Bayesian.

My video today (it should be available for everyone in an hour or so) talks about what this blog and my YT especially are all about from the inception. Sure, visuals, explosions, drones, tanks, aircraft and red and blue arrows on maps (which are as far removed from real military maps as possible, with some exceptions you all know) that the nature of war and REAL combat has been completely drowned in this tactical minutiae by all kinds of fanboys who never served a day in uniform as a grunt, forget about officer rank with real military experience. At some point all this pseudo-military noise gets to you and I used today's lull in "political news" to deliver some doze of war reality as seen from those who plan and execute those plans in REAL war. 

So, the primer to those who never heard about Markov Chains or Bayes and Bayesian Networks. This is not difficult on a conceptual level. 

Bayesian statistics combines prior knowledge with new data to make decisions. It provides a flexible way to update beliefs as new information becomes available. Unlike traditional methods, Bayesian statistics quantifies uncertainty and provides a more dynamic view of data. This article explains basic ideas like prior knowledge, likelihood, and updated beliefs. It also shows how Bayesian statistics is used in different areas. 

Here is a key and also the entrance into Operational ART. Why it is called such.

Bayesian statistics provides a probabilistic framework for reasoning under uncertainty. It is valuable in scenarios with limited data or prior knowledge. At its core is Bayes’ Theorem:

Here: 

• P(θ∣D) is the posterior probability: The updated probability of the parameter θ after observing the data D
• P(D∣θ): is the likelihood: The probability of observing the data D given the parameter θ
• P(θ) is the prior probability: The initial belief about the parameter θ before considering the data
• P(D) is the marginal likelihood: The overall probability of the observed data D for all possible values of θ

Do you see what is highlighted yellow and underlined? Well I will repeat again what real military professionals are dealing with--RESOLUTION of UNCERTAINTIES. And here comes the main issue--why West loses its wars. Speaking plainly--it has fucked up beliefs both in enemy's capabilities and gross overestimation of own ones. This clusterfuck hasn't been fixed, it is impossible to fix. Not with present crop of NATO planning officer corps which is largely incompetent, arrogant and lacking military culture required for the war of the XXI century. It has been proven empirically time after time since 2022. It is institutional catastrophe. So, here is my little introduction to COGNET and how you POPULATE networks and how handling beliefs (yes, Bayesian Networks are belief networks) and uncertainties separates a true operational artist from some three-star ass-kisser. This is your frame of mind you need to understand what is in my today's video about how operational planning is done. 

About Ust-Luga ...

 ... again. Here it is--today. It is really easy to debunk 404 and West's propaganda today

Many still cannot grasp the scale of it. Here it is. 

That is why lucky hit on one terminal (the port has six of them) and lighting some oil (which is usually extinguished fast) doesn't change operations much and Ust-Luga continues to operate. I speak about it in my today's video, which should be up soon, and about vicious circle of media butt-hurt and lies, such as Reuters. Finland, however, should get used to her status of a pawn in a serious geopolitical game. More is coming. 

Yes, We Know ...

 ... it takes "5 hours for Russian tanks to be in Kiev", per Mr.Trump. Obviously, Donnie has a very peculiar relations with geography and with the movement of armor columns on march, but here is what's wrong with his "beautiful" assessment. For starters--here is a theoretical and shortest distance from Sumy to Kiev at which Russians theoretically can "march".

As you can see from the map "as crow flies" distance is around 300 kilometers, if to imagine that Russians attended DJT school of advanced military studies and want to cover this distance on tracks (and wheels) alone--doable, but kills motor resource of the hardware--the speed of the armor column of such nature could be, and that is a good result, on average about 25-30 kilometers per hour. So, if we take 300 kilometers and divide it by 30, we get around 10 hours. But that is theory. 

If DJT wants to have an idea (of course he doesn't, he knows it all) what does it mean to move motor rifle battalion on march, here is a good primer from ... Soviet Defense Ministry on how to plan (battalion is the first tactical unit which actually has own staff) and move in column. It is in Russian, but a lot of it is understood in terms of CO Decision, planning and shit like that. Simple stuff, no math is needed for DJT. 

This is BEFORE the battalion does anything with piu piu and other exciting shit. A model of moving a whole damn tank army when need be--is a 320 kilometer march (in one day this formation of 951 tanks and self-propelled guns managed to cover more than 100 km) of Pavel Rotmistrov's 5th Tank Army which engaged Hausser's panzer Corps literally on the go. Rotmistrov's army lost almost a third of its tanks during this march. Pay attention to this chapter of Hausser's life--a reason why the US Army has no idea about the war on the Eastern Front and strongly believes that it won WW II. 

Following the war, Hausser participated in the work of the U.S. Army Historical Division, where under the guidance of Franz Halder, German generals wrote World War II operational studies for the U.S. Army, first as POWs and then as employees. 

But I digress. So, you get the idea about what it would be to move an army size formation to Kiev. Granted Russians want to take the city of almost 3 million, which they don't--only American generals who listened to Wehrmacht and SS generals fairy tales would believe that Russians want Kiev. But I am on record--operational planning? Nah, they don't know what this is. 

Meanwhile, the warm up at the front is ongoing today--Konstantinovka-Pokrovsk axes. 

More from today;

You see, Russians made a slight and very pleasant mistake, they slightly OVERestimated the staying power of the VSU and broke through faster than anticipated. Hey, not bad. What you see on the maps is called putting the enemy on the split and this exhausting pattern will continue until the order is given. What this order will be, we just have to wait and see. Tomorrow Donnie will be trying to "scare" Putin, LOL)) Donnie, get real military professionals into your Cabinet, albeit it is too late now. 

About White Noise, Again.

Larry is doing a superb job of breaking through the white noise and tactical minutiae constantly, now Saker did a good write up on all this tactical-operational BS. 

In Russian there is an expression “this is unpleasant/upsetting but not dangerous” (это обидно, но не опасно).  I think that this fully applies here: nobody in Russia is particularly happy about what is taking place (except maybe the Russian General Staff IF we assume that this is all a big trap the Russians deliberately created, and there is some evidence for that as the force concentrations prior to this attack were reported by numerous observers, so it was hardly a secret that the Ukronazis were about to attack somewhere in the northeast).  But we need to really keep aware of the proportions of what is happening: after six months of warfare, this is the first and only Ukrainian attack which shows some real capabilities, and it is all limited to a rather narrow corridor within the Russian tactical defenses only!  As I said, these are strong tactical attacks and clashes, but the size of them does not even amount to a real “battle” or “offensive”, at least not in the military sense of the word.

So, it is a tedious task to explain to laymen all intricacies of operations, real ones, and what comes in their planning. But I will add even more gravitas to this whole thing--strategy, a real one, not some BS "taught" in political science courses. 

Here is me yesterday trying to draw the larger scheme of things:

Defining this whole affair as a white noise created by tactical minutiae. The hardest thing in life is grasping this seemingly simple principle of the "in the grand scheme of things". What we are facing today is a complete remake of the world order and, effectively, a wrap-up of the 20th century with real victors coming back for their spoils. But describing this is a whole other matter and that is why I tell my publisher about the new book--not yet, not yet...