Syrian Chaos: Can this end well?

I'm pretty sure that's Russia very clearly stating that they won't be able to protect them if they do something that far beyond the pale.

"Won't be able" to stop the US and EU from having their way with Syria? Ha! No, I don't think that's what Putin is saying.

I'm not even sure that phrase is in the Russian language -- it is not something I have ever heard a Russian say.

For the benefit of those who are stumped or immune to sarcasm, HCN is a blood agent, not a nerve agent.

Also only really effective in confined spaces; easy to cure; and commonly occurring as a result of combustion, so if they were poisoned by HCN it's still not proof that it was a gas attack rather than, say, a urethane foam couch burning. But mostly the part where it has absolutely nothing to do with the nervous system. For my next trick:

Well, it's sort of similar, amirite?

Here's a though: being caught in a blast wave [bad words] you up internally (pulmonary embolism, flailed chest, pneumothorax), even before you get into noxious fumes caused by secondary fires and rapid decomposition of complex chemicals; you know, high explosives.

EDIT: [bad word]. The top link? THAT'S A SECURITY FIRM. THESE ARE THE PEOPLE YOU TRUST TO DEFEND FREEDOM AND [bad word].

Re: Albert Speer: It's the consensus view that he pulled a fast one and manufactured his "distance from the regime" - at least as distinct from the sort of thing everyone was doing in the final days - after the war, when he saw the advantages of full-on pretending to have been the poor misguided Hamlet of the Third Reich.

It worked, especially early on, in terms of the public perception of him, but didn't save him from a jail term. Which quite peeved him, as he'd expected all his "Gosh, Justice Jackson, now that I look back you're right" malarky to get him a lighter sentence or acquittal. But, hey, all those dead slave labourers and he didn't wind up hanged, so...

As I've mentioned once or twice in other threads the "bland colourless perpetrators just pushing trains around" thesis has fallen apart (and been perceived as having fallen apart) as people realized that, eg, Adolf Eichmann was committed to killing off Jews and quite proud to have done so, because he believed in Nazi ideology.

In Holocaust scholarship the classic dichotomy (which of course is artificial) is between "intentionalism" - explaining the Holocaust as a consequence of furious anti-semitic hatred and racist ideology - and "functionalism," the Holocaust as a consequence of structural processes like bureaucratic oneupsmanship in accomplishing Hitler's vaguely expressed racial-ideological aims and "cumulative radicalization."

In practice historians care a great deal about both sorts of inputs but even a fairly strong functionalist doesn't go very far towards making Nazi crimes seem even subjectively that "bland" or "banal." ("Sane" vs. "insane" to my mind doesn't even enter into consideration. I don't see mental illness as a factor of any great consequence. And if one means "insane" in a sense other than mental illness then it's probably a confusing way to express whatever it is that one's saying.)

The closest thing I see to "blandness" and "banality" is the weird (but not necessarily consistent) "normalization" of horrific behavior as seen in, eg, Klee, Dressen and Reiss' The Good Old Days. And that tends to be terrifying rather than "a bland let-down," as Eichmann's demeanor struck some.

If you dig through it, it is pretty banal. "Blah blah blah, we send the Jews to Poland to build roads, most of them will cease to build roads due to natural causes, the rest we give special treatment." It's only horrifying because you know exactly what the Polish roadbuilding board of 1942 had in mind because people like Eichmann translated the doublespeak because he didn't give a fuck because he was going to swing from the end of a rope anyways.

TURN TIGHTER.

I dunno, if the perpetrators, the prosecutors and the people reading half-decent histories all know what the code means (and know that the people using the code knew what it meant) then I don't feel like "blandness" is that interesting or functional a part in understanding it all. A mobster saying "go with the guys we talked about and do the thing in the place" doesn't make a mafia hit banal. It lends it a euphemistic character, but Eichmann, for example, wasn't in any sense "hiding" behind the euphemism psychologically.

EDIT: Anyway, this tangent could probably get pretty circular if we dice the meaning of euphemism and who might have used it how, just wanted to toss in my standard "careful about the banality of evil idea" spiel.

My impression was that's exactly what they are saying. Not in those words of course, but in meaning. "Don't use gas or we will not protect you. Oh, and remember Gaddafi? That guy was hilarious!"

If the regime uses gas there is a much higher probability of international intervention regardless of the UN Security Council. In that case even if Russia is inclined to keep using their veto as a customer service it will only cause bad international relations for them without helping their client. This is just an acknowledgement of that reality.

Yes, that's fair enough. As you say it can be some of both, in that being cosmically evil can suit a not very imaginative bureaucratic mindset.

I think it's pretty consequential in specific cases, Hitler himself being the most obvious one. It's hard to see his behaviour, especially in the last years of the war, as anything other than crazy, even by the standards of his professed ideology. In general I agree though, history is an unbroken chain of atrocities, much of it involving brutality that makes the Nazis look unimaginative, and there's no reason to think the perpetrators were mentally unbalanced in anything other than a moral sense.

I'm not saying Speer didn't take steps with a view to mitigating the damage of Germany's downfall, but there's the question of timing and motivation, particularly when his postwar pose of penitence is so completely distrusted by historians.

I find the choice of Keitel as a counterexample a bit ironic, actually. I've read his testimony, his post-sentencing memoirs, and some recently published notes from one of the prison psychologists, in addition to having a good grasp of the criminal responsibilities that attached to him most directly. I wasn't really struck by his whitewashing BS, which was consistent with the "whitewashing BS defence" the military leadership mounted at Nuremberg, and I don't doubt that that odd mix of nitpicking and wholesale fiction, designed to exculpate both individuals and the army, reflected his thinking. But parts of his concluding speech - most of which was the usual nitpicking nonsense - and his memors actually seem more self-aware and guilt conscious than almost anything one saw from the rest of the military leadership. (Of course, that's a low standard, and one can argue that it was a belated "Speer strategy" in the case of the closing remarks.)

There was a solid case for hanging Keitel and Jodl, but their execution (and the execution/premature deaths of a semi-arbitrary selection of other officers) sit weirdly alongside a far greater number of light sentences and wholesale evasions of any justice that were the norm for the Wehrmacht leadership as a whole, a large number of whom were very deeply implicated in the sort of war crimes that one would expect to be capital using the same moral scales.

Halder could've been hung three times over and wound up as a much beloved American pet post-war with a medal from JFK.

I don't think you could get Ian Kershaw on board with you there. In the wider '33-'44 period there's the semantic question of what to call an unsual, scary personality joined with irrational, scary, evil beliefs - and in the final period there's the more acute irrationality and all of the stuff Downfall dramatized. But aside from maybe pointing to mental/physical aspects of his failing health, that seems to me more the unusual scary personality with irrational scary evil beliefs having about the sort of nervous breakdown one would expect in the face of defeat and death.

We all know the Hitler who has irrational, scary, evil beliefs - a minute from any of his speeches is enough to substantiate that. But I think there's a meaningful distinction between that sort of scary and someone with such a strong streak of megalomania and nihilism that he's willing to order the destruction of infrastructure and buildings in occupied territories and throughout Germany itself, had paranoid fantasies of suicide, and anticipated his own early death, even before Barbarossa. In other words he seemed to quite explicitly want the wholesale destruction of Germany to accompany his death, certainly if he couldn't win.

Whether this amounts to clinical insanity I'm in no position to judge, but it matter little for my point: someone who is that nihilistically 'different' has a psychology massively consequential both for his own actions and how he should have been dealt with.

To my mind being "very different in a very bad way" is better understood on its own terms than those of mental illness - granting that "mad" and "insane" are often used in broader, context-sensitive senses and it'd be pedantic to object to that.

Some amazing footage of tank use in Syria. I say amazing not just because the cameraman is pretty ballsy, but amazing because any unit that employs its tanks in that manner (ie you can see the problems with angle of attack, the level of exposure to any ground troops and the absence of infantry support) in an urban canyon should have no tanks left in short order.
A freeze frame from the reddit thread suggests there were weapons being tossed out of nearby windows, explaining the focus of fire.

That guy's got balls of stone -- he doesn't even flinch when the tank fires a couple of stories directly underneath him.

And yeah, it's pretty surprising how they're in such a vulnerable position without any (apparent) support. Even with support that'd be a crappy position. I would have figured that's something that any tank commander knows about.

Did all the even halfway competent Syrian soldiers defect?

I dunno. If anyone nearby had one of those RPGs they could run up to the roof (to avoid the backblast) and stick one of those tanks right in the top armor. That the remarkably cool under fire filmer wasn't doing so suggests otherwise. Or maybe they were just out of ammo I guess.

Yeah, I don't know. It's much harder to get a good sense of the tactical situation of [unknown number of people and assets in building]. I just thought it was an interesting catch because I definitely missed that completely when I saw it. I have no idea what it means.

True. Hard to piece together what's going on from such limited information. Always interesting to try though, if only as an exercise in putting yourself in another's shoes!

I figure filming the action with the intent of uploading must have been the guy's express purpose, as merely spotting wouldn't have required such lingering shots and how would he share the video quickly enough anyway. Seeing the Syrian military ineptly and blindly plug away with tanks point blank on what look like apartment complexes is certainly striking.

I get the impression- purely from public sources- that the Syrian military really doesn't have its heart in this. Given all its advantages in terms of materiel, experience and numbers, it simply isn't as successful in suppressing this as it should be. I'm not sure whether this is by intent (direction from Assad) or lack of commitment by personnel. Nor have we seen striking success from the opposition, which to my mind rules out any committed foreign support, either in terms of equipment or consultants.

Why is this conflict still ongoing? Why haven't we seen indications of a clear resolution?
Are the government troops undertaking things like randomly shooting at apartment buildings out of a desire to prolong this or at least avoid victory?

Did they ever? I'm asking seriously because to my vague understanding the broad category in which most militaries like that fall is one in which the concept of a strong NCO structures (and corresponding tiers of tactical engagement) simply don't exist. That could well be Western/Major Power/whatever exceptionalism at work, but it just seems like a strata that doesn't fit well in terms of modern warfare in conscript/elite officer type militaries. I mean, obviously the ranks exist, they just don't mean the same thing.

I find that completely baffling. I'm an armchair general, never even seriously thought of being in the military, and it's readily apparent to me just from playing table top games that sticking your tanks where they could so easily be Tank Fisted (erm, excuse me, Panzer Fausted!) is begging for trouble.

I would imagine all it would take is one person asking "what about RPGs?" for anyone in a tank to experience sudden dread upon seeing tanks so poorly positioned, even had they somehow never considered it before. Or forget wondering hypothetically -- surely the Rebels have put RPGs to use already?

I mean, I get that they're perhaps not choosing the engagement and they're forced to defend Damascus, but that's not exactly an ambush and they have time to reposition. Are they just sticking green infantry recruits into tanks without anything beyond "here are the controls!" training? Are they just cocky? Do they think they have infantry support, but it's been cut off for some reason? Is some moron giving them crazy orders?

I'm torn between thinking that surely there most be some out-of-video extenuating circumstances, or if it's as it seems that Assad is just hosed.

Not likely. If they were just jerking off they'd do it in a place where it's less likely to get them killed.

Panzer translates as armour.

There's a length of track lying on the ground there, (possibly not belonging to the T-72's) a couple of the ERA cells appear to be blasted, there's a lot of shit atop the one tank that looks like gravel and rocks, there looks like there's some scorch marks on the back end, the tank has some off bits hanging off the side that suggest it may have once had a side skirt and full ERA protection on it. If I were to hazard a guess, it was a tank retrieval that went pear-shaped because they didn't clear the area with infantry first. Or possibly there's a third tank or APC that is being towed off-camera. In any case, they're asking to have a giant fucking IED dropped atop their tank.

On the other hand... It seems the Syrian Army is a tad slow on the uptake:

Exploding tanks seen from a distance.

EDIT: Some random guy on Youtube did a compilation. That is a lot of burning tanks and APC's in places they have absolutely no reason to be.

The compilation. I didn't see anything gory, but burning tanks, so viewer beware.

Scratch that, really slow on the uptake. With no apparent appreciation of the dangers of taking armour into urban combat, and far too much faith in the invincibility of the vehicle. So, basically Syrian armour is driven by people who are not competent to use it.

EDIT2: Links instead of embed, just to quarantine it as much as possible.

Uh, yeah, I know. ;-)

Sheepherder - woah, that second video - APC or something cooking off after being hit by something.

It's impossible to armchair general anything based on a couple of seconds of footage. I imagine that is especially the case in a civil war when the front lines are very fluid. Vehicles could be returning to base and caught out, lost, fallen behind a column, whatever.

The first tank in the video that turns off the road onto to the dirt track seems to go straight over a rather obvious freshly disturbed mound of dirt - and thus gets an IED right in the kisser.

Urban warfare is not really fluid: all movement must conform to the layout of streets and alleyways which are constricting in ways which very few natural landforms are; areas are easily cordoned off and fortified; lines of sight are tightly restricted by buildings and parked vehicles; routes of ingress/egress which normally allow for rapid vehicle movement are easily predicted and blocked. You don't see lines of battle because in cities you fortify points, not lines, and then shoot anyone stupid enough to walk or drive in the open.

It's not impossible to draw some fairly accurate conclusions from a couple seconds of footage, or even the stills. If you've trying to engage people several stories almost right above you with a tank you are being dumb; if your vehicle is burning because you were hit while trundling along in a narrow space you are being dumb; armour needs an infantry screen to be it's eyes in a city, if you don't have one you are being dumb; if you turn off your engine outside of a bivouac in a combat zone you are being dumb; if your first reaction to an RPG hit is counter-battery fire rather than angling your thicker armour towards the threat or getting the hell out of there you are being dumb. Lizard_King is right, these people are amazing.

Were I the driver of the second or third tank I'd seriously consider getting the hell out of there, for reasons that the video makes clear.

Forgot to mention, the APC that cooked off looks like a BMP-2, hard to tell due to video quality.

Not saying these guys are good soldiers, just that we have no idea what is going on in most of those videos.

To be fair to your point, (that the soldiers in question might not be entirely to blame) it's sometimes hard to tell where derp ends and herp begins. Tanks with no infantry for example: were they not provided infantry support by their commander, did they simply charge on ahead leaving them behind, or did the infantry just ditch their tanks? I guess it could be that they got split up, but losing people you expect to watch your arse isn't exactly a great show of competence either.

Well, yeah, got no idea. The possibilities are endless, ranging from incompetence ("TANK GOOD!"), desperation ("Go hold this crossroads until the infantry get there!") through to situations such as the infantry already being pushed back without the tankers knowing.

I'd be genuinely interested in some sort of review of how the ground war is playing out, but I wouldn't know where to look for a good one.

Bad tactics aside, these videos are also part of the propaganda war of the resistance. They're unlikely to show actions where the Syrian army displays competence and kicks their ass, so we're subject to selection bias here.

I'm not sure how much that changes the equation, or if it changes it at all, but it's worth keeping in mind that we're only getting a very tiny and rebel-edited picture with these videos.

What about the actual War Nerd?

I love his writing style, but suspect his actual military conclusions are somewhat suspect. Certainly he often focusses more on the cultural / ethnic / religious factors at play, than the banalities of proper small unit tactics in urban warfare or the correct way to use an RPG-7 vs T-54 armour.

Not useful in my opinion. I've disagreed with his general approach before on subjects that I know better, fwiw, and I don't see any evidence it's less of a crapshoot now.

Now I know why I've never cared to keep up to date on any writing of his: he's sort of a douchebag.

Ha ha ha. No.

Wouldn't a better reason for using a thrusting/stabbing motion be that it doesn't require shifting your shield out of line as much to do so?