The_Capt

Won’t let Russia collapse but does not want to get dragged down with them. So the next question is “who is actually calling the shots on the Red team now?”

Won’t let Russia collapse but does not want to get dragged down with them. So the next question is “who is actually calling the shots on the Red team now?”

I wonder if China, despite some chest puffing, is not actually reining this whole thing in. If they can broker/force a peace in this war it will be a win for them. All we could do was lob kit and kaboodle until China walked in and said “ok, that is enough”?

I think what is killing the RA is DC at the operational level. We have not really discussed the differences here but one can do MC at the operational level and DC at the tactical - Soviet doctrine was kinda built for this...theoretically (I kind of think this was BS as the entire Soviet system was pretty tightly controlled but...). War is multi-dimensional. So even if you have Gunny Sergeants going all Clint Eastwood and exercising initiative it won't matter if the operational level is doing more conservative DC style C2 - tactical level just becomes fireflies in a jar. But vice versa can work, again in theory. The RA can move and control their troops like proper killbots, but if the operational level is able to exploit opportunity and keep the killbots moving towards that opportunity....well you have a solution. Hard DC is a symptom of an autocratic political body. One does not give a lot of empowerment in people who have all the guns when you are a dictator. But you can make it work if you allow higher commanders to run with the ball (or at least did) but you risk them getting too "uppity". This is what created the whole "Joe Stalin is threatened by Zhukov dynamic". I personally don't think it is really "easier" one way or the other. It affects more than simply how we give orders. It lays down a foundation of just about every aspect of what follows - from force generation through sustainment, to employment. MC has different bandwidth requirements than DC - how enablers are packaged and organized. Even how much fuel they burn. So it is not a simple as "ok. now you are all empowered/not empowered." Now re-designing a force to be able to quickly do both is an interesting concept.

This speaks to the upside down equations of emerging modern warfare. The reflex is to spend millions more to protect the million dollar platform, but that could just as easily be pushing good money after bad. At what point does the cost of keeping a heavy unit alive compress its utility and value to near singularity?

I think you might be a bit dated, USMC thinking has evolved somewhat: https://www.secnav.navy.mil/donhr/Site/Commandant Strategic Documents/USMC Vision and Strategy 2025.pdf The USMC has smartly figured out that their value proposition is not to "seize and secure advance Naval bases", it is to be the fastest conventional gun to draw on. You want to send a signal in the land domain...send in the Marines fast, first.

You have pretty much nailed the reality to be honest. I have been doing this a long time and have rarely seen full MC, and frankly a lot more DC than we would ever admit. In practice it definitely is a spectrum and applied to varying levels. Enablers are a really good example - one does not let ones engineers execute iaw "intent" sprinkling obstacles around the battlefield, they execute the plan because there are never enough of them or time to mess around with intent. Further real world legalities and authorities do not care about our command philosophies - yep, the damned lawyers. The biggest issue is that we sell/train for all MC, but we really do not do it in its entirety. We say the words and then micro-manage because the ex is on a timetable and we need to "win by Fri", we already ordered the BBQ! However, as technology accelerates, I expect that extremes, and swinging between them, will become more viable. This will collide directly with culture and hilarity will ensue.

Right!? I mean if this is really going to turn into a global Decision Point war, even the most backward insularism is going to be hard pressed to sell the rolling up of the USA as a viable strategy. We very may well have lost interest in '24 if this was still "just Russia". Throw in a real fight with China and the sleeping giant may actually fully awaken.

And this is a real problem when the higher formation commander knows more than the tactical commander. Further higher formation commanders do not have time to justify or explain why lower echelons "have to follow orders they do not understand." I suspect this is already happening in Ukraine. Higher formation commanders have access to a full suite of western ISR and then integrated tactical feeds - so when that commander says "stop!" and the unit commander is all MC, which by definition allows a lower echelon to go against orders if they follow intent in a changing condition. This can turn into herding cats pretty fast. The answer is to push all the same info to the tactical level but then we run into human brain limitations. Lower echelons have their hands full are not really going be able to avail themselves of full SA and context all the time - it is why we invented higher echelons. To the real risk of MC is empowering the people who know less about what is going on. As to UAs current situation, my best advice is to "keep doing what you are doing." Whatever this thing is is working for them.

Interesting idea but I am not sure it stands up entirely. An extreme DC "drone" mindset takes a lot of discipline, brutal discipline in fact. MC has discipline in a form as well but gives freedom of thought and action by its very definition. So when shifting from one system to the other: DC is pulling back from hard muscle memory that has been beaten into people and telling them "now think and see" , while MC is asking people to unthink and unsee. Neither one of these is a small ask and would take a lot of practice and training. Further Commanders would need to be selected for their abilities to do both and knowing when to apply them. You are now talking cultural reform, which is really hard to do. I suspect that the metric of advantage is the agility of the system to swing between C2 models.

Little of column A and a little of column B. What we don't know is how much was adaptive pressure and how much was already inherent within their C2 system. What we do know is that they adapted a lot better-faster than their opponent. Russia on the other hand had all the advantages but looks like it was trying to fight a type of war its C2 system was not aligned for. So now down the real question: "how would we do?" I think if a fully bombed up NATO force were in this exact same fight, and the RA chose to fight us in the manner we were built for, it would have ended badly for them. We likely would have learned a few hard lessons, particularly about protecting LOCs - everyone keeps skipping over the fact that a modern NATO Battle Group is going to need gas, and that gas is still carried by soft trucks on long stretches of roads in "secure areas". As soon as an opponent takes away those "secure areas", and it sure as hell looks like UAS can do this, our operational system does not magically just float on. Would we have won, definitely. Would it have been as easy as Saddam, no freakin way. We would have struggled with air superiority and SEAD as well. A2AD still works against us as well. In the end however, I think our C4ISR advantage combined with deep precision strike would have cut the RA to pieces in the backfield until we could resume combined arms manoeuvre. We would have gone "ah-ha, see MC works!" conveniently forgetting that most of the killing was done by tightly controlled targeting cycles that are almost the direct opposite of MC. But this is really the wrong question. "How would we have done against the UA?" Is the much better question. A force that has dispersed and hybridized, armed with some really wicked next generation stuff and world-class C4ISR over top a crowd sourced ad hoc JADC2-like architecture. Now that one should be keeping all the military-thinkers up at night, because frankly I do not know. This would be a force that is operating on a whole new level, likely swinging between hyper-MC style C2 and then DC - on the same mission. Our back ends are really vulnerable to this - Iraq and Afghanistan taught us that much. We would be a sledgehammer made of ice swinging at fog. And no amount of empowerment is going to solve for that.

Aww chin up little fella, we are still within the richest block the world has ever seen. We just needed a wake up call, and this might just do it.

You can think about it on the way up the next mountain…after the CMCW: BAOR AAR preview battle.

Oh my this is interesting. So, if true (big if, first I have heard of lethal aid from China) this would be an escalation. Odd that China would show its hand so quickly on this one. Going to have to think about the political implications here. As to military implications, well not insignificant but also not game changing, yet. Unless China gives Russia an ISR architecture to plug into these munitions are going to have limited deep strike application. We know China is building a large C4ISR enterprise but it is likely no where near the US capability, and is all pointed in other priority locations. This kinda looks more symbolic than anything, or perhaps testing western resolve. Well folks this may be a whole new ballgame if China doubles down though and really starts to backstop Russia, a global proxy war. This is odd because the west holds the escalation stick right now. This could trigger a large escalation from the US, the kind of stuff people have been asking for because the US is not kidding around about China. I mean Russia has been a warm up round if this becomes a contest between China and the US. I am surprised as China is simply not ready, too soon by a half. So people have wrung a lot of hands over this war but we have always said that “until strategic conditions change”. Well China jumping into this thing would constitute such a condition change. Of course I would worry a lot less about the ‘24 US election if China gets in deep on all this, even the most isolationist candidate is not going to be able to ignore this shot across the bow.

Ok and @Kinophile can jump in on this one too. So we are muddying up some stuff here, so to clarify: - The original point on MC vs DC was to point out the cultural constipation of conventional services and how they are nowhere near as innovative or open to disruptive thinking as is often sold. Over the military generations, military doctrine becomes dogma and counter-thinking in an organization that literally exists to create uniformity in behaviour is not well accepted. We in the west have built a democratic myth of "empowerment and gumption" but it really does not translate well into actual military reality. We can debate this but I know what I have lived for the better part of 3.5 decades. - The UA is a hybrid mix of Soviet and Western schools, and for them I think this was a major advantage. It was not because we peppered them with western doctrine and training, it was because they had both worlds to pull from. If we had an all western force in this thing, with the same restraints/constraints and capabilities as the UA, my hypothesis is that we would have done worse because we would have tried to apply an all-western approach. I can definitely see in Phase I where this would have gotten us into a lot of trouble. The UA is already outside of boxes and pulling in so much from the civilian side so quickly also helped in breaking doctrinal group-think and creating whatever this has turned into. As to which school MC or DC, that the UA employs I do not think we have a clear idea but it is also likely a hybrid - which was how the entire thing was actually designed to work. - MC vs DC schools of thought. Ok, this is a whole other thing. Mission Command is a essentially (and I will just use my own descriptions, feel free to go look up others) is essentially empowered command. It arms subordinates with context and intent, "why we are doing this and here is what we are looking for". This, plus allowing them to exercise initiative to exploit opportunity - the alignment of circumstance, context and capability, theoretically provides a force with higher potential for tempo advantage. The thinking goes that empowered tactical commanders can see opportunity well before formation level and as such if they exploit it without waiting to be told the entire force can OODA faster than an opponent. This is a cornerstone of Manoeuvre Warfare which is really a strategy of Annihilation through Dislocation. We seriously bought off on all this and drank the Kool Aid on it about 40 years ago, to the point it became so dogmatic that it left little room for counter thought. DC is one of mission control being held at higher levels. Subordinates are empowered to do a task (The terms are actually derived from the Germans largely because Depuy and Starry really were hot for German warfare - Auftragstaktik and Befehlstaktik, The first meaning "mission tactics" the second "detailed orders tactics"). They then wait for further direction before exploiting opportunity. They can still execute initiative in execution of the task but not the overall mission. So was born the Great American Military Myth (and frankly almost every western nation jumped onboard). We were a democratized military built on "good ol 'merican innovation and initiative." Further this All-Yankee Doodle (sorry but we really got beat over the head on this one back in the day) approach is very economic as it yields quick nearly bloodless wars. The Persian Gulf became the poster child for this type of warfare, but more than few put up their hands and asked if it wasn't a false-positive. The Gulf War was highly attritional and mostly driven by air supremacy - the land battle of mission command and manoeuvre warfare was basically executed against an already beaten foe, and one crushed by far more Detailed Command approaches of the Air Force. (This brings up the other problem with the Kool Aid, it really does not work for either the Navy or Air Force - and does not work enough for SOF, kinda). The truth is far more complicated. The largest problem with Mission Command is that while it is great in theory it runs into serious problems in full execution because of all those pesky enablers. Tactical commanders can run all over the place all empowered but there is only so much ISR, artillery, engineers and logistics to go around. So what really happens is far more control in practice. The Main Effort gets a lot more empowerment but if you are on a side gig, well you might very well get held back because the boss simply does not have the stuff to support you if you go all manouvrey. Detail Command it far to restrictive and you get into micromanagement, so in reality neither systems works in extremes. The future. Well the problem was seen coming way back during the RMA days. "What happens when a higher level commander knows more than a tactical one?" I suspect if the UA has created a sort of ad hoc JADC2 system then this has already happened. If a higher formation commander knows more than the tactical level, then DC starts to make a lot more sense. And then what does Manoeuvre Warfare turn into? Well a form of Corrosive Warfare is one option apparently. There is a lot of sense to this, we already do it with unmanned systems, which are going to expand in use not contract. Detail Command that controls the battlespace like a production line and not a jazz band is not totally out of the question. So at one end we have "lets go all DC because higher can see all". While at the other end we have "remove higher command entirely." This is hyper-Mission Command, or self-synchronization. Here tactical units are loaded up and basically command themselves with their peers - this gets a lot of traction in SOF circles. They then share enablers in a hand-off system where "higher" is really coordination and not command and control. Here we get into military effects clouds and inverted command systems. This also makes some sense but many are shy as to human nature. How are enablers going to be shared? This is always a friction point, and higher commanders are the referees. What happens if we get rid of them. Some have suggested AI does the job as it can calculate requirements far faster than a human can, or a human AI pairing because human can do context. So in the end there is no "answer". We should continue to try both, and maybe have a C2 system that can swing wildly from one to the other based on good ol human art of war. But service cultures and equities already get in the way. This is way tanks got resisted, the machine gun and even unmanned systems. We make idols of our history and sometimes it gets in the way of evolution. Experimentation and paying attention to wars like these are absolutely critical as we can start to get some idea of where things are going and then plan to adapt at a better rate than an opponent.

Ok, let’s say you are totally right. The Col Macgregors of the world have got a bead on reality and we here are deluding ourselves (completely ignoring our track record to date). The war unfolds as you outline above…so freakin what? It will be a hard fight, so we should quit now? We should quit now and hope that Russian and Chinese expansion stops somewhere “over there”? Especially after we pulled off the field, tails tucked between legs. Or maybe we should negotiate and hope they leave us alone? What possible historical experience points to where backing away from an expansionist dictator is a good idea? That somehow they take a foot off the gas when they win? Seriously, who are the people who promote this? They cannot be the children of the great generations who built this world. If they are they have forgotten what their grandparents and parents fought and sacrificed for.

So we do not, or at least should not plan for the last war. If all we did was support concept based on what is happening on the ground “right now” we are programming in a progress-through-failure strategy. The issue with Mission Command, for example, is that it is designed to empower those closest to then problem and having the most current information. That has been the tactical level. Problem is this that looking forward evidence is building that higher will in fact be better informed than tactical levels, may already be happening. So while in Ukraine MC still appears to have advantages (and in reality all effective command is a combination of both), the underpinning of that advantage could be shifting. If we treat MC as sacred, we may not see that shift until an opponent does it for us, which is an unacceptable risk. We will see how warfare evolves based on this war but the second we get enamoured in our own methods, and see nothing but validation we are in trouble. To my eyes Ukraine is definitely western leaning, but they are also making up new rules as they go, likely because their reality is forcing them to. For example, a lot of talk on combined arms and failures by the RA; however, the UA has been exercising another version of combined arms employing alternate strategies…and they are working.

I think you are missing a whole lot of nuance of what actually happened on these missions. The military was not simply being “police” as there was an open insurgency/guerrilla war going on, which is well outside the scope of police forces. Police forces were not anywhere near prepared to deal with what was going on in these places, and military power alone could not do it either. These insurgencies were to the point that governments in country could not function and in the end defeated both us and those governments. We cannot and should not approach this with a “whelp the first three days went really well, watcha gonna do?” Military power is “designed” to do whatever the political level asks it to do - we do not get to say “sorry we are not designed for this”, we redesign ourselves to the problem and win. This is an extension of what military power within the context of our nation states, is really there for - to implement policy, and guarantor implement of policy by others. Moving the goal posts is an incredibly bad idea. I mean why learn from our mistakes and build better, when “we really won after all?”

So my initial thinking is that with respect to China we need to do two things right (at least) based on what we have seen so far: Sustain our warfighting “cloud” while denying same to opponent. This is really C4ISR heavy but more than that. Essentially we are moving to an Amazon effects model. Customer makes an order, systems figures out best way to link - well outside traditional C2 lines and delivers. We do that better-faster than an opponent we are well on our way. Our cloud is our C4ISR bubble that is completely integrated with effects, shield and sustainment. Air, sea and/or land matter less than the sum of the whole. Whole system superiority if you will, as opposed to domain components. If capabilities get eroded, we re-wire in motion. In the end if what we want is a big freakin boom on an X, how that happens needs to be almost entirely militarily capability agnostic. Learn faster than our opponent and sustain that advantage. War is a collision and as such is dynamic. We need to be able to build theories of cause-to-effect-to-outcome faster and better than an opponent. We do that and we are on our way to being able to fight on completely different levels and dimensions. China has already declared aspirations in this space…put those to the test.

Now that is definitely a fair point. The RA’s dogmatic adherence to old metrics of mass is frankly baffling. “Look at all my mighty tanks” which I cannot man, maintain, coordinate, move to the front undetected and integrate into whatever the hell combined arms is becoming. I again think this comes down to ability to learn - translate lived experience into shareable knowledge. Russia (and I am looking at China as well) is a cognitively constipated outfit due to the way it power structures are built. And it is coming back to haunt them in this war - even Stalin figured this one out at the back end. I think a western commander would get bit, and maybe even more than once but at some point a subordinate commander is going to go “What the F#ck, sir?!” And the healing could begin. Funny you should mention this… Бил Hardenberger is a slippery one, but your point is valid.

Our shared canvass will be CMCW.

I never heard of HIMARs as “ersatz AirPower before this war”. I also know an entire military service that would have fought that idea tooth and nail - in fact they still are. Which of course gets into another factor of innovation stifling - service equities. I do think we sure as hell would have figured it out though. The trade off of the Western system is economy, speed and lethality. We prioritize lower casualties and quick deadly wars, while Russia comes from the old school of blood-volumes. Even the Soviet manoeuvre doctrine was built on savage attritional echelons. We simply do not think that way anymore - the fact that we never stockpile enough ammo is a pretty clear indicator. The issue is that we have streamlined ourselves to fight our wars. We are not anymore set up for robustness than Russia was for the information environment it found itself within. This is not something we could glue together quickly in a conflict and hopefully capacity-matters is one lesson we come away from this war.

I have heard this inspirational "innovative verve" argument before and I am not entirely sold to be honest. At strategic and operational levels we did not adapt in Afghanistan or at least nowhere near enough. We became hammers looking for nails and never prioritized the non-kinetic over the kinetic. In Iraq we also failed to win a peace by setting in motion sectarian alienation. Place it still a mess. Now in some ways these wars were (are) unwinnable as the adaption we would need to make to win them are off our maps. Tactical innovation does stand out but troops everywhere have been doing this for centuries. Largely due to Darwinian pressure on the battlefield - those who cannot improvise, die. I am not sure we can definitively say we are better or worse than other forces to be honest. So the evidence that at the scope and scale of this conflict that we would really do any better going off-doctrine than the UA already has, is pretty limited. We are pretty dogmatic about how we fight, for example to suggest that we should start thinking about Detailed Command, and the utility of Mission Command could be limiting is outright heresy in western military circles. And although you won't be taken out and shot for speaking heresy in the west, you will still be sidelined and isolated. Military cultures are extremely conservative - look at our track record in the people space, we have always lagged the rest of society on social change (don't ask, don't tell, integration of women etc) I think the only real advantage we may have is in learning because the west is built on liberal education. That does allow for a lot faster and more agile collective learning potential, but again we counter it with culture in a lot of ways. In the end I am not sure what we would do if airpower was removed. I think we would likely initially try to do what we have always done with airpower and suffered setbacks. We then likely would have also adopted more cautious and deliberate strategies much in the same way the Ukrainians have. I like to think we would done better than the RA because they are extremely wasteful in chasing attrition, and have demonstrated an extreme aversion to actually learning. However, we may have also stuck too close to manoeuvre and decisive battle as opposed to the far more distributed defence we saw from the UA in Phase I, which could have gotten us into serious trouble given the battlefield realities we saw emerge. I never assume advantage or overmatch until I am damn sure we actually have it. Understanding ones weaknesses is almost as important as understanding theirs, same goes for strengths.

Sure, a lot of this is force management and leadership/culture. But let’s also not get too high on ourselves here either. Plenty of militaries have won wars not employing either our culture, C2 philosophy or force management methods. Taliban just handed the west and its proxies their bums and they definitely do not follow our systems, as an example. The whole “the UA is winning because they fight like us” has a lot of flaws and holes that sound nice and make us feel good. But they also just reinforce the belief that “we are just great as we are”, which is really dangerous given that some fundamentals are currently up for grabs. We can say that the UA has sustained troop quality far better than the RA, which is definitely something.