Check in to this week’s The Brief for what should be the best discussion about the war in Ukraine you’ll find anywhere. I’m hosting, of course, and will have two incredible guests—Jon Soltz, chairman of VoteVets, former tank commander in Kosovo, and logistics officer in Iraq. You can guess where that discussion will go. We also have Brandon Friedman, former spokesperson and advisor to Julian Castro and Tammy Duckworth, who served two combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan as an officer in the 101st Airborne Division.
You can watch the show live right here on Tuesdays at 1:30 PM PT/4:30 PM ET, while the podcast version goes live Wednesday mornings at all the usual places, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify. A full list of places to download the show is available here.
Meanwhile, everyone is starting to realize that the Russian army isn’t everything it was hyped up to be.
"In three days, Russia couldn't achieve what we did in three hours in Iraq in 2003," a senior retired Air Force officer says, somewhat hyperbolically. In three days, the officer says, the number of aimpoints Russia attacked is only one-quarter of what the U.S. hit in the opening airstrikes in Iraq (more than 3,200 aimpoints). Preliminary analysis from U.S. intelligence indicates that Russia delivered 11,000 bombs and missiles to precisely hit some 820 separate "aimpoints," or about a seven percent success rate (the U.S. equivalent in Iraq in 2003 was well over 80 percent) [...]"The Russians seem to be focusing on piecemeal attacks because the choreography of a coordinated attack seems too complex for them to pull off."
Another good point:
A total of 150,000 Russian invaders may sound impressive, another analyst says, but that force pushed into Ukraine from about 15 different locations, dividing up the power of each individual attack. The analyst says that such a multipronged approach demonstrates another overestimation on the part of Moscow, that the country could be quickly occupied.
That’s also 15 different supply lines that are left exposed. Given the lack of fighting prowess on the battlefield, we’re now going to see traditional Russian military strategy—have artillery bomb everything in front of it, and let the infantry occupy rubble. It’s going to be awful.
This is good, by Jon Soltz, and you better believe we’ll be talking about this on today’s show:
This thread is also important. Here’s my other guest today:
Seriously, the show will make everyone smarter on this conflict.