Russian general when he learned about F-16s heading to Ukraine…

Вот чёрт!!

From Phillips O’Brien…

Its impossible to exaggerate the intensity with which Ukrainians from all walks of life, from the top of the state and military to civil society, were focussed on getting F-16s for the Ukrainian Air Force.

Why F-16s are critical…

• Ukraine’s Air Force is woefully behind the times, their main fighter – the Mig-29 – has been around for 40 years and is beyond obsolete. 
• Getting spare parts for the UAF’s Migs is getting harder and harder.
• F-16s are very, very capable – military-speak for they can do lots of things well.
  • shoot down other planes
  • support ground operations
  • launch missiles to hit targets hundreds of miles away
  • shoot down incoming rockets and missiles
• Unlike the Mig-29, F-16s have constantly upgraded
• Unlike many other planes, they are relatively simple to maintain and there is a huge stockpile of spare parts

The net is there is no other single airplane that fits the bill as well as the F-16.

Okay, it’s gonna take a very long time to train Ukrainian pilots on the F-16…

Well, no.

An internal US Air Force document indicates Ukrainian pilots  – with almost no training – could execute complicated maneuvers albeit it in an F-16 simulator. Multiple sources indicate Ukrainian pilots can be flying the F-16s in combat a few months.

And…

It’s unlikely the F-16s will have much of an impact on the already-started/upcoming Ukrainian offensive, but they will play a major role in Ukraine’s likely long war.

What does this mean for you?

More good news for Ukraine, and bad days for Russian butchers.

There’s much rending of clothes and gnashing of teeth in the mass media about how Jack Teixeira’s criminal stupidity will:

• help Russian generals defeat Ukraine’s pending attacks by identifying attacking units and eliminating surprise
• really tick off our allies
• reveal key shortages of materiel (military-speak for ammunition, spare parts, supplies and weapons systems)

Uh, no. Let’s take these in order. (much more detail at Phillips O’Brien’s excellent substack postings.)

The upcoming offensive

Is the worst-kept secret since Trump’s sexual antics with porn stars.

Ukrainian officials, military leaders, Allied intelligence, Russian military bloggers have all talked about this. Heck, they even know the military units that will do the attacking. What we don’t know is when and where…and Teixeira’s documents don’t give a date or location..

Angry allies

What? An ally is spying on us? How…common.

Reality is everyone spies on everyone else all the time. There will be outrage and histrionics from politicians from Israel to Norway, all furious at such conduct.

All will be for public consumption, this will die down pretty quickly, and really…does anyone think allies will abandon the US or Ukraine over this?

Materiel shortages and impact thereof

This is perhaps the most ridiculous “disclosure.” There have been hundreds of public reports, news articles, blog posts and stories about this over the last few months.

Lastly, among the “revelations” in Teixeira’s documents is that our intelligence community has doubts about whether Ukraine’s upcoming offensive will achieve much.

Hardly.  With some notable exceptions (e.g.the timing of Russia’s initial attack) US intel has a rather poor record of predicting what’s going to happen in Ukraine. And that is being kind.

What does this mean for you?

Top Secret…isn’t.

More than 1.3 million individuals have Top Secret clearances.

You can bet your house the Russians knew everything in Teixeira’s documents long before they hit Discord.

 

B2B sales is NOT about “value”, RoI, relationships, or anything else you think it is.

It is about meeting the emotional/psychological needs of the key buyers.

You may have sensed this, or interpreted it as “relationships” that make deals happen  – but that is a misread. The reason relationships work is they reflect the sales person’s deep investment in getting to know the buyer(s), understanding what drives them (outside of obvious business goals), and mitigating their fears.

A terrific piece in Harvard Business Review speaks directly to this…(quotes from the article)

• findings indicate that B2B customers prefer interactions that fuel their psychological needs — even if they require more time or cost more money.
• Among vendors who provide “poor” service, only 33% of respondents reported that the vendor knows them personally. In contrast, among vendors who provide “good” service, respondents indicated the vendor knows them personally more than twice as often (70%).
• Even when you have an effective solution in mind, provide your clients with options so they’re reminded that they’re in control.
• 
  (this is directly supported by our most recent survey of prescription drug management in workers’ comp…respondents overwhelmingly want PBMs to provide them insight so they can fix problems collaboratively)
• Our study also included some interesting findings around empathy. Expressing empathy, a common way of increasing connection with our friends and family, can backfire if customers perceive it to be disingenuous. Too often, service providers script empathy into customer interaction, assuming it’s what customers want to hear. That’s a mistake. Our research indicates that customers far prefer a service provider who responds knowledgeably over one who “feels their pain.”

What does this mean for you?

be genuine.

ask questions, don’t present.

don’t schmooze.

It’s been a blissful few months as COVIDF has retreated into the background, likely to remain with us forever but hopefully as a nuisance not the million+ killer it was for the last couple of years.

So, two new items.

First, in what can only be described as a huge waste of taxpayer money, a very large and very scientific study found ivermectin does not reduce COVID symptoms. 

Shocking, right?

Details…

• double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled platform trial
• 1206 US adults with COVID-19
• median time to sustained recovery was 11 days in the ivermectin group and 11 days in the placebo group.

Hucksters, charlatans, former US presidents and other of the willfully-ignorant will undoubtedly parse, lie, misstate, ignore, or otherwise continue to claim that a veterinary medicine for treating bacterial infections is actually a cure for a viral infection.

to quote a T-shirt recently spotted…

Lab leak, nefarious plot, or animal-to-human transmission?

Last week the new broke that the US Department of Energy thinks  – albeit with “low confidence” – that COVID leaked out of a Chinese lab.

This is sort of like saying “Tom Brady is going to sign with the Yankees as a pitcher…heard this from a guy I know who was on a plane sitting next to a woman who looked like a reporter and saw her writing that Brady’s heading to spring training in Tampa…”

This is NOT to disparage the scientists at DoE, rather to remedy what seems to be a serious lack of reading ability on the part of too many who can’t seem to grasp – or rather refuse to accept – that things are rarely black-and-white, or as friend and colleague Pier Rousmaniere notes in his signature line;

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. – Voltaire

[Unless, of course, one has completed a rigorous 1200 person RDB – CT study]

Nine Federal intelligence agencies have completed their research on the “where did COVID come from?” question…Two of those concluded a likely lab leak, five said natural causes and two said they don’t know.

Given the really lousy record these state-of-the-art labs have when it come to keeping deadly viruses contained, it is certainly possible it leaked.

Reality is  – it is unlikely we will ever know – for certain.

What does this mean for you?

Read carefully before posting.

Last time we talked tanks…

This time we’ll focus on Russia’s winter offensive. If you don’t have time, just skip to the takeaways at the bottom of this post.

credit Institute for the Study of War; I highly recommend ISW’s briefings

Quick take – the offensive isn’t going well. While Russia is making advances, they are measured in meters not miles, and are coming at horrendous cost in dead, injured, and captured Russian troops. The Russians did capture Soledar and have make barely measurable progress around Bakhmut and a couple other places but none of those are – in any way – changing the reality on the ground.

Which is Russia is screwed.

As we discussed in WOT #10, you need troops and equipment to fight a war.

The Russians lost a huge amount of equipment last year – hundreds of tanks, armored fighting vehicles, cannons, trucks, trains – equipment it cannot readily replace, if at all. If you want to attack, as Russia is trying to do in its winter offensive, you really need armored vehicles to penetrate opponents’ lines and break out into less well-defended territory. Dug-in defenses  – usually several lines deep – are very, very hard to defeat unless you can blow a really big hole in them and exploit the opening with fast-moving vehicles.

So, in what is eerily reminiscent of World War One, Putin the Butcher is throwing thousands of untrained men at Ukraine’s front lines. (If you want a taste of that, I highly recommend the book and film “All Quiet on the Western Front“.) Trigger alert – it is really awful and disturbing, and the German general is a bald version of Putin the Butcher.

PtB’s tactics are pretty awful…

• untrained ex-prisoners and recruits from Russia’s far east are forced to attack Ukrainians positions.
• they are slaughtered – because they have no idea what they are doing, have minimal weapons and ammunition, and are going up against entrenched, battle-hardened and well-supplied Ukrainians, but
• in so doing, the Ukrainians reveal their positions, which are then bombarded with rockets and artillery and attacked by much more capable Russian troops.

That is NOT to say Russia’s “real” soldiers are invulnerable. Reports from the front indicate Putin’s “elite” units lost dozens of armored vehicles and hundreds of soldiers over the last few days…equipment and men which Russia cannot afford to lose.

Putin the Butcher has a seemingly inexhaustible supply of poor young men but they are a very poor substitute for modern military vehicles and artillery.

Takeaways

While others much more knowledgeable than I see this war grinding on for years, I’m hard pressed to agree.

Russia:

• cannot replace most lost equipment,
• is losing more and more of its irreplaceable, experienced and well-trained troops,
• has not demonstrated its generals have any idea what to do,
• is facing an increasingly better-equipped and far more motivated enemy, and
• is losing the information and intel dimensions.

Like we saw late last spring, all is well until it is not, and then it goes really, really badly for Putin the Butcher.

all previous posts on this topic are here.