• 16: What’s going on in Kazakhstan?, submitted on 2022-01-06 13:16:49+08:00.
• 17: What kind of equipment and training did your average medieval conscript soldier have on campaign? Around 1300-1450 during the height of the Middle Ages., submitted on 2022-01-07 01:17:57+08:00.
• 18: How does experience stack up against training?, submitted on 2022-01-08 16:14:29+08:00.
• 19: Why didn’t the Iraqi Army perform well and how could it have realistically improved their performance?, submitted on 2022-01-09 02:19:34+08:00.
• 20: Why was the modernised late Ottoman Army (19th and 20th centuries) such a horrendous failure?, submitted on 2022-01-09 04:10:47+08:00.
• 21: How is the Russia-Ukraine crisis re-emerging? I thought as of two weeks ago, Russian forces were withdrawing?, submitted on 2022-01-09 14:15:40+08:00.

16: What’s going on in Kazakhstan?, submitted on 2022-01-06 13:16:49+08:00.

—– 16.1 —–2022-01-07 03:05:47+08:00:

1. Kazakhstan always was and still is a tribal society. The uly juz, a tribal confederation in the southeast, has been running the place since 1465. The dominant tribes of the uly juz (literally: Great Horde) are Zhalayr, Shapyrashta and Dughlat. Virtually all of the Communist party officials in Kazakhstan came from those tribes, and the majority of every cabinet since independence has as well.
2. Because it’s a tribal society, there is also a lot of social cohesion among the remaining ~90% of the population who are not of these tribres. This is why the protests went from peaceful demonstrations to full blown civil war, with protesters performing rudimentary small unit tactics and forcing police to surrender at RPG-point, in 3 days.
3. The main social conflict in Kazakhstan since the Kazakh genocide of the 1930s (where ~70% of the population was starved or forced to China in the name of transforming a nomad society into a “modern” industrial workers state) has been between those connected to the state and those distant from it. Nearly all the entrepreneurial success stories after independence were the former, and nearly all the oil wealth went to them too. Though Kazakhstan has a fairly high GDP for the region and is the most developed CIS state, it is highly unequal. The average income is around $10,000, but the median is only about $3,000. The social privilege being part of the elite group gives you cannot be understated: even the bulk of Kazakhstan’s celebrities are from the elite group, and are propped up by massive oligarch-owned media conglomerates like GAKKU TV.
4. This conflict is wrapped up in nationalist terms as well. The elite of the country, living in places like Astana/Nursultan and Taldykorgan (“Taldy-paris”) are Russian speaking, connected with Russia, and in some cases intermarried with Russians. Kazakhstan as a whole has moved sharply in the direction of steppe and Turkic nationalism since independence, however, with a rapid increase both in the use of Kazakh language and Kazakhs as a % of the population. Nazabayev has successfully pursued a “Fabian” strategy of derussification, gradually pushing the Russian population out and increasing the Kazakh population, but this is not satisfactory to most young Kazakhs.
5. The Kazakh opposition has been greatly influenced by the Kyrgyz revolution, in their much poorer “brother country”. Nazarbayev regime held onto power as long as it could maintain economic growth, but with the oil crash there, unrest was inevitable.

—– 16.2 —–2022-01-07 06:13:45+08:00:

Vanished Khans and Empty Steppes is a good book.

There weren’t any insurgents prior. But, being tribal, Kazakhs were able to quickly organize resistance in a way that wouldn’t have been possible in a less cohesive society.

—– 16.3 —–2022-01-07 06:14:38+08:00:

Didn’t the Soviets’ genocidal modernisation campaign (as many as 40% of the Kazakh population were murdered) completely destroy the old nomadic society? How did these tribes survive that period?

Correct - they only survived outside Kazakhstan, in China, Mongolia, and Afghanistan. Those countries adopted a far more autonomous policy towards Kazakh minorities (not least because they were allied to the central governments there). Tribalism, however, never died anywhere. Even after they became sedentary, Kazakhs continued to be able to trace their lineage back 7 or more generations and organize along tribal lines.

Btw, you seem to have an impressive arsenal of knowledge on virtually every society on the globe? I’ve frequently seen you on WarCollege and CredibleDefense. How did you acquire it?

I wouldn’t go that far haha. I know a lot about the former Soviet Union and China and my knowledge gets more sparse the further from Urumqi you go.

—– 16.4 —–2022-01-08 00:57:48+08:00:

No worries all good

I read somewhere that Tokayev and Nazarbayev are from different tribal backgrounds, and that part of the intra-elite drama in this unrest is to do with an attempted shift in the balance of power. Is this true at all or just unsubstantiated/rumours? Are they even from different tribal backgrounds?

I don’t know Tokayev’s tribe (post-Soviet leaders of Kazakhstan tended to be hush about it), but he was born in pre-capitalist Almaty (then Alma-Ata) so he is almost certainly part of uly juz. The elite are almost all from uly juz - if they are from orta juz (the “middle horde”, most of the population) or kishi jutz (“junior horde”) they are tokens. Junior juz members get nominated to cabinet more often, because they’re not seen as a threat, whereas when middle juz members get nominated to cabinet they typically come from small and insignificant tribes like Uak. So we can say with certainty that the Tokayev-Nazarbayev conflict isn’t tribal.

What is possible is that Nazarbayev chose Tokayev as a stand-in for one of his daughters, which is something Central Asia scholars have been speculating since his nomination.

What is meant by a Fabian strategy, sorry? Also, why is it not satisfactory to most young Kazakhs, do they want more extreme measures?

A slow, gradual strategy. Most Kazakh youth bear resentment to Russia for the genocide of the 1920s and 30s and blame CSTO for the fact that the country is still a dictatorship.

I would really love if you had the time to expand a bit on how this worked.

Kazakhs and Kyrgyz are basically the same people. The languages are mutually intelligible (Kazakh just sounds more harsh). In fact before the 1910s and 20s they did consider themselves the same people (either calling themselves “Kipchaks” or “Kyrgyz” for Kazakhs and “Kara-Kyrgyz” for Kyrgyz). Kazakh as an ethnic label was invented by Russian anthropologists, and Kazakhs in China, Mongolia, and Afghanistan, while referred to as Kazakhs by their governments, still call themselves Kipchaks.

Kazakhs today have embraced their label and associate proudly with the khanate of Zhanibek and Kerey, but there’s a general awareness that Kazakhs and Kyrgyz are the same people. There is frequent travel between the countries, and a huge portion of both populations visits the same vacation spot every year. The clock has essentially been ticking for the Kazakh regime since Kyrgyzstan became a democracy in 2010. Kazakhs on social media will often use Kyrgyzstan as an example of even what their impoverished cousins could achieve.

—– 16.5 —–2022-01-08 04:05:00+08:00:

Great editorial and spot on. Compared to Ukraine and Belarus, which he knows a lot about, Putin’s knowledge and judgment about Kazakhstan is and always has been spotty. He once made the remark that there was “no history of organized statehood in Kazakhstan” prior to Nursultan Nazarbayev and clearly does not understand the mess he is stepping into.

17: What kind of equipment and training did your average medieval conscript soldier have on campaign? Around 1300-1450 during the height of the Middle Ages., submitted on 2022-01-07 01:17:57+08:00.

—– 17.1 —–2022-01-08 04:42:14+08:00:

Stephen Turnbull’s Book of the Knight and the Knight Triumphant offers some detail about the Anglo-Norman mechanism of conscription. Before the HYW the main mode of recruitment was through “commissioners of array”. The commissioner of array would be charged with the procurement and equipment of a set number of soldiers in each of a variety of categories (generally footsoldiers, archers, and hobelars) and had a fixed budget to do so. The second mechanism was the subcontracting system, where a knight would be given a pay scale for different kinds of troops, had a contract to raise that number of troops. While technically volunteers, there were cases of recruits being “voluntold”.

Even Commissioners of Array were notorious for providing substandard troops. There were many complaints of soldiers not fitting physical standards, not to mention training and equipment standards. Over the course of the HYW, commissioners of array became decreasingly important as a mechanism of raising troops compared to subcontracting. The decline of conscription in England mirrored the process in France centuries earlier. Charlemagne had tried to “modernize” the Germanic levy system by requiring each landlord, proportional to his acreage, provide a set number of trained infantry, archers, and “byrnied” (hauberked) cavalry for campaign. The laws were so inconsistently followed that he reissued them six times during his reign.

I’d say the only area where the stereotype OP mentions was true by 1300 was the Rus’ principalities. The Rus’ were still using the levy system and army composition of their Viking ancestors when the Mongols invaded. These poorly equipped armies, consisting mainly of unarmored infantry and archers, were easily swept aside. The Mongols changed Russian military doctrine in the aftermath of their conquest, shifting the “basic soldier” from a Viking-style infantryman to a recurve bow wielding archer, but retained the levy system (this was mainly because they left the mechanism of levy up to their vassal states, simply demanding a fixed quantity of soldiers for campaign, and the vassals just did as they always had). Despite the “modernization” of their doctrine, these levy armies were notoriously ineffective and were constantly defeated by the Lithuanians.

Basically everywhere else, as you mention, war was conducted mainly by volunteers. This was in no small part motivated by the fact that war was profitable for the individual soldier in those days, as he could expect loot and, if he was lucky, the ransom of highborn captives.

18: How does experience stack up against training?, submitted on 2022-01-08 16:14:29+08:00.

—– 18.1 —–2022-01-10 00:05:24+08:00:

There’s no distinction. Imagine you’ve been forced, somehow, into a career as a cage fighter with no coach, no gym, and no team. You step into the octagon for the first time and predictably get your ass handed to you. You have another fight coming up in 3 months. What do you do? Just sit around all day? Of course not, you’re going to be drilling with friends, looking at youtube videos. You’ll buy a heavybag and a grappling dummy, run cardio for as long as your willpower will take you. Do burpees until you get bored, and find a sparring partner. But since you don’t have a coach you can look forward to ending your career with a 0-10 record.

It works the same way for armies. The Syrian rebels are training. So is every force that’s fighting a war but isn’t, at the moment, actively engaged in combat. All their new recruits get basic training as well. If the end product is bad, it’s because they lack the time, money, or qualified personnel to deliver effective training, not because they are doing no training at all.

19: Why didn’t the Iraqi Army perform well and how could it have realistically improved their performance?, submitted on 2022-01-09 02:19:34+08:00.

—– 19.1 —–2022-01-09 23:51:30+08:00:

All the books on this topic (whether it’s Tom Cooper’s Series, Williamson Murray’s book, or the fallen Kenneth Pollack) have different opinions on every aspect of this topic except one. Their lone point of agreement is that the Iraqi army, at its core, was not a “battle seeking” army and as a result never learned how to efficiently perform offensive operations.

I’m not going full VD Hanson here and claiming that not being “battle seeking” is an Arab, or even more erroneously, an “Eastern” trait: ISIS, a primarily Iraqi force, was very battle seeking. As were the Iranians in the Iran-Iraq War. I’m simply using that term in its most basic, least romantic sense: the Iraqi army avoided battle whenever possible. They spent the vast majority of the Iran-Iraq War in a state of total passivity, hunkering down in trenches and waiting for the Iranians to come. They did the exact same thing in Operation Desert Storm, and in the 2003 Iraq War.

This passivity was deeply ingrained in the institutional culture of the Ba’athist state. Unlike his role model Stalin who insisted on counter-attacks everywhere while his army was falling apart, Saddam Hussein did not have a very aggressive military outlook. This is quite surprising considering that, in general, he was a very aggressive person, but it almost certainly derived from his lack of direct experience. Again in contrast to Stalin, Saddam never commanded troops in battle and the whole of his military thought prior to the 1980 war was based on populist assumptions about how to wage a war. Namely, he believed in the popular adage that “artillery wins wars” and attempted to minimize casualties in the opening stages of the Iran-Iraq War through reliance on fire support. This is all well and good, most would say, until you run out of ammunition, but Saddam actually took meticulous care to ensure his units were over-supplied with ammunition. What, then, was the problem with this seemingly common sense idea? That it rendered “operational maneuver” for the Iraqi army impossible. Entire Iraqi battalions were being held up by Iranian platoons, as their default response to any resistance was to wait for fire support. When even these tactics generated small losses, Saddam ordered the entire Khuzestan offensive halted.

This amateurish preference for “clever” and passive tactics over more aggressive and immediately costly approaches persisted throughout the war. With the exception of the failed Dehloran counteroffensive, Saddam refrained from taking the strategic offensive in the war until 1988, when his forces had acquired an overwhelming material (and even numerical) advantage over Iran. Instead they became masters of fortification, learning how to set killzones, bulldoze berms in less than ten minutes, and create artificial lakes to narrow the front. The problems with this again seemingly intuitive approach were twofold. First, the Iranians were always choosing the time and place of the attack. Even in 1986-87 when their forces were in a sorry state, having constantly failed to meet IRGC recruitment quotas and with equipment that was literally falling apart from arms embargo, the Iranians were still pushing the Iraqis back. Second and more importantly, wars are not won by sitting behind a trench and waiting for the enemy to come. This “smart” approach ignores the simple reality that it allows the enemy to control his rate of loss. Wars are only won by taking the fight to the enemy and inflicting unsustainable losses on him.

That said, it’s well known that offense is more difficult to pull off than defense. It relies on risk taking, and for all levels of command to have a strong intuitive grasp of war. Miracles like Fall Gelb, Malaya, and the Six Day War were not dictated by the plan of Supreme Command but by a mass of officers relentlessly and skillfully exploiting opportunities. Even in centralized armies like that of the Soviet Union, successful operations were based on the sweat equity of staff officers who rushed between HQ and the front to coordinate fire plans. Offensive success is, in other words, based on subjective and intuitive skill that only develops with experience on the offensive. Soviet observers of the 1991 war commented that Iraq should have taken the offensive into Saudi Arabia. The reality is that, even if Saddam gave such an order, his forces had no idea how to attack. The “brilliant victories” of Iraq in 1988 all involved overwhelming superiority over the Iranians, and achieved feats that were quite limited in nature.

In 2003, the war you are specifically asking about, Saddam did plan an “active defense”, but once again his force demonstrated itself incapable of doing anything that involved the word active. The army units he had scattered around Iraq did not, as planned, attack coalition supply lines, which were very insecure owing to the aggressive American campaign plan. This led to paradoxical situation - unseen since the Malaya campaign - of a numerically inferior force cutting off and encircling a superior one in the defender’s own country. It is not an exaggeration to say that the majority of Iraqi units in 2003 simply sat around and waited to surrender, and they did that because that was what they had grown accustomed to doing for 20 years.

20: Why was the modernised late Ottoman Army (19th and 20th centuries) such a horrendous failure?, submitted on 2022-01-09 04:10:47+08:00.

—– 20.1 —–2022-01-09 23:24:35+08:00:

Because the way modernization was carried out, it was not progress. The pre-Tanzimat Ottoman military was not an entirely ineffective organization. It achieved considerable success against Russia and Napoleon in the decades preceding the Auspicious Incident. However, it was a dangerous organization, and had overthrown the Sultan numerous times. The main problem Mahmud II was trying to solve with reform was not military ineffectiveness, but political unreliability.

To contemporary military writers, this was very well known. The main British cavalry manual of the 19th century had the following to say about Ottoman reform:

For ages the finest cavalry seen in Europe was indisputably that of the Turks […] The late Sultan Mahmoud must needs have his cavalry disciplined alia Franca, or in Christian fashion; and he imported a number of French, Italian, and German non-commissioned officers to teach his men to ride with long stirrups, and to form, dress, and look like Europeans. […] We have seen, quite in our own day, this effective and really brilliant cavalry reduced, by the spirit of imitation and ill-understood reform, to a condition beneath contempt. […] the Imperial, centralizing tyranny—masked under the names of reform and civilization—which has been raging with more or less intensity these last fifty years, has not left on the surface of the empire a man of hereditary rank and wealth, or any private country gentleman, with the means of restoring the lost breeds, or of supplying such good light cavalry horses as existed in abundance at the commencement of the present century.

Mesut Uyar’s military history of the Ottomans offers more detail on “imperial centralizing tyranny masked under the names of reform and civilization”. In the aftermath of the Auspicious Incident, Sultan Mahmud appointed a “conservative but power hungry” officer, Husrev Pasha, to the equivalent of Chief of the General Staff (Serasker). Though he had no love for modernization, “Husrev Pasha understood quite well that military knowledge was the key to power under Sultan Mahmud. To achieve a complete monopoly on military knowledge, he created a staff of foreign experts, translators, and other useful personnel”. In the subsequent decades, a new class of officers educated in French style known as Mekteblis became the aristocracy of the Ottoman army, dominating senior command posts. Problematically, as von Moltke pointed out when he first inspected the Ottoman army, very little of their education was actually focused on military tactics, strategy, and applications. The Ottoman military curriculum followed the civil-engineering model of the French, but to an even more extreme degree. The new military elite were envisioned by the Sultan to be civil-military plenipotentiaries with the power to centralize the empire under his reign and replace internal opponents.

These internal opponents represented the traditional military establishment of the Ottoman Empire. Besides the Janissaries, the pre-Mahmud Ottoman military establishment was dominated by “Alaylis”, literally “from the regiment”. These men were exceptional soldiers promoted to officer ranks, from which they rose to the highest level of command. These men were tactically competent, but lacked the literary qualifications to be effective staff officers. Shoddy staff work was the problem in the Ottoman army for the entirety of the 18th and 19th centuries: every single war, there was an incident where commanders envisioned a bold flanking maneuver, but it turned into a frontal attack because of bad coordination. However, instead of solving this “Prussian style” (creating an educated staff to advise command officers), the Tanzimat government solved it “reverse Prussian style” (subordinating the former command officers to educated arms of the Sultan). Not nearly enough Mekteblis were trained to actually resolve the staff shortage, and the subordination of the old military hierarchy to these upstarts led to ridiculous situations such as, in the 1877-78 war, Mehmed Ali Pasha paying “more attention to news coming from Europe than to intelligence reports coming from his units, because he did not know enough about his immediate subordinates and his units”.

The Ottoman army that emerged from the reform era was essentially a “switchboard” for the Sultan, obeying his every command to the letter but showing no independent initiative - something very uncharacteristic for an army that had traditionally relied on bold offensive operations. Mesut Uyar’s book is full of sad stories in every chapter like this:

Unfortunately for the Ottoman side, neither Nadir Pasha, who was leading the assault towards Gumru, nor Ali Riza Pasha marching against Ahilkelek, saw the exceptional opportunities that now existed. There was no master plan or coordinated strategic aim. Both commanders were simply advancing for the sake of obeying orders. […] During the Crimean War, except for ineffectual naval bombardments and the transportation of troops, the Ottoman navy remained a self-made prisoner in its own bases.

And it could not be any other way. Even the best Ottoman officers “were not above some of the traditional Ottoman military illnesses, chief among them jealousy and envy-related personal discord, which was mainly the result of an unjust promotion and assignment system that remained largely based on favoritism and patron-client relations”, and the Sultans and their staffs had a bad habit of trying to micromanage every war from the comfort of Istanbul. They frequently went below generals, sending messages directly to their subordinates, and gave them no freedom to act on their own. This culminated in Mesut Uyar’s damning indictment of the Ottoman war effort of 1877-78:

We can safely say that the army of Balkans fought without a commander in chief from the beginning till the end. Istanbul was far from the combat theaters, and they only received glimpses of developments (that were always late or outdated). Unfortunately, neither their military ignorance nor inaccurate intelligence deterred them from meddling in combat affairs, which in the end was instrumental in the creation of chaos.

The army’s remedies to its failures were typical of a delusional, micromanaging leadership and worsened the initiative problem:

The army’s commanding generals were relieved of duty and threatened with court-martial, thereby giving no chance for them to correct their mistakes or learn from experience and, understandably, increasing their reluctance to take calculated lated risks. Oddly, some of the sacked generals were reinstated to command positions after a short while due to the acute shortage of qualified generals. This ridiculous policy of punishment followed by parole not only took away the limited initiative of the generals, confined to the top ranks of the army, while most of the field grade positions were left to Alaylis. Moreover, over, the war showed clearly that this new generation of officers was far from perfect.

Ottoman high command was management from hell. It was simultaneously micromanaging and ignorant, operating with an incomplete or sometimes nonexistent picture of the situation on the ground but insisting it knew better than its field officers. Any failure was immediately punished with firing (then reinstatement the following month) and the drafting and changing of operational plans was completely neurotic, switching from one bold and delusional design to another. The creation of this “switchboard system” was cloaked under the guise of “modernization”, and herein we arrive at a newer interpretation of Ottoman military history, the kind of which has only been developed over the past 10 years. The Ottomans of the Napoleonic Wars were not going into battle with bows and matchlocks: there was broad consensus for technological improvement in Ottoman forces prior to 1826. What there was not consensus for was the subordination of a traditionally autonomous army to the Sultan: “conservatives” within the military correctly interpreted all attempts to build a “modern” army as attempts to create an Imperial guard that would eventually shell their barracks and kill them (in the case of the Janissaries) or reduce them to cogs in a machine (in the case of the Alaylis).

In short, Ottoman reform was very effective at its intended purpose: eliminating the Ottoman military’s threat to the Sultan. Unfortunately, it eliminated the Ottoman military threat to everyone else as well.

—– 20.2 —–2022-01-10 02:27:38+08:00:

Egypt was defended by the Mamluks who were a parallel military establishment. The main success of the Ottoman army in this period was the Siege of Acre and subsequent reconquest of Egypt.

21: How is the Russia-Ukraine crisis re-emerging? I thought as of two weeks ago, Russian forces were withdrawing?, submitted on 2022-01-09 14:15:40+08:00.

—– 21.1 —–2022-01-13 00:24:20+08:00:

That - people don’t understand that Russia holds these massive “flash exercises” all the time. Since Soviet times they’ve been the main test of military readiness, the theory being that unless huge numbers of troops are mobilized without warning, the army has no idea how it will perform in a real war.