This may have been posted earlier just in case. I personally feel we are all being railroaded; the MIC is having a field day and the "best" solution for all seems to be an endless war. Here's a fresh look from someone who knows better than most
The war in Ukraine is a confrontation between two systems, one modern, legalistic, decentralized and multicephalous; the other archaic…
medium.com
I assume you mean "Military Industrial Complex" for MIC. We're not going to see an endless war. Russia is managing to stay in the field right now, but their army has taken significant losses and the only way to restore it to a real fighting force is to withdraw devastated units and rebuild them from the ground up. Instead they are feeding untrained troops into the existing units diluting their combat effectiveness and it will eventually get a lot of mobiks killed or maimed.
The military analysts who I trust all have the opinion that if nothing falls apart in Russia the Russians will be expelled from Ukrainian territory in less than a year. If Russia unravels internally it will happen quicker. This winter is going to be very hard on the Russians. Their supply situation is very bad and armies need more supplies in the winter to stay in the field. A lot of Russian troops are probably going to be lost to frostbite and hypothermia.
The Russians are running out of basics like uniforms and rifles. A lot of the people who were mobilized are suffering in makeshift camps with no basics like tents or sleeping bags as the Russian winter sets in. They can't ship them to Ukraine because they don't have enough rifles to give them and with the precarious supply situation in Ukraine they can't figure out how they are going to feed them even if they do send them to Ukraine.
They are probably producing as many AKs as they can, but production levels are way below needs for just about everything. Russian steel has degraded in quality since the fall of the USSR. There have been complaints from artillery commanders that post-Soviet barrels are wearing out much faster than the older Soviet guns. They also don't have much barrel production to replace worn out barrels so when a barrel reaches end of life, they discard the entire gun.
If their steel is that bad, the AKs that have been in combat for 9 months are also wearing out. New production of AKs is probably going mostly to replace the worn out AKs in their elite units leaving the left over junk for everyone else.
The flow of new equipment from the west is agonizingly slow. European NATO allies are sending all the spares they have, but the bulk of spare equipment is American. Now that the election is over Biden may pick up the pace in deliveries. A lot of US spare equipment is mothballed and needs to be refurbished after sitting for years. There is a lot of equipment the US military will never use like M113s from Vietnam and early version M1 Abrams. The M1s are a bit trickier to supply because they require extensive training to learn how to maintain them and I'm not sure what the stockpiles of 105mm ammunition are for the main guns.
M113s though are generally better than the BMPs the Ukrainians inherited (more survivable when hit being foremost) and are fairly simple beasts. If the Ukrainians wanted to farm out maintenance, it's been used by many countries so there are thousands of mechanics around the world who know them inside and out.
I suspect the US is training some Ukrainians to maintain and fly F-16s now. There are rumors some may be going to Ukraine by spring. F-16s would help the Ukraine air situation quite a bit and they can launch almost all NATO ordinance. But ground combat capability is most important right now.
In any case, Russia is not going to be able to keep up this war indefinitely. The west can continue to feed Ukraine weapons for a long time to come, but Russia is running low on some supplies, and may be out of others. Their capacity to build more is very limited and there is going to come a point when they can't even fake supplying the troops anymore.
If Ukraine can reach the shores of the Azoz this winter, that will be another blow in Russia's ability to supply their army. They are ferrying trucks in large numbers across the Kerch straits. In the winter this is only kept open with ice breakers. With land launched Neptunes on the coast of the Azoz, the Ukrainians can sink the ice breakers which would shut down the ferry service. If the Ukrainians have reached the coast all routes between Donbas and southern Ukraine, even road links, will be broken and their only supply route will be risking bridge collapse trying to run heavy trucks across the last span of the Kerch road bridge, or running heavily loaded trains across the damaged rail bridge at Kerch. The bulk of the army will be stuck with no supply in winter.
I agree Taleb, a disastrous loss for Russia in this war will likely trigger a civil war in Russia and with the army wiped out in Ukraine, Moscow will have a very tough time regaining control of the country. They probably won't be able to. We then have a balkanized Russia and spats between the new countries will probably be ongoing for years.
For the rest of the world that's probably the best outcome possible. Russia will be done as a military power forever.
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