Bil Hardenberger

Worth a read as it links into the previous points on "traditional mass" and deployment of such and the problems they will likely encounter in the future given what has been seen in Ukraine
https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/May-June-2023/Graveyard-of-Command-Posts/
P

Not buying the mass argument in the least.  Traditional military mass has gone to pieces completely in this war.  I do not think it would have mattered how much infantry the RA could generate - it did nothing for them at Bakhmut.  They had firepower mass at Severodonetsk and it mattered little.  They have overwhelming mass advantage in the North in the first month and it got stopped cold by a much smaller force.  Kherson, Kharkiv, mass ratios all over the place and none I can recognize.
One thing with respect to mass that does seem to matter is it 1) distribution, 2) its connectedness, and 3) its information empowerment.  We have seen again and again where the RA concentrates higher traditional military mass and gets hammered because of the ISR asymmetry.
If I was going to draw a lesson on mass for this war it would be “less physical, more effective information, more AI, more synthetic”.   The author of this piece is drawing exactly the wrong conclusions in my opinion.

So not to pile on and beat up.  I get the position, video after video of Russian saps getting blown up may seem excessive and masturbatory, and for some it is. However, every video gives off information. Some is just noise, or repetitive.  While others are gold and constitute key indicators which when confirmed by other observations can point to trends.  Trends lead to broader deductions and assessments - this is not a single “keyhole” it is thousands of them.  In most keyholes the milk maid is bathing, but then you start to notice the copy of Karl Marx next to the tub.
ISW and other OS intelligence analysts are doing exactly what professional military are doing.  Looking at all the “war porn” and pulling out trends and indicators that tell a larger story.  Oryx is not counting blow up vehicles because people get their jollies seeing blown up Russian tanks.  They are doing it because individual losses sum up to larger attrition trend which chart the course of a conflict.
This is micro-analysis and has pretty much set this group apart - or did, other groups have caught up.  Example: back in the early days of the war the majority of open source assessment (and frankly military as well) were expecting this war to take a predictable course.  A rapid overwhelming Russian invasion, shock and collapse of the UA, and a drawn out insurgency against a puppet Ukrainian political regime.  It was places like this forum where micro-observation first challenged a lot of macro assumptions.  We saw war porn, but it added up to something going very wrong for the RA.  In fact it pointed to something even more fundamental shifting in warfare itself.
This was not a one-shot deal.  Micro-analysis backed up be expertise has kept us well ahead of the pack in all phases of this war.  Phase II did not become a protracted set of urban sieges - the RA logistical losses and Ukrainian resistance demonstrated that.  Phase III did not see an RA “cauldron” despite their use of WW1 levels of massed fires.  Phase IV the UA counter offensive did shock us at its scope but one could see that this was indeed a collapse of the RA operationally on two fronts (one slow, one fast).  Phase V - Op Russian Leg Humping: was going nowhere - one need only follow the famous “battle of the T” to see why.  And we will use it for Phase VI to try and understand how the UA offensive is unfolding.
So while some may only see Russian sods getting blown up.   I see: poor basic field craft in poorly constructed trench lines which suggest basic training shortfalls.  No effective C-UAS counter measures on the RA side.    The evolution of drone warfare throughout.  The big fact that Russia has still not been able to create information denial (let alone control) in the battle space. HVT losses within the Russian operational system - C2 nodes, A2AD platforms, engineering and logistics.  Failures in RA C4ISR…the list goes on.  I do not see this through a single war porn keyhole, I see them through thousands of them.
Are these view’s skewed?  Definitely.  But the fact that we do not see thousand of videos of Russian UAS blowing off UA heads is telling in itself (does anyone think the Russian info sphere would show any restraint in this?).  Open source is “open”.  In the end it is about filtering noise and trying to hear signal - and again, this is exactly what ISW or any other public analysis platform is doing, along with professional military.  We are just doing it in house - this is how the sausage is made.  What bakes my noodle is that in my lifetime a large virtual collective is able to conduct this sort of work, and demonstrate accurate assessments (more than just a lucky once or twice) is game changing.  
In twenty years we will all be old, senile or dead. However an another group of young(ish) folks will do this for another war but they will likely have AI support (we have already seen it here in its infancy).  They will have access to even more raw information but will have a better ability to use it - they may very well be directly involved in the prosecution of the war and not just sitting in chairs on the sideline.  We are at the beginning of an age of Open Source Warfare - all those keyholes are “pixels” in reality.

Can’t say I’m surprised about this:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/05/politics/russia-jamming-himars-rockets-ukraine/index.html
Jamming GPS is a very effective tactic versus UAVs, interesting that the Russians are using it effectively versus HIMARS and Excalibur. Bet the Russians are losing a ton of jammers now. 

Can’t say I’m surprised about this:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/05/politics/russia-jamming-himars-rockets-ukraine/index.html
Jamming GPS is a very effective tactic versus UAVs, interesting that the Russians are using it effectively versus HIMARS and Excalibur. Bet the Russians are losing a ton of jammers now. 

Can’t say I’m surprised about this:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/05/politics/russia-jamming-himars-rockets-ukraine/index.html
Jamming GPS is a very effective tactic versus UAVs, interesting that the Russians are using it effectively versus HIMARS and Excalibur. Bet the Russians are losing a ton of jammers now. 

Can’t say I’m surprised about this:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/05/politics/russia-jamming-himars-rockets-ukraine/index.html
Jamming GPS is a very effective tactic versus UAVs, interesting that the Russians are using it effectively versus HIMARS and Excalibur. Bet the Russians are losing a ton of jammers now. 

Can’t say I’m surprised about this:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/05/politics/russia-jamming-himars-rockets-ukraine/index.html
Jamming GPS is a very effective tactic versus UAVs, interesting that the Russians are using it effectively versus HIMARS and Excalibur. Bet the Russians are losing a ton of jammers now. 

Can’t say I’m surprised about this:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/05/politics/russia-jamming-himars-rockets-ukraine/index.html
Jamming GPS is a very effective tactic versus UAVs, interesting that the Russians are using it effectively versus HIMARS and Excalibur. Bet the Russians are losing a ton of jammers now. 

Can’t say I’m surprised about this:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/05/politics/russia-jamming-himars-rockets-ukraine/index.html
Jamming GPS is a very effective tactic versus UAVs, interesting that the Russians are using it effectively versus HIMARS and Excalibur. Bet the Russians are losing a ton of jammers now. 

I think the problem with this sort of point of view is that it still assumes that annihilation through manoeuvre was possible. And even if it was, would it have been worth the costs at that point in the war? 
Russia got itself out of Kherson; however, 1) we do not know the full scope of attritional losses over time - how much critical equipment did they leave behind? and 2) how do those stack up with Ukrainian gains compared to their loses?  This point of view mirrors more than a few western pundits as “lost opportunity = loss”, but skips over the cost-benefit equation on retaking a regional capital essentially unopposed.  I strongly suspect that the UA looking to a longer game was not interested in bagging whatever was left of the RA at Kherson because the cost was too high for the gains.  Worst scenario for Kherson was a large urban battle that would still be raging.  If Ukraine had boxed the RA up into that city that is what likely would have happened.  Instead Ukraine left the back door open so the RA would simply leave - it was less about killing Russians there and more about liberating Ukrainians.
We keep making the error of looking for a western style victory in this thing.  I have seen more bold offensive arrows, both red and blue, being drawn all over the place.  What we have seen though is bold arrows of red collapse, with a blue follow up.  This is a war of Russian collapses and contractions, some better controlled than others.  This is what victory looks like, yet we keep demanding a Gulf War metric as an indicator of success, which does not track in this environment.  The losses are over time, erosion, not fast forced crushing.  It is the environment that drives this - death of surprise, mass dilemmas, long range and precision.   We are talking about a war where both sides have had to relegate their armor to indirect fire roles - something is happening in a fundamental way.
So what?  Well this does not mean that the 30k prisoner haul is impossible in this war, or the bold strokes we all want to see.  However, I strongly suspect that they are going to be a finishing stroke/final note at the end as a result of corrosive warfare, not the cause of the end itself.  The core warfare principle we in the west adhere to will become a punctuation mark, not the primary means of delivery of victory.  We should not hold Ukraine to a standard of success that I am not sure even exists anymore in this sort of operating environment.  This war is still about killing Russians, but it is all over the place, all the time, not in a single concentrated area.  Why, because concentration kills in this environment unless you have already eroded an opponent into collapse - be it slow or fast.
In the end Kherson along with Kharkiv were major corrosive warfare victories.  At Kherson the UA with nearly 1:1 force ratio pushed the RA across a major river because they made their position untenable.  They retook a provincial capital of 300k taking very few losses which was a major strategic blow to Russia - no one could call this war for Russia after Kharkiv and Kherson (or at least no one credible).  We should not apply our own western experience to this war because we have not fought one like this since Korea, and the rules of the game have shifted dramatically since then.
I for one am surprised that Kherson did not turn into a protracted bloodbath, there was a lost RA opportunity that speaks to an idea that perhaps Russian Will is not made of steel.  Now if Russia is finally so badly beat up that the old rules of warfare apply - a la Iraqi Army - then yippee!  But that 1) does not validate our western doctrines as “right all along” because that final stroke took a year of broad scope high speed attrition pruning ops and 2) will be a signpost, not a decisive point.  The result of months of shaping and eroding that has already occurred over the winter. 

Russia already did this from 2014-2022 and the sky did not fall.  They are very likely to be complete a@@holes no matter how this thing goes.  What I disagree with is the idea that Russia is somehow going to be willing to sustain complete Western isolation and grinding losses for the next century.  There is a lot of "Forever Russian Bear" myths floating around and this just feeds into them and gives Russia far too much credit and stamina.  It also runs paradoxical to other narratives of "backward Russians who wont do anything so long as they are fed vodka and propaganda", because decades of a slow burning war is a lot of "something".
"It's up to the loser to decide when a war ends"...nonsense.  Gulf War One, Korea, WW1, all of these were ended when both sides decided to quit, not the "loser".  Gulf War, US coalition decided to stop at Iraqi border.  Korea, both sides decided to sign the cease-fire.  WWI, Allies did not invade into Germany for a full occupation driven victory.  The loser decides when to stop resisting and the winner has to decide when to stop winning.   The history of warfare is full of examples where the winner went "good enough" and tied the thing off.  And plenty where the loser refused to quit and slowly petered out until they wasted away and were unable to continue - like the entirety of indigenous resistance in NA.
What Russia doesn't have to do is normalize with the West, this is not the same as negotiation.  We will very likely arm the ever living daylights out of Ukraine after this war and invest very heavily in its reconstruction.  One thing that has stuck in my throat since this whole thing began is a myth that the West is somehow weak and barely holding on against the might of an unassailable Russia.  "Russia will win this in a matter of weeks" (they did not), "Russian mass will eventually wear Ukraine out" (it did not), "Russia has escalation dominance" (they did not, we did), "Russia will decide when this war is over." no they won't all sides will have to decide that.  We could be fighting a containment and compression war against Russia for years and based on how the last one of those went I would be very concerned to be Russian right now. 

You really can if one is trying to negotiate towards a workable victory.  I think what a lot of pundits are missing is that the West (US in particular) need Russia to lose - just enough.  This drives an incremental approach of slow eroding pressure as opposed to a coherent campaign plan that sees Russia tossed back over the border completely by X date.
As of today and the pending Ukrainian offensive the risk from a western perspective is not Ukraine doing enough, it is doing too much or going too far.  I disagree with the idea that Russia can sustain a 5 year war.  It ignores the main principle of corrosive warfare which is eroding an opponents operational system faster and better than they can repair it.  Russian forces would need a serious inject of external support to shore up its failing system.  So unless China steps in and gets really serious about reestablishing a level of symmetry, Russian is on the wrong end of a devolution curve.  
In the 21st century one cannot simply stuff ill-trained and I’ll-supported troops in holes and hold ground.  Not if your LOCs remain in clear view and actionable ranges.  Your armor is blunted, your AirPower denied and your guns are wearing out.  We are about to see how well a conventional defence hold up under these conditions and my bet is “not well”.
The risk of Ukraine over-reach is not small.  It could create shock and panic at political levels in Russia, and those conditions are when major mistakes start being made. This entire thing has hallmarks of threading a pretty tricky strategic needle.  It may feel good to see ATACMS hammering everything in depth but it could lead to an uncontrollable Russian collapse, which we have discussed at length, and clearly regardless of our opinions this is a serious concern to those in political leadership in the West.
To summarize - slow motion collapse with off-ramps = good.  Uncontrolled collapse in a suicidal game of chicken = bad.  The strategy we are seeing is aligned with the first one.
The_Capt’s second axiom - “strategy must not only encompass a theory of one’s own victory, it must also encompass a theory of an opponents defeat.”

You know the more I think about this the angrier I get.  This is an egregious double standard against Ukraine coming from the “experts”.
The course of this war for Russia - 
I will invade and crush you…fail
Ok, now I will create 20 sieges and crush you…fail.
Ok, getting serious now.  I will WW1 blast you in the South - we really only wanted that anyway, create cauldrons and crush you…fail.
Ok, ok, you asked for this, I will create multiple Stalingrads on defence and you will die trying to take your country back…fail.
Alright you have really ticked me off now, prepare for human waves and a winter offensive…fail.
That is it!  I am all out of patience and now you are in for it.  Prepare to die on the Putin Line!  (And western pundits are buying into it)
Meanwhile “Ukraine is barely hanging on and maybe we should rethink about support because they have not driven the RA into the sea yet.”  I mean c’mon, with friends like these…

Well I can’t speak to “smug” - perhaps you meant “informed”, but we have been seeing these sorts of reports since this war began.  Some come from a place of honest fear that Russian superiority will assert itself, others from hope that it will (e.g. Macgregor).
As to the “hundreds of Russian aircraft”, well the other factor is the Russian willingness to lose them.  Unlike mobs of poorly trained men, Russia has a limited amount of effective fix wing aircraft and a big @ss sky that it needs to control, largest sovereign airspace in the world.  So I expect, much like this entire war to date, the Russia’s willingness to throw its remaining AirPower away in a denied airspace is pretty damn low.
As to your points:
- not sure where you are getting “easy” from, nothing easy about any of this.  What it won’t be is “impossible” which is what both the OP and articles seem to suggest.  Seems like many fear/hope for the opening of the Somme.
- We really need to get over WW2 and the Russian defence myths.  In this war Russia has failed on defence pretty consistently.  We had no siege of Kherson, or Kharkiv.  Instead we have seen three operational level collapses.  The biggest issue with the “bloody Russian defence” is that they are not defending Russian soil, this is a discretionary invasion war in another country.  I am sure some units will dig in but a lot of others - now mauled by whatever this crazy winter assault was - are likely going to buckle early and fast.  We should see a new line being drawn somewhere but I suspect it will be a scramble back to the Crimea bottleneck and an Eastern line N-S.
- I am a military engineer by trade and frankly have no idea how obstacles will work in this environment.  Given the effects of corrosive warfare that we have seen so far, I am not even sure these will work as viable investments.  The Russians are clearly thinking “force multipliers” but there are basic calculus’s in the wind right now.
- If Russia had the ability to conduct deep operational battle (e.g. static bridges, rail etc) via AirPower, then why has it waited until now to use it?  It bled itself white over the winter trying to grab something/anything and we did not see a single coherent operational level air campaign. So now while it is being assaulted it is suddenly going to figure that out? I am sure we will see some weak disjointed attempts but if Russia could do this - do it freakin now before those reported 9 fresh UA Bdes form up on the start line.
- Russian EW and UAS will add friction to the attack.  But they need to to more than that.  They need to disrupt and dislocate.  This means Russia need to be able to employ a defensive form of corrosive warfare (the ability to project enough precision attrition and friction on an opponent to create wide systemic failure in their military operational machine).  We have not seen this.  Russia has been relying almost entirely on old school front edge combat attrition, trading 3 men for 1 theirs type stuff.  
- Ukrainian formations are green?  What kind of shape do you suppose the RA units are in?  They are 1) pretty banged up and replacements likely rushed into place and 2) have not had a free and donated western force generation stream to pull on.  The UA has experience in conducting operational level offensives, the staffs and HQs that pulled that off are anything but green.  All of it rested on an increasingly more integrated western supported ISR and targeting enterprise.  In the competition of “who is in rougher shape before the spring/summer offensive of ‘23”. I gotta go with Russia.
I am not predicting a rout of the RA back to its borders (but if it goes well enough that is not off the table), but this thing has the hallmarks of another Russian operational collapse in the making - highly eroded operational systems, significant C4ISR asymmetry, and still no sign they can establish favourable strategic or operational pre-conditions in any domain.  If they do manage to hold the UA back effectively, then something fundamental will have changed and we damned well will need to understand what that is because it might mean that this war is done pretty much where they stand now and we are out of military solutions.  But I am not there yet, quite the opposite, I am wondering how successful the UA will be and whether not it will be enough to keep the west engaged in this.  As we saw at Kherson - which many western pundits ping to with disappointment- the bar of western expectations is sometimes unreasonably high, largely because we have no modern experience in wars like this one.
Regardless, I guess we will see soon.

We now have the point of view from the FPV drone. Crazy war.

This fight took place on 9th of April. Probably this is fight for the road near Khromove, "Honor" company of 1st mech.battalion "Da Vicnci" of 67th mech.brigade. 
Dead soldier "Norman" at first minutes of video is Oleh Kornay

Also in the same day "Honor" lost other soldier "Tyomych" - Artem Berezniuk

47th mech.brigade with Slovenian M-55S and Bradley

And in the Holy Fudge category of combat footage, we have a new king:
POV guy shows great personal courage, head is on a swivel. Top notch NCO-ing going on.

Situation in Bakhmut
Last night and morning
Fierce fights on 1000 x 1000 m quadrate. Wagner all pulled to the center. They can't pass. It's not possible to shove endless number of troops in 1 km of front. Only, establishing reserves in close rear, being shelled by artillery. Northern and southern flanks without changes.
Mid day
We have stabilized railroad for now. The city is not encircled, we repelled them near Ivanivske and Khromove. Mother....rs ran down into the "Rose alley", but we knocked out them back, though they have there small gains. 
2 hours ago. 
Aviation, artillery of mother..rs is working heavy, they assault from the north very tough, all very hard.
 

Coming back to this one because this is how misinformation and conspiracy nonsense starts.  And again the US operates under a similar but different legal framework.  So government does have control of who they grant security clearances to, or not.  Absolutely.  However, that authority exists within a legal framework that also ensures that unlawful discrimination is controlled out of the system.  For example, imagine if this kid was black.  Does anyone think they the US government should start filtering out 21 years old who are black, or Jewish based on that alone (and if you do, please leave)? 
Security clearance in the public sector = taxpayer funded employment, and as such has to walk that oversight and transparency line like anything else.  I have no doubt discrimination happens but the system is built to ensure it is minimized as much as possible, with lengthy reviews, audits etc.  These systems are also in place to protect the employer (i.e. the US Government) from law suits of discrimination in hiring practices.  E.G.  Say this kid held onto his racial bigotry ideas and got a job in security clearances, what mechanism are in place to prevent him from simply only granting clearances to other sad, lonely white men?
Before we put this to bed for good, the reason to address it is that there are a LOT of just garbage myths and information out there on how western governments actually work.  I mean these are massive enterprises in the 21st century and it is too much to expect the average citizen to understand the layers and layers in play.  However, the problem with this is that people fill in the gaps with anecdotes and misinformation.  Suddenly the government is capable of doing all sorts of things that legally it simply cannot do, or at least do easily.  Hollywood has done us exactly zero favors in all this too.  Executive actions (i.e. political assassination's) is one such area.  If you believe TV and movies, western governments are doing these everyday and twice on weekends.  In reality the levels of controls and authorities to conduct an extra-judiciary killing (outside a defined operational box) are enormous.  Hollywood is likely much more accurate on how the other teams are operating, such as Russian FSB but have little to zero reflection on the actual work going on in western defence and security.
Probably about as far as I can take this line right  now.  Bottom line, when you hear some of these claims, just do the due diligence and cross check along a few lines to be safe.      

https://youtu.be/OnxHgyMMD90
 
A Combat Mission Fortress Italy story, using Bil Hardenberger's and A Canadian Cat's excellent C2 Hard Cat Rules v2I.
 
In this episode you will see the Hard Cat rules in operation, reflecting the lack of intel if C2 is lost, and the efforts required to gain fresh intel and the issuing of fresh orders.

They were arrogant, and for good reason... what they did as a team against massive odds along the Chir River is legendary. They definitely provide a good model to base a defense against long odds. Balck is one of my inspirations and favorite Generals from WW2.

I will take a gander at this tomorrow.
Also, these rules were developed in partnership with @IanL, aka the Canadian Cat, hence the naming.  
I am happy to see another AAR using these rules. 

Bil

https://youtu.be/Ai5bvbwqDU8
 
A Combat Mission Fortress Italy story, using Bil Hardenberger's excellent C2 Hard Cat Rules v2I.
 
For those of you who like to take game accuracy/authenticity to the next level, I highly recommend you give Bil's rules a run out. They make the game far more challenging by, amongst other things, removing the player's ability to react to situations that the troops on the ground would be unaware of.
 
I will be producing these DARs as I play the game, so I'm as unaware of the outcome as you will be!
 
Feedback appreciated, as always
 
Drew