As with Vietnam, then Iraq and Afghanistan, mainstream media provides very patchy coverage and this is increasingly, year by year, by journalists with little understanding of practicalities. Back in 1972-74, my situation allowed me to attend the weekly intelligence briefs for the Chairman, Chiefs of Staff Committee of the Australian defence forces, approximately the same post as the Chief of Australian Defence Force today. It was not enlightening. Certainly not for me, nor I think for the CCS... a tangle of little bits of tactical information without attempt at strategic interpretation. It is important that the mundane be detailed. But it is important that they acquire meaning. Too often meaning is determined at policy level, far from reality.
A problem that develops is that for the general public boredom sets in and the little local reports lack meaning. Meaning for us is meaning for me. Give me that. I return to the moment when across his cabinet room table a state premier once shouted at me: "Don't give me advice, tell me what to do." Matched in the general populace by "don't tell me, I know."
I have, as a result of ridiculously extensive maturity in my eightieth year, a quantity of experience. I am fortunate in that I still seem to have an awareness of history, that to which new events need to be tied if not to be awash in the slosh of ideology..
Having had my career buggered (I cannot find a more accurate expression) by chronic illness, I do not have behind me a snail's trail of pretentious opinion to inhibit me.
I regard it as essential that to have an opinion on broad strategic matters I must understand the tactical details. I know that for some this is a strange idea.
I trawl for interesting comments but always come back hunting for primary source information. I find myself relying on one daily tactical report on the Ukraine war.
The reliability of this report must be in whether over time it turns out to be right:
1 in short term, when it say this happened today, it is evidently still correct in several days time;
2 in longer term, if thoughts expressed on probable direction of the war are borne out;
3 I am also impressed by word such as "I was wrong" as much as by readiness to refer to opinions from both sides.
People who talk quietly are better value that people with trumpets.
So here's today's assessment from Dima, who is, I think, from Belarus. This is the daily I read every day, when I have the stomach to do so. You will hear some longer term perspectives amid the detail. English is not his first language, probably his third or fourth. Accept his mannerisms:
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