Comment by silvestrov

Basically yes. Ukraine has a big problem with soviet commanders who waste lives needlessly. The post Soviet younger commanders have much better reputations and use that to recruit, ie 'you can join my unit and won't be conscripted'. The popular and successful units grow and split into sub units. This way they dont have to fire the unpopular soviet era but politically connected commanders, they just slowly lose relevance.

Note that capturing a live Russian soldier is worth 10 times more than killing one. Think about how that affects the incentives of Ukrainian soldiers. Avoid committing war crimes, get better gear for your team.

There's nothing new about earning "points" for kills. Warriors have always tallied their kills and displayed their numbers, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_marking or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalping, though the rewards were typically accolades, and only indirectly access to more materiel.

> Gameification of war is the literal worst thing I ever heard.

Is this much difference from a combat mission being written up and soldiers being promoted/awarded medals.

The point of this is to see who is successful and what drones/weapons are the most effective. With a limited budget and much larger enemy it comes down to kills per dollar.

It sounds more like market based allocation than gameification.

This is silly. Elite units have always gotten better gear. If this is the part of war that causes you moral outrage I think you've got some rexamining to do.

The paper has a lengthy section entitled "The Crucible of Ukraine: The Transparent Battlefield".

The paper explicitly mentions Ukraine and that’s a key motivation for its conclusions.

In Taiwan's case, the question is how does China see the reunification.

It could be a naval blockade until Taiwan runs out of food/fuel/medicines and they surrender. Or it could be "we will take the island no matter what" and if somebody survives OK, if not, also OK.

And if we're talking Ukraine, we have to talk Poland as it has been facilitating 90% of all Western military equipment, humanitarian aid, and crucial trade deliveries into the country.

Poland is, of course, geopolitically positioned in a way that requires at least regional power status to survive if not thrive. A power vacuum in Poland is bad news for the security of Europe and Poland's immediate neighbors and regional partners as well.

As a result, an important component of long term Polish grand strategy has been the quiet building up of its logistical prowess and might and its supply chains for years. Current big names: the CPK/Port Polska megaproject which is designed with civilian/military dual use in mind; Euroterminal Sławków; expansion of the Port of Gdańsk and other ports. Regional projects include the Via Carpathia and the Via Baltica.

Thanks for linking this is interesting. It sounds like they are still unable to produce many of the base components though?

> most manufacturers of everything within Ukraine remain dependent on imported machining tools — traditionally Chinese, but increasingly Indian and, for those who can afford it, European.

But for the cheapest components, simple base-line products like transistors, circuit boards, wiring, or solar cells, nobody can yet step up to the scale of China’s mass production.

The sheer quantity of "mislabelled"[1] PRC origin parts passing through the logistics chains as Primo-A-grade-American-Made - even in Defense - is deeply disturbing, and that's the stuff that they do catch.

Transshipment is the elephant in the room here - smaller components made in PRC, then shipped to wherever as Raw Materials (tm), and then put in a "friendly nation" box and sold as safe.

DoD's DMEA and DLA CD programs, plus GIDEP reporting, capture confirmed cases . . but not the miss rate. On the occasion they do bust open a jet (or god forbid a missile) and look at all the bits with a microscope, it can be scary.

[1] They like to avoid the more precise "criminal fraud"

Stuff like https://www.hadrian.co/ is pretty neat, but the whole "electric stack" is hopelessly Chinese from this perspective- batteries, motors, all kinds of small and crucial electrical things- and critical minerals, like Gallium for radar.

Ukraine seems pretty paranoid about this, having backup suppliers for parts. Looks like they take efficiency hits and build more complicated things out of multiple discrete chips that would normally be ontegrated commercially so that they can go to suppliers in Oceania, eurasia, or eastasia depending on who is being helpful.

Which supplies? Batteries are produced everywhere. Power electronics are dime-a-dozen. IMUs, GPS chips, and CPUs are produced in Taiwan anyway.

There are a lot of differences. One of the chief differences was that during World War II the United States continental homeland was pretty much untouchable, which allowed the United States and the allies access to a secure and resource rich supply chain that helped lead to victory over the Axis powers.

In an engagement with China it is likely that both sides would be able to strike each other's defense industrial base, with the added "benefit" that American missiles, aircraft, and other equipment are stationed strategically in the region in various countries (Japan, South Korea, Philippines, Australia, and others) and as such the United States can project some amount of destruction on critical Chinese industrial facilities. I'm wondering if China in this scenario would be eager to, or hesitant to strike the United States for fear of a very rapid escalation of the war. Anyway - the point is that long range missiles, drones, and other offensive capabilities mean that supposedly "safe" manufacturing facilities are in danger, with the United States being a bit closer in range to inflict damage than China and with China having I would guess a little bit of hesitancy to strike mainland America.

In addition to some of the simple geographic differences, China has its own strategic challenges. Energy, for one. So far nobody has built a tank, plane, or ship that can run on batteries and while drone technology has continued to advance in many critical ways they don't bring the big bombs quite yet. Naturally the United States in the event of a war is going to at least consider if not outright strike Chinese energy facilities, and deny imports of oil which are critical to supply chains and conducting a war.

If China's only theater is perhaps Taiwan that's probably less of an issue, but then you've got the United States with its, in my view, inferior supply chain, operating unfettered, similar to during World War II while the Chinese supply chain both local and superior particularly for small or "low cost" components is facing both energy stress and stress from missiles or other attacks.

I don't mean to sound pro-USA here or to suggest there aren't other significant advantages or disadvantages for either the United States or China, but to just highlight that your thoughtful comment here which seems to imply that China's massive industrial capacity is akin to the United States' during World War II is not quite an apples-to-apples comparison.

> The US manufacturing capacity was a huge factor in winning WW2.

Not wrong, but the British were outproducing the Germans in many things (e.g., aircraft[1]) even before lend-lease was a thing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_aircraft_producti...

The Nazis were really bad at running the economy:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Destruction

Look at 1950s aircraft. That was the decade of really weird aircraft, as people figured out how jets were supposed to work. Supersonics. VTOL aircraft. The X-planes. Rocket-assisted takeoff. After that, more was known about what worked, and designs became more similar.

For more reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion

During WW2 in the United States, you had all sorts of consumer goods companies reorganized to output a prodigious amount of military supplies. There were multiple companies making the same model of things, with fairly rigorous QA to ensure quality and uniformity.

For example, the BC-348 receiver, widely used in aircraft, was produced initially by RCA, and eventually "farmed out" to 3 other manufacturers.

More than 4 million M1903 Springfield Rifle were produced by the Smith-Corona typewriter company.

Here's a really good example, look at how the production of proximity fuzes, was distributed.[1]

The key thing is to have second sources for everything. Something the US military seems to have forgotten, or decided to ignore in their pursuit of gold-plated weapons systems that give the most kick-backs.

[1] https://usautoindustryworldwartwo.com/vtproximityfuze.htm

One design doesn't mean one factory. And it's not about one design anyway, just the thought of culling the less performing ones.

They literally gamified it? Amazing.