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Kellie Armstrong an Alliance party MLA for the Strangford constituency.
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I saw a load of comments from commentators online, from talking heads on radio and TV, from people on Twitter, that the mobilisation ordered by Putin last week to try to shore up his invasion of Ukraine was stupid. It was stupid to try to mobilise people with no military experience, it was stupid to think they could have any effect against high-precision, long-range weapons that the Ukrainians are now getting.
It was stupid not to consider that they would have no experienced officers, it was stupid to not understand that this lack of leadership is a key reason why Russia is losing, it was stupid not to consider the destabilising effect that this order would have in the population in Russia, it was stupid to have all the skilled young men fleeing over the closest border, it was stupid, stupid, stupid.
I’m not convinced.
This made me think of Elon Musk’s Hyperloop. In case you don’t know, Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla, who is listed as the world’s richest man, has proposed and apparently started working on a high-speed mass transport system that would involve a sort of train inside a vacuum tube. With all the air evacuated from the tube and no wind resistance, people could be transported at over a thousand km per hour, as fast a jet liner. This has gained him huge publicity, and quite a bit of political traction.
Musk has also proposed underground tunnels and rail systems that would move cars around with huge efficiency, and argued that he could construct tunnels and tubes like these to connect major American and world cities, and would begin by connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles, with travel times that seem fantastic compared to the driving times in car-choked southern California.
Fantastic, in that it is a fantasy. There have been no shortage of people pointing out that this project is impossible. It will never happen. The cost of tunnelling is hugely expensive, very time-consuming and a legal nightmare in densely-populated areas like California with disputes about title, risk of subsidence, not to mention the safety risks of having accidents and fires in inaccessible tunnels, and the potential for huge congestion at entry and exit points.
The idea of a train in a vacuum tunnel is even more hot nonsense. There doesn’t even exist a proposal for how air might be evacuated from such a vast space as an intercity tunnel, let alone any equipment that could do it. And even if that could be achieved, there is no design proposal, there isn’t even any material known to humanity that could withstand the gigantic stresses of the outside atmosphere bearing down on the vacuum, and even if you could propose a design and materials, it would be certain to include internal struts, which would make it impossible to run a train through the space.
If you’re interested, there’s no shortage of YouTube videos on this, ridiculing Musk’s plans, and they make a good education on the physics, the engineering and the logistics that show that this proposal is just totally impossible for a whole host of reasons – and along the way, you can have a good chuckle at just how stupid Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, was to propose this in the first place. Check out the channels of Thunderfoot or Kurtzgesagt if you are want to laugh along.
But here’s the thing. He’s the world’s richest man. Could he really be that stupid? Being the world’s richest man certainly doesn’t prove that you are the world’s smartest man, Musk has been lucky in life, for sure, but luck alone can’t explain his success. He can’t be that stupid, can he?
He can’t, and he isn’t.
If someone who objectively can be seen to be smart seems to be doing something stupid, maybe you should reconsider who it is who doesn’t understand what’s going on.
California High-Speed Rail is a state-owned, state of California-owned, rail project currently under construction, from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and also planned to extend from Sacramento to San Diego and link many other cities. It’s a real project, it’s being built now using real technology, it will run real trains on real lines at speeds of up to 350 km an hour.
And, as I said, it’s owned by the state of California, it’s a response to public pressure against traffic chaos and car-dependency.
And, as I said, Elon Musk owns a car company, Tesla. California High-Speed Rail is a direct competitor for the motor car, as would be any similar future projects that might be inspired by its success, and the success of high-speed rail in the US would hurt Tesla’s sky-high share price, which much of Musk’s wealth depends on.
There was, of course, much controversy in California about the development of the high-speed rail system, a lot of political inertia and opposition had to be overcome, and no small amount of that came from the fact the people were hearing about Musk’s hyperloop, which sounded much better, cheaper and faster.
Musk has been talking about this for ten years, although his company supposedly developing the system has less than 200 employees, and doesn’t seem to be doing much other than publicity stunts. But, just maybe, that’s the whole point. Maybe Musk isn’t as dumb as Thunderfoot or Kurtzgesagt or all the other nerdy analysts make out.
Maybe Musk looks at the hype going around in a loop as a pretty good-value way of undermining support for the public transport system that threatens his vast fortune.
And as for Putin, maybe he’s not as dumb as all the commentators think either. Sure, he is being protected by his lackeys from all the bad news; sure, he thinks the world smells of fresh paint, because wherever he goes is freshly painted, but a lot of his enemies are dead and he’s not, yet, so it’s worth considering that he may not be all that stupid.
First of all, it’s clear that the mobilisation is bigger, maybe much bigger, than the 300,000 announced. It is perhaps 1.2m men, but it could be significantly more. It’s also being concentrated in poorer, rural and particularly ethnic minority areas of Russia, of which there are a lot.
There has been a lot of chatter that the failing war in Ukraine could lead to the break up of Russia, maybe like how the Soviet Union broke up 30 years ago, or maybe more violently. Personally, I think that’s unlikely, but it’s possible that, rightly or wrongly, Putin doesn’t – and if you were afraid of that happening, what better thing to do than to gather up all the fighting-age men and not even to send them to Ukraine, just send them to training camps thousands of kilometres from home, where they don’t know the people, don’t know the lie of the land, maybe don’t speak the language and keep them busy there.
And maybe you’ve seen all the videos of people – mostly young, educated men – in traffic jams at every border crossing out of Russia, from Finland to Mongolia, buying up every available flight out of the country. Young, educated men, the exact demographic and, self-selecting, the exact cohort from that demographic that is most opposed to Putin, and in a position to rebel. Sure, he’s tanking the economy, but if you were Putin, would you really be that heartbroken to see that the people who might be taking to the streets of Moscow to oust you, are instead taking to every other means of transport to leave the country?
And for the few, the very few, who are protesting against the war, they are carted off by the police, and many of the males among them are being served with their conscription notices right there in the police stations and put on a transport to what passes for military training camps.
So even before a single untrained, conscript with a rusty World War II-era rifle sets a leaky boot on Ukrainian territory, the mobilisation has helped Putin with a lot of his problems.
That’s not to say he won’t still have a world of problems, and one of them might be underestimating his enemy. But that’s a mistake that a lot of people should be careful about making.
