Yes and emergent behavior goes both ways. Organizations have many properties that the individuals they’re made up of don’t have and they lack many properties that individuals have. Organizations don’t have feelings. Even in the rare cases when the feelings of the people in those organizations are homogeneous, the organizations almost never manifest those feelings without significant alterations.

Are you seriously comparing Joe Rogan with NATO strategists?

There’s a bit more to it than that.

NATO is a strategic alliance lead by the US. NATO doesn’t have any feelings and isn’t pleased or displeased about anything. Instead it generally does whatever is the US believes is most strategically advantageous.

Those strategist are typically smart people who listen to all kinds of things. They’re definitely careful about what they say though and won’t go around promoting information they don’t want suppressed.

China knows that the US has a lot of economic leverage. They’ve been working very hard to change that and a lot of those efforts have flown under the radar.

BRI is pretty obvious and it’s seen as one of the major reason the ASEAN countries are pivoting towards China. But consider the whole South China Sea issue. Everyone frames it as a contest over sea resources and few people consider the strait of Malacca. It’s a potential choke point for all trade west of Southeast Asia. While China is working to be able to defend that they’re also working with Thailand to build a canal that would bypass the straight of Malacca all together. All of that is primarily to reduce US leverage and those initiatives tend to work more often than they fail.

US is by far it’s largest customer

That’s true and there’s also more to it.

The US is China’s largest single trading partner but China has many many trading partners.

May nations now trade or at least negotiate in blocks. Both ASEAN and the UE, as blocks, do more trade with China than the US does. When it comes to individual nations the US isn’t as far ahead as it might seem. Russia, Vietnam and Taiwan together trade more with China than the US does, despite having a combined GDP that’s a tiny fraction of the US.

The key issue is that China has been working really hard to make itself less dependent on the US. They still have a way to go but they’re much less vulnerable than they were a few years ago.

Just started playing Shapez 2. https://shapez2.com/
Hot damn, is that addictive.

I think that still boils down to attrition and relative size.

From what I’ve seen. Russia has only pulled small numbers of troops out of other theaters to reinforce Kursk. They’ve had an ongoing assault on Avdiivka and they don’t seem to have pulled enough troops out of there to slow down the assault.

The impact, both the severity of the impact and the duration of the impact is likely to hinge on how deep Russias reserves are and their overall production capacity. As near as I can tell, they have both in spades.

From what I’ve seen on Russian industrial production they don’t really care too much if all of Kursk were destroyed. It’s not a strategic location (I think) and all the human and material resources can be easily and quickly replaced.

That obviously involves a lot of guesswork on my part. That’s why I’m wondering if someone with expertise just knows the answers to these kinds of questions (and would hopefully also provide sources).

If that’s the case then Ukraine would need to repeat the Kursk invasion a lot before it made a difference.

Trying to out attrit an opponent with many times the population and GDP is a pretty tall order.

I’m trying to differentiate between things we might like and things that are actually likely.

I’ve been looking for some sort of analysis of this Kursk incursion but have come up empty handed. I’m looking for something along the lines of Markus Reisner’s analyses.

In particular, I’m wondering what the likely paths are to altering the course of the war.

How likely is it that Ukraine will be able to hold this territory? Will they be able to use it as a staging area to launch additional attacks?

Is it likely to alter the artillery equation? Russia currently fires 3-5 times as many artillery shells as Ukraine does. Does this do something like limiting their production rates or their ability to deliver ordinance to the front lines?

Is it likely that Ukraine killed or captured enough Russian troops to impact the broader war?

A phrase like, “That figure is almost as much territory as Russia has seized in Ukraine this year.” kind of implies that there has been a shift in the momentum of the war and that we can expect such announcements more regularly going forward. Is that actually likely?

My pessimistic guess is that this was a brilliant tactical move that will ultimately get steamrolled by Russia’s sheer mass, but I’d love to read an analysis from someone with more expertise.