The_Capt

Very good point. I have said before and will re-state here and now, a free fall Russian collapse will make the current war a fond memory compared to what would likely happen next. Our best case scenario is a slow and steady decline of an isolated Russia until they are pretty much a client state of China, who will of course recognize “being shackled to a corpse” and all that entails. I think a full Russian failure is in the cards without a major regime change in a direction that simply remains extremely remote - I.e. full Russian pivot back towards democracy and a European facing political ruling class. The question is really “how fast?”

There you go. You finally landed on it. So this is pretty much what they tried to do. In fact they started to tie the hands of the Red Team to stop them from winning.

If those USVs bring UAS with them those nets will have to cover the entire ship. I am interested in a few ideas beat nets. First are very small unmanned bots who swim in and manually cut the nets up. Second is tandem attacks. Third are standoff EFP which will simply blow through the nets.

I remember hearing about that ex, caused quite a stir. They ended up re-setting and re-floating the fleet. I think we are going to see hybrid surface/sub-surface systems. Sub-surface for long range positioning and then pop them up and go fast for close in kill. Very small USV/UUVs are hard to pick up on sonar and impossible on radar. Once they get close enough surface and go hydrofoil or somesuch and swarm. Not a bad idea to launch a bunch of air systems at the same time. Like UAS only way to really counter this will be a screen of ones own USVs. This approach basically takes the strength of sea mines but makes em a lot more mobile and flexible. Further it allows for offensive employment. Like heavy in land warfare, large expensive platforms are at risk of becoming liabilities as opposed to assets in this sort of environment.

I think you have just articulated why Russia cannot simply sit back on defence. Add to this political considerations etc. A defensive war against an opponent that can hammer really expensive stuff, like infrastructure - while the same opponents warfighting infrastructure is effectively inside NATO nations is a sure fire way to losing in the long run. Putin needs to keep the pressure up until something gives because he really has no real other viable options. If he can get the west to falter and start talking ceasefires, he can then reframe this fiasco as the greatest Russian victory since Bagration.

I have a serious problem with this narrative that somehow Russia “did Adiivka” and has now fully recovered. This entire position is based on some pretty sketchy vehicle production stats, most of the info coming out of Russia itself. As far as we can tell the RA wrecked an entire MRD at Adiivka. This is on top of loses elsewhere. The idea that Russia simply stamped out an entire shiny new MRD to replace it is disinformation as far as I am concerned. Russian force quality has been on a one way trajectory from the start of this war, except for a few notable areas: UAS and ISR - and we still are not sure if these are anomalies or trends. In other capability areas it is exactly as you describe, more older equipment. (equipment less suitable for this environment) This is due to RA losses exceeding Russian industrial capacity to generate modern equipment. It has been noted by more than one expert that Russia is draining its Soviet legacy force pool of equipment and ammunition. So the idea that Russia is simply shrugging off all these losses - losses that Ukraine is barely able to sustain, while quaking under the giant footsteps of an unstoppable Russia, all the while the weak and puny west sits back and watches…well this borders on propaganda not worthy of this forum. These sorts of gross oversimplifications without any real evidence, or skewing evidence need to stop as they play directly in Russian information operations. I suspect the Ukrainian posters who have pitched these angles are a combination of war weary and/or are thinking that by continuing to promote a desperate Ukrainian situation that we will somehow become politically motivated. However, they are missing the very real risk that some who read this forum may take this entire narrative as a sign that Ukraine is a lost cause, and we are all out of patience with lost causes. By continually shouting “Ukraine is dooooomed” they might just convince enough people that they are right. The answer won’t be to “double down and support Ukraine” it may wind up being “cut out losses and move on”. That is what makes this angle such a powerful pro-Russian tool. Russia must make this war appear “too hard, too complicated” because we in The West hate those situations. Any and all skewed or heavily biased assessments like these simply play into Russian hands.

Not really but maybe half way there….? My point was that a societies military is a lot more than a lone political ideological data point. If we somehow built a perfect Afghan military that aligned with their society and culture the outcome would have likely been the same. This is because the issues with Afghanistan were deeper than defence and security. The ANA was very often a domestic army of strangers because the locals were voting with IEDs. No equipment or training was going to solve that. Maybe a couple hundred years of social evolution but it really wouldn’t matter how we built a central military in that nation because it did not want to be the nation we wanted it to be. Hell the Taliban do not have full internal security control and they are far better aligned to Afghan reality. The failure to “graft” an Afghan security force was a symptom of a larger disease, not the disease in itself. My larger point is that there is a link between a society and its military (obviously) but we should avoid oversimplifying that relationship or ignore a lot of other factors as we apply a nice neat template to the war in Ukraine. When one is doing Military Assistance, you definitely have to take into account “how they fight” but one cannot bet on that single pony and expect success. “How they live”, “Where they live”, “How they pay for it”, “Who they fight and fight for” and “Why they fight” are much larger than whatever political ideology is in play. In reality this entire discussion is not about building militaries around the world, it is about intervention as a broader strategy. Based on the last 30 years it has been the major strategy of the Western world, we are doing a version of it in Ukraine right now. However, our successes in employing this strategy are spotty at best, with many high profile failures. How much longer we are going to keep trying it? Well that is a very good question.

I guess the primary evidence is not in losses or numbers, it is in the fact that the RA have not been able to translate tactical advances into an operational breakout/breakthrough. If the UA were totally overmatched the RA would be advancing tens of kms, if not hundreds. Does anyone think that Russia can do this right now but is holding back due to restraint? What is clear is that the UA is still able to deny air, land and sea spaces even with the ammunition disparities. Now as to how long either side can sustain this, or if Ukraine is somehow losing more than the RA - well we do not know, none of us. The UA has been holding actual casualty numbers very close to their chest. So far the Ukrainian president has said openly that the UA has lost about 31k KIA and one can extrapolate about x3-5 wounded. Is that enough to buckle UA force generation? Again, unknown. All we do know is that neither side appears close to operational collapse, and the UA is holding the line and costing the RA heavily. We do not know what the breaking points of either military are or are not. Any other “bright and shiny” or “doom and gloom” assessments are pretty much being pulled out of @sses by this point.

Well kudos for trying to wrestle with it. There is a lot in the wind with respect to warfare right now. All of my theories could easily collapse tomorrow. I spent the first year of this war, mouth agape, trying to figure out what was going on. The second year, things started to form, but they are nothing more than shadows we can see from the outside. Now into the third year, I am convinced of some things, which if wargaming has taught me anything, is about the time Bil H drops the bomb and blows up my entire plan.

Outstanding summary…much better than mine. I would add that “Air Superiority” is also about “range, reach and persistence”. We relied on air power dominance for deep battle, which is critical to the western way of warfare. If that is denied we run into serious trouble. The Soviet system relies of air power more for, as you note, denial and strategic shaping. The Soviets really did not have a CAS or operational air power complex like we developed in the west. Even Tac Avn was seen as a firepower projection element and not an integral part of manoeuvre. Beyond Air, the west relies heavily on multi-domain superiority. We not only need to own the air, but also the maritime, space and cyber for our system to really work. The major problem is, and will continue to be that potential adversaries are not stupid. They know that if they cannot dominate a domain, they only need to deny it in order to create cracks in the western military system. They have, and will continue to invest heavily into these denial capabilities. The problem is that denial has become increasingly easy to achieve. This has been due to several driving factors but miniaturization of processing power has been central. By being able to load more complex processing power, and sensors to inform that processing…all cheaper and lighter. It means weapons for denial have become not only smaller - allowing for greater range - but more autonomous and precise. This is potentially enormous. It redraws the fabric of warfare at some pretty fundamental levels. In the past it was some very small things. The ability to create overwhelming firepower in the form of things like machine guns and fast fire artillery had a massive impact on warfare. But in reality the largest impacts on warfare were a rail line, signals wire and tin can. Rail lines allowed for massive quick force projection on scales and timelines we never saw before. Signals wire linked all that firepower volume together. And tin cans meant we could keep troops in the field for 365 days a year. Those three relatively disconnected technologies changed warfare forever. What we are seeing on the modern battlefield is even more profound. We are talking about artificial thinking and decision making. We are seeing everything in real time and feeding it back to these systems. To try and pin this on a Western or Soviet military school of thought is really not useful in my opinion as what we could potentially be seeing is so much larger.

Danger young “S”. This is not the first time this distillation has been attempted. As I allude to in my post, the link between military schools of thought and the societies behind them is not 1) unidirectional, nor 2) in glorious isolation. There is truth to the above argument but only partial truths. For example, in war societies themselves shift and change (see Japanese internment camps) so the evolution of their military will also shift and change. In the examples you cite, these are less failures in military transposition but in a larger political ideology. More bluntly we cannot reproduce western democracies in many of these nations. The failure of western military school in these same nations is a symptom of a large issue. At the same time history is full of “westernized” indigenous troops who were successfully integrated and operationalized out of line with their home cultures - Sikh Regiments anyone? A military must be a recognizable extension of its society but that is far slipperier and squishier concept than the picture on the cereal box.

There is some truth to the idea that militaries are an extension of the people who make them, however, one cannot become too focused on political ideology as the sole source of an overall school of doctrine. History, resources, infrastructure, culture, environment and even things as simple as education and literacy all play important roles in how a military is generated and employed. We can see vast differences in communist military approaches, for example. North Vietnam had a very different approach than the Soviets, as did China and other non-Soviet communist states. Western militaries also differed, not only internally but over time. There is a vast difference in US military doctrine as it went from conscription to an all volunteer force. Its conscription based force actually favoured mass until the 70s as did many other western nations. I think this risks dangerous oversimplification of the issue. Ukraine is on a democracy spectrum, not a full fledge liberal democratic state yet. Russia is also technically a democracy, but far more in the “locked in” autocratic/oligarch end. Neither Ukraine or Russia are communist states (see their economic systems). So boiling this all down to Russia = dictatorship = communism = Soviet system: Ukraine = democracy = western system, is a serious oversimplified lens through which to view the situation on just about every point of the algorithm. The initial Russian invasion was constructed pretty much as we expected - BTGs under Brigade formations. The nature of the assault was multi-axis manoeuvre designed to overwhelm an opponent. The RA did not employ a Soviet style military approach here, they were much closer to western military philosophy and doctrine - fast moving warfare based on strategies of rapid annihilation through manoeuvre. We did not see MRDs in an echeloned system designed to attack in multiple waves or the massive fires complex that are hallmarks of the Soviet system - in fact if Russia had gone with a Soviet style attack, with the numbers behind it, they may very well have won. No the RA tried to employ what was basically a western style opening attack but it failed, nearly completely. Now why it failed is interesting and two camps have sprung up. The main one is that “Russia Sux” and cannot do western doctrine, despite trying to look like us, for various reasons - a BTG is nothing more than a type of Battle Group. The other camp is of the mind the RA failed because conditions on the modern battlefield have changed. The first camp has been the loudest but the evidence in support of the second is growing. The western school is far more than training and kit - it is a deeper military philosophy that generates strategy, which in turn generates campaigns…pretty much like the Soviet school but taking very different routes to get to a similar end-state. Now as the war has progressed the RA quickly saw that their was little hope for them by holding onto the western doctrinal school, they appear have to fallen back on mass but even here in small bite sized chunks…why? This is the Soviet style but descaled. The immediate answer to this descaling was “Russia Sux..LOLZ” but this does not make sense. Russia managed a 5-6 axis, high speed operation at the beginning of the war but cannot figure out a Battalion level attack two-years in? The good news is that it appears the Soviet approach is also under constraints based on the environment as well. High concentration is too dangerous so they too have to de-aggregate. As to the UA the idea you appear to be proposing is the “one more XYZ and they can win” idea. It is that if we can only make the UA more like us, enough, that victory will somehow happen. This does not match observations either. Ukraine started this war fighting hybrid. Mixes of conventional and unconventional defence along the entire length of the RAs overstretched operational system. That was not western doctrine nor Soviet, it was something we have seen in COIN but upscaled and empowered. The core C2 component of the Soviet style system is centralized control and task-command. We saw neither of these from Ukraine in the opening days of the war. They were far more western in that resistance in that regard. Last summer was a testament and watershed moment. It is well documented that the UA had a lot of western equipment and tens of thousands of western trained troops. The UA tried Bn level mechanized breaches in the centre south that are straight out of the western manuals. They clearly trained for them in Europe and operationalized them. They also failed…dramatically. So either the Ukrainians can’t do western (another narrative that sprung up) or there are weaknesses in the western technology based approach on these battlefields. I argue the latter. The single largest one is the over-dependence of the western system on air superiority. Without that the entire western school starts to fail. And in the modern UAS environment air superiority is impossible. So it won’t matter how much western equipment and training we provide, our current doctrine looks like it will not work on this battlefield. So what? We need a new doctrine. It really doesn’t, in Ukraine and both sides have pulled back from the western style approach as they have been pulled into an attrition war. The western school vs Soviet school is less about politics and more about military strategies. Both were built for Annihilation strategies but the Soviet school has a far higher tolerance for attrition warfare. Ukraine has kept the high technology approach but western style manoeuvre is simply undoable in this environment at any scale. Or it may take a scale so high that it looks more Soviet than anything else. Your position sounds an awful lot like the militaries of WW1 - one more push and we are through. But now they just need more F16s. The Russians have taken the same philosophy but are basing it on human capital and not kit. I suspect both camps are incorrect. The western school of rapid overwhelming manoeuvres may be dead due to nearly complete battlefield illumination and modern friction. Dumb mass is definitely dead for essentially the same reasons. Neither side will adopt either the Western or Soviet approach in full because both of these schools are 80 years old and designed for a different time. The Western school cannot deal with a modern attrition based war and the Soviet one cannot deal with the technological realities. Neither schools can address the realities of denial and friction we are seeing. So we are going to see the evolution of something else. And our job over here in the safe sidelines is to try and stay out of Ukraine’s way while they figure it out…and take notes. In summary, both militaries started this war more western than Soviet. It worked for the Ukrainians on defence but has failed them on offence. The Russians started with a more western-style approach on offence but once it failed ran back into the loving arms of Soviet doctrine on defence. The Russian have tried a much smaller scaled down version of Soviet style on offence and it has provided limited gains at horrendous costs. Ukraine has tried western style offensives, also at smaller scales, which have essentially done as well as the Soviet system, but with much lower casualties. So here we are, neither school is really working on offence but can do defence. Hence the growing belief that we are into something larger than either school - defensive primacy. So, solutions. Well doubling down on either school is likely a dead end. We probably need a new school entirely. One we have not seen yet. This war, and the next one will be a race of adaptations. We have yet to see where it will end. My position is that neither the Western or Soviet schools are working in this war, even though they have been attempted. We should not even try to make the UA more like the US Army at this point. Nor will expunging “Soviet legacy” fix the situation for Ukraine. I suspect we have yet to see a new school of military art and thought emerge. It is largely built on a foundation of artificial intelligence/forward processing that can create massed precision fires. Both sides appear to be trying to figure out this problem, my money is that Ukraine is ahead in the game but not unassailable.

I think you are mixing a lot of themes here to the detriment of objective analysis. The Soviet system was designed to create as much mass as possible and project it at an opponent. It may appear "cruel and uncaring" but in reality it was built on the brutal lessons of the Eastern Front and how a quick violent short war was far better than a drawn out one. We vie for the same aspiration of short wars, we simply lean on technology instead of human capital. And frankly we have no real proof either system is truly superior. The Soviet system is a poorer fit for modern democracies; however, before we sit too high on that horse, lets not forget democracies fought in WW1 too, and were very able to throw human capital at a problem at great loss. The reality is that there is nothing inherently "wrong" or "evil" about the Soviet military system - talking political ideology out of the equation - so long as one asks that system to do what it was designed to do. The exact same thing goes for the Western military system. In this war, both sides have tried the western approach...and it did not work. Now they are in a grinding war of attrition for which the western systems is also a very bad fit. Nor is there proof that democracies can't do attrition either. We have proven that we are very capable at spending a lot of lives to win. What I oppose is this reoccurring narrative that somehow all the problems all sides are having are "Soviet legacy" and any successes are somehow western modernization; this is simply not proven by what we have seen. Russia has fallen back onto a more Soviet-like approach to force generation and employment...and clearly it is working for them. They are able to hold ground and even conduct tactical advances even with appalling losses. The UA is moving much farther to the western doctrine, and frankly some of it is working for them too. They are able to hold, strike deep and have very high precision. The weaknesses of either system are also on display for all to see as well. For the Soviet system it is rigidity and logistical weight, which is untenable on the modern battlefield. For the Western system it is the serious lack of depth and capacity. I suspect that each side is evolving to some sort of hybrid, or at least trying to. Either way, it does us little good to point at every problem and go "difficulty upscaling due to Soviet legacy" which frankly does not even make sense based on what Soviet legacy really was. As to that last part I highlighted - well yes and no. The Mongols created smart fast mass and took over half the planet, so not entire a new idea. The Soviet system could generate modern mech and armor forces like no one else. Their operational art was very advanced on how to employ that mass. In many ways they really are a defining school of modern warfare, the counter-point to the western schools. We have no actual war to try and decide which system was better to worse to be honest. The Gulf War was the closest but it really was a poor analogue. This war has shadows of the Soviet system but overlapped with other schools.

I have no argument on either the Ukrainian or Russian military medical system shortfalls. I do have a problem with hitting the "Soviet legacy" button too often. Hell the rampant corruption within that system may even apply; however, we (or they or whoever offers this analysis) have been far too quick to assign too many problems to "Soviet legacy" in my opinion. This makes for weak analysis as we basically now have an iron clad assumption and do not need analysis anymore. The Russian medical system is failing because a lot of their sustainment systems are failing. They were never designed for the war they got. In fact if Russia did have the Soviet era military medical system, they likely would be in far better shape.

From what we can tell..."not really". The modern Russian military system employed at the beginning of the war looked a lot more western in composition. Since then, it does look like Russia is rolling back to the Soviet Divisional construct at least for force generation. As to EW employment specifically...who knows, but I suspect the Russians are falling back on volume. They definitely appear to have upped their ISR game somewhat. In the field both sides are down to multiple small unit actions to go anywhere - this is why Adiivka likely took months instead of days. Why that is happening has nothing to do with the strengths or weaknesses of the Soviet era systems. It has to do with profile and time. We have seen plenty examples of detection of forces well back from the front line. So if one tries to marshal anything bigger than a company your ISR signature is going to get picked up very early. Hell the troop positioning movements alone will likely get picked up. Second element is time. It takes maybe 30 minutes to get a company group or combat team lined up and into action. Less if you have drilled it. A Battalion can be an hour or more. A Brigade can take hours to days to get into position and lined up for an operation. An entire day sitting with a lot of highly detectable assets in range (now being +50kms) of strikes is suicidal on this battlefield...so neither side is doing that. This has little to do with upscaling ability, or Soviet era C2, and everything to do with battlefield illumination and long range strike at a tactical level. If you want to lose a Brigade, sure deploy it within 50kms of the front in concentration and try and get it shook out for a major operation. So both sides appear to be de-aggregating in order to have some chance of actually getting forces to the front. This has resulted in corrosive tactical scatter in a lot of cases. In the few areas where we see concentration (e.g. Russian assaults at Adiivka and Bakhmut) we still saw small scale actions, just a lot of them repeated. We also saw horrendous losses. There is a very real possibility that behavior on the battlefield is a result of the environment and not legacy shortfalls in C2. This scares the bejezzus out of the west as we have bet the farm on the superiority of our own system. The real lesson for the west is: "do not fight in a war like this one". Which is a great idea, unless all war is headed towards versions of this one, at least for the next while. I strongly suspect we are headed for something even worse for the western system to be honest. The trends pulled out of this war speak to a completely different battlefield dynamics, much of which we have not figured out. We could have entire volumes of doctrine that have been overtaken by events, and nothing scares a modern military more than that.

Damn, I thought someone had started a punctuation and grammar thread. FYI we hired a professional editor for the campaign briefs/write ups in CMCW.

Huh? The same legacy system that has kept Russia in this war far longer than they should have. There is nothing militarily wrong with the Soviet system for the time it was in. In fact a modernized Soviet system might just be better at modern warfare than the western one - massed precision, for example. The Soviet military system demonstrated its full potential at the end of WW2 and frankly was highly effective until about the mid-80s. If modernized there is no proof it could not be highly effective again. We have a tendency to blame every failure on this “Soviet legacy” without really understanding what that military was, or was not. The Soviet system had very high resilience, which the RA is demonstrating pretty much on a daily basis. It also could marshal and project mass like no one’s business. Problem is that the mass was “dumb” - and frankly I am not sure it was as dumb as we believed. Problems in a medical system could be from many causes. The “Soviet legacy” has become an easy-button for western analysts to explain pretty much everything. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP82-00039R000100110060-3.pdf https://www.milbank.org/wp-content/uploads/mq/volume-40/issue-04/40-4-Highlights-of-Soviet-Health-Services.pdf The Soviet medical system, for example, had its strengths and weaknesses but there was nothing inherently “wrong” with it (for example the Soviet Union had lower doctor to patient ratios than the US). It was designed for a different baseline, much like pretty much everything else in the Soviet system. The Soviet system was by-design aimed at supporting mass. So failures in the current UA system buckling under the weight of casualties cannot all be thrown at the feet of Soviet legacy, when that legacy was designed specifically not to buckle under massive casualties.

I have never fully bought this reason for the UA or RA difficulties in this war. It got rolled out after last summer to try and explain why the UA failed while trying to employ western doctrine and equipment: “well you see it would have worked but the Ukrainians struggle to coordinate above company level.” Problem with this theory for both the UA and RA is that the first year of the war had plenty of examples of larger operational level coordination for both sides. Russia pushed in a 5-6 axis attack that saw successful penetration up to 250kms. It wasn’t a lack of coordination that stalled and killed these attacks it was the levels of friction modern C4ISR and weapons can project on conventional forces. The UA coordinated two nearly simultaneous offensives roughly 450 kms apart at Kharkiv and Kherson successfully. Kharkiv demonstrated Brigade level manoeuvre and Kherson started that way be devolved to Coy level actions the forced the Russia withdrawal more slowly. Finally, there is nothing in the infamous “Soviet system” that precludes higher level coordination. In fact it is quite the opposite. Soviet doctrine was all about mass and scale. Mission Command does not magically create upscaling. We watched western doctrine and equipment fail very visibly back in summer ‘23 and our immediate reaction was “well it is clear they are doing it wrong”. Based on the evidence we see, nearly daily, do we think perhaps there might be other reasons that are forcing both sides of this war to adopt multiple small unit actions as the primary mode of offensives? After 2 years of this war, perhaps they understand and are employing what works as best as it can due to battlefield realities better than we do?

I get the need to vent and all, but you are kinda yelling at the church choir here. Steve either banned or we chased off the right wing twits (and I mean MAGA-types, not honest Republicans who's biggest crime is simply losing control of their party). To paraphrase Kofman, Ukraine will never run out of ammunition, they can simply chose to "fire less" (The_Capt rolls his eyes). This war is in a odd place right now. Ukraine is under strain and suffering but also appear to have upped their strategic strike game significantly. Russia, is also suffering but is showing improvements in some disturbing areas, like ISR. No one has solved for the operational stalemate that has evolved. Hard to really say what is going to happen but I am getting a strange sense that something is going to give one way or the other soon.

I think that if RA C4 can be eroded the effects are a lot deeper than strategic strikes. If Russia cannot managed the C4 space, it cannot react to events in the field. Nor can it employ a competitive targeting enterprise. If the UA can achieve information superiority, and are backed up with resources to exploit that, we could see operational level corrosive warfare that can create RA collapse. A key question is at what point can the RA no longer effectively defend an 800 km front? At that point collapse becomes likely and the area will have to fall back onto a lower energy state and shrink that frontage. The result will be opportunities for the UA to retake significant ground and regain momentum. Information is a key component of all this is it really allows the RA to be able to react with low troop density along that very long frontage. Take that away and those troops essentially are pushed back in time. Go back far enough, like say WW2 level of C4, and 300 troops cannot hold a km as they are now. To my mind this dimension of the war is more important than tank production.

That is really just more academic "technically" speak. Russia can "run out" much in the same way Germany "ran out" at the end of WW1. Further there is a spectrum of running out, some lines they likely have already crossed (i.e. running out of an ability to conduct successful operational level offensives.) Will the raw materials in the ground "run out", no of course not. Can Russia run out of effective capability production to keep pace with this war...definitely. I mean sure, technically, if all they have are small arms and conscripts they have not "run out" but at that point they are pretty much ineffective in prosecuting the war. If Russia "reduces consumption" they run the risk of Ukraine gaining initiative - this is exactly what we have all been afraid of with respect to the UA and artillery ammunition - note how Ukraine can "run out" but not Russia. Russia can decide to use less, and the UA can decide to retake ground as a direct result. This all comes back to "when will Russia run out?" Run out of being able to create, generate, project and sustain effective capabilities that underpin strategic options. It is like having an electric car...technically you can never run out of gas; however, if you are down to recharging with 9v batteries you have effectively run out of gas. It is splitting hairs to say "talk of when the electric car will run out of gas is not useful" when effectively that is what happens. Russia can definitely run out of effective military production, compared to losses that creates an asymmetric advantage for the UA. At that point, when the UA start rolling forward...the RA has "run out". In a war based on attrition, it is the question no matter how it gets dressed up.

I can recall at the start of this war someone coming on the forum and boldly declaring that Russia would dominate this war because they had control of the Black Sea. So much for that theory.

Gawd, I am sorry but Kofman has built an entire career on being an academic contrarian - a conversation of "reconstitution rate, relative to observed attrition, and time required to generate additional formations..." Is really just all components for answering the fundamental question of "when will Russia run out?" So "when will Russia run out?" is the "wrong conversation." The right conversation is "when will Russia run out?"

Kinda weird that one. The thing looked beached.