Syria Disintegrating: Part 2

[Josquius]

scary demographics including plummeting birth rates
and disturbingly high mortality and morbidity rates (alcoholism strikes again),

I thought that the birthrate had mostly recovered in the last few years.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure it has.
Though the missing children from the 90s/00s are a problem only just ripening.

[Razgovory]

scary demographics including plummeting birth rates and disturbingly high mortality and morbidity rates (alcoholism strikes again),

I thought that the birthrate had mostly recovered in the last few years.

Another benefit for the 'Stans in the Soviet Union.  You were always getting some influx of people from other parts of the Soviet Union.  Not just workers and their families but whole ethnic groups would be settling out in the middle of nowhere.

[The Minsky Moment]

scary demographics including plummeting birth rates
and disturbingly high mortality and morbidity rates (alcoholism strikes again),

I thought that the birthrate had mostly recovered in the last few years.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure it has.
Though the missing children from the 90s/00s are a problem only just ripening.

Just goes to show that data >>> bs-ing from memory.   

HOWEVER.
Fertility rates are still well below replacement, and Russia is not exactly well positioned as a high quality immigration magnet.  And as Tyr says, as the Yeltsin-era girls reach prime child bearing age another dive is likely.
Also, male life expectancy in the 65 area is nothing to hold a parade about.

[DGuller]

HOWEVER.
Fertility rates are still well below replacement, and Russia is not exactly well positioned as a high quality immigration magnet.  And as Tyr says, as the Yeltsin-era girls reach prime child bearing age another dive is likely.
Also, male life expectancy in the 65 area is nothing to hold a parade about.

As far as immigration goes, I don't know if the data supports it, but Russians are quite concerned about mass immigration from Central Asian countries.  Compared to its neighborhood, Russian economy is quite strong, and there are plenty of former Soviet republics around where Russian is still widely spoken.

[Razgovory]

I don't think that anyone is saying that Russia's hand is hopeless, just that Putin isn't strengthening it.

[mongers]

Well the US has ended up spending $500 million on 5-6 active rebels and some others who're at this very moment negotiation what safe passage they can get in return for their underwear and boots, which make Moscow's involvement so far look relatively cost effective.

Incidentally I watch a CNN/BBC short documentary on a big US carrier (Theodore Roosevelt?) and the captain said they'd dropped 792,000 lbs (360 tons) of ordnance and expended around 10 million gallons of jet fuel doing so (though I'd have thought that would be the total for the all air operations by the carrier during it's deployment and it's probably for both Syria and Iraq missions.

Nothing especially surprising there, as those sort of operations are expensive in many ways, but what interested me was I saw it just after seeing a report elsewhere about ISIL training and indoctrinating thousands, if not tens of thousands of children, some as young as eight, to be fighters and suicide bombers; talk about asymmetric warfare, multi-billion dollar carriers vs children strapped into explosive vests. 

[Admiral Yi]

Sorry to step on your joke, but I heard recently that only 5 of that 500 million has been spent.

[DGuller]

Incidentally I watch a CNN/BBC short documentary on a big US carrier (Theodore Roosevelt?) and the captain said they'd dropped 792,000 lbs (360 tons) of ordnance and expended around 10 million gallons of jet fuel doing so (though I'd have thought that would be the total for the all air operations by the carrier during it's deployment and it's probably for both Syria and Iraq missions.

Nothing especially surprising there, as those sort of operations are expensive in many ways, but what interested me was I saw it just after seeing a report elsewhere about ISIL training and indoctrinating thousands, if not tens of thousands of children, some as young as eight, to be fighters and suicide bombers; talk about asymmetric warfare, multi-billion dollar carriers vs children strapped into explosive vests. 

I think that is a problem for modern armies.  What is the point of being the most powerful military in the world if exercising that power is economically prohibitive?

[dps]

Incidentally I watch a CNN/BBC short documentary on a big US carrier (Theodore Roosevelt?) and the captain said they'd dropped 792,000 lbs (360 tons) of ordnance and expended around 10 million gallons of jet fuel doing so (though I'd have thought that would be the total for the all air operations by the carrier during it's deployment and it's probably for both Syria and Iraq missions.

Nothing especially surprising there, as those sort of operations are expensive in many ways, but what interested me was I saw it just after seeing a report elsewhere about ISIL training and indoctrinating thousands, if not tens of thousands of children, some as young as eight, to be fighters and suicide bombers; talk about asymmetric warfare, multi-billion dollar carriers vs children strapped into explosive vests. 

I think that is a problem for modern armies.  What is the point of being the most powerful military in the world if exercising that power is economically prohibitive?

Maybe we just should send the 11 year old from the other thread to the Middle East.

[mongers]

Incidentally I watch a CNN/BBC short documentary on a big US carrier (Theodore Roosevelt?) and the captain said they'd dropped 792,000 lbs (360 tons) of ordnance and expended around 10 million gallons of jet fuel doing so (though I'd have thought that would be the total for the all air operations by the carrier during it's deployment and it's probably for both Syria and Iraq missions.

Nothing especially surprising there, as those sort of operations are expensive in many ways, but what interested me was I saw it just after seeing a report elsewhere about ISIL training and indoctrinating thousands, if not tens of thousands of children, some as young as eight, to be fighters and suicide bombers; talk about asymmetric warfare, multi-billion dollar carriers vs children strapped into explosive vests. 

I think that is a problem for modern armies.  What is the point of being the most powerful military in the world if exercising that power is economically prohibitive?

The draft to fight ISIL?

Killing Western and especially American soldiers on the ground in Syria/Iraq is exactly what they want, so that's should be nearly the last play.

Maybe the West/NATO should find more proxies to fight the war on the ground for them?

[mongers]

Sorry to step on your joke, but I heard recently that only 5 of that 500 million has been spent.

Foreign policy says over $41 million to get to those 5-6 plus the 100+ recently set there currently falling apart as a unit.

What's the guarantee that the remaining $450 million of the program is going to be significantly more effective over the next year or so?

[DGuller]

Incidentally I watch a CNN/BBC short documentary on a big US carrier (Theodore Roosevelt?) and the captain said they'd dropped 792,000 lbs (360 tons) of ordnance and expended around 10 million gallons of jet fuel doing so (though I'd have thought that would be the total for the all air operations by the carrier during it's deployment and it's probably for both Syria and Iraq missions.

Nothing especially surprising there, as those sort of operations are expensive in many ways, but what interested me was I saw it just after seeing a report elsewhere about ISIL training and indoctrinating thousands, if not tens of thousands of children, some as young as eight, to be fighters and suicide bombers; talk about asymmetric warfare, multi-billion dollar carriers vs children strapped into explosive vests. 

I think that is a problem for modern armies.  What is the point of being the most powerful military in the world if exercising that power is economically prohibitive?

Maybe we just should send the 11 year old from the other thread to the Middle East.

[Berkut]

Sometimes I get the feeling that the USSR really was a bad deal for many of the republics involved.

I'm not sure about that.  It was definitely a bad deal for the Baltic republics, but for the others, it's very debatable.  It's not like the other republics were all that developed, and were guaranteed to flourish if not for Russia. 

Well, maybe maybe not - but it seems pretty clear they were guaranteed NOT to flourish under Soviet rule, so a "maybe" would be an improvement.

Forced "flourishing" under false economic pretense is no long term help.

And once you go from Eastern Europe to *stans, USSR starts looking pretty damn good.

In the long run? Really?

Not sure I buy that.

[DGuller]

You have to separate USSR from communism to have a meaningful discussion like this.  Obviously USSR hasn't managed to disassociate itself from communism before it fell apart, so no, in the long run, no entity run under communism would flourish beyond a certain point.  That said, communists did bring about education and industrialization to largely agrarian economy, albeit at an unacceptable human cost, so in the short run they accelerated development.

But if Gorbachev were more adroit at reforming USSR, would eastern Europe or stans be better off being part of the same country?  I think a lot of reasonable people can justifiably answer affirmatively (though I personally don't really know).  It's a misconception to think of USSR is an empire with Russia as a colonizing power, and the other 14 republics as colonies.  It was really conceptualized as a mutually-beneficial union and written as such, which is why it all so easily fell apart when republics wanted out.  They actually had the right to do it.

[Berkut]

Oh, I don't at all think of the USSR as Russia plus some pissed off colonies. Indeed, I actually think that Communism was largely attempted in basically "good faith". An abject failure, maybe even so abject as to be unfair to the basic ideals of Communism in fact, but still I think the people who ran the USSR, within the normal bounds of human shittiness, did so with the idea that what they were doing was beneficial to those involved, including the SSRs.

I think the idea that as late as Gorbachev one could come up with a "If only they had..." scenario is pretty farcical however. The success or failure of Soviet Communism had long since been determined before that, and no amount of even theoretically amazing reform could change it at that point.