David Hutt
Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 showed just how weak the Russian military is. This wasn’t a surprise to some historians; the first year or two of any Russian war, going back centuries, is marked by unparalleled losses before the sheer size of Russia’s population and manufacturing capacity comes into play (which may be happening now). But the present-day weakness also shows what happens when you let one person, Sergei Shoigu, the Russian defense minister sacked last month, steal most of the defense budget.
Over in the Middle East, the October 7 pogrom was obviously a result of Israeli intelligence and political failures. There’s reason to believe that there had been warnings of such an attack for a year prior, but a cohort of ultranationalists who now occupy several ministries and claim to be security hawks are among the least competent officials, having effectively been raised in state-subsidized environments where they have gained no real-world experience before taking over government departments. The latest assault on Rafah is necessitated because Israeli intelligence has underestimated the percentage of Hamas soldiers it thought had been killed elsewhere.
Which brings us to China. There is no way of knowing whether the Chinese military is the juggernaut some imagine or is the paper tiger akin to Moscow’s degraded armed forces. Either way, the revelation would be terrible for almost everyone.
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