The Secret History of the War in Ukraine

> “If you ever get asked the question, ‘Did you pass a target to the Ukrainians?’ you can legitimately not be lying when you say, ‘No, I did not,’” one U.S. official explained.

That's some shady word mincing. Who are they afraid of, US Congress? journalists? Who would be asking these questions.

This is in the same vein as "we never engaged in water torture!". But did you use "enhanced interrogation techniques using water?". You can still answer "No", if you use diesel fuel instead, you see.

Yes, the Cold War never ended. And it seems like Russia is winning now.

We're in a Cold War with hot proxies. The original Cold War was also like that.

Now, China, Iran and North Korea are backing Russia without engaging in direct confrontation in Ukraine; the EU, NATO, and maybe still the US are backing Ukraine. If Trump realigns with Putin against Ukraine, then the axis of authoritarian countries will have won a major battle. Trump will ofc lose many of his old-guard GOP supporters if he does that.

Remember how Putin saying that Russia was fighting the USA and not Ukraine was supposed to be an example of either him going insane or puffing up the conflict for his domestic audience? Well, for whatever reason now the western media are allowed to tell the truth. Now, why would that be - that's still a mystery.

It’s largely due to a move from single-branch designs to weapons “platforms” that are used by multiple branches of the armed forces so they now go through far more bureaucratic design processes. They had to do it because of the funding cuts after the end of the Cold War (although some systems like ATACMS predate that, both it and HIMARS just reflect a more bureaucratic army). HMMWV and MRAP though are generic terms, not really restricted to the US armed forces.

Designs that are ordered by a single branch like the USAF often still have the emotive names like the Predator and Reaper drones.

> Is this an intentional effort to make warfighting sound more like a kind of bureacratic exercise?

I'm not sure how intentional it is in the sense that they made a deliberate choice rather than it being an unspoken consensus to move this way. However, the language around warfighting in the US has been increasingly sanitized over the years. A key event here is the change in name from Department of War to Department of Defense. Later on we started calling things "defense" instead of military. It's the "defense sector" of the economy, not the military sector. The defense budget, not the military budget. You also see the sanitization with how war is conducted, increasingly from a distance. Bombing an enemy rather than putting in ground troops (or at least delaying putting them in). Now with drones the operators (note the term, it doesn't convey what the job actually entails) may be located at a state side base and go home after conducting a mission somewhere else in the world.

Combat vehicles still tend to get good names. American Indian tribes are traditional for helicopters, while ground combat vehicles still get named after troops & their leaders, like the new M10 Booker assault gun:

https://www.defensenews.com/land/2023/06/10/us-armys-new-com...

While it's entirely justifiable to name trucks after famous logistics officers or heroic motor transport drivers, it's just not done. Artillery is interesting, with Paladins (in action) and Crusaders (cancelled), but nobody refers to them by those names. Ships and subs are their own kettle of fish.

For World War 2 we relied on the British to name things (The US produced the M4 Medium Tank, the Brits called it the "Sherman"). The theory was they were government designed and (at least theoretically) produced by many companies.

I believe the Cold War names mostly came from US contractors- the government defined requirements ("air superiority fighter") and the contractors came up with designs that then had to be marketed against each other so they were given cool names ("Fighting Falcon").

Now there has been a lot of consolidation of contractors, and budgets are much more constrained. You no longer have the DoD funding competing designs and selecting, but a situation closer to early WW2 where the government is closer to the design.

At least that's my 5 minute guess, probably lots of 'citation needed' to be done.

A somewhat silly response, but to me ATACMS sounds a lot like the plural of atack'em which is short for "atack them" in colloquial "American"

And HIMARS sounds like you are sending something to Mars. Quite the thing to name an artillery platform :)

For some reasons Americans like acronyms that spell words. Like SAVE Act (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility) or PATRIOT act (Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism)

Our servers used to be named after the Simpsons characters but now they are corp-us-web3 and dev-eu-sql2

ATACMS is usually pronounced "Attack 'Ems", FWIW.

> A somewhat shallow comment, but why do post-Cold War U.S. weapon systems have such intentionally bland names? ATACMS, HIMARS, etc?

Maybe because so many of them from the late Cold War on got cancelled between the stage where they would previously get a “friendly” (hostile?) name and deployment that they just stopped doing that as much and kept the development project name. But I think you exaggerate the significance of the change.

> Abrams and Bradley are now HMMWV and MRAP.

HMMWV was deployed during the late Cold War. And that name with the pronunciation “Humvee” is a lot like the classic GPW “Jeep”.

More similar to the M1 Abrams tank and M2 Bradley personnel carrier in the post-Cild War world are the (cancelled late in the program) M8 Buford armored gun system; the newer M10 Booker assault gun, the Stryker infantry carrier vehicle, etc. All of which got names.

I think it has everything to do with US strategy: What do you want to get out from this war?

I guess different interest groups have different answers. And sometimes they don't want to share the answers for apparent reasons.

From a realpolitik perspective, the US would like this war to go on forever. Under Biden, the war was grinding up enemy Russian troops and not-really-an-ally Ukrainian troops, weakening both strategically while costing us no troops and 0.2% of GDP. Plus we were able to expand NATO and give Russia an ongoing PR nightmare.

Obviously they can't say any of that out loud, but the underlying strategy is sound.

> They acted like the goal was to step on Putin's toes without pissing him off too much...

I mean, when you're fighting a nuclear power, making sure you don't piss them off enough to make them use their nuclear weapons, or at least unleash their most powerful conventional weapons on your main cities, seems like a good strategy.

Imagine for a second that instead of Russia, it was the USA fighting a proxy war against, say, China. And that China had just provided the intelligence and maybe weapons for, say, Cuba to sink the largest US Carrier. I am very sure the USA would freaking unleash hell on Cuba, maybe also on China. The only reason the Russians didn't do the same is that they're probably not capable of doing so, at least not without losing too much for it to be a rational choice. But at the time, the USA was not entirely sure of what the Russians would do when provoked to such an extent. They were understandably worried. As they learned the Russians were not exactly doing what they might have expected, they gradually started pushing more and more up until the point the Russians launched an Oreshnic ballistic missile which could've easily been carrying a nuclear payload, but luckily didn't. Biden still pushed further a bit even after that, but in my opinion that was rather irresponsible. You can't push the Russians forever, even in their current position, before you should expect them to become desperate and start using whatever they can to start pushing back at you, and the Russians still can do that.

April, 2022. In the NYTimes app version of the article as you scroll down information about the "part" you are on stays at the top like a sticky nav to give better context. So for where your quote comes form it says "Part 1 February - May 2022"

I think the answer is simpler - if they draft young people, their demographic pyramid will be even more utterly devastated after the war ends.

Definitely the demographic thing, but also the "Putin approaching death" meme feels like mostly a PsyOp from Ukraine. The unspoken correlary is, Ukraine doesn't have to outlast Russia, it just has to outlast Putin.

> belief that Putin has been "approaching death" for 2 years?

I truly believe this was a significant part of why Alexei Navalny was willing to go back to Russia knowing full-well he'd disappear into their penal system; he was betting he'd be able to outlive Putin.

Ukraine hasn't sat on it's laurels either though, they can see the situation. They have also responded with domestic production, and European manufacturers have started building factories in western Ukraine.

Not giving them what they needed to win but just enough to hang on was a huge mistake imo because they're not going away, Russia isn't going to roll over the rest no matter what happens now. Instead we prolonged the war and failed to create a superb ally in a great position.