Open Thread

6-10% of people don’t/won’t/can’t follow all of the instructions.

Let us all chant in chorus: “RTFM!” All together now: “RTFM!”

I know in California, and I’m sure in Colorado as well, an enormous effort goes in to writing those instructions to make them clear. But, as you say, some people just don’t seem to absorb it. Makes you wonder how they manage to function in the rest of their luves.

Now that Trump has “settled” his millionth war, the Europeans have been trying to redirect his attention to Ukraine. ObWi in general seemed to be interested in some of the stuff I posted from Comment is Freed (Sam and Lawrence Freedman), so here is something with an expert opinion on the state of play there:

“The Kremlin faces some very difficult choices later this year”
An interview with Dr. Jack Watling
Lawrence Freedman
Jun 18, 2026
∙ Paid

Today’s post is an interview with Jack Watling who was in Ukraine just before the full-scale invasion and has been back many times since where he has got to know many key military figures. He is now recognised as one of the most authoritative commentators on the war and developments at the front line. Jack recently published Statecraft: The New Rules of Power in a Divided World, which contains not only some fascinating accounts of the Russo-Ukraine War but also observations drawn from many other conflict zones, including in the Middle East and Africa.

Jack is a Senior Research Fellow for Applied Military Sciences at the Royal United Services Institute. He works closely with the British military on the development of concepts of operation, assessments of the future operating environment, and conducts operational analysis of contemporary conflicts.

He has worked extensively with the Ukrainian Armed Forces during Russia’s full-scale invasion, across NATO, and in Iraq, Mali, Rwanda, on Yemen and further afield.

Lawrence: You open the book with you in Ukraine days before the full-scale invasion. It’s a poignant story, because you’re convinced that the war is coming and the Ukrainians are not, until almost the last minute they realize this is for real. You give the explanations for their scepticism. Not all intelligence agencies agreed with the Americans and British. It seemed a foolish thing for the Russians to do, which was my view at the time as well. If they were going to do it, there were other ways of doing it, perhaps concentrating on the Donbas, and so on. What was the key thing that made them realize, actually, this was serious?

Jack: There had always been people in the Ukrainian system who did share our view, but they were a minority at a senior level. The assessment changed at the point where the Russians received their orders. Once the Russian units were told this is what you are going to do, and started to pack up their equipment and get ready, the Ukrainians had to take it very seriously. But you’re talking about 72 hours before, and even then Zelenskyy personally was not immediately convinced. So really you’re talking about 48 hours of decision time.

Lawrence: They did quite a bit in that 48 hours.

Jack: Absolutely. Firstly, the Ukrainians had been at war for eight years, and they had a lot of military capacity and a lot of reserves, including reservists who were not committed. There was a lot of latent potential, which they were able to draw upon. The second thing is that their own military assessment was that the Russian forces were inadequate in size for the task they had been given, which was correct. The third thing is that the Russians performed so badly that they gave the Ukrainians time to mobilize. They wouldn’t have had to have been much faster to overrun the process of mobilization in parts north of Kyiv. It was much closer than some people like to think.

I’ll give you an example. Whether the Russians made it through Mykolaiv and into Odesa came down to whether a Russian brigade was prepared to attack across a causeway, and they were en route to do it. The Ukrainian force defending that causeway was 15 people, which the Russians didn’t know. The Ukrainians dispersed across the village and started talking on their radios about where they were going to deploy the Javelin teams, and the Russians were listening to this communication, and stopped because they thought that there were 30 or so Javelin teams in front of them. There weren’t any. But just the fact that the Russians slowed down meant that all of a sudden there was 24 hours in which the population could mobilize, equipment could be moved south. The numbers started to change.

There was one Ukrainian air defence unit that found itself on the wrong side of the front lines and drove out of its base and actually ended up driving alongside a Russian column for a period of time, asking them for spare tires at one point, then drove across the front line, set up, and started to engage Russian aircraft. So, Russian execution let them down.

Lawrence: You discuss a number of times in the book how the Russians don’t make the most of their advantages, such as with the attacks on critical infrastructure. They don’t quite follow through with as sustained and directed a campaign as much as they could have done.

Jack: Absolutely, early in the war, I remember walking around a whole load of sites that had been struck. We were trying to work out the logic of what they had hit and why. It looked like a bit of a smorgasbord and not a very appetizing one. We kept finding that locations had been hit because 10 years ago it was used by the Ukrainian military for something. It was evident that the Russians were working off a list which just hadn’t been updated. Within the Russian military the people doing strategic strike planning were not integrated with those doing tactical activity.

Lawrence: You finished writing the book at a difficult time for Ukraine. Since then the position has improved.

Jack: I finished writing it in February 2025 and that was a difficult time. The trend line wasn’t good at all. And now I think things are looking much more optimistic. The last year has been very important as the Ukrainians have addressed some of the weaknesses of their own force – improving force generation, getting more infantry into the force, improving the structure of the commands, so that they can start to better manage the units along the front line, and also better integrate the different tools that they have for strike. At the same time we’ve seen the Russians continue to lean into their worst instincts, and so the quality of Russian forces has degraded to the point where they are less capable today than they were a year ago, and that wasn’t the trend we were on.

Lawrence: How important has drone technology been in this? It is quite astonishing, the speed with which Ukraine has turned itself into this sort of drone superpower.

Jack: Absolutely; it’s important for us to acknowledge that that was a deliberate choice that the Ukrainians made. They decided that this was the capability they could scale and use. Because it is the weapon they have invested in it is now the backbone of their defence. It is allowing them to impose around a 50 kilometre attrition belt on Russian logistics. And they want to push it to 100. Then there is about a 20 kilometre attrition belt on vehicles, and a 10 kilometre attrition belt on personnel in front of their units. This means that the Russians can’t project and sustain combat power across the front line, and therefore they really just can’t build any momentum or get a positive correlation of forces at the point of contact.

It’s causing Russian advances to be extremely incremental and to happen at very high cost. There are significant limitations to drones as a tool. I was sitting down with probably the best user of drones in Ukraine three weeks ago over dinner going through plans that he has for the next fighting season. He had designs of tanks and armoured vehicles in front of him. He said, ‘I’ve got all the drones I need, but this is the tactical problem that I need to fix’. And he was looking at how you design armour. He was also looking at the role of artillery and glide bombs, for hitting many of the targets that the Ukrainians would need to hit to displace the Russian reconnaissance system as they are in hardened structures or buried. You need more payload and velocity than a drone can give you to kill them. This is a very old lesson: that an effective military force that can win a campaign is a combined arms force that can integrate all of these technologies and use them in a way that creates competing dilemmas for the enemy.

When I finished writing the book there were some very capable drone units but also infantry units that were struggling. It didn’t feel like a force that was working together, and that was hurting the Ukrainians. Now we’re seeing a much more collaborative approach between all the different elements of the force, and they are much more coherent in when and why they apply different tools to different problems. Whereas on the Russian side it’s the opposite. We’re seeing a disintegration of the application of force, partly because of the logistics problem, so that the force is becoming more spread out.

It’s still the case that the manpower question is central to all Ukrainian planning and defence discussions. It’s a major focus of Fedorov, the new Defence Minister. It was the first priority he mentioned when he gave his acceptance speech to the position in parliament. Zelenskyy has just announced reforms to the mobilization process to try and address the manpower problem, so they know it’s an issue, and it’s a major priority.

The question is how does Ukraine generate enough additional troops to have a reserve force, so that it can deal with contingency, but also so that it can rotate combat units off the front line in order to give them rest and recovery. That would also allow them to upskill the force by rotating units off, training them, and pushing them back. That doesn’t require full mobilization of the population. It requires maybe the generation of around 70,000 additional troops, but you’re talking about needing to recruit and train more people than you’re losing, that’s one issue. You also need officers and people to lead these units, and that’s one of the biggest challenges the Ukrainians have: they have a limited pool of talent when it comes to particularly senior officers.

Lawrence: This issue of can you have enough recruitment to replace losses is obviously one for the Russians as well. The Ukrainian claim is that they’re pushing the Russians to the point where their losses well exceed recruitment. Do you think this leads potentially to further mobilization on the Russian side?

Jack: The Kremlin faces some very difficult choices later this year. I think Putin is quite a cautious person, and will probably put it off for as long as he can, until after the Duma elections, I think the data that will be coming into the Kremlin will make very clear that they are not making progress, and they’re not even on track to achieve their objectives militarily, and so do they mobilize in order to generate enough headroom in the force? If they do that, then how do they absorb those personnel and train them. The current system doesn’t really give Russian infantry any training, so how they turn that large body of personnel they could generate into a useful mass is something the Russians have not yet demonstrated a capacity to do.

That would be necessary because otherwise they couldn’t sustain all of those troops across that 100 kilometre logistics attrition belt. They would just have a lot of troops set in the rear, but it would mean that they could continue the current conflict for longer. The Russian military has been arguing for mobilization for a long time, but I think the likelihood is that Putin will not go down that route unless there was a large loss of territory, some shock that causes him to pull the lever.

More likely I suspect is that they will reduce the tempo of operations and shift onto a more defensive posture and try to demonstrate to Ukraine that they can maintain this as an active conflict for a very long time and then use this to gain leverage over Kyiv which wants to finish the conflict sooner rather than later. The problem with that is that as the Ukrainian strikes on Russia expand and diversify, Russia is not going to be sitting comfortably.

Another possibility is that a ceasefire would give them the opportunity to destabilize Ukraine during an economically and politically vulnerable period. And of course a ceasefire doesn’t preclude the opportunity to re-attack. So Putin may as a very cautious individual see that as the approach that gives him significant options. But Western European states have said that they will enter Ukraine the moment there’s a cease fire and that is not something that Putin wants. So for now it is easiest just to keep the conflict running.

Lawrence: Where does Putin actually get his information from? He keeps on describing a front line which looks very different from the front line everybody outside of Russia sees. It seems to be coming up the Russian military system with just everybody passing up good news because they don’t want to be the bearers of bad news.

Jack: Every time I go to Ukraine I go through captured Russian maps. What has been interesting over the last year, is that the mismatch between where Russian troops are and where the maps say they are has been growing. At some points it’s quite extreme. These are not maps which are produced for propagandistic purposes. These are the maps off which the higher Russian headquarters is planning and generating orders and distributing them as instructions. And they do not represent reality. There are a number of factors that are driving this. Firstly, the way that the higher Russian headquarters do their planning is still consistent with pre-war doctrine, which didn’t really have a cartographic method for describing the kind of contested grey zone that is currently pervasive on the battlefield

So they tend to annotate things in a way which is consistent with the textbook, but not consistent with the observable facts. And while the unit that makes the markings might understand the difference and interpret the map sensibly, once you get up a few echelons and people are detached from the tactical situation they read it as it is written. The other issue is dishonesty. A lot of commanders are saying they’ve achieved objectives that they haven’t, for fear of being removed from post, or put into assault units, or punished, or told to attack again. So you have false reporting that’s coming up the chain as well, and that is still being fed in to the Kremlin.

As we saw with Kupyiansk last year there are instances where it’s very difficult for the Kremlin to not challenge the information it is receiving, because the difference with reality starts to look quite stark. That is why more Ukrainian offensive action is very important, because suddenly bits of terrain that the Kremlin thinks are Russian are going to change colour. That only has to happen a few times before I think there’s a wider questioning of what is the actual situation.

What narrative might emerge from that realization? Is it ‘this is a crisis so mobilization is necessary’ or ‘reduce the tempo of operations, but protract longer to keep the pain on Ukraine’ or ‘is a cease fire now desirable’? It is important to keep track of the Russian media and see what the Russian population is being prepared for in terms of the next steps after the Duma elections.

Lawrence: A lot of what you been talking about here on the Russian side is a sort of doctrinal fixation with how you fight wars. They basically don’t seem to have rethought how they go about their business.

Jack: At the tactical level there’s been a lot of adaptation, and we’ve seen a significant improvement in tactical integration and command and control, the proficiency of electronic warfare units, air defence units, and so on. At the operational level, fundamentally no change, and in some ways, a reversion to mass and material. We’re going back to a divisional structure, and fight this as we always have.

Within the Russian military science community, there is a recognition that they have this problem of being unable to concentrate combat power. Military journals in Russia are filled with discussions of the problem. They don’t yet have a solution. If, when this war ends, Putin sells it as a victory, and sets Gerasimov up as the general who led us to victory, it’s going to be very difficult for people to come up in the system and say we need to fundamentally change how we do business. On the other hand, if Gerasimov is removed or there is a reckoning that the Russian military has underperformed, then who is going to shape the future becomes a very political question; a pretty viciously fought question, I imagine.

Lawrence: To what extent are Ukrainian views on a ceasefire likely to change? In the first year of the war they were not particularly keen on ceasefires, because that would leave Russia in control of a large chunk of their territory. Eventually, because they spent the last couple of years on the defensive, a ceasefire started to look like quite a good idea, especially as it would keep Trump happy as well. But can this change? If the Ukrainians do start to take back territory, their interest in a ceasefire may change with it.

Jack: The overwhelming interest of Ukrainians is a lasting peace, and the emphasis is on ‘lasting’. And so the big concerns about the terms of ceasefires are mainly around the risk that it breaks down and we end up back in a war in two years’ time in a worse situation. This is why when Trump was demanding that they withdraw from Donbas in order to get the cease fire it was a non-starter. It wasn’t about the value of the Donbas per se. It was more that the proposition was that they withdraw from all of their defensive positions and the fortified lines onto flat open ground that’s not prepared for defence, and sit there as the Russians occupy all of the terrain that would otherwise have taken them months and maybe years to get through. They could then just break the ceasefire at that point and attack a much weaker, more vulnerable Ukrainian army and go further. The proposition that the US was putting forward was not conducive in the Ukrainian view to a lasting peace, which is why Zelenskyy and his team rejected it.

Lawrence: You have observed a lot of conflicts on the ground. How is it that you’ve got drawn to going to all these crisis sites? It didn’t start with Ukraine, you were doing it before you arrived in Ukraine.

Jack: Ultimately, I think I’d say curiosity, and originally it was very much just a case of wanting to get out and see the world and find out what was going on. I started out at Reuters, and that provided a framework to show me that it was possible that you could do it. But even as a child my parents travelled extensively, and I would travel with them, and so I was quite comfortable going into the unknown. I very quickly came to the conclusion that within the analytical community there is a lot of information that gets passed around and recycled, and there is relatively less information that gets generated and added to the conversation. So I think it’s very important when we look at things that have huge amounts of uncertainty and misinformation and confusion attached to them, that you try and generate knowledge in order to inform the analysis, and so my instinct is usually to try and get close when it’s possible.

Lawrence: It leads you into some hazardous places. One of your underlying themes is the difficulty of governments, particularly Western governments, getting a grip on what is going on, because what they’re being told is going to be inherently superficial. There’s a frustration running through the book about Western governments. Part of your objective appears to be to demonstrate the importance of accurate knowledge, but also you are pointing to the need to respond to events as they occur and as they’re being understood, rather than waiting for everything to be digested and policy options developed. You want more agility in policy making?

Jack: I think there needs to be much more agility, and in order to be effective with agility, you need contextual understanding. And one of the weaknesses of our system, I think, is that it has become hyper-centralized. There is an expectation in the press and among our political community that ministers are responsible for everything and that they should have knowledge of everything, and I think information technology and connectivity has exacerbated this. It’s harder to explain to people that you just weren’t aware.

But the consequence is that either you have ministers who are trying to make so many decisions on so many things that they just cannot look at anything in sufficient detail to think it through, and so they tend to make very instinctive decisions – reactive heuristic decisions based on prior knowledge, which can be out of date. Or else if they are very deliberate and thorough they can only make decisions about such a small number of things that everything else gets worse through paralysis of decision making, and you end up with this kind of cut off where only things that are a crisis get actioned or dealt with, leaving lots of issues that could have been resolved before they became a crisis. So I think the thrust of the argument is that we need to develop dispersed decision making and let lower level officials be more empowered and also therefore more accountable, to be able to deal with the situation in front of them.

Lawrence: Giving somebody the responsibility to take decisions, including allocating resources requires quite a commitment by government. If they get it wrong it is still the centre that will be held accountable.

Jack: If you have a situation in which the centre is either saturated, such that it can’t spend time on anything, or is only making decisions about a subset of issues, and therefore allowing everything else to get worse, then you guarantee a bad outcome. Whereas if you disperse the decisions, then you may get some bad decisions made, but on the whole, I think you’ll have fewer bad outcomes. So, I think it’s a case of moving it from guaranteed failure to possible failure.

Lawrence: A lot of the settings we’re talking about are multinational, involving alliances and so on. Isn’t there bound to be a sort of disconnect between some countries where individuals have been given enormous power and encouraged to take initiatives, and others where there’s almost a paralysis of decision making for all the reasons you’ve given. It makes it quite hard to manage this across alliances.

Jack:Yes, absolutely. Afghanistan was a very good example of this, where you had committees of allies trying to support each Afghan ministry, and they all had different directions from their governments. Where people got frustrated with the lack of consensus, and therefore the lack of action, they would start using other bits of their own governments who weren’t bound by the committee process to engage with that ministry to try and shape its behaviour. So you would get these divergent projects being set up, and the Afghans were getting conflicting advice from everybody. So in a multinational context, I think it’s very difficult to do this kind of work. Really, most multinational contexts work when you have a country that is leading the process consistently, not necessarily a hegemon, but certainly a chairman. You definitely need a hierarchy and a structure about how this is going to work and who’s ultimately going to decide the trade-offs. It needs to start with a clear articulation of ends.

Lawrence: We have, at the moment, a prime example in the US of some pretty screwy strategic decision making with the war in Iran. How much does this fit into your model? Is it just simply an impulsive president being convinced that if he acted decisively and quickly he could topple the Iranian regime.

Jack: The book talks about the Strait of Hormuz quite a lot. That’s not evidence of any particular foresight from me. It’s rather reflective of the fact that these issues were extremely well understood by the policy community. So nothing that’s occurred in Iran has surprised anyone who was paying the slightest attention. The interesting question is, how, given that there was this knowledge in the US system, the decisions were made as they were. My observation would be that during the first year of the Trump presidency, two things changed. One was the complete breakdown of the interagency process, because Trump centralized all decision making. He basically broke down the lateral relationships at the interagency level and pulled decision making into a very, very small group of people – basically cabinet secretaries – with very few officials in the room and everything being done through verbal briefing. He fired any official who came in and gave an off-script brief, even if it was a private brief. So when the DIA gave their evaluation of the effect of last year’s strikes on Iran, the leadership of the DIA were removed because it didn’t conform to the outcome that the administration wanted

The second trend that we’ve seen over that period is that he had a couple of early test cases with the military instrument, and found that he liked it. It was very responsive to his desires, it made things change when other levers of government were often frustrating, and I think that’s a pattern that we’ve seen with many leaders. Comparing Trump and Tony Blair might be a bit unfair, but leaders get more comfortable with the military instrument as they get into the swing of things. Because the first two operations went well, when the option was briefed to him of using the military to solve this problem, I don’t think he was briefed on the consequences. It was filtered out by Hegseth and the cabinet secretaries, and he thought it was going to be easy.

Lawrence: How does he get out of it?

Jack: There is a very easy way out, which is that the US claims victory on the basis of the damage they’ve inflicted to the Navy, and so on. They allow the Iranians to wait a couple of weeks and then lift the blockade on Hormuz, and then they can return to a longer term negotiation over sanctions relief to deal with the reparations question for giving up the nuclear programme. That is basically the framework of the outcome. The problem for Trump is that domestic opponents will frame it as him having been defeated because of the outlandish objectives that he articulated, and it won’t look good ahead of the midterms. So it’s not that he doesn’t know how to get out of it but that he can’t absorb the reputational pain of writing this one off as a failure.

Lawrence: You come back to the point that every time you’re in one of these big international crises, big geopolitical stakes, there’s a domestic side to it.

Jack: It’s the thing that the professional foreign policy community are very bad at factoring in. I often speak to people in finance. They are never more sceptical of me than when I say I think this is going to develop in a military direction, and there’s likely to be a conflict. To them it’s going to be economically damaging for both sides, and they just can’t see the logic of it. It’s the same thing within my community, looking at foreign policy when we engage with politicians and their decision making is overwhelmingly focused on the domestic political angle and we struggle to understand or be sympathetic to it.

The latest from a certain prominent member of the Israeli government:

“all of Lebanon must burn”

“for every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep”

The saddest thing is that not that he’s a psychopath but that a fair chare of people voted him into power and agree with him.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/jun/19/middle-east-crisis-live-israel-strikes-targets-in-lebanon-as-us-iran-talks-in-switzerland-called-off?page=with%3Ablock-6a34f1a18f083b97ede8ba1d#block-6a34f1a18f083b97ede8ba1d

The man is a monster

“for every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep”

The saddest thing is that not that he’s a psychopath but that a fair chare of people voted him into power and agree with him.

Indeed. One is remined of a promjnent member of the American government saying that an entire civilivation (i.e. Iran) would be destroyed.

In the latest at the reflecting pool, the blue epoxy coating has started peeling off of the walls and bottom. Lots of hypotheses about why it’s peeling are being advanced. My own advice to the people who take care of the pool, based solely on anecdotal observations here and there around the country over the years, is “The only real non-lethal way to control algae is turnover. You have to be replacing water from a pretty clean source at a rate that produces an observable current in the pool/pond. Otherwise the algae will win at some point during the summer.”

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That’s clearly the fault of the Green New Deal, and the algae came in via Mexico as a result of the open border policy of the previous Dem administrations. Those effing paddies are likely in on it too given their fondness of Green. And where are they famously? In the FBI. So, Patel still hasn’t got those Deep Staters under control..

Look, thank God Reform did so badly in a constituency which was among their top 10 targets. But, other than that Andy Burnham is very popular in that area, and Keir Starmer’s popularity stats nationwide are dire, it’s very hard to know if this is anything more than an anti-Keir vote, with a lot of non-Labourites voting Labour tactically to keep out Reform. We can hope, of course, that evidence of Reform’s sub-par candidates, poor performance in the local councils which they do control, and recent scandals about Farage’s £5million gift from a crypto zillionaire played a part. But it’s all too volatile to know for sure at the moment. And, while of course AB winning was the best possible outcome, it’s hard to see how he (or any Labour leader under current economic conditions) will be able to do much to turn things around. And if Keir puts up a fight about going, we only compound the sick feeling engendered by having had 7 PMs in the last 10 years. Here, for (a bit of) light relief, is Marina Hyde:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/19/reform-candidates-nigel-farage-makerfield-prime-minister

My guess is that Burnham will take over as Labour* Party leader, and hence as Prime Minister, during the summer recess. There are too many MPs who fear losing their seats if Starmer remains in charge for that to be sustainable.

Starmer? There’s nothing to dislike about him, but he’s not good at the job – a bit like Gordon Brown. Based on his popularity in Manchester, it seems plausible that Burnham will be better at making the government look good, and better at keeping his party onside.

*note the spelling.

And if Keir puts up a fight about going, we only compound the sick feeling engendered by having had 7 PMs in the last 10 years.

On the other hand, Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has been in office since 2022. 🙂

wjca:I know in California, and I’m sure in Colorado as well, an enormous effort goes in to writing those instructions to make them clear. But, as you say, some people just don’t seem to absorb it. Makes you wonder how they manage to function in the rest of their lives.

“when all else fails, read the instructions”

With a couple of decades of teaching experience under my belt, my experience tells me that every prompt or set of instructions is going to cause confusion for some set of readers, and that revising them can minimize that number, but won’t eliminate it completely. At some point it always becomes a game of musical chairs.

After another couple of days, I have to revise my estimate of the “can’t follow the instructions” rate down, significantly. During a break I asked a supervisor about it. She told me that the people who run receiving and the sorting machine and “assemble” the hundred-envelope batches have the machine separate out envelopes according to some set of parameters, and that problematic ones do tend to come in bunches.

Yesterday we got the first envelope where someone included a thank-you card with their ballot. Like all other non-official items found, it goes in a collection to be either returned to the voter (eg, drivers licenses) or destroyed. No pinning on the walls.

The extraction team gets Monday off. The QC group, OTOH, gets to go in early and learn the QC process for tabulation, which will be starting.

Good grief, the level of corruption in the current US and MAGA specifically continues to astound, along with the largely lackadaisical reaction of the public On the possibility of Jordan’s re-election: “By design, he is an inevitability.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/20/jim-jordan-super-pac-ice-donation

i’ve always assumed exactly that.

RW mythology says DC is pure evil corruption. so when these true believers get there, they use that myth as a way to justify their own corruption – “Me? Hunter Biden! Bill Clinton!”