. . . Ukraine’s punch through Russian defenses in the first foreign invasion since World War II exposed Russia’s military flaws and laid bare Moscow’s apparently illusory red lines.
Now some are again questioning the centerpiece of Washington’s Ukraine strategy: a slow, calibrated supply of weapons to Ukraine to avoid escalating tensions with Russia that critics argue has dashed Kyiv’s chances of driving Russia out and resulted in a grinding war of attrition with massive casualties.
Ukraine’s Kursk incursion “proved the Russians are bluffing,” said Oleksandr Danylyuk, a former Ukrainian intelligence and defense official, now an associate fellow with the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank in London. “It shuts down all of the voices of the pseudo experts … the anti-escalation guys.”
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I remember taking a class in 1970 at Colorado State University taught by a retired U.S. Air Force Colonel who had a guest speaker from the Rand Corporation who spoke of how miscalculations will be the most likely trigger for a thermonuclear war between nuclear armed nations. The Washington Post seems to suggest that if crossing Putin’s red lines has not yet crossed the miscalculation threshhold triggering a nuclear response, then the Biden-Harris Administration should just cross more red lines until . . . as with the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Biden-Harris Administration grossly miscalculates the enemy’s strength and animal cunning.
— S. Byron Gassaway webmaster / administrator
See:
https://tnsr.org/2021/09/moral-choices-without-moral-language-1950s-political-military-wargaming-at-the-rand-corporation/
Language: 1950s Political-Military Wargaming at the RAND Corporation
John R. Emery
The RAND Corporation was the site of early-Cold War knowledge production. Its scientists laid the foundations of nuclear deterrence, game theoretic approaches to international politics, defense acquisition, and theories on the future of war. The popularized understanding of RAND as filled with cold, detached rationalists who casually discussed killing millions with no moral abhorrence misses the immense contestation in the early 1950s between the mathematics and the social sciences divisions, which sought to understand the impact of nuclear weapons on war and international politics. To do so, they created the first political-military simulations, called the “Cold War Games.” The games had divergent outcomes, with the mathematicians quick to launch nuclear weapons and the social scientists acting with nuclear restraint. The key difference in the game models was a high degree of realism in the social science game that engaged the players’ emotions. This immersive experience had lasting effects beyond the game itself as defense intellectuals bore the weight of decision-making and confronted the catastrophic consequences of using nuclear weapons. The role of emotion is central to both ethics and decision-making, and is essential for wargaming today, yet often remains excluded in rational theories of nuclear deterrence.