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On resilience and collapse - Russian heart attack [1]

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Date: 2022-09-11

We are a system.

Let me preface this with a confession: I might be late to the party. I will be debating ‘future’ events that may have already happened, with a possibly unhelpful conclusion.

In my previous article, I speculated that Russia may run out of tanks completely in about 4 months, though I quite embarrassingly did not account for about 10 000 tanks in cold storage. Today I will focus on outlining what such a loss would even mean in the grand scheme of things.

It is said that misfortune never comes alone, always in groups. One of the reasons is that everything in our lives is a part of one system or another — and a collapse in one part of the system tends to send shockwaves through the rest, causing more collapses.

To prevent this, well-designed systems are always built with resilience in mind. Resilience (or redundancy) means that you build in backups, coping mechanisms, and repair processes. That way, the system can continue working, even if parts of it don’t. Human body is one excellent example of this — we are remarkably resilient, and that combined with modern medicine allows us to survive things we frankly have no business surviving. Did a kidney fail? We have another one. Did both of them fail? Dialysis machine or kidney transplants save the day.

The issue is, the more parts of a system degrade or fail, the more stress is put on the rest of the system. Sure, you can survive with only one lung. But that lung is exposed to the extra stress of essentially doing a two lung job. Your performance will degrade too — you will run out of breath more easily. Sure you can live with arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat), but it stresses out the heart and can even disrupt other systems — arrhythmia is often accompanied with respiratory issues.

With this gradual degradation comes an increased risk of failure. One subsystem, stressed beyond its coping ability, collapses completely. And depending on how crucial that subsystem is, its collapse may put so much stress on other subsystems that a cascade of failures occurs. This is what total organ failure is: a row of falling dominoes. It is especially likely if the degradation is widespread — a weakened body part is more likely to give up when impacted by a collapse somewhere else.

Armies are also systems, ones which are built especially resilient. It comes with the territory — armies are meant to be thrown into danger, and degradation is both inevitable and brutal. Even the Russians, incompetent as they are, had redundancies, coping mechanisms and reserves. Precision missiles running low? Re-purpose the SAMs. This works, but it depletes AA missile stockpiles faster. Bridges to Kherson blown up? Use pontoons and ferries. It works, but not nearly as well as a bridge.

This is where I loop back to my previous article. Running out of all the tanks would be a catastrophic failure of one of the ‘organs’ of Russian military. One that could potentially cause a cascade.

My theory is — assuming that an army is a system not unlike a human body, it will continue to compensate, replace, mitigate… until it suddenly is no longer able to, causing a collapse in one of its parts and setting off a chain reaction. The conclusion to this train of thought is: Russian army is likely to collapse very quickly and suddenly, and it will be a surprise to everyone.

Since I am writing this after the Kharkiv counter-offensive has started, the conclusion is a bit ‘well, duh’. It seems to me that it was not the tanks, but the staffing and morale that buckled first. There simply weren’t enough soldiers guarding that Kharkiv front, and they largely ran or surrendered first chance they got. Manpower and morale issues have been plaguing Russian army since the very start, but this is the first time it fully collapsed — no longer able to compensate with other systems, like massed artillery or Chechen commissars.

I fully believe this is a heart attack. Russian army is getting rushed to ER and this music is playing on max volume. The manpower collapse will send unbearable shockwaves through the other systems — notice just how much equipment got destroyed or captured? How much ammo, how many tanks? These will be sorely missed in their respective systems, and could set the dominoes in motion. If that happens, nothing will save this dying man.

- With love from Czechia

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/9/11/2122162/-On-resilience-and-collapse-Russian-heart-attack

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