts. I was finding that Ritter and MacGregor were saying the same things in each video as they were being presented to different audiences - so I've stopped watching them. I have to be more economic with my time. As for military expertise, I think that Ritter, McGregor, Johnson and Berletic have this but I would be hard pressed to judge just how much they have. The same applies to some others who you haven't mentioned. Khairullin and Boris Rozhin (and some other 'Telegraphers') appear to have military expertise that I could not quantify. Anyway, my role is that of mirror, so I try to minimise military analysis, speculation or expressing my own opinions. As for the cauldron, Dima isn't the only one talking about this. It's beginning to look a lot like Bakhmut.
Oct 14, 2023·edited Oct 15, 2023Liked by Dr. Rob Campbell
Ah.. others are critical of taking Dima's word on military matters? I hadn't known. Good. Better to feel one is not alone. :)
The military expertise that Ritter and Macgregor have they don't really tell us about do they? They just make the sweeping observations.
Berletic's 'expertise' I think suffered tremendously from his year long (or maybe still current, I don't know) earnest 'scholarly' and pedantic pronouncements on the state of the (Kiev) Ukrainian armed forces built entirely on his scrupulous reading of the public announcements from primarily the US govt on arms 'gifts' to Kiev. Why/where/when/how would a 'military expert analyst' ever believe and depend upon public announcements of availability of arms and munitions?
I never forget the half naked, shoeless Vietcong using bicycles to carry artillery shells along jungle trails that US military experts declared nothing could traverse.
i.e. military experts are often fools in retrospect.
So the expert analysis I look for is of the most basic and dependable kind but which might be very interesting and illuminating to us.
Little details pertinent to this do trickle out. Like the guns. We have learned that guns need barrels changing. Hence the efficacy of a battery is lowering continually while it continues firing.
There must be other intimate details that would be important. As an ex gunner myself I can well imagine that simple failure of a tyre on a towed gun would put it effectively out of action until the mechanical aid detachment got there if it ever did. I can't even remember the proper name of such now, that's how long ago that was.
We seem to be curiously without any detailed observation militarily.
Only in recent times has elevation come to be mentioned. And now it is mentioned all the time as though it is the be all and end all and with no regard to the actual heights nor the visual ranges gained.
And talking ranges there are notional 'arcs of range' of course for various things. For each kind of artillery piece from mortars to the longest guns and then to missiles and nowadays encompassing drones. And 'arcs of range' for ECMs and those ECM's would come in various kinds, too, each with its own range and target. That would or could include anti aircraft measures. And range from fuel points.
My point is that a battlefield could be seen as a board with all these different circles on it or 'half circles', 'arcs of range' as I'm calling them and they are all very important and interesting and more especially where they overlap.
Blah, blah, blah.... you can see it just goes on and on... a whole wealth a vast field of important, significant detail in play all the time...
You make some very good points Arthur. I appreciate that we don't really know how much materiel is actually being supplied to Ukraine and when. Military 'experts' thought that the Ardennes was impenetrable for armour and that Singapore could not be invaded through the jungle. History is full of military experts getting it wrong,
So you were a gunner. Do you mind saying where you served.
I wouldn't mind but it's not worthy of mention. A peacetime soldier never visited a theatre of war, never saw a shot fired in anger. In Australia.
Happy days. They were/are somehow central to my being I now suspect. But perhaps that's nonsense. All the days of our youth are perhaps 'central to our being' aren't they? :)
You're tempting me into philosophising again. Youth is part of our being but not necessarily central to it imv. Some psychoanalysts, such as Freud, have theorised that childhood experiences shape our being to a large extent. I'm not sure if they are correct and I have long been suspicious of psychoanalysis.
These Primary Dealers do the same thing as "Market Makers" in the stock market. Whenever someone wants to sell shares in any listed Corporation, the Market Makers, buy, creating a floor price. Same thing for U.S. Primary Dealers in the Debt Market. They provide a bid to keep U.S. Debt prices from collapsing. They have to buy (take their portion) whether they want to or not. And they can always demand the U.S. Federal Reserve cash them out of a lousy auction deal.
Primary Dealers have made money, hand over fist, as interest rates fell and bonds rose in price over the last 30 years. Now bonds are a hot potato.
I have only a very superficial understanding of these things - though I am aware of the debt problem of course and the need for governments to 'sell' their debt. But who are these 'Primary dealers' and what is their 'special status'?
Pretty much everyone has concluded that this war is almost over IF the US does not provide another massive cash and equipment boost. And since Israel is first in line due to their lobby in the US being far stronger than the Ukraine lobby, and since Israel depleted its military stocks by sending them to Ukraine at the US' request, it's fairly certain that Ukraine won't be getting much more.
The general assessment is that Ukraine can't last more than a few weeks without constant US assistance, both in terms of government funding and in terms of military logistics. Scott Ritter continues to say the Ukrainian army will collapse by end of the year. And I continue to stand by 3-6 month to collapse, although now it's closer to 2-4.
I should note that I suspect when the collapse comes, it won't look like a collapse initially. It will look like a hole in the lines. I think that is what the Russians are waiting for: a hole they can pour 100,000 troops and tanks and artillery through, reinforced by air power and standoff weapons.
Russian doctrine, as I understand it, is based on "reward success, not failure." Say you have 3 battalions right, left and center. Left is being mauled by the enemy, center is holding and right is having some success. US doctrine is send the reserves to the left to reinforce the mauled battalion. Russian doctrine is "fuck the left, they failed, send the reserves to the right and maybe take some from center, too, and go, go, go!" They push through the right, flank and surround and annihilate the enemy.
So one hole big enough in the Ukraine lines, while Russia is pressuring Ukraine all along the rest of the front so Ukraine can not divert forces to reinforce that hole, and the bulk of the Russian reserves will plow through it, out-flanking the Ukrainian entire line. Then the roll-up of the line will begin, forcing Ukraine to retreat back to the Dnieper, taking heavy casualties all the way. That will be the collapse.
Ukraine might try to build a new defensive line on the western side of the Dnieper, but Russia by then will have the capacity to either cross the Dnieper in Kherson - Marat reported some Russian units had already taken some islands in the middle a couple weeks ago - or pivot around in Belarus and come down on the western side. That will force the Ukrainians to wholesale retreat back to Kiev.
Kiev itself is no problem. Russia will have the troops needed to cut off the city from reinforcement, food and water, then send in recon to locate resistance points, then send in Chechens and Wagner to degrade resistance, then wait for the city to fall, like Mariupol. Doesn't matter what the Ukraine government officially does then - flee to Lviv or Poland, declare a government in exile, who cares? With Kiev and all the government buildings in Russian hands, the war is effectively over. Then on to Lviv and the Polish border, no matter who else says what. Everything else is cleanup, which might well take some months, if not a year.
In any event, we'll see.
Thanks Richard - I also believe that the Ukrainian army could collapse over the winter - we'll see.
Thanks very much - I appreciate your comprehensive and balanced coverage.
Cheers Cromwell
Thanks for the excellent summary Rob. News about Ukraine has disappeared since the outbreak of hostilities in Israel and Gaza. It is amazing to me how quickly this silence has emerged. Looks like a lot of the Western Leadership and their media courtiers are keen to move on to a different story as the sad tale of Ukraine has for them, a bitter ending that becomes more obvious by the day.
It surprised me how Ukraine news simply shrank overnight and I've had to wade through all the middle east stuff in order to find news on Ukraine. It is more time consuming. Cheers.
Full marks to your perseverance and dedication Rob. It's not as if everything has stopped in Ukraine, in my view it is the opposite as Russia starts to press all along the Line of Contact before the rains in preparation for offensive actions in winter. It is still on a vast scale compared with Israel and Gaza and for news to dry up as you say is just extraordinary. More grist for the mill for those who think that Western media is there to shed darkness rather than light. Cheers
The U.S. is having big issues with selling their debt. Primary Dealers, who don't want to hold any more depreciating (losing face value) American IOU's are being required by their "special status" to mop up auctions, which would otherwise fail.
CogDis. Do I take a bullet to the chest now and hope to survive, or a bullet to the head and lose my Primary Dealer status/privileges. Market Value of Old Debt is approaching $1 Trillion losses in the U.S. alone. Europe is hoping no one notices the hole in their Debt bucket.
Total Debt sales/purchases of New and Roll-over Old Debt in the next 12 months is approaching $6,000 Billion/$6Trillion. All those eager buyers of the past with fists full of newly printed Fedbucks have scampered back with the cockroaches.
If the U.S. Federal Reserve buckles and starts buying debt, directly in the market, or indirectly by financing buyers, then Hyper Inflation is next on deck.
It is comforting to know that intellectual Giant Biden is at the helm.
Kam - do you have a reference to some source that provides this analysis. I have a section on debt in the latest Update and would like to include some of your discussion but I need a link.
It's all falling apart - thanks Kam.
Good one, thank you. Very valuable to have it all put together for us like that.
'Dima believe a cauldron is in the making...' I wouldn't pay too much attention to Dima's beliefs about things military. His tracking of actual facts and placing of current frontlines, unit positions, etc. is excellent, but his opinions are strictly off the cuff layman stuff. He is not a military analyst. None of them are. He is a reporter.
We need some military analysts, we have virtually none I think.
Ritter and Macgregor are held up as virtual paragons in precisely that sphere I think? Such is the paucity of acumen at large. Neither of them give any real analysis of anything military. They each simply pronounce the same mantra, each his own and both very similar, which is that Ukraine is losing and must lose.
Eventually they will be shown to be right. Of course. Having actually contributed nothing to it.
Or, rather, very probably contributed much to making it last longer.
For their prognostications and endless dire warnings that 'Ukraine' (meaning Kiev Ukraine of course - the 10 million Donbas Ukrainians utterly discounted) is badly in need of this that and the other, continually for months, well over a year, will doubtless have often been used one way or another to promote the cause and stress the urgency of sending more 'aid' to Kiev Ukraine.
That's about all the 'military analysis' we have.
Delighted to discover I'm wrong if anyone can show that I am.
:)
Thanks Arthur - good to be appreciated. No one divides opinion like Dima who I have been following for about 16 months or so (along with about six other Sitreps). He sometimes irritates with his click bait headlines and his speculation but he also provides some good detail if you want that. I used to watch the others (e.g. Ritter, MacGregor, Johnson, Duran, Berletic etc.) but I am finding that I don't get much out of them now. Alexander Mercouris uses similar sources to myself so I'm finding that I have already written about the stuff he discusses: the same applies to some others. However, Mercouris is good for political stuff: being very astute in that regard. But his videos are too long. I am spending too much time on the Update so I am looking for shortcuts. I was finding that Ritter and MacGregor were saying the same things in each video as they were being presented to different audiences - so I've stopped watching them. I have to be more economic with my time. As for military expertise, I think that Ritter, McGregor, Johnson and Berletic have this but I would be hard pressed to judge just how much they have. The same applies to some others who you haven't mentioned. Khairullin and Boris Rozhin (and some other 'Telegraphers') appear to have military expertise that I could not quantify. Anyway, my role is that of mirror, so I try to minimise military analysis, speculation or expressing my own opinions. As for the cauldron, Dima isn't the only one talking about this. It's beginning to look a lot like Bakhmut.
Ah.. others are critical of taking Dima's word on military matters? I hadn't known. Good. Better to feel one is not alone. :)
The military expertise that Ritter and Macgregor have they don't really tell us about do they? They just make the sweeping observations.
Berletic's 'expertise' I think suffered tremendously from his year long (or maybe still current, I don't know) earnest 'scholarly' and pedantic pronouncements on the state of the (Kiev) Ukrainian armed forces built entirely on his scrupulous reading of the public announcements from primarily the US govt on arms 'gifts' to Kiev. Why/where/when/how would a 'military expert analyst' ever believe and depend upon public announcements of availability of arms and munitions?
I never forget the half naked, shoeless Vietcong using bicycles to carry artillery shells along jungle trails that US military experts declared nothing could traverse.
i.e. military experts are often fools in retrospect.
So the expert analysis I look for is of the most basic and dependable kind but which might be very interesting and illuminating to us.
Little details pertinent to this do trickle out. Like the guns. We have learned that guns need barrels changing. Hence the efficacy of a battery is lowering continually while it continues firing.
There must be other intimate details that would be important. As an ex gunner myself I can well imagine that simple failure of a tyre on a towed gun would put it effectively out of action until the mechanical aid detachment got there if it ever did. I can't even remember the proper name of such now, that's how long ago that was.
We seem to be curiously without any detailed observation militarily.
Only in recent times has elevation come to be mentioned. And now it is mentioned all the time as though it is the be all and end all and with no regard to the actual heights nor the visual ranges gained.
And talking ranges there are notional 'arcs of range' of course for various things. For each kind of artillery piece from mortars to the longest guns and then to missiles and nowadays encompassing drones. And 'arcs of range' for ECMs and those ECM's would come in various kinds, too, each with its own range and target. That would or could include anti aircraft measures. And range from fuel points.
My point is that a battlefield could be seen as a board with all these different circles on it or 'half circles', 'arcs of range' as I'm calling them and they are all very important and interesting and more especially where they overlap.
Blah, blah, blah.... you can see it just goes on and on... a whole wealth a vast field of important, significant detail in play all the time...
We hear nothing.
Curious. :)
You make some very good points Arthur. I appreciate that we don't really know how much materiel is actually being supplied to Ukraine and when. Military 'experts' thought that the Ardennes was impenetrable for armour and that Singapore could not be invaded through the jungle. History is full of military experts getting it wrong,
So you were a gunner. Do you mind saying where you served.
I wouldn't mind but it's not worthy of mention. A peacetime soldier never visited a theatre of war, never saw a shot fired in anger. In Australia.
Happy days. They were/are somehow central to my being I now suspect. But perhaps that's nonsense. All the days of our youth are perhaps 'central to our being' aren't they? :)
You're tempting me into philosophising again. Youth is part of our being but not necessarily central to it imv. Some psychoanalysts, such as Freud, have theorised that childhood experiences shape our being to a large extent. I'm not sure if they are correct and I have long been suspicious of psychoanalysis.
ASL Capital Markets Inc.
Bank of Montreal, Chicago Branch
Bank of Nova Scotia, New York Agency
BNP Paribas Securities Corp.
Barclays Capital Inc.
BofA Securities
Cantor Fitzgerald & Co.
Citigroup Global Markets Inc.
Daiwa Capital Markets America Inc.
Deutsche Bank Securities Inc.
Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC
HSBC Securities (USA) Inc.
Jefferies LLC
J.P. Morgan Securities LLC
Mizuho Securities USA LLC
Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC
NatWest Markets Securities Inc.
Nomura Securities International, Inc.
RBC Capital Markets, LLC (Royal Bank of Canada)
Santander US Capital Markets LLC
Societe Generale, New York Branch
TD Securities (USA) LLC
UBS Securities LLC.
Wells Fargo Securities LLC
These Primary Dealers do the same thing as "Market Makers" in the stock market. Whenever someone wants to sell shares in any listed Corporation, the Market Makers, buy, creating a floor price. Same thing for U.S. Primary Dealers in the Debt Market. They provide a bid to keep U.S. Debt prices from collapsing. They have to buy (take their portion) whether they want to or not. And they can always demand the U.S. Federal Reserve cash them out of a lousy auction deal.
Primary Dealers have made money, hand over fist, as interest rates fell and bonds rose in price over the last 30 years. Now bonds are a hot potato.
Primary Dealers are "market makers". They have to buy/sop up U.S. bonds, notes and treasuries when the rest of the market isn't enough.
But in theory they can sell them right back to the Federal Reserve. Therein is direct money printing.
I understand - thanks.
I have only a very superficial understanding of these things - though I am aware of the debt problem of course and the need for governments to 'sell' their debt. But who are these 'Primary dealers' and what is their 'special status'?