War in Ukraine VII

We are clearly in Endspiel

One of the topics that I wrote about in End Times was Ukraine. After I turned the final version of the text to the publisher in late 2022, I continued monitoring the news about the course of the conflict there, because I was curious to see how well my assessment of the Ukrainian state (a plutocracy) and the war there (a proxy conflict between NATO and Russia) would fare as history unfolded. It was, thus, interesting to see that in the early 2023 the views on this conflict, and predictions about its future course, could be so diametrically opposed, depending on who was writing and what ideological background they came from. The tone in the MSM (main-stream media reflecting the official American position) was quite triumphant. But many American analysts, former military and intelligence professionals, held a very different view.

It occurred to me at that time that this difference in predictions is actually amenable to an empirical test. As long-time readers of my blog (now here on Substack, previous posts archived on my web site) know, I view ability to empirically test predictions from rival theories as key in doing Science (with a capital S). Just search my blog archive using the keyword “prediction” and you will see multiple posts on this subject. So I decided to conduct a formal test.

For concreteness sake, I selected two predictions, both based on an explicitly quantitative argument, but coming from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. One was from Paul Krugman, channeling the official American position. The other was from another American, who is, however, considered as a “rogue actor” and a “Putin’s stooge”, Scott Ritter. You can read the actual quotes from both in the Introduction of the SocArxiv article, in which I “pre-registered” predictions of my model.

I won’t repeat the details here, because you can read them in the series of blogs I published two years ago, followed by the SocArxiv article that put it all together in a systematic manner and provided R scripts that allow others to replicate all my results. Here are the posts for the convenience of my new readers:

What Osipov and Lanchester Tell Us about the War in Ukraine (War in Ukraine I)

War in Ukraine II: The Model

War in Ukraine III: an Interim Assessment

War in Ukraine IV: Projections

War in Ukraine V: Alternative Hypotheses

War in Ukraine VI: Adding Economic Power to the Attrition Model

Today I thought I would do another interim assessment. The first reason is the much-ballyhooed meeting between Trump and Putin tomorrow in Alaska. The second reason is that there was a marked change in the tone of coverage on the course of the war in the last couple of weeks. What happened was that the Russian forces apparently ruptured the Ukrainian frontline in the Pokrovsk area. If this is sustained, it is clear that the conflict entered a new phase—–Endspiel.

This assessment is shared by writers coming from the complete ideological specter—from pro-Russian partisans to the “American Pravda,” the New York Times. An excellent analysis of this development is on Big Serge Substack, which tends to be factual, rather than ideological. (While Big Serge focuses on the military aspects, for non-military implications, see the commentary by Nicolai Petro.)

Big Serge argues that “Ukraine’s mounting manpower crisis and its severe shortages of infantry have reached the point where they can no longer properly defend a continuous frontline.”

Let’s now go back to the quantitative prediction I made in 2023 (see the graph below).

Source: Figure 3 in Empirically Testing Predictions of an Attrition Warfare Model for the War in Ukraine, with added “We are here” line.

In this graph, brown trajectories represent 10 “realizations” (different runs, resulting from variable stochastic influences) predicted by the main model, explained in the article (this is the Attrition Warfare Model, AWM). Each trajectory shows a possible rate of accumulated casualties on the Ukrainian side. The blue band is the region where casualties mount to the point where things break down.

As you can see (the dashed red line “We are here”), we’ve already entered the region where Ukrainian army can collapse at any moment, although this “moment,” according to the model can happen at any point between now and February 2027 (corresponding to 60 months after the start of the conflict). As I explained in my posts and the article, the final outcome is not much in doubt, but the rupture point is extremely difficult to predict. The situation is akin to seismology. For example, the recent Kamchatka earthquake of exceptional power was predicted 30 years ago, except nobody could know when it would actually strike. The Attrition Warfare Model is actually more precise than that. From its point of view, it would be a surprising outcome if Ukraine is still fighting beyond February 2027.

Note that I said, “from its [the model’s] point of view.” I emphasize that the future is unknowable in precise terms. In any case, the goal of this article was not to predict the future, but to use the method of scientific prediction to empirically test between two, or more theories.

The Attrition Warfare Model (AWM) encodes both alternative theories, (1) the Economic Power hypothesis, which predicts a win for Ukraine (Krugman) and (2) the Casualties Rates hypothesis, which predicts a win for Russia (Ritter). It is clear that the first theory will be rejected, no matter when the war ends.

Which is not to say that the AWM is “true” in any sense of this word. No model is true, but some are useful. The course of the war has already shown that the AWM made some wrong assumptions. For example, it calculates casualties projections assuming that the majority of them are caused by artillery. But as we know, a new technology, drones, has gained importance during this conflict, and is now the prime killer, especially on the Ukrainian side.

This is just one, of many, ways in which the AWM is wrong. But is it useful? Looks like “yes”, although we will have to wait until the war is finally over to pass the judgment.