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Gaza war (part 4) - Israel's quiet turnaround

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 After 6 months of the ground war, I want to look at how Israel fared so far. Israel had the following objectives: Operational: 1. Destroy Hamas’s capacity to be threat. 2. Get their hostages back 3. Handle any threat from Hezbollah, West Bank, or others while operating against Hamas. Strategic: 1. Put any talk of a Palestinian state on the back burner (as it has been after Saudi and UAE     normalized relations with Israel) Hamas had the following objectives: Operational: 1. Demonstrate that Israel was not invincible (either on Oct 7, or in subsequent fighting).   2. Get back some of their prisoners in exchange for hostages. Strategic: 1. Force the world community to seriously discuss the creation of a Palestinian state. 2. Start a larger war against Israel with the participation of Hezbollah, Iranian proxies and other      Palestinians in the west bank. My view, as expressed in part 1 of this series, was that if the IDF suffered 10,000 irrecoverable casualties (d
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Ukraine war part 7 - After 2 years

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In part 6 of this series, I had made 2 major sets of assumptions: https://rpdeans.blogspot.com/2023/10/ukraine-war-6-logistics-politics-and.html Manpower : Ukraine had deployed all its trained manpower and all volunteers (1 million), to be left with an army of around 500,000 men, which is lower than Russia’s and of worse quality &    Plans : Russia would conduct several small attacks across the front – most likely in Avdeevka, giving the Ukrainians a choice of either defending and accepting an unfavorable casualty ratio, or giving up ground.  These assumptions were correct. Russian operations, particularly the capture of Avdeevka have exacerbated Ukraine’s manpower problems and worsened loss ratios.  Trends in losses : What is significant with the current manpower numbers, is that they have, in my view, crossed a tipping point for Ukraine and have moved loss ratios more sharply in favor of Russia. This is inevitable if the bulk of the Ukrainian army now consists of conscripted
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The real Ed tech opportunity

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  There are as many recent articles on the fall of Byju’s – the world’s most valued ed tech startup, as they were on the rise of Byju earlier. I have commented on the deluded thinking around unicorns in my earlier blog posts. https://rpdeans.blogspot.com/2023/08/the-coming-unicorn-meltdown.html While Byju’s had problems with corporate governance, ethical concerns around its selling, unrealistic (in retrospect) expectations around growth from investors – as do other startups, I want to talk about opportunities I believe Ed-tech startups are missing and how Ed-tech, if does what it was originally intended to do, can transform education in India and with it the quality of our workforce and ability to compete. What tech is supposed to do :   The internet and the tech startups around it, were supposed to transform business by doing the following: -Reduce costs by replicating data or infrastructure (e.g. textbooks or classrooms) digitally, thereby  improving quality (i.e. high quality
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Gaza war (part 3). 100 days of the ground war. An update

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100 days into the ground war (excluding the ceasefire after a month of fighting) is a good time to review the assumptions made in the first 2 parts of this series and provide and update on the fighting. As was the case in the first 2 parts of this series. I am not commenting on the moral or political aspects of the conflict, as that has been commented on at length in any number of fora, representing a wide spectrum of opinion. There are however military and military related geopolitical aspects of this war that are inadequately covered, which is a gap I’d like to fill. The 2 previous posts in this series: https://rpdeans.blogspot.com/2023/10/what-israeli-invasion-of-gaza-might.html https://rpdeans.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-gaza-war-by-numbers-2-months-later.html In my past post, at the end of Dec, I had speculated that brigades from the 36 th and 162 nd division of the IDF would move out for rest and refitting, while being replaced by fresh units. This was based on the high number o
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