The_Capt

Ya so this guy is a SAMS grad apparently, which is about as high as one can go on the “smart guy but not command material” career line. So he has the background and training to know what he is selling is pure BS, which makes this worse. So we are to believe that Russia is waging a limited war - after Bucha and criminal missile strikes (I have no doubt he is denying both of those points despite overwhelming evidence) - and accepting attritional bleeding approaching major war levels because…reasons? If anything his narrative makes Russia even darker and more irrational. According to him Russia could end this war in a week but is not, and therefore dragging the suffering on both sides out, for some sort of weird “winning the peace” long game restraint? (He has been selling that one since this thing began). The guy is a traitor to the military profession…as to the rest, well we will likely have to let the courts decide. In other news, found another interesting RAND piece - this is a western assessment of Russian assessments pre-war: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RRA100/RRA198-4/RAND_RRA198-4.pdf Really big and complicated power analysis and assessment models throughout but don’t let turn you off. What is interesting is that Russia is entirely wired to see the world as a threat space - the entire thing is threat orientated. Further, Russia sees itself as anything less than global 1 or 2 as a threat in itself. This is bigger than NATO or Eastern Europe, it is a society that has to be on top or its existence is in question. Historically that stark calculus never went anywhere good. What struck me is the underlying end-game dichotomy - “we know we will never dominate the world but we have to dominate something”. There is a tone of insecurity and compensation for that throughout. This is beyond all the social and physical metrics rubbed all over everything, it speaks to the Russian certainty. It is too easy to simply write this off as “duh, see Russia”. It speaks to something we spoke about earlier, the theory of Russian defeat. So how do you get a nation that is built on that certainty to renegotiate with itself peacefully?

Critical shopping malls and apartment buildings. No way to dress it up, the Russian “strategic” deep strike campaign has been a flop. It caused a lot of misery and committed a lot of warcrimes, but that just amped up support for Ukraine and painted stark lines in this conflict. It did not drive Ukraine or the West towards political dilemma in fact it did the exact opposite. And it did very little in supporting strategic military goals. A really skeptical part of me thinks there was a movement to sell Russia as more dangerous than it was for various reasons. Turns out Russia was a pretty sad and sorry bear - but even as such we are still dealing with capacity and preparedness issues. Basically Russia set the bar pretty low and we are still finding out how hard it is to jump over it.

Yeesh, that report did not age well: “The key military tasks of the unified strategic operation are all related to engaging targets beyond the range of Russian ground forces and artillery. These tasks are long-range conventional strikes against critical military and civilian targets; electronic warfare (EW) to disrupt command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR); counterspace actions; and cyberattacks against critical infrastructure.” Russia could not get a unified operational level operation, let alone a strategic one. We were expecting this at the opening of this thing and instead got whatever this missile lobbing exercise has been.

To this add the UA upward trajectory. We are seeing more and more next-gen weaponry showing up on the battlefield. Force generation is going strong in the backfield. The UA is definitely taking losses but they are replacing them with better trained and equipped forces. Ammo is the only real concern but I am really not sure how close the the actual line we are with respect to reserves. Further, as the UA leans heavily on PGM they do not need as much ammo to get the same jobs done. The RA is the one who was using WWI levels of fires to try and overwhelm defences - they had better saved some for the counter-attack.

Precision of precision guided? First precision guided was this thing apparently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_X Abstractly one could argue that assassins were really the first PGM, but that might be stretching the analogy. As to unguided precision well it was probably the spear itself. Hammers, clubs and even axes rely on broad swing arcs, the spear is focused on a very small point. As to ranged, the sling is good candidate or this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spear-thrower What is really interesting is less the technology itself but what it did to combat (well hunting first, then combat). Once we could focus energy down to a narrow point and project it, everything changed.

Given likely state of Russian maintenance I would be more optimistic.

Not bad at all to be honest. I think they will one-two split as well. Not sure as to sequencing as it could be conditions based, but if your force is in good shape while theirs is stressed, and you can maul there LOCs from afar, putting stress at two points makes sense. Creates dilemma and forces your opponent to swing quickly from one AO to the other - this is playing to RA weaknesses. It copies the model of Kharkiv and Kherson but it works and what is the RA going to do about it? If they slack off in the east they are looking at getting supply lines cut from the North, if they ignore the middle they get the land bridge cut and now have two non-contiguous theatres to contend with. Grinding directly back towards Donetsk in the Donbas is a waste of time. They could try a bold river crossing south of Kherson but that is a tall order and risky. And then we get into wild amphib and/or airborne type stuff but the UA is likely not there with the specialized stuff. I think Haiduk is onto something with the idea of leading with current inventory and then break out with western kit - they gotta use it and show the world they are using it but they also do not want to trash it.

Well I am not a big proponent of predictions but since we are being compared to Kofman and crew, let me make one. The RA is building up to another collapse - when and where are pretty much up in the air but we will be the first to know. How is getting clearer by the day. The only question is, "will it be a full strategic collapse or another operational one?" My bet is on operational. The RA is going to hold onto Donetsk and Luhansk (the cities) until the dirty end. Crimea we have talked about. But I know Steve has been aching for a strategic one for some time now, maybe his day has dawned. I am saying this because we are getting a lot of signals coming out of the RA war machine that it is starting to creak, and they sound a lot like last fall - in many ways worse. Meanwhile the UA is getting breaching equipment, next-gen UAS and loitering munitions, and freakin JDAMs.

Normally the initial lanes are done by the tanks themselves after the engineers fire line charges if it is an explosive breaching. As to slow, well yes and no, very likely a hard no for the RA. A simple minefield can be pushed through pretty quickly but the lead plough tanks are very vulnerable, it is why you always do double breaches - as you note, straight line. It is when the minefield is complex (i.e. with embedded obstacles such as an AT ditch or dragons teeth). Then you need to do the breach with the tank, then bring up a specialized armoured dozer, clear the ditch or obstacle. Push through the rest of the minefield and then do the assault. It is one of the hardest operations to do, water crossings are likely one of the few harder. A professional well practiced outfit can do all that in minutes, but the RA has been anything but. The UA are likely training like mad on this sort of stuff right now because they are going to need it. On the modern battlefield you would basically need to create an EW bubble to keep drones and ISR away as best you can. Support with a lot of deep strike, likely program in feints and false breaches. It is near the high water mark for a modern force.

That is a nasty piece of kit. Saw what the 2000 pounder could do in person. The ER version can reach out to 74kms. That means you can launch the thing 20km behind your own lines and still hit an opponents operational rears areas. If they go heavy payload these things could be a nightmare for RA counter-moves forces during a UA offensive.

Exactly, the factors of erosion of a defence are really just symptoms of the defensive puzzle being solved. A defence is really a puzzle system, and in land warfare a fairly rigid one. Positions are built and sighted on terrain (approaches, LOS etc), obstacles are placed and trenches dug in. Counter-move forces positioned and logistical support linked up. The attacker has to solve for this. The doctrinal solution is to either isolate and bypass, letting the system choke out once the logistics are cut, or overwhelm with force. However each attack erodes the defence while also figuring it out. Finds the weak points, or it makes weak points. Figures out the counter-moves plan and adapts. War is competitive adaptation - it lies at the nexus of communication and negotiation, and both sides are trying to adapt better than an opponent. The problem with defence is that over time it cedes adaptation advantage to the attacker. Why? Because it is tied to terrain. So as to force ratios, well initial attacks can be quite costly with very high loss ratios. However, humans figure the puzzle out and once a defence starts to fail the losses start to stack up. Then if it fails completely the losses for the defender can skyrocket as all its puzzle advantages collapse. This concept applies to a platoon dug in, the company, the battalion and up to strategic levels. We have been pursuing how to break this dynamic for a long time. France 1940 demonstrated you could solve a very complex defensive puzzle with convergence (combined arms and C4ISR). The Gulf War demonstrated that you can solve a very large defensive puzzle with AirPower and GPS (AirLand Battle). Russia has demonstrated in Ukraine that you cannot, or at least their versions of these ideas. It is vague because I suspect it is still emerging. I also think we saw it during the opening month of this war. Ukraine essentially waged a non-linear adaptive defence during the initial invasion. It was highly hybrid and distributed and looked very self-synchronizing. It mirrored the defensives we saw within insurgencies but upscaled dramatically. So non-linear means that unlike traditional defence if you hit A you will not get a consistent B effect. You may get C or D, or X. I am not sure if this is really non-linear or simply very complex (jury is out on just how non-linear humans can be). Either way it makes solving the puzzle much harder as one has to build a new theory almost every time. Here the rigidity of the offence, largely due to logistical realities, failed the RA. Adaptive means the defence can adapt faster that the attacker, which means not being as tied to terrain. Ukraine traded 100s of km of terrain in the initial invasion but appeared to envelope those RA lines of advance. Further their defence had a crowd-sourcing element to it which suggests a lot of spontaneous action. All of this adds up to an unsolvable puzzle (or at least to hard for the RA). In the future I suspect that unmanned systems will shape the battle space more than terrain. A smart minefield with legs can deny vast swaths of ground and move. Flying swarms can deny large areas and also move. The only way to really solve for a defensive cloud is to bleed out the cloud (or change the weather…but that is later). So I expect the defensive may be re-emerging as dominant but it is not the defensive we knew and loved. Now the big question is whether this is transitory or a long term thing.

Maritime Special Operation

Having just read into this Nordstream thing, I kind of have the same question. A lot of moving parts here that pretty much point to a state sponsored job. If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck and blows up 8 meter stretches of concrete encased pipe at 300 feet ocean depth, in four separate locations while other ships with transponders off cover for you...like a duck. Then is was a bloody MSO job. I assume the hubbub is which state did it?

Damn forgot the urban angle. So Kofman and those guys are taking the position that the RA who: - Have been seen using human wave attacks with poorly trained and equipped troops - Lacking artillery support, which has been noted as burning out and faltering by Russian troops. - Combined arms integration - Lacking ISR (or at least any notable improvements) - Have been essentially doing frontals into an urban defence against a prepared defender who has owned the terrain for months And pulled off a 1:1 attrition ratio....?....! Ok, well first off they are going to have to prove that beyond "we went to Bakhmut". And if it is true something very odd is happening, which we definitely want to keep an eye on.

I have to wonder if this is so cheap why Russia did not invest in it. I mean UA ISR is a column from the ground to space, while the RA are foundering. The few notes we have gotten from RA space capability has been extremely low refresh times - they would do better buying the data from commercial systems (but whoops, sanctions). I suspect the Geo stuff is for Sig and ELINT, which is probably more important than visual. Some of the US stuff is extremely classified so hard to say what they can see or detect but based on the UA targeting of deep strikes, it appears pretty damned good. Now as I have said before, I am not worried about fighting Russia, I am worried about fighting someone enabled like the Ukraine.

Ah and I found academic corroboration as well - https://www.usni.org/press/books/nato-and-warsaw-pact-tanks-cold-war I have a copy from an online library and Green says on page 283 "1976" as first introduction into East Germany. Outstanding, so the T64 is on the menu for BAOR from the start. It will effect rarity but there it is.

Oh, I love this kind of stuff. I see the entry for T72s but where does it say they were T64s? Or was this the event mentioned in the CIA doc?

I think it is actually more simple than this. If I could boil down the problem for the defender it is to become unsolvable. Every defence is a military puzzle whose biggest problem is human learning. If attacked, poked and probed enough, even the most vigorous defence can be solved given enough time. The game is to make the cost of solving it beyond the bank account of the attacker. Even back in WWI the extensive trench systems, communications, rapid firing artillery and railways all conspired to make trench warfare unsolvable. Sides adapted, inventing airpower, tanks, tunneling and storm troops, all as way to solve for this defensive warfare. In the end one side simply was exhausted but someone would have solved for that type of defence eventually - we know this because the Germans did in 1940. So in order to become unsolvable, a defence must become non-linear, adaptive and dynamic. Big problem in land warfare is that terrain does not work that way. Problem in air and maritime is that the physics of fluids work that way too well. I strongly suspect that unmanned systems, particularly ground systems could change this. Defence/Offence on land may start to look more like that in the sea - at best one can gain temporary control. Land warfare may be evolving towards denial of ground, the trick will be the right peice of ground at the right time. Within small wars we see this sort of thing "amongst the people", similarities between people and oceans are interesting. But unlike oceans, people appear to be able to suddenly freeze from the inside out as opposed to external factors. But this is another topic entirely. As to Bakhmut, well currently the UA defence is still not solved. It is solvable, however, the question is how long and at what cost. The RA bizarre inability to learn is very much helping the UA right now, but no party last forever.

But it only gives one coverage of one slice of the planet at a time. You get "global coverage" but only of the same spot once every 12 hours. Assuming you load that orbit up with enough satellites you get a continuous slice of the planet as it passed beneath. In order to get real-time continuous, one needs to either load up on geosynchronous, or build multiple solar orbits to get full coverage - I do not even think the US is there yet. So in order for China to be able to get ISR on Ukraine, it will get a snap shot every 12 hours with those solar orbits, but a lot can happen in 12 hours. I would bet all the peanuts in the bar the US has got eyes on that part of the world 24/7 using a bunch of platforms, including geosynchronous. China also has most of its assets pointed regionally so in order to build up a full picture, we are still talking re-vectoring assets away. So how much does China really love Russia in all this because even trying for half decent parity over the AO is going to cost them. We know this is not happening, or at least there is no evidence it is - such as Russians suddenly getting a lot better at targeting.

So we still use force ratio/rules of thumb in planning but it is a start point, not the final answer. For example, if we are planning to attack an opponent 3 times your size with rough parity of combat power, well you had better have some offsets. I think what is breaking the calculus in this war is the level of impact information advantage is having. It is followed up by how that information is being generated. Another key aspect is qualitative factors. I spoke to an old op research guy from back in the day and he noted that the US calcs for the Gulf War did not take into account qualitative factors, while the UK did...and the UK numbers were far more accurate in the end (he was a Brit himself, so there is that). Analysis of this war did take into account some qualitative aspects (the mighty BTG) but failed to really grasp information quality as a thing. Back to hard force ratios. Yes, I went through War By the Numbers as a phase back a few years ago. But what became apparent is that large sampling of battles and their force rations/losses is really just one apples-to-oranges-to-Tuesday exercise. For example, the only way to do some math on Bakhmut is to take historical battles similar to Bakhmut - but there really aren't any. One cannot look at the Somme, or Verdun or even Mosul as they all had very different conditions at play. So you can take 600 engagements and do some math but everyone of those engagements is unique and can skew the numbers for all sorts of reasons. Bakhmut can only really be compared to similar battles in this war (e.g. Severodonetsk) but as we have seen even in these conditions are really different. So people built some pretty complex models, and still are but I have yet to see one that can do the job complete justice - outside CM, of course. We can see trends of attackers in similar situations and derive some deductions that inform but this all get down to "every battle is the same, every battle is unique" paradoxes. It is possible that the RA has pulled off 1:1 casualty ratios but given their shortfalls of effective combat power compared to those of their opponent, and the fact they are attacking over prepared ground, it does not really add up. At best one comes up with some "gut feelings" of how things should be happening and compare to results. Then spend a decade trying to figure out what happened.

I love a good kit intro question. The US are far easier as they have archived all their senate arms appropriation meetings. Soviets are a little tougher. So a good source is the Freedom of Information stuff from the CIA back in the day. Then you have to kinda bracket the thing in: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp81m00980r001200150003-0 "We understand that last year U.S. military leaders mistook deployment. of the Soviet T64 tank for the T72, especially in East. Germany. Please discuss this matter and state whether the T72 is now being deployed. 22. Please provide an historical table showing Soviet military manpower levels for each of the past ten years, and deployments in East Europe." So the letter was from 1978, so 1977 seem to be a lock. Now were the observed in 1976?

This whole line of thinking got me onto the idea of information mass. The old rules of physical mass have largely fallen part in this war in may instances. But perhaps mass still applies but has been offset into another domain. I would bet a pretty large wager that the UA has got an information-mass advantage right now. If we measured the raw data coming in (e.g. bits), being analyzed and turned into information, and then integrated into knowledge leading to learning advantage the UA looks like the Colossus, not Russia. Further information is much harder to attrit. You either attack the repositories (nearly impossible in this day and age) or you let time render it less relevant. All you can really do is attrit the mechanism of information collection and analysis/processing, and the RA simply cannot do this. So if information mass counts as much as bullets on the modern battlefield, it may go some way to explaining why the UA has crippled a far physically larger foe. Mass may still very well matter but just not how we traditionally think about it.

So we were talking about losses attacker to defender, and how they vary dramatically based on a lot of factors; however, the overall principle that one tends to be more vulnerable and at higher risk of losses in the offence stands. How this is offset is through a myriad of methods and a lot of them are qualitative - the one thing the Lancaster Equations never really got. Speed, surprise, shaping and mass are all factors in reducing that vulnerability. In recent years modern western militaries have moved away from simple force ratios and towards "combat power" which is a whole hockey-sock of components (see FM 3.0). We do force comparisons based on all these factors when doing operational planning. I suspect this is what happened with the UA. They had a lot more combat power even though they had smaller physical forces in comparison. As we have seen things like C4ISR, UAS and precision are fundamentally changing how we think about combat power. So when we see the RA outnumbering and grinding, we are failing to take into account all the dimensions of that combat power. The UA is losing troops but its other elements of combat power (e.g. C2,logistics, ISR and fires) are not suffering attrition (or at least we are not seeing it). The RA is not in the same position. We can see its combat power suffering attrition across dimensions, not just in manpower. So this sets up other false-deductions coming out of Bakhmut - even if the UA and RA are suffering the same manpower attrition (which, again does not really make sense with what we have seen), what is the combat power attrition calculus look like? Reports of daily Russian losses of guns, CPs and logistics trucks are out there. The UA is pretty tight lipped but I am not sure they could hide an equivalent size of losses on their side - and we know a lot of UA combat power generation is out of reach of the RA. So the UA can inflict 1:1 loss ratios while attacking prepared RA defenses, or maybe even higher because its effective combat power is much higher than the RA despite smaller manpower. The RA is much larger but its effective combat power is much lower. So when the RA is attacking a smaller defensive force with higher effective combat power the outcome is pretty plain to see - the RA get nowhere fast. [For those who want to learn more https://irp.fas.org/doddir/army/fm3-0.pdf Chapter 2 is all over this]

First off China is coming up fast, there is no getting past that. However it is not there yet, nor does it have global coverage. So some numbers for context: https://www.statista.com/statistics/264472/number-of-satellites-in-orbit-by-operating-country/ (obviously not all military ISR) Better assessment of pair up here: https://www.rand.org/paf/projects/us-china-scorecard.html Really long write up here: https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-05/China_Space_and_Counterspace_Activities.pdf Bottom line China is not messing around but is still focused regionally. Backed up by this: https://www.fpri.org/article/2021/05/chinas-maritime-intelligence-surveillance-and-reconnaissance-capability-in-the-south-china-sea/ Another good short summary here: So what? Well China had a finite number of systems and it is a big-@ss sky. Solar orbits gives a satellite stability on the region it covers but the earth spins around underneath it. Satellites (except for geostationary, which are actually pretty far out) are built in constellations designed to keep eyes on specific regions as continuously as possible. They hand off with other ISR and integrate to give a complete picture. China is clearly focused on the maritime domain, which also means the ISR they are using may not be optimized for land battle. China like Russia still has pretty slow refresh rates, as such they are not real-time. Repositioning those assets toward Ukraine would mean holes in the rest of their system - this is not simply flying one satellite like a balloon over Ukraine. It would mean shifting entire constellations or launching new one. Ironically, and definitely not-funny, the use of high altitude balloons in Russia as ISR into Ukraine would be a possible solution if they could control them. Regardless, China is not there yet with respect to global ISR. The US is because projecting military power globally is a strategic objective, but even it has limitations.

Ah so onto REDDIT tactic #2, treat the other poster like your personal information waiter. I spent nearly a half a page answering your post but this is the “soup you do not like.” This is exactly what I mean by obtuse flanking - I do all the work and you sit back and nit pick from the high ground of ignorance. “Prove to me that the earth is indeed round!” You need a few more years on that learning journey because you do not even know what you are looking at. All of this research is by-design trying to figure out how to overcome the attacker-defender problem. It has been central to warfare, pretty much from the beginning. The problem is pretty simple, attacking is more costly and dangerous than defending but it is the only way to get things done. So how do we overcome that? Force ratios is one way, but there was a lot of research on speed, tempo etc because we were all up in manoeuvre warfare back in the 90s. All those force ratio studies were reinforcing the western myth that attrition was dead. It was all the rage right up until this war where clearly attrition is back on the menu. Of course there are other factors in the force ratio equations, now you can go look up what force multipliers really mean. The bottom line is that if you look at highly attritional battles against prepared defences losses ratios at the tactical level can get very high - the the opening of the Somme. However, over time those ratios tend to settle into around 2-1.5 to 1 losses agains attacker…until/if the attacker achieves break out, then the ratio will flip pretty fast. The major weakness of defence is that it is more rigid system, more tied to owning terrain in land battle. Once that system is cracked it can fall apart pretty quickly. However clearly the UA has not suffered this yet. But hey if you want to cling to the idea that at Bakhmut the RA - throwing literally waves of untrained convicts and poorly trained and supported conscripts at prepared UA defences, should be seeing 1:1 loss ratios because you haven’t seen a curve on a graph…well I cannot help you. I can tell you that if you dial in a solution that does not take into account the fact that attacking is more costly and dangerous in the short term in any professional military school, from junior leadership to joint staff college, you will fail.