The_Capt

All war is negotiation - between warring parties, between internal social structures and identities (e.g. macro-micro) and between stakeholder/shareholders. And finally with reality of a massive collision itself. This is a very good point and I would take it further. The US could be signalling a few negotiating positions here. First they are signalling to people in power in the backfield, ones who may be getting soft on Putin, that there are possible end states that do not see the complete implosion of Russia as a nation state - a softer Russian landing strategy. Russia will pay, and be very aware it is paying for this war in the end, but that is a sliding scale that if managed effectively could still keep the country together. Second, it is signalling negotiation position of advantage for the western order - oh, you can bet we are going to get what we want out of this war and maybe western powers are figuring out what that is exactly. Lastly it is signaling to Russia that the US is actively engaged in the negotiated end state. Russia has to fear that the Ukraine has gone rabid at the end of the NATO leash (their perspective only) and everyone wants to avoid an accidental escalation. So, yep, there will be negotiation. The question is - who will it be with in Russia other than Putin? No way does his regime survive this war unless we let it happen. And there will be some that point to the west as the evil hand that orchestrated this whole thing to remove Putin, to which I call BS - this was a suicide-by-policy ending if there ever was one.

I am sure Gen Miley has better data. I am not sure him or his staff really know what to do with it though. No one in at least two generations in the West has ever been in a war of this scope, scale of parity intensity. Iraq was big but it was no where near a peer-level conflict. Further, no one in those rooms have ever been in a modern war like this either. The actions of the UA this Fall are not stalemate, they are asymmetric offensive operations. Now whether the UA has enough in reserve to finish the job? That is a good question. Are they exhausted and at risk of losing strategic initiative?…not from what I have seen. I also challenge the very metrics being employed to determine what “exhausted” really means. We just watched the UA erode the RA out of a major strategic objective with force ratios in the 1.5 to 1:1 range. They did it without large heavy formations or air superiority for the most part - which from a western operational planning simply does not compute. So ultimately the UA will need to decide when it is done, the ball is in their court on when this war ends (gawd, remember all the “this war will only end when Putin decides!”?). For now I see a lot of “of it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it” way ahead until the UA truly decides it has run out of gas. As to winter warfare - my estimate is that it vastly favours the UA. Winter warfare comes down to training, experience and logistics - with a small addendum for ISR. The UA live in Ukraine and have been training to fight there as they are now for at least 8 years. The RA has been pulling a bunch of conscripts, most with likely zero winter warfare training or experience - urban kids are in for one crappy time. Logistics - the pull on logistics in the winter time goes up dramatically. Everything from vehicle maint, supply and medical goes up a lot. Now which side seems to be doing better on the logistics front? Finally ISR, this one is weird as depending on the terrain tree and vegitaiton cover fades and thermals get pretty happy. This may actually make life easier for the RA ISR-wise but they have had real problems linking in a targeting enterprise, something I am not sure they will fix in the middle of winter. ISR for the UA will also get easier at the tactical level; however, I strongly suspect operational and strategic is already multi-spectral. However, however, the UA have already demonstrated a world class targeting enterprise in action, and now after the Fall offensive, is full of veterans while the RA got a lot of theirs killed by UA deep strike. So adding that all up, I expect a UA reset but I do not think they are done yet. Barring a major political shift (eg Putin falls out a window), and this war continues, my bet is a major UA winter offensive - my money is on that “strategic land bridge” being cut - that is a whole lotta frontage to defend for the RA. General Winter is on the UA’s side as far as I can see - based on RA logistics performance the environmental casualties are going to be horrendous, but we will simply have to wait and see.

So about 1.5:1 on terrain their opponent had been holding for nearly half a year before the major offensive. No doubt they achieved much higher ratios locally, but that is still pretty impressive. Very interested to see what the casualty ratios per side were, and the ammo expenditures.

Everyone (re) read Frank Herberts Dune - shielding led to "fast on defence - slow and deliberate on offence", I think we appear to be heading into something that is starting to look like that. That and, in corrosive warfare "encirclement" has become remote envelopment in depth. The effect is slower to take hold but the projected dilemma is pretty consistent.

Whelp that'll do it. Pretty standard for the last one out to turn out the lights. Still not entirely clear but this whole thing has an "ending with a whimper" feel to it, as opposed to a clever trap or valiant last stand. Could be some holdout positions but it kind of looks like the RA doesn't have the human capital to throw away on a hopeless urban slugging match. So I can see some are disappointed here, but once again - check your metrics. The bad news is that the RA appears to have adapted to retreating and can do so in a more orderly fashion. The good news is that the first real sign of RA operational learning is within the area of retreating. Offence was a hard fail, defence looks pretty shaky, but retreating is off to a solid start. So before everyone gets all glum let take a hard look at this whole thing: Tactical/Operational - While not being able to bag thousands of PoWs, and sending another few thousand RA troops face down out to the Black Sea is disappointing, let reflect a moment on the tactical and operational achievements of this Fall. First the UA managed to stage two operational offensive on both ends of a very long front, simultaneously. This is an incredibly hard peice of work. The logistics coordination and synchronization of operational support and enablers is truly epic - I have zero doubt the post-war analysis will show this. We all saw Kharkiv, as the UA crushed the right flank of the famous Russian "encirclement" in the Donbas. Next, for Kherson, I would really like to see an accurate comparison of force ratios in what just happened. Because I am willing to bet very good money that they were nowhere near 3:1 for the UA. In fact I would not be surprised to see them inverted the other way on paper - the little guy just kept crushing toes until the big guy left limping. This breaks a lot of rules of warfare as we understand them (again). This is not small in the least and it makes the case for corrosive warfare as being highly effective in both defence and offence - fog eating snowmen in either direction. This operation did exactly what such on operation of infiltrate - isolate - fix/finish - repeat should, it went slow...and then it went fast at the end. I fully I admit that I was getting worried there for a minute as well as perhaps the RA had finally proven that the entire theory was weak on the offence, and the potential to freeze this conflict was more real, but Kherson just put another nail in that coffin. Finally, the very good news is that so long as 1) the RA cannot adapt at levels outside the scope of this war (e.g. C4ISR) and 2) the UA are sustained and supported to keep doing what they are doing = it won't matter where the RA digs in (with maybe one exception), this approach can be repeated. It is only a matter of UA concentration of focus. The RA can put in massive obstacle belts but I am not sure they will even work against the UA's approach. Also, even though we did not get the bloodthirsty itch scratched at the end, do not forget just how much damage was done to the RA in this sector before they decided to pull out - the RA has continued to lose things they cannot get back. So by other metrics the UA Fall Offensive will be one for the history books. Beyond it being an incredibly ambitious and bold set of offensive operations - both were successful on many levels. I await what happens next with bated breath. Political/Strategic - Massive victory - I mean Trafalgar Square massive in this entire Fall Offensive. All war is communication and negotiation - and the UA might have just changed the narrative of this entire war for good which will directly impact the outcome. This is no longer a war of Ukrainian survival, it is one of liberation. By re-taking a major regional capital the political pay off is potentially immense with the strategic narrative in the west, we love a winner and we love a freedom fighter. Up until now - even though everyone here knew it was about liberation since the spring/early summer, as did everyone in Ukraine - I suspect the mainstream west still saw this through the lens of survival. Kharkiv was cool but it might have just been a fluke. If spun right, and I suspect it will be, Kherson should be pivotal in shifting that perspective towards "freedom for all freedom loving peoples" (insert music) - the entire narrative has potential to upscale (there is that word again). OR there is a possibility that the west goes "ok, well they proved their point lets tie this off so I can worry about the price of my Cheetos" - gawd I hope it is the latter. So What? Well it should reinforce external support and possibly shift the pressure of tying this off "right now" towards something else. I am not sure it means the entire Donbas and Crimea back in the sweet loving embrace of Ukraine by next summer, we have discussed this at length and I am still not entirely sure it is a good idea - at least not immediately. However it has very likely bought Ukraine time and options, while taking time and options away from Putin. Putin and his cronies should be looking out the window of the Kremlin right now saying "damn, we are in a tight spot!" Finally, something I have been thinking about a lot, beyond options, is alignment. Ukraine has near perfect alignment between its micro and macro structures - Russia does not, and for them it is getting worse. That alignment serves as the foundation of collective Will. Now how that alignment is created, reinforced and sustained has filled volumes of books, but right here and now it is clear that one side of this war is very different from the other. All that is left to screw up is the third party's alignment in this war - the West. We have been analyzing this instinctually but the alignment between the macro and micro social spaces in the West with respect to this war are likely going to determine its outcome - unless Russia totally implodes and then we have got a whole new set of problems. So What? Tell your family, neighbors and friends the good word - the micro-social space starts in your own living room.

If it is, it is the weirdest operational trap I have seen. I mean if the city was filled with Russian supporters /insurgents one could argue a "war to the knife" baiting. If the RA had any possibility of operational manoeuvre on the north side of the Dnipro, maybe. If we were talking a Stalingrad long game to pull the UA in and then cross back over the Dnipro for an encirclement later...but seriously, no. The RA don't even have superiority of fires anymore really so a retreat so "we can smash you when you enter" doesn't match up. Serious headscratcher on the "trap" thing to be honest. Only thing I can think of is a nuke, but we have flogged that one to death...and the Russians don't need all the pretense, they just toss a nuke. I honestly think it is an RA withdrawal because even their pretty dense strategic military level figured out that trying to defend from the wrong side of a river with your LOCs all shot to pieces is a bad idea. Snow saw the fog and decided not to get eaten further in detail.

So how fast can a conscript become a fanatic? They likely have similar levels of training and equipment - but as you point out motivation is the key. I am not sure but the RA seemed to be able to hold onto the wrong side of a river for "reasons" for a couple months. Not sure what the calculus of RA defenders in Kherson would be thinking. Some are likely going to be "screw this", frag their officers and surrender. Others might be a little more hardcore, especially if they have been on the wrong end of the UA previous to this. All war is personal, is a major point Clausewitz missed. The narrative on the RA tends to migrate based on how people want to cast them in the worst light. They are savage drunken mad dogs who need to be put down in one context, bumbling idiots over here, and now at Kherson a bunch of surrender monkeys each with white flags in their packs. My bet is that the RA is a combination of all three and maybe a pinch of troops that actually know what they are doing and are fine with killing as many UA as possible, largely because the UA is trying to do the same to them. Regardless, unless the UA can jedi-mind trick the forces in Kherson into an easy surrender (and given the treatment of Russian PoWs I would not rule this out), caution will be merited if they even to decide to take it on...which frankly I am not sure they need to for military reasons.

{Apologizing for a very long post up front - proceed at your own risk} Ok now we are getting somewhere. There is ample evidence that in 2014 the RA surprised the world in that it did not actually suck, there is your citation above and then from the references I posted: "The Ukraine conflict has been described as “World War I with technology.”11 One aspect that stands out in the Ukraine conflict is the Russian employment of indirect fires. Combining separatist and regular BTGs, Russia has effectively degraded Ukrainian military forces with long range artillery and rocket fire. Russia’s preferred concept of operations has been to keep its fires units at a safe distance, while relying on drones, counter-battery radars, and other intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets to target over the horizon.12 The observed combination of increased range and precision tracks with a general trend noted worldwide, particularly with multiple rocket launchers. As a result, Russia has on numerous occasions successfully blunted Ukrainian operations while avoiding significant casualties. Ukraine, on the other hand, is estimated to have suffered 80% of its casualties from artillery fire.13 The increased lethality has required fewer rounds, yet Russia has also demonstrated that it retains the ability to mass large volumes of fires when necessary." "A defining feature of Russian fires has been their speed. Ukrainian units report that once a Russian unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is spotted they may receive artillery strikes within minutes." https://nsiteam.com/social/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/NS-D-10367-Learning-Lessons-from-Ukraine-Conflict-Final.pdf These by Karber - there is no grey area here and plenty more which we could fill pages with. Yes, the Russian proxy forces did suck but these were not Russian "hybrids" by any stretch, it was not until summer '14 thru winter '15 that RA conventional forces got fully in the game, and even then highly constrained because - denial. Once those conventional forces got into the game they appeared to largely dominate the battlespace and a series of major reversals on the UA ensued. This surprised the hell out of everyone - I was in FD at the time - because exactly as you note "Russia has been sucking" at conventional war since the end of the Cold War, from Chechnya thru Georgia. Suddenly this yokel military was doing things that we could not do, particularly with integration of tactical fires. But...and it is a big "but" (tee hee) even Karber saw some holes that point to the fact that all was not sunshine and roses on the RA side: Ah ha! To my old eye this speaks to 1) lack of PGM integration and 2) a rigid system that can deliver very fast but lacks agility to switch on the fly. So what? Well in the intervening 8 years the UA adapted to highly dispersed and more mobile warfare. There is a lot more out there on how in 2014 the Russian's did not suck tactically and even hints they got their act together operationally - but nowhere near enough for 2022. Finally the results also speak for themselves as the outcome of the war was clearly a Russian win - even with only gaining half of the Donbas, the Russian failure was translating a tactical win to a strategic one. In fact it appears that Putin simply "post-truthed" the entire thing and called it a strategic win, when it was not. We could fill a lot more forum space on this but in the end Ukraine was not cowed and subserviently accepting Russian dominance, they pivoted heavily to the west - we started our training missions there then - and conducted major military reforms exactly because they had suffered battlefield defeats. It is on Putin and Russia for 1) giving Ukraine the breathing room and 2) convincing themselves of their own superiority. Both factors led directly to the debacle of this war. In fact Putin likely set in motion the very reasons for this war - a westward facing Ukraine looking seriously at NATO. So rather than playing "Russia Sucks" and "No It Doesn't - UA rulez" because it is frankly going to get us nowhere lets have a conversation on what the real issue is in the early assessment of this war and why it went largely wrong. I offer it had nothing to do with "Russia Sucks" or "Russia Rulz" and everything to do with two key factors in the analysis - context and scaling, the pitfalls of effective military assessment. (that is right folks, the deep truths are very often the least sexy). So the primary issue with pre-war assessments - and I am talking for both the west and Russia - as far as I can can tell is that they took the tactical performance of the RA in 2014 1) out of context, 2) failed to properly understand the challenges of scaling and 3) applied very poor alignment of that scaling. So what is The_Capt talking about? Well context is the first daemon people did not slay. Karber glanced off it and many cautioned against directly translating the phenomenon of 2014 over to this war but it looks like everyone did it to some extent anyway. In other work we studied global pandemics for various reasons, the fact we were in one being the primary, and we found that pandemics are not unlike wars when looking at macro and micro social constructs. It causes similar tensions, vertical and horizontal, and reaches deeply into human psyche. But that is not my point here, the major conclusion was that pandemics are like wars in that each has commonality between events but also is each unique in its context. There will only ever be one COVID-19 pandemic. In ten years COVID could take a twist to the left and do its gig, but the context will be very different. Primarily, it would occur in a post-COVID 19 world. The trick in pandemics and wars is being able to identify what is a trend and what is an isolated phenomenon, and how we do this is through careful analysis of context. So the 2014 war was very small by the standards of this one. Russian involvement at the strategic level had major issues - one of which I just explained up there. Russia demonstrated acumen in strategic subversive warfare - and frankly I have read and heard plenty that we probably over estimated this as well - however, they had no strategic follow through and displayed a lot of poor assumptions and biases both going into and out of 2014. It was no strategic masterpiece and we should have expected a strategic mess in this war as this was a visible trend from way back to Chechnya. Further it was made unfixable largely due to political interference. Next, there were signals that at the operational level the RA was still operating under an old ruleset. My take away from Steve's posted citations was likely problems with the RA logistical system and the lack of operational enablers. The Russian issues with operational level of warfare were not really that evident but there were plenty of indications that all was not perfect either. Tactically, we have already discussed at length but here is where context left the building. Ok, so 4000 RA conventional troops summer '14, which is what? about 3 BTGs? - managed to score some pretty impressive points against a military that was clearly not prepared for what they brought. But this does not immediately translate to the entire RA, nor does it mean the RA could do this at a different scale. Assessing tactical success or failure without context is nearly useless - we learned that in places like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan the hard way. Further onto the real punchline - tactical success or failure without full understanding of scaling is not useless, it is dangerous as hell. So scaling can go up or down, and the major failure in understanding this war from a lot of the experts was the assumptions on scaling the RA in both directions. First there was taking the tactical performance in 2014 and upscaling it. It was a huge leap, and frankly pretty amateur for the pay grades of some of these experts, to take the observed RA tactical "wows" and upscale them through the operational level to the strategic. The level of complexity and investment to make those "wows" happen on a larger scope and scale, let alone synchronize them is a challenge for the US military who is spending the most on military capability in the history of our species (ok, and before the Prussian, Mongol and Spartan lovers jump in...per capita exceptions accepted...gawd, I hate all you so much). It was an enormous leap of logic to think that Russia would walk out of phonebooth as a super-military able to do something the US and western allies would think twice about - the upscaling challenges were (and are) frankly humbling. Now because chaos rules in this universe, it is a bit less of a leap to say badness upscales, I will give you that; however, it is also a risky venture. Less so for outcomes but it masks a whole lot of the macro-issues, which frankly if Russia ever did solve for, we should be concerned because by definition it will mean they understand their weakness and can learn from them. So at the beginning of this war, we had a lot of experts who had spent 8 years upscaling 2014 and then failed to down-scale when the war actually happened...seriously?! A whole lot of wargames and operational research showed the RA in Kyiv in less than a week. Wargames in the Baltics showed the same Russian blitzkriegs. So, ok, lets forget that Russian superiority at the strategic and operational level was in doubt even from 2014, failure to downscale and actually test the Russian "wows" against what they were going to be facing at the tactical level (and we had a very good idea what the UA was capable of at the tactical level - we had been training with them for years). In the business we call this macro-masking, which is where macro calculus fails to take into account micro-phenomenon across a broad range of samples. For example, if all the experts had loaded pre-war scenarios into CMBS they would have seen that battlefield friction had gone up significantly. So if your dice rolls at the operational level say "the RA will advance in three days", well test out that advance across a range of tactical vignettes and lo and behold it did not go so well because it turns out that global ISR advantage, plus smart-ATGMs, plus PGM against what the RA could bring to the party pointed squarely to rethinking those stupid operational dice tables. So what? Well over here in CM land we were looking for other things than those at the macro-table. The (very expensive) experts with lot of letters behind their names were watching the big red lines on the country map because that is how they played their games. We were looking at a lot of abandoned Russian equipment - and I mean a lot of very valuable equipment. We were seeing a steady stream of hi res UAS video coming out of Ukraine on a daily basis when we should not be seeing anything. We saw RA combined arms fall apart, right along with their logistics as demonstrated by F ech vehicles out of gas and burning re-fuelers. It did not take a major leap at this altitude to know there was really loud dangerous sounds coming out of the RA engine room, while mainstream was waiting for Kyiv to fall. However, we also understood upscaling as well. The effect of the tactical mess spread along most operational axis was consistent - as was the complete lack of operational integration. Targeting, air support, logistics and the list goes on - the RA was fighting 5-6 separate 2014s, not a coherent and integrated joint operation designed to collapse Ukrainian option spaces. So, so what? Well sitting around and patting ourselves on the back is about as helpful as circle-jerking does for procreation. I think we have established we were, and still are to some extent ahead of the curve - no point dancing a jig on that one. What we need to do is fully understand what is happening on the ground on this war, what is a trend and what is isolated context. I am not really interested in what I think I know, I am interested in what I know I do not know. For example, the old Capt has gone on about mass...at length. Well if the utility of military mass has shifted, even slightly, the repercussions are profound - one need only study WW1 and WW2 to see why. Do the principles of war even still apply? Is conventional manoeuvre warfare still a thing? Is the tank dead? What the hell just happened? The point of a highly distributed collective "brain" as we have developed here on this little forum is to try and understand the events better - to inform and create cognitive advantage. So this is not about sitting around and feeling good watching RA soldier have a bad last day, nor self-validation or promoting/reinforcing echo-chamber; it is about collective learning about war through what is happening in this one...and what better place to do that than a bunch of computer wargamers with far too much time on their hands?

Very good point here and there is a precedent-Mosul. The combined Iraqi and western forces used a very incremental hybrid approach in that battle. The city was largely destroyed and it took 9 months but casualties were minimized compared to other urban nightmares.

I am not too worried about the humanitarian disaster being projected onto Ukraine - well, I mean from a strictly military objectives perspective. Given the events of this war it is going to be an extreme reach for Russia to sell a humanitarian disaster in Kherson as “the UA’s fault” because they are not attacking hard enough. I can imagine line ups of NGO aid waiting to get into the city - make it Russia’s problem. That is harsh but there is no real way out if the RA digs in as heavy urban combat will be so much worse. Threatening to starve the civilian population or the same civilians being blasted in a street fight is all crappy but here we are. The UA should not burn itself out on Kherson or it will risk its ability to continue offensive ops and plays into freezing the conflict or at least really dragging it out. I think your point on Russian “losing our way” is spot on and links back to the whole identity thing. They are looking for Stalingrad and the best military strategy is to simply picket and bypass. How that will float at the political level is another story. Didnt Russia already blow up the dam upstream? I am not sure what the additional damage blowing another one will do, which dam are we talking about?

Interesting hypothesis. However, I am not sure there is a forcing function on the UA in all this. Why pound your own city to rubble when you can just isolate it? A bunch of tunnel rats hiding in holes in Kherson do not have any real range outside the city. Once the UA closes in they can isolate the city further from the other side of the river, so leave em in place. Once they secure the North bank of the Dnipro the UA has options, a lot of options. They can try to bounce the Dnipro in about 5 locations by my count or maybe they just secure it and pound RA positions from a distance and open up an offensive elsewhere, like down from Zaporizhya towards Melitopol. From there they can push south toward the Crimea and/or west to cut off Kherson from the south. All these positions are viable and support advantage in the continued erosion of the RA in that sector. Feeding good troops into a cauldron of Kherson really is playing by Russia’s rules and to their strengths and I don’t see the UA falling for it. If the RA manages an orderly withdrawal it isn’t great but they are withdrawing for a reason, namely that their position is untenable. Finally, this withdrawal is going to be one way. Without a major - and I am talking biblical - strategic shift, the RA is pretty much on the defence and will not be on the north bank of the Dnipro again. They will have left a lot of hardware and people behind for nearly zero gain and that is a good news story in any war.

So Russia just announced to the world it is pulling out, to the point that famously cautious mainstream news is reporting it. They know that we can see Pvt Potato Head scratching his a$$ from space. So what would be the possible use of lying at this point? “Ah ha, we cleverly lured you into a trap on the wrong side of a river onto a city you were already advancing on”…? Some sort of IO play on the population? But to what end? Russian has been deporting and oppressing all over the occupied territories but now it need some weird gambit to convince the local population of something? If ISR is still picking up RA on the scopes at this point it is just as likely a SNAFU on withdrawal than a clever ploy. Unless someone can explain what the point of a setting up a fake withdrawal would be?

So this is the same corrosive warfare we have seen since Phase I - it took about as twice as long, about 2 months vice 1 but the RA was much less stretched at Kherson. People keep looking for traditional breakthroughs and breakouts but beyond the RA in the first week (and we know how that ended), we have mostly seen a steady erosion of the RA along its entire length - apply pressure - wait...2,3...and collapse. It was controlled at the end of Phase I as the RA pulled out out the North, uncontrolled at Kharkiv and appears to be more controlled here. It is the corrosive effect on the RA which is the masterpiece because it is eroding it to the point it cannot hold up under its own weight...or at least that is a working theory. It is almost like an exhaustion strategy but sped up dramatically. The only fly in the pie is that the RA may finally be (re) learning to pull out before full operational collapse. If they really did pull off a Gallipoli style withdrawal, well that would be the worst case...we shall see.

Well I would not say "zero", in reality the central contest of will is also within us in the west. Do we want to win or let distractions pull us away? Russian conventional forces aren't the problem, never were - the west keeping the eye on the ball is the central issue and always has been since the end of the Cold War. We can get a grip on our crap and get back to stabilizing that order, or keep shouting at and over each other - or worse...change the channel. "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” Durant et al.

Yep, that and an envelopment are near the top of the list, right next to assault obstacle crossing and amphib landings. I would be very surprised if the RA pulled off a Gallipoli - if they did this is not very good news to be honest. Now if they did a Dunkirk and just got a lot of men out without equipment the news is better. I suspect that the position became untenable and the choice was stay for totally uncontrolled collapse or try and salvage something to reestablish a defensive line.

Looking more legit, mainstream starting to pick it up: https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/russians-withdrawing-from-key-position-in-southern-ukraine-1.6145255 If it is a ploy it is an odd one. It is not like the RA can hide an armoured division waiting in the tall grass. I guess UA recon will be the first to know.

I would argue that the game being played here is much, much bigger than this. This is a contest of wills between Russia and the western global order, the stakes are so much higher than the single nation of Ukraine. They speak to the course our species will chart for the rest of the century. If the western global order is finished we are back to the anarchy of states and then a power competition to create a new order which will likely make Ukraine look like a "minor border skirmish".

Fog Eating Snow - it is slow...until it becomes fast. If true, it does show the RA may be learning as this looks like it avoids the uncontrolled collapse that happened around Kharkiv. But the amount of hardware and resources left behind will determine if this was a Dunkirk or not. Either way it would appear - again if confirmed - that the UA has solved for offence in two operations now.

Perfect, welcome to the deep end of the warfare ocean - and I do not mean to be condescending in anyway, there are GOs in service who don’t understand this. The famous “social contract” is another example of the vertical tension in society. One also has to consider the horizontal tension within a micro-social construct so sending kids from one region to die while other get to stay home. The system works so long as people believe enough in their imagined communities “King and Country!” But the second they start to realize that their real community is losing badly, the equation starts to shift. Putin has been bafflingly obtuse to the realities in Ukraine but I strongly suspect he is a master at managing the Russian micro-social spaces, which is what this war is really all about. His problem is convincing micro-social systems that Ukraine/NATO/Whoever are a direct threat to individuals and their real communities and worth sacrifice (there is that word again). Despite the slathering rhetoric displayed on this forum, I suspect that the average Russian is pretty “meh” on Ukraine and doesn’t care about it anymore than the average US or Canadian citizen really cared about Iraq of Afghanistan - I mean there is caring as a shareholder and the there is caring as a stakeholder, kind of thing. The second Putin starts putting too many Russians into the fire he risks unlocking a lot of that dormant human energy. He has built an entire scheme to keep it dormant but if it shifts on its own, well that is how leaders wind up hanging from street lamps or pulled out of culverts and shot. The really scary part is that external powers can directly influence that micro-social space, it ain’t easy but we call it political warfare, among other names. And if I were a betting man I would guess that the architectures that do this sort of thing have been kicked into high gear.

That was the overall political objective, in fact this war points to even broader ones; however, Russia has demonstrated a strategy of incrementalism warfare as opposed to full on land grabs - examples of this are throughout the Baltics and it’s Near Abroad, it is what makes this war so odd. My point was that the overall objectives of the 2014 action were not clear, and while I am sure Russia would have been very happy with the entire Donbas region, the actual objectives of the operation in context of the overriding requirement to minimize western reaction are still in doubt and likely in Putin’s head. There is no evidence that points to the RA running out of gas in early ‘15 (in fact quite the opposite) forcing the Russian political level to the table - that is pure fiction as far as I can tell, particularly the depth of the Russian military gas tank demonstrated in this war. Finally looking at Minsk II in detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minsk_agreements The thing got agreement on “elections of self-government” (para 4),for the Ukraine to still pay for land it just lost (p8 ) and to reform its very constitution to open the door to “decentralization” (para 11) …where I come from when a nation is agreeing to re-write its constitution at the insistence of another, after armed conflict, is a solid loss. The Minsk II agreement gave Russia exactly what it wanted, a legal foundation for full annexation without a peep from the western powers - they even got OSCE monitors in ffs!

Hmm, ok lemme try and keep it from getting too weird. War is a social exercise and as such social frameworks are very important to its prosecution - I am pretty sure everyone gets that. It can be argued that society, since the Agricultural Revolution and creation of complex societies, is not a homogeneous mass. There exist dimensions to society, libraries have been written on this stuff but very little on how these dimensions interface with warfare. War is a macro-social exercise in almost all war theory. Clausewitz had his trinity of macro social blocks, and many have used these to describe the fundamental theories of warfare. By macro, I mean at a state or pseudo state level it is comprised of manufactured sectors of society - government, military etc - this in contrast to organic social structures. The relationship between macro and organic has been touched upon - “skeleton vs cellular” by Appadurai for example. Looking back a war before complex society anthropologist like Keeley write about how pre-historic warfare was tribal and below the “threshold of formation”. Micro social structures are an ocean of humanity relationships and cultures that reside under the macro notions of a state or other large grouping. They are your family, neighborhoods and friends - Harari refers to this as intimate communities vs imagined communities of macro structures. Ok, so what? Well if we accept that society is comprised of macro structures resting on top of organic micro-social structures then central to prosecution of warfare is the relationship between the two. We can side step how that relationship affects Will and focus on warfare within these two dimensions itself. The vast majority of military power is designed to fight within a macro-social context. Militaries are designed, built and employed as an extension of macro-structures (mostly, but there have been exceptions). These are designed to fight other macro-structures in a collision as has been described by many. Where things get weird is when macro structures attempt to deliver effects into micro-social constructs. An infantry combat team is not designed to deliver effects within a micro context - beyond blunt approaches of wholesale elimination, which is a very narrow option set. When thrust into a situation where a military is going to need to be able to deliver effects into this space they have developed specialists and special units. SOF is most often employed in this space but there are others. Police forces are another interesting example as they are purpose built to work in a micro-social context “walking a beat” but have to specialize to create formation and function on a macro level e.g, riot control. ”Ah Capt but what about the tactical level, is that not simply a micro-level of warfare”…no, but thanks for asking. The framework of macro-micro in warfare is not about scale it is about orientation. A single soldier in a platoon attack is still orientated towards macro constructs of warfare. A deserter running away from the war is orientated towards micro-social constructs, the difference is not the soldier but which way they are facing and the impact of that on a wider scale is how entire armies fall apart. Many of our failures over the last twenty years has been an inability to affect those micro social structures, in fact they have turned on us many times. Sending conventional forces designed for macro warfare into a micro driven conflict is the epitome of insanity. Clearly the Russias took this into account but then threw those specialized security forces into a conventional war and hilarity ensued. This is the tip of a very large iceberg because within those micro-social structures is an enormous amount of human energy. We kick upstairs to the state but the majority of human energy never left the intimate relationship space. That energy tend to be very localized and short range but when it boils over and start to emerge as a macro force, well that is when revolutions happen. So there is a link to subversive warfare in all this as well. In the case of this war, the failure in Russian strategy is not only in regard to big red lines on the map, it was a failure to create sufficient effects within micro-social structures to avoid wide scale groundswell resistance, and they have shown no real plan to win these structures over post -conflict - I strongly suspect the level of partisan resistance in occupied has been under reported as has the wide scale oppression. Finally that fire has a risk of spreading into Russia itself which is what all the talk of upheavals etc have been sitting upon. Does that help a bit?

Well I think we are just going to have to agree to disagree and maybe things will become more clear when more data becomes available. I am not seeing any corroborated evidence of above and would need to in order to follow a thread from 2014 to here. In fact reviewing some of this stuff (again) in context of this war I come to the exact opposite conclusion - the Russians were victims of their own success from 2014. We can nitpik tactical performance all day long but in the end the RA supported a proxy war and then rolled in pseudo conventional forces in new force structures and were observed crushing an opponent who had been succeeding against uncon separatist forces. They pulled off two major operations that first pushed back the UA and then decisively defeated the in the field in early ‘15 forcing the Ukrainian government to the negotiations table. In the end Russia had taken the Crimea and about half the Donbas and avoided any real western reaction. I am sure there were observations of RA issues, no military in history has ever had a perfect war, but nothing I can see leads to a forecast of what happened in this war in prosecution or outcome. To take the position of “well they didn’t take the whole Donbas = they suck” is a serious stretch given the context of the conflict. Did they want the whole Donbas? Could they do it without a full scale invasion which they were avoiding see: no western reaction? Hey maybe you were the lone prophet, the outlier who saw what everyone missed; however, using your own conclusions to prove your own theories is pretty risky and filled with pitfalls. Further, I am not sure it sets up a theory that is resilient enough to stand up to scrutiny. I think “Russia sucks” as a general theory is weak and overly-simplistic for explaining the phenomenon we have seen in this war and will continue to do my part to keep looking for other answers.

The "Police Action/Intervention" bites yet another global power in the a$$. At some point we should get into the role of military power within micro-social contexts, and just how bad an idea it is for anything but very specialized forces.

Now that is a batch of really good questions. They really orbit a central one - how much did Russia believe its own hype i.e. smoked their own supply? I suspect that at some levels within the RA and political machine of Russia they had the exact same perception as mainstream analysis in the west. Any dissenters were shamed, blamed and fired because "look at what might Russian bear did in Ukraine in 2014 and Syria". If you look at the Rand study link I posted the prevalence of poor Russian strategic assumptions was noted throughout 2014, which makes me think it was less about excellent Russian strategic planning, and more about western constraints that kept the war at a level where the BTG functioned well and the vulnerabilities of the RA operational system were not well seen. The Russian leadership went with "Russia Rulez at War!" which proved to be disastrously wrong in that they only "ruled" at very narrow and specific contexts of Ukraine 2014 and Syria. We basically had a welterweight military convince itself it was a heavy weight - some cultural bias and identity desperation, and some because it went into a school yard and beat up children - it then decided to get into a fight that real heavy weights would have thought twice about and found itself in a jiujitsu match...whoops.

Oh definitely, we knew about 72 hours in this had not gone according to plan, and by the end of the first week it was apparent they RA was in serious trouble. I think we bounced onto "Sieges from Hell" phase for about a day or two before it become apparent from the stream of tactical vignettes that the RA logistical system was completely failing and its C2 was not far behind. The collapse of the Northern theatre was not a surprise in the least, in fact I think they held on longer than was healthy. We also forecasted the slow grind to nowhere in Phase II in the Donbas and were waiting with bated breath for the UA offensive in the fall (Phase III). I was personally very surprised at the UAs ability to sustain two separate operations on either end of the front line as both Kharkiv and Kherson were happening concurrently. Since then corrosive warfare continues its steady march to a tipping point at Kherson. What happens next is a likely steady pushing pressure UA over the winter, some sort of weak RA symbolic offensive as Russia tries to freeze this thing. I suspect the UA will wait until conditions are right but I can see that infamous "land bridge" being cut down the middle. Beyond that I have more questions than answers - how long does it take for the Russian military complex to completely fail? How long for the Russian economy to fail? How long for the internal divisions within Russia to start making serious noise? How long can the West hold out in support, how long before the West gets distracted by its own crap? All war is certainty/vision, communication, negotiation and sacrifice. Those last two will start to increasingly impact the first two for each side over time and I suspect we will end up with a result no one is happy with at the end, but maybe we can avoid WWIII or a Russian Civil War redux with nukes if we are really lucky.