This is neat!

I discovered yet another new blog on the Russian military and foreign policy. Today, Wikistrat published an analysis titled, "What Would a Russian Invasion of Ukraine Look Like?" I was not familiar with Mark Galeotti until now, but he's apparently done good work on the topic (including an earlier piece for Foreign Policy), so I am going to have to read further.

RIP James Schlesinger + more on Ukraine situation

I wanted to open this post by paying my respects to James Schlesinger, who died today at the age of 85. I'll admit I knew little about him until now, besides the fact that he pissed off almost everyone at the CIA by cutting their manpower 10%, but he was also a major proponent of two of the best modern combat aircraft ever flown by the U.S.A.F.: The A-10 Warthog and the F-16 Fighting Falcon. (He was apparently ill for a while before his death, but I wonder what he thought about the Pentagon's recent steps towards retiring the A-10.)

Now it's time for me to eat some crow of my own: I've previously expressed skepticism that a Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine would happen. And it looks like I was wrong (apologies to my roommate). The Russians are claiming that the 30,000 troops now on the border are just an exercise, and the Pentagon has called bullshit on them. The UN has officially declared the referendum leading to Crimea's annexation as illegal, which is always re-assuring just because - well, it's the UN, and non-binding resolutions are always welcome at times like these. Meanwhile, Obama called out Putin yesterday, and then, surprisingly, shot back at Russian accusations of U.S. hypocrisy by defending the Iraq War: "[E]ven in Iraq, America sought to work within the international system. We did not claim or annex Iraq’s territory, nor did we grab its resources for our own gain. Instead, we ended our war and left Iraq to its people, and a fully sovereign Iraqi state could make decisions about its own future." And now Russia Today has yet another rebuttal, calling Obama out for claiming that Kosovo's sovereignty, determined by referendum, was any more legitimate than Crimea's referendum. So that's that: Obama is flailing his arms angrily, Putin is sneering, China is sitting on the sidelines and watching, and meanwhile, Russia's troops are getting ready to take more territory away from Ukraine.

More worrying is that the discussion is now shifting towards other parts of the former Soviet Union that Putin might seek to bring back under Russian control. Gen. Breedlove, NATO's commander, has already pointed out that Transnistria in Moldova is a likely candidate for annexation. (The BBC has also put out a useful map of countries with Russian minorities to get one's imagination worked up over the possibilities, and it looks like the Washington Post is already following suit.)

Oh, and I love my boss' take on Obama's reaction: "U.S. says Russia is invading countries out of weakness. Europeans quietly hope it does not get any weaker."

So Crimea is once again Russian territory. Now what?

I'm still reeling in shock from a recent event that has truly rocked the world. It was something nobody could have seen coming, and it was the sort of thing most experts would have deemed impossible. I am talking, of course, about the stunning NCAA basketball upset that just took place on Friday, when Mercers' Bears managed to kick my Duke Blue Devils out of the tournament after beating them 78-71. Bear in mind that we were seeded 3rd, and the Bears were seeded 14th! This is the worst defeat we've suffered since Lehigh beat us in 2012, and as a Dukie, it's a loss that will take me some time to get over.

Oh, yeah, and the loss of Crimea to Russia is pretty bad, too (more for the United States, not so much for Duke). So, moving on...

The crisis in Crimea is finally settling, aside from continued rumors - mostly being promoted by the new Ukrainian government - of the Russians gearing up to move into southeastern Ukraine. At this point, nobody has any doubts that Crimea will return permanently to Russian control, exactly 60 years after Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine as a "gift". (Actually, Khrushchev mostly gave away Crimea for reasons of political expediency - such as winning the support of Kiev's elites to assist in his power struggle against then-Prime Minister Georgii Malenkov - but I am digressing.) Ukraine is pretty unhappy about the whole deal - the interim President, Oleksandr Turchynov, is ranting about how Ukraine "will never accept the annexing of our territory" in the vain hope that his nationalist cred won't be undermined too much by the Svoboda Party. In Russia, Putin and his buddies are laughing at the sanctions that Obama's administration announced last week. (I cast my vote for Deputy PM Rogozin's reaction as the most caustic so far.) And in the United States, pretty much everybody has given their take on what just happened, what it means for us, and who foresaw these events (and who dropped the ball in predicting them). I've decided to collect a sample of those reactions here, for future reference and my own reaction:

• The loudest crowing is coming from Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin and their supporters, who are all too happy to point out that they were right and Obama was wrong about Russia's significance as a rival. (Romney himself has also written an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal on what he calls Obama's "failed leadership.") And they do have a point - Obama, a man known for arrogance, is going to have to eat crow, especially after the 2012 Presidential debates. But I'm also not sure if I agree with the conclusion that "Conservatives have a history of correctly predicting world events."
• I haven't been at all surprised to hear people reference the classic cautionary tale of consequences for unchecked aggression - Neville Chamberlain negotiating with Adolf Hitler to achieve "peace in our time", back in 1938. The only surprise here is that none other than Hilary Clinton is among the voices making this comparison, not just the usual people we expect to hear at times like this.
• Last week, The Atlantic had a really good article examining why a robust American response (and certainly an American military response) is fiscally and politically unfeasible. Choice quote: "in today’s dollars, according to one estimate, the Marshall Plan would total roughly $740 billion. That kind of money would certainly enable far-reaching economic reforms in Ukraine, and likely anchor the country in the West for years to come. But, of course, the suggestion is absurd. Today’s Senate can barely pass an aid package 740 times as small."
• On the conservative side, Henry Kissinger is still trying to play the voice of restraint. Although Kissinger lost a lot of credibility in realist conservative circles by supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, he's being a lot more sensible these days, observing in an op-ed for The Washington Post that the time has come to "avoid treating Russia as an aberrant to be patiently taught rules of conduct established by Washington" and that "[a] wise U.S. policy toward Ukraine would seek a way for the two parts of the country to cooperate with each other. We should seek reconciliation, not the domination of a faction." 
• Earlier this month, David Brooks got quite a bit of attention for describing the administration's policy as "The Leaderless Doctrine" in a piece for The New York Times. He laments that, "Americans have lost faith in the high politics of global affairs. They have lost faith in the idea that American political and military institutions can do much to shape the world. American opinion is marked by an amazing sense of limitation — that there are severe restrictions on what political and military efforts can do" A more optimistic rebuttal comes from Peter Munson at War on the Rocks, who concurs with Kissinger that a more hands-off approach is just right for Ukraine: "Putin’s desperate, losing move will ultimately be overcome by the tides of history. Far more important is helping Ukrainian leaders—and other leaders in similar situations—to thread the needle, channeling the blind passion of the people to a reasonable end."
• There are a number of voices in defense quarters asking whether it was really such a wise idea for the U.S. military to spend a decade becoming a COIN-centric force now that Russia has returned to the forefront of America's geopolitical rivalries. Former Air Force General David Deptula is happy to point out that maybe SecDef Bob Gates committed a gaffe by halting F-22 production and then firing everyone in the military's top ranks who disagreed with his vision for the force. (And on another note, maybe this means no more sequestration, or at least less sequestration...or so they hope.)

Photos from Ukraine

Some of these pictures, as posted on Business Insider, are pretty eye-opening:

Uniformed men (rear), believed to be Russian servicemen, watch Ukrainian servicemen walk past a Ukrainian military base in the village of Perevalnoye, outside Simferopol, March 6, 2014.

Uniformed men, believed to be Russian servicemen, walk in formation near a Ukrainian military base in the village of Perevalnoye outside Simferopol, March 6, 2014.

A Ukrainian serviceman (rear L) gives a cigarette to a uniformed man (R), believed to be a Russian serviceman, at a Ukrainian military base in the village of Perevalnoye, outside Simferopol, March 6, 2014.

Members of a pro-Russian self defence unit stand in formation as they take an oath to the Crimea government in Simferopol March 8, 2014.

Ukrainian soldiers, left watch as a Russian soldier guards the gate of an infantry base in Perevalne, Ukraine, Tuesday, March 4, 2014.

A Russian soldier lies with his back to Ukrainian fighter jets as he watches Ukrainian serviceman at the Belbek airport in the Crimea region March 4, 2014.

Yet more oversights by Putin...

...this time expressed in a surprisingly thought-provoking piece by Slate. Some inconvenient facts Putin (presumably) considered:

• "That narrow strip of land tethering northern Crimea to the Ukrainian mainland, called the Perokop Isthmus, is the peninsula’s lifeline. What’s left out of most Western analyses of Putin’s brazen military intervention is the Crimea’s complete economic dependence on the mainland, which provides nearly all of its electricity and water and about 70 percent of its food."
• "Most of the Crimea is basically a desert, with less annual rainfall than Los Angeles. It is impossible to sustain its 2 million people—including agriculture and the substantial tourist industry—without Ukrainian water. Current supplies aren’t even enough."
• "After independence, Ukraine welcomed back the Crimean Tatars. Some 300,000 have returned from exile and their numbers are growing, with continued migration and birth rates higher than either Russians or Ukrainians. They strongly oppose any separatism, and they will not go peacefully into a Russian-controlled, authoritarian 'Yanukistan' along the lines of Transdnistria. Not only are they extremely well organized, they are Muslims with friends. Representatives from Russia’s Tatarstan region are already supporting them. Turkey, which controlled the Crimea for much longer than Russia ever did and has close ties with the Crimean Tatars, is watching. So are Chechen rebels."

The Waterloo analogy sucks, though: Please let's stop comparing these types of crises to major, Earth-shattering global events.

Oh, no, Ukraine is getting invaded...

...quite soon:

And this is the reaction:

On another note, someone I know on Facebook posted this:

I'm going to continue to monitor the amusing reactions and misuse of historical analogies ("Is it the Cold War again? Is it 1914 again?"), but right now, I'm a lot more interested in Russia's snap military drill that began along the Russian-Ukrainian border a few days ago. Ukraine's acting President, Oleksander Turchinov, has already announced that this a military intervention by Russia would mean war. Sadly, some of my favorite bloggers on the Russian military (i.e. Dimitry Gorenburg) have not yet written more about the topic, but I expect that this crisis is going to give analysts a much better idea of the modernizing Russian military's ability to conduct joint operations within its re-drawn (as of 2010) military districts. Whatever happens, that will be the most important comparison to come out of this crisis and Georgia in 2008. Back then, the Russian military demonstrated that it couldn't even grasp tactical basics such as establishing air superiority and cover for its advancing ground forces as they attempted to squeeze through one point of entry - the Roki Tunnel (which would have made them extremely vulnerable, had the Georgians not been equally incompetent). This time, they're facing the far larger and better-equipped Ukrainian military, which has less recent combat experience than the Georgian forces, but plenty of other advantages (among other things, a growing lack of dependence upon incompetent and poorly-motivated conscripts, something the Russians cannot say about their own forces). In the end, Putin and everyone else knows that there is not much that the U.S. can do to keep him from exercising power in the Former Soviet Union. But his army needs to have a better showing than it did in 2008 if he wants any future threats to have credibility.

Oh, yeah, and: