The_Capt

Or 3. You and the analyst were (are) basing your conclusions on incomplete understanding - both parties saw what they wanted to see - and when the coin landed, your predictions turned out to be more correct. None of this is particularly good news as analysis is all about focusing on what you get wrong and digging into that to get a better understanding. Self-validation creates a reinforcing effect that leads future analysis off a cliff because "you already have it all figured out". I would say the mainstream analysis before this war did exactly that, but that does not mean you have developed a universal or unifying theory that will inform the next war based on "see, Russia Sucks". The missing piece as far as I can see is a detailed understanding of "how and why" they are sucking, which I firmly believe the "Russia just Sucks" camp is vastly over-simplifying. Ok, off the mark, do you have any supporting analysis or post-action to back any of this up? Is this your perspective of events or does it align with post-war analysis? If so, well ok, but here is some counter-narratives: https://nsiteam.com/social/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/NS-D-10367-Learning-Lessons-from-Ukraine-Conflict-Final.pdf I point to section 3 specifically (pgs 8-13) https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR1400/RR1498/RAND_RR1498.pdf Pages 43-45 cover the period from May 14 - Feb 15 when conventional RA forces were fully engaged to stop the failing of their proxy Donbas forces from LNR/DPR - you can see how quickly the war shifted once the BTGs got engaged and specifically "Although artillery skirmishes continued, both sides took a break to rearm, train, and consolidate between September 5, 2014, and January 13, 2015, when Russia launched a second offensive. Following a second encirclement and defeat at Debaltseve, Ukraine signed the Minsk II ceasefire on February 12, 2015, with terms highly favorable for Moscow." (p45) This Rand document is fascinating in hindsight (note Kofman as lead author) as it gets a lot right in forecasting the weakness of Russian strategic assumptions, particularly in the political and information warfare domain. It gets a lot wrong with respect to the potential of hybrid warfare, noting it was "inconsequential" when conventional forces arrived on the battlefield (p 70) when the RA crushed the Ukrainian defence. I think that conclusion led mainstream thinkers down the wrong path at the start of this war. https://mwi.usma.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Analyzing-the-Russian-Way-of-War.pdf Interesting peice on the link between Georgia 2008 and Ukraine - punchline the RA learned a lot from Georgia and underwent reforms which led to 2014 success...but not so much in 2022. And finally the peice by Karber - the guy actually got so close he got hit in an MLRS strike: https://prodev2go.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/rus-ukr-lessons-draft.pdf In this peice Karber goes on at length at the effectiveness of the BTG and the emerging "Russian way of War", I know the US military took this pretty seriously, as did we as on paper the BTG could outrange any of our BattleGroups TFs. We then saw similar trends in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and the mainstream estimate was they would unfold in Ukraine in 2022 - nothing on "Russia Sucks". So I do not agree that the post-war analysis nor the facts on the ground (see Rand study) support the idea that RA sub-par performance was observed. The fact that a pretty modest interjection of RA forces in Aug 14 at Ilovaisk ("4000 troops") dealt a major reversal to the UA, and then the decisive defeat of the UA at Debaltseve in Jan 15 forced Ukraine to the negotiation table to sign a pretty bad deal for them (Minsk II). There is plenty of evidence that the LNR/DPR separatist forces sucked, but Russia was trying very hard to keep a lid on the whole thing for deniability reasons. Nothing in any of these assessments/analysis (and there are plenty more - Anx A of the first link has two pages of references) point to the pre-ordained abysmal performance seen in this war. I am not sure what sources you were pulling from to come to your conclusions; however, it might just be possible that 1) all the above mainstream post-war analysis is wrong, and 2) whatever sources you were using were correct, and Russia really did suck...but - the end-state does not support that perspective either. Regardless of tactical performance Russia achieved pretty much the impossible, it fully annexed the Crimea and over half the Donbas region without a reaction from the West. The more I read into this, I strongly suspect that Ukraine 2014 was Putin's "Czechoslovakia" moment and he convinced himself the west was so divided (divisions he helped make worse) that we would sit back and let Ukraine fall, so go "full Poland" in 2022. There is no way to spin 2014 was anything other than a Russian "win" both on the battlefield and on the political stage based on how things unfolded on the ground. I am afraid that if this served as the foundation of how you saw the outcomes of this war then you too were working with incomplete concepts. If you had gone into 2014 with "Russia Sucks due to Georgia 2008 = they will lose" you would have been completely wrong. Bringing that theory to this war does not make it anymore correct - the theory found a war where it made more sense, but that does not make it a workable general theory. This would be akin to developing a theory "The US Sucks at War" based on its performance in Korea (and there was plenty of evidence in the first year) and then predicting Vietnam as a US loss because "the US Sucks at War" - this glosses over so much nuance and context as to be nearly meaningless. The mainstream analysis went the other way - "Russia is Terrifying in 2014, so they must be terrifying in 2022", which is not any less incorrect and shame on people who get paid for this work. So what? "Russia Sucks at War" is not a workable or even accurate foundational theory in my opinion. It is inconsistent with observed phenomenon in previous conflicts and fails to take into account the complexities of context and evolutions of warfare over time. "Russia Sucks at This War", how badly and why is worth exploring in depth, not the least of which is how much the UA/western backed warfare is forcing the RA to "suck". The very tricky part is to try and distill these reasons into trends that may continue and influence the next war. There is significant risk in porting over all the observations from this war to the next one e.g. Tanks are Dead - I cannot say if tanks are dead, they appear somewhat out of place in this war but we need to understand "why" before we can say if the next war will see the same thing. However, I think we do agree that Russian failures and Ukrainian success do not operate in glorious isolation of each other - they have a shared causality with each other. And the study of that relationship does not neatly sum up to "Russia Sucks", at least not from my point of view.

I a not sure mass is dead, I think static mass is dead. Agile mass capable of very wide dispersion and then rapid concentration is likely still on the table. As for your scenario above, I guess my question is how would this be any different than Phase I of this war? The RA might be able to get crazy gun concentrations and then mass all them big ol tanks, punch a big hole in the UA line and charge!!....but into what? They will get strung out on longer LOCs, have their logistics hammered because they can be seen from space and we are back to stalling and corrosion. They could try smaller punches that only advance a few kms at a time but then you are also defeating the purpose of a big punch through because you opponent has time to react and re-set. The very purpose of "punching a hole" is in doubt because it cannot create disruption when you opponent has ISR superiority...they will watch you punch the hole, then shoot all your gas until you run out, and then watch your crews abandon their vehicles and walk back. I do believe you when you say that the RA may try it, it has that WW1 feel of "one last push and we are onto Paris/Berlin" feel to it.

Ah, but by this point they had already crossed the Rubicon of committing forces to 4-5 other operational axis. They pushed hard with what they had left. If they had concentrated all 300k forces - with the exception of deceptions - in the Donbas on day 1, concentrated their operational and strategic strike on that and the supporting regions I argue they very well could have taken the entirety of the Donbas fast enough to leave the west dislocated and divided. Call it an R2P operation, create enough BS Ukrainian oppression stories in the region and then seal it up quickly. I do not think the reaction from the west would have been the same. This was possible and Russia Sucks theory does not hold up in this "what if" because, as you note, the UA would have been holding without widescale western support. Russia was still sucking but its strategy would have been aligned with its capability. However, under our timeline Russia made bafflingly bad strategic choices - ones that were not predictable without a lot of information/data that we do not have access to. Well that does not match the western analysis I have seen, 2014 was full on liminal warfare and they took half the Donbas and the entire Crimea without much of a western response, so "win" by any metrics. The tactical lessons observed show that Russia was leaning into a modern way of warfare that was starting to concern us, I have already posted several of these analysis and none of them point to "Russia sucking", in fact quite the opposite. In that conflict the UA was noted as fighting like it was 1982 and got clobbered, hence why they went hard at military reforms including a lot of western training missions. So the evidence, at least as far as I have seen, point to more limited gains by Russia due largely in part to them wanting to keep that war in the "uncertainty" space to keep that war obfuscated and the west confused and divided, not poor battlefield performance...and it largely worked as Europe kept by Russian energy by the buttload, while making squawking noises. In fact the 2014 war is largely why the west kept over-estimating the RA before this one. I am going to have to see some further evidence to join you on the 2014 version where "Russia Sucks so they went to Minsk". I was not convinced until it was clear that they were doing a "full bars" grab. A full on invasion as definitely clear but how that invasion was going to be carried out was not, nor were the political/strategic objectives clear (stated or implied). It was about 72 hours in that it was clear that they had picked a strategy that failed and that mass was not working...Russia sucking was secondary to my mind until it was clear they were attempting a war well outside their abilities. And here we land at what is probably the point of disagreement, one that I do not think can be settled until we have a lot more data, likely after the war is over. I do not think what Russia did or did not bring to the table were the most important. Their very poor political and strategic thinking definitely set the conditions, again I do not see any evidence these were easily predictable...in fact I think most were surprised just how overtly Putin went in on this. What was the most important condition in my opinion was highly unpredictable and that was what happens when the UA combination of highly empowered dispersion, ubiquitous ISR, and precision weapons met traditional conventional mass - poorly formed, trained and C2'd mass fully accepted but I am not sure if the Russians had better C2 and combined arms performance it would have really made a difference. Their logistics would still have been highly vulnerable and nothing the RA could have done could have solved for western ISR integrated into the UA, which likely the single biggest factor in the outcome of this war at the operational-to-tactical level. You posted this one first but I will leave it to last. You seem to be alluding to the idea that somehow we in the west - who do not suck - would somehow stop this operation? That is not how military operations work. If we in the west were caught up in a war taking significant casualties we would do everything we could think of to mitigate that but we would not simply cry "stop the war". Canada's military, or any other western military for that matter would keep fighting for as long as its people told them to, regardless of the brutal casualties; history is on my side on this one. Do you not think we knew how useless the war in Afghanistan was from the ground level, yet we kept going because there were no other options? I suspect the RA is in the exact same situation. They have not adapted, but I am not sure how much they can at this point. They have political and strategic direction, so they attack when told to and defend when told to. They are trying to use mass and it isn't working, but that is not proof "they suck", at least not at the operational and tactical levels - it means they are stuck in a very bad political/strategic framework where there is no way out. The military answer is to pull back and try to freeze this war before they lose ground they had before it started, but the RA does not have this option. All they can do at this point is keep feeding human capital into a meatgrinder. Russia is Stucktm is a far more accurate assessment of their situation in my opinion, or may Russia is Stuck Suckingtm There is plenty of evidence of RA qualitative failures but being stuck in an impossible loop is not one of them.

Economies on the scales we are talking take a long time to build up the pressures for major shifts, this is something that the average person does not understand because personal finances are very simple systems in comparison and can blow up in an afternoon. Even the 2007-08 financial crisis can trace causes back to banking deregulation during the Clinton era (and likely even before that). So what? Well sanctions and economic pressure are not like a nuclear weapon - bright flash and big boom. They take a long time to build up to something dramatic. It took two and half years of a global pandemic to create the economic mess we are in now globally, nations were deficit spending on a scale not seen since...well, I am not sure when we blew that much creating what were essentially welfare states as entire economic sectors collapsed....but hey let's blame {insert political party of your choice}. Further the damage being done to Russia on this scale may become generational, particularly if Europe hardwires outside of Russian energy, that was the single largest misstep Russia/Putin made on this whole mess - burned his major market to the ground over whatever this thing was about. The Russian future looks very grim without renormalization, which will not come easily if at all. Now will that lead to a coup tomorrow...doubtful but the conditions for one are brewing.

And here we agree fully. I do not think Russia is capable of freezing this conflict either. The West and UA have far too many options left to them while the Russian option space has pretty much collapsed. We can go around the tree a few more times on why - Russia Sucks vs UA-is-bending-theories-of-warfare-in-the-same-scope-as-the-Mongols-didtm- but at the end of the day the reality we are in now is that the Russia is so far behind the UA that it would take Russian military reforms to come anywhere near being able to compete. Reforms that would need to be conducted from the forward edge, back through the operational and strategic, to the industrial, legal and political levels. Russia would realistically need to freeze this conflict for the better part of a decade - even without being under crushing sanctions and isolation - in order to re-tool the military it needed to counter the UA and the West on an equal footing. I am not sure that is even the play to be honest. Right now it looks like Russia is desperately playing for time, hoping that Ukraine fatigue will set in and western support will wane. That, or the west will decide and push for some arbitrary line that "there is where Ukraine has won enough and Russia has lost enough", my money is on the post-2014 lines but even that will require Putin to have a 9mm headache, along with his power circle. I think the worry that western support will dry up and the RA will be able to resume offensive operations is highly unlikely, the RA is pretty much shattered at this point as far as major offensive operations as far as I can tell.

You mean like going out and playing whack a mole with the TB for 5 years? - the very definition of conducting useless attacks repeatedly for years with no successful outcome. Now this war compared to COIN is apples to oranges but I do not believe for a second that western militaries are immune to banging their heads against a wall repeatedly. Russia is really doing the only thing it can think of, and frankly it kind of worked in WW2, or at least that is the myth - just keep feeding live Russian teenagers into combat until the other side runs out of bullets. I think it is myth as the Soviet military had developed a lot with respect to operational manoeuvre by the end of that war but Putin and his hand picked generals have clearly been reading whatever the Russian version of Ambrose is on WW2 mythology. Well we are going to have to continue to agree to disagree...cordially of course. I think you are becoming enraptured with the after glow of the accuracy of your prediction, or at least are at risk of it. I would red-team the assumptions that your predictions are directly and solely causal to where things are today, maybe just a little bit. I do not think it was possible to predict the outcome of this war beforehand unless one knew the Russian strategy. If Russia had gone for a limited "sewing up of the Donbas", they could have afforded to suck tactically and even operationally but they still may very well have secured their objectives before the world got all up in arms. I am convinced the response from the West would have been pretty much in line with what it was last time...all squawky and sanctiony but we would not be seeing the massive amounts of military support over a few more acres of Donbass. It was places like Mariupol and Kharkiv that created the attention and the drama, that and a brilliant IO campaign by the Ukrainian government. It wasn't until the UA got all the resources to connect the dots on whatever this has become did the fate of the RA become truly sealed, and that needed the political/strategic over-reach mis-step of trying to take the entire country in flagrant violation of the global order. I do not argue that you very likely predicted the tactical outcomes of this war before it started but the operational and strategic outcomes were impossible to predict until we are about 3 days into this war. Even then HIMARs and full western support took longer to form up, allowing the RA as poor as it was to still hold onto large swaths of territory and severely damage its opponent. Finally, the overall Russian offset to sucking tactically has always been overwhelming mass. You are good Steve but I am not sure Arquilla himself would have predicted just how much the utility of dumber mass would drop in this war, I know I sure didn't. The Russian initial attack was with the best troops they had, the same approach that worked very well in 2014, and the fall back was Enemy at the Gates with the mountains of Soviet era equipment and ammo - recall everyone freaking out about that back in Apr/May? No one could predict that would fail on Feb 21st unless they 1) knew the Russian strategy and 2) knew the West would put in place the enablers and support to make the UA able to do something no one thought possible before the war. I am of a firm mind that a whole lot of conditions had to fall into place in order for us to be where we are in this war today. Some of those conditions were predictable, like the growing tactical disparity between the two sides as one was modernizing while the other was rotting from corruption. Others, such as the Russian baffling strategic choices and the UA breaking the rules of warfare to the extent they did, were not predictable and yet were just as determinative to being where we are. Sure Russian's suck at this war, but that is the beginning of the analysis of this event, not the end of it in my opinion.

We already have micro-drones. Nano is something else entirely - it is extending warfare to a molecular level: https://www.nano.gov/nanotech-101/what/nano-size#:~:text=Just how small is “nano%3F” In the International System,is about 100%2C000 nanometers thick This will likely be a lot like cyber, an omni-domain in military terms; however, the major difference is that nano is all physical. Like cyber it will transaction information; however, the information is more the basic "bits" of physics itself. I honestly think the destructive power of nanotechnology is simply too high and will cross into the same strategic weapon status of nuclear weapons, but there is so much risk of it leaking out do to practical tactical applications. The good news is that true mastery and exploitation of this tech is still a ways out.

The issue is the range. Recon by force at these ranges means that in order to create a controlled bubble you would need massive amounts of recon, well above the 1/3 rd rule. First problem are ATGMs, small man portables with the range and better lethality than the old vehicle mounted systems. Two guys in a bunch at 2km. You now need to sweep every shrub 2+kms out along the route of advance - the manpower bill for this is enormous. A good offset would be micro-unmanned but again…volume. Second problem, UAS/UGS, recon in force now includes air superiority below 2000 feet and sweeping ground level for mines with legs and possibly sub-surface systems lying dormant to pop up and hit your main force or logistics. We have talked at length on the challenges to this. Third problem, observation. This environment is one where if you can be seen you can be killed. So how does one blind an opponent with recon in force? In the old days it was effective artillery and air power deep strikes combined with recon but ISR is now on every street pole, smart phone from ground level all the way up to space-based…that is one helluva recon in force battle. The attrition recon forces will face will be extreme, which is frankly the weakest part of the western approach - we throw some of the highest trained soldiers into most attritional processes and expect magic to happen. And all of that will do little against PGM artillery where a single gun can do the damage a big fat and easily found battery used to do. Cheap disposable unmanned PGM arty is the next obvious move in this crazy game. I think we may need to reinvent reconnaissance to be honest.

Steve, I do not disagree on the “force generation” sucking - I am not sure how much of that is “sucking” and how much is crisis of their own creation, but why split hairs? As to the video, the two guys moving down the road are unarmed as far as I can see and I suspect they may have been hit in the initial strike and were already in shock. This is consistent with them simply getting back up even after getting hit by the drone and trying to march back down the road - those two were very well in shock the whole time but we do not see the first strike. In fact this whole outfit looks like it is in shock. As to Russia Sucks - here is a clear example of my point. This video, heavily edited for propaganda purposes, does not scream “Russia Sucks” to me. It screams “UA is crushing it”. The RA troops are likely inexperienced and may even be conscripts but that ambush was done from very long range/remotely - not a single UA soldier in view, and with extreme speed and precision. Without several billion dollars of defensive system investments I am not sure a Canadian Combat Team would have survived it either. I think where we differ on “Russia Sucks” is that I think Russia Sucks for very specific reasons related to this specific war. Their strategy was and is a mess, peace on that; however, operationally and tactically they suck because they are in the wrong war. They are fighting a 20th century war against an opponent with 21st century capability (even limited). An opponent who has adapted that capability very rapidly and integrated it into something else.

Your point on UA capacity accepted but we have seen the ISR/PGM/light infantry tirade too many times in the last 8 months to be able to ignore it - this last video is just a repeat of that theme. We have heard opposite reports on ATGMs - the Javelin doing 80%+ percent shot/kill etc. Without an operational AAR we cannot know how widespread the phenomenon really is but I have seen enough to come to the conclusion that something fundamental is afoot in the evolution of warfare. To your points, I would pushback on ISR. I think that for this war the ISR asymmetry between the UA and RA has been a definitive factor. It has been widely reported that it is not only the mass use of tactical UAS but a layered western architecture going all the way to space plugged into the UA at multiple levels. We are seeing a smaller, lighter force destroying a large heavy one largely due to that ISR dynamic - the UA can see the RA likely better than RA commanders are able to see themselves.

I do not think it is crackpot at all. In fact it is one of the few solutions that makes sense - up-armoured dispersed “light” infantry in powered suits. You gain survivability, mobility and firepower where you need it, directly on the operator. But you also can keep a lower battlefield profile and dispersion. The biggest issue is power. If you want armoured infantry battle suits like Starship Troopers (book not movie) or The Expanse, one needs very high density but low weight power generation and I do not thin’ we are there yet.

Well jury is still out but the evidence from this war is indicative in that direction. APS and C-UAS could be competitive at the forward edge, but the defensive requirement is extremely high and the technology to counter the counters appears to be accelerating while also dropping in cost. We have discussed UAS at length but “zapping” them to cut link back to human operators is countered by more autonomy and the hard kill systems are still very expensive, highly detectable and are incapable of handling swarms. Drones on the other hand are becoming cheaper and more disposable. Further none of this deals with UGS. APS are quite developed but are also vulnerable to being swarmed by sub-munitions, stand-off EFP munitions, decoys and top attack. And after all that, there are no counters to PGM artillery, let alone smart artillery delivered sub-munitions, nor space based ISR - in fact ISR is moving from “layered” to a cloud where everything is a sensor. This combined with battlefield hi capacity data networks, backed up by emerging AI support means the loop between find and finish is not only becoming tighter, it is also becoming highly distributed. The result is a battlefield that is not only more lethal, it is smarter too.

This is one of the problems with these twitter videos - they make great war porn but the thing is so heavily edited that it is hard to actually make out what happened in any meaningful manner. Were those BMPs “parked” or did they slam into each other in the confusion after one was hit? Was one trying to do an extraction? Or did the crews simply abandon them in location? Answers to these questions create a wide array of implications. I would say the outfit in question looks pretty green from some of the video, maybe coming under fire for the first time, but they had BMPs and tanks with gas in them and looked to be advancing in column before it all went sideways so still mounted mech capable. I am wondering how they got into that ambush in the first place to be honest. One thing that is clear is that it was one helluva effective ambush. I am not sure how to defend against it to be honest. At the beginning those looked like ATGM strikes which could have been delivered by dismounted infantry way out. Then you have scary accurate artillery, all being observed in high resolution by UAS who follow up with aerial attacks. No recon screen is going to pick up infantry teams in wood lines up to 2kms away. Without c-UAS you cannot hide a mech force like that (we don’t see the ISR systems above this), and that artillery is landing right on top of them, likely very quickly and accurately. If someone has a clever answer that does not involve a few thousand dismounted recon sweeping every bush 2kms on either side, a magic C-UAV wand that can’t be detected from space and a shield bubble that makes tanks and BMPs both invisible to western ISR and protect them from PGM - well let’s hear it.

Exactly. I did not see fundamental “sucking”, which is the problem with this philosophical point of view - every video is Russians sucking. I saw a mech RA outfit get totally shellacked by a combination of what I think were ATGM, UAS and really nasty accurate artillery - how they got there is unclear. Those two “low intelligence and problem solving skills guys” were likely already in a state of f#cked up, the lack of weapons is a hint, then getting a UAS grenade in the face pretty much guarantee they are pretty much zombies after that. This is not a sign of anything beyond the fact that HE to the face makes everyone have low intelligence and poor problem solving skills. Having been under accurate mortar fire, I can say from personal experience all one has drills and muscle memory when the world starts exploding around you and we were nowhere near as bad off as those sods in the video. Those clustered guys may be a symptom of poor training but I would not write off inexperience as it is human nature to huddle together in those situations, hard to reprogram that even in trained troops.

And none of this addresses the major operational and strategic issues that brought them to this point of the war (i.e. losing strategic and operational initiatives and on the defence) - the misalignment between political objectives and military strategy's; a poor collective military learning system unable to adapt at the same or better rate than its opponent; the lack of a modernized operationally competitive C4ISR enterprise which underpins an effective joint targeting system; and the continued erosion without any real mitigation of a logistical system stretching from the forward ammo resupply point back to production and procurement. The RA can churn out units and people all it wants, however, until it entirely retools itself to fight the war it is in and not the one for 1999, it simply will not matter how many troops it can produce…unless there is a failure in support to Ukraine whose single greatest vulnerability is that is is not strategically self-sufficient in the prosecution of this war.

A move from Izyum to Bakhmut is more of a lateral repositioning, the fact that the UA is forcing the RA to do these sorts of moves is a form of strategic interdiction in itself as the wear and tear of major force shifts causes attrition on its own. I am not sure people understand how much strain constant the lateral shifting of forces has on C2, logistics and morale impacts a fighting force but the horizontal friction the UA is projecting on the RA is not small. As to operational or tactical reserves, we may be seeing the evidence in the steady stream of tactical vignettes but we cannot know without context. We do know the UA waged a successful deep strike campaign on RA logistics nodes in depth, so it is clear that the UA has the capability and intent. What we do not know is whether they have the means (eg ammunition and bandwidth) to do deep interdiction over time. I would argue that if the RA are moving reserves as a counter move or in prep of a counter offensive within a tightened area, the UA is going to expend the rounds to interdict them…and more easily than if they were trying to cover a much larger area. My point being that concentration of mass - as one sees in shortened lines scenario - in this war appears to be more of a liability than a benefit, except in a single scenario at Kharkiv but I suspect there were some very specific pre-cursors to creating that one. There is a point where traditional massed based conventional warfare works just fine, once you erode your opponent to the point that they are effectively blind and so brittle that they can no longer hold under their own weight. However, as this war has progressed I think the term “freedom of mass” is worth exploring. It is clear that the utility of massed forces itself is a dynamic and competitive arena (always has been) but the algorithms of that competition appear to have shifted. In this contest it appears that the UA have gained higher freedom-of-mass while the RA has lost it - which all goes back to compressing and expanding options spaces.

I am still not sure there is a mass advantage at Kherson to be honest. As you note it is Severodonetsk in reverse except that the higher density force is being slowly eroded by the lower density force - recall at Severodonetsk the Russian had something like a 900 gun concentration in a very small area to make incremental gains. At Kherson we have a much less density UA essentially making incremental gains at much lower cost, and one far more sustainable. The cutting of supply lines clearly worked as the Russians, again with a much larger conventional force (at least on paper, recall the trainloads of armour) has not been able to muster anything that looks like a counter attack, they are basically holding on by fingernails. What I have found surprising is the fact that the RA has had enough left in the tank to last this long - that is not good news. Higher density on the middle portion of the line towards Zaporizhya may very well end up mirroring the slow gasps of the RA at Kherson - they likely will not collapse like Kharkiv, at least not right away but they will be on the losing end of an attritional battle. Attrition on a redundant military system is a classic tipping point scenario where things go slow, and then suddenly very fast. Russia is gambling that they can stay left of the tipping point of a cascade collapse until some miracle occurs; however, cramming more resources into a smaller area and creating a target rich environment that increases the efficiency of your opponents strengths is bad strategy. I would be far more concerned if the RA was dispersing and setting up for an unconventional fight aiming to erode in depth the UA as they try to advance. But to do that they would need all of the enablers that they did not bring to this war. If the RA did try to disperse as they are - to use all that real estate, they will simply die isolated from each other as their C4ISR architecture is nowhere near able to effectively support the coordination required to wage a modern hybrid warfare defence, let alone support it. An Army built for conventional mass in a war where that mass is a liability = self constructed dilemma - use the mass as designed and die slow or try to fight hybrid and die fast. But Russia does not care, this is all a massive delaying strategy hoping the UA runs out of support - which is also incredibly bad strategy when one is also committing very visible warcrimes on a daily basis effectively shoring up your opponents support.

Absolutely, so the trend line of this war is consistent as ISR, lethality and range has once again taken a leap forward. The issue with reserve advantage (also in response to @Battlefront.com Steve) is that those reserves are also highly visible and hittable than before, so I am not sure the battlefield management advantage will carry over as it has in the past - reserves are very vulnerable interdiction in this environment and being on shorter higher density lines actually will likely make them more vulnerable, right along with logistics lines. ISR, deep precision strike and dispersed infantry really still dominate this battlefield as far as I can tell and creating narrower higher density battle spaces is likely not a good idea - unless you are the RA still trying to fight the last war.

Well that is an interesting question. The conventional answer is the advantage would go to the defender. A defender with high troop density along a shorted line forces the attacker to create higher force ratios with less manoeuvre room. But…. In this war, especially against the UA as they are currently capable, high troop/force density looks like more of a liability. Firstly large troop concentrations are highly visible and therefore vulnerable to PGM as you note. And their logistics, which will need to be larger, is also vulnerable. My guess is that large lower quality troop concentrations are going to suffer a lot of attrition without really doing much back at their opponent, this is the same problem with obstacle belts - high density, resources intensive that gets cut to pieces by observation and PGM. Lastly, high troop density = high attrition = plummeting moral, especially with a poor medical system. So like a lot in this war, it is likely the reverse of what we are used to as the value of high density mass appears to have changed.

This looks like a great conversation on UAS, I wish I could add a lot more but have been on the road agin. I would offer that you are all describing a defensive system that would be successful, at least for awhile, in protecting what I assume is a “capital core” that looks like an all arms manoeuvre team - so mech infantry, tanks, engineers and artillery in support. Problem with this is at least twofold. First is the cost and complexity of the defensive system - it is huge in both dollars and data bandwidth. AI/ML support is a must, as has been noted, but the ability to essentially counter a lethal cloud in order to protect that “capital core” will end up costing more than core itself. You would also have to add on some sort of c-indirect fire capability in this Iron Dome++ net system. Ok, but you do get the traditional conventional heavy capital core back on the battlefield with enough survivability to be able to perform its original function - firepower and manoeuvre. Or will it? As far as I can read (and apologize if I missed this) this highly complex and costly protection system (also consider we will need an offensive system to do the same to the enemy) can fend off fully autonomous UAS swarms or at least give a force a fighting chance. But what about UGS? What about UGS hybrids? What about sub-surface systems. I am talking about a minefield that can move itself in front of an advancing land carrier-like group - because you are going to be able to see it for space - lie entirely dormant until the capital core is basically on top of it, and then autonomously attack that core from multiple dimensions with zero notice? So we have mines that will scuttle across the ground and attack from below. UGS mines that can pop up and do direct kinetic attacks from offset range. UGS mines that can become UAS and smart attack from above basically from under the feet of the capital core. None of this is even close to science fiction at this point, hell I am not sure it is even Horizon 3. My point is that at this point I am not sure the “tank is dead” because the entirety of vehicle based manoeuvre could be dead in this environment. A sophisticated APS system could be like putting armour on a horse in 1914. There will come a point when trying to keep our traditional conventional capital core alive stop making sense…so what? We reinvent firepower and manoeuvre. The cloud becomes “the core”. People are simply systems within that cloud, likely dismounted and disaggregated, or virtual - we need the brain forward, not the trigger finger anymore.

Here I have to diverge. The plan was doomed by bad strategy both political and military - capability only guaranteed it. This is why I claim no prescience before the war because until we saw the actual strategy could the outcome become clearer. For example and one you used, if Russia had focused solely on the Donbas and limited objectives we would likely be seeing a very different outcome, sucky tactical capability and all. It was the absurd political objectives misaligned with strategy and reality that killed this thing, the UA’s ability to reinvent warfare made sure it was going to happen faster and across a broader set of possible outcomes - to the point I am note sure how the RA could have pulled this off as they were built for another war entirely. It isn’t western thinking it is military professional thinking, something Russia lacked. Find me a military school of thought, east or west where this was a good idea. A lot of this is arguing with simple physics and some pretty simple rules of war - like effective concentration of forces, unity of command and selection and maint of the aim for starters. I agree but you are really stretching the concept of an effective plan here. A term I employ is “relative rationality”, sure from inside the Russian bubble it was a great plan, we love this plan! But inside that bubble was mass delusion reinforced by an autocrat who does not tolerate dissent. Just because everyone opinion the room believes it is a great plan doesn’t mean it is in reality…the last 7-8 months have been a glorious testimony to that fact. A plan based on fantasy does not have merit, even if they really believed in that fantasy. Relative rationality and progressive unreality are absolute poison to military planning - trust me I have flogged enough majors with this over the years. A “good plan” is aligned with reality, certainty and capability. It ensures the certainty one is pursuing is going to be well communicated, supports a position of stronger negotiation and keeps the sacrifice to a min. The Russian strategy had none of that, except in this world they totally made up. Steve, no I do not buy into the post-truth world. Bribe, lie, cheat and murder may get me on a runway in Paris but reality is going to come crashing down sooner than later. Reality is squishy, I get that, but it is not that flexible, nor is a plan so detached from it. I can see how you might come to the conclusion that IF Russia had a good relative plan but tactical capability sucked THEN military capability was the determinative factor. But Russia did not have a good or viable strategy that aligned the capability they had (means) with the operation (ways) to achieve viable objectives (ends). I think we are coming at this from opposite directions. Here is some test questions: - If Russia had a better strategy, say to solely focus the crappy capabilities it had to take the entire Donbas and far more limited objectives would it have worked, even with UA resistance? Would it have met better and more realistic political objectives? -If Russia had better capability would it have been successful in its extant strategy? - If the UA had poorer capability, say similar to,what they had in 2014 would the extant Russian strategy work? - And finally what about the UA strategy? What would have happened if they had sought decisive battle (which is very western combined arms) for example? What is becoming clear to me that we have a spectrum of Russian sucking but in different places and levels. Some, such as a broken strategy, were definitive. Others such as bad capability or operational systems were contributing. The same applies to the UA but here their capability to resist appears more definitive as it destroyed Russian strategy - UA strategy was less dependent on Russian capabilities. A different Russian strategy that took into account UA resistance may have worked, different Russian capability not so much - we noted that even modern western militaries would have a problem with the UA right now. A bad UA strategy would have killed this thing too but they aligned theirs with their capabilities very well, and then those capabilities adapted and evolved very quickly. Russia a rigid strategy that stifled evolution, hell they are pretty much zombie operations in the Donbas right now. So it comes down to much more than Russia sucking - where did they suck and why. What impact did sucking at certain levels of warfare have? It also comes down to how much Ukraine did not suck, excelled in fact. And then the comparative collision of those two systems.

I feel like we have switched sides in this debate - from the “It isn’t all about Russia sucking” side I think your analogy is missing some key elements that lead me to delusion, not plan. In your analogy the missing facts are 1) you don’t own a dump truck, you have three guys and wheelbarrow, and 2) that is not your driveway. So in this case you would be building a plan, a flawed rigid one even under your own delusion, that is detached from reality. To carry over to the war, Putin made (at least) three major strategic assumptions; - Ukraine would fall quickly and resistance would be short, light and unorganized. His force to time, space and objectives clearly points to that. He tried to blitz conquer a nation larger than France with a population of 44 million with 300k troops and a laser light show. - Any resistance would be quickly eaten by Russian bear and be pooped out as a happily subservient puppet satellite state. Given the history of Ukraine, even recent history, the idea that he could control this country once he achieved victory through brutal oppression was, let’s say ‘flawed’ from the get go. - The weak willed and dithering West would not be able to react and happily keep buying Russian gas and drop any sanctions through boredom before the war chest ran out, as Ukraine was violated and then dominated. From the loins of these brilliant assessments sprung a 5-6 operational axis assault with ridiculous LOCs and zero establishment of operational pre-conditions to disrupt, dislocate and isolate Ukraine - that is a fail on any operational planning staff exercise, I assure you. The fact that the insane plan was rigid and built on a tactically messed up military was just the ice cream on this doomed poopy cake. This was not red teamed nor acid washed, nor did it have a Plan B should any of those ridiculous assumptions prove to be false…this was and is the “hold my beer” military operation of the century…and given the history of the last 20 years that is saying something. This makes shock and awe, and “they will greet us with joy in the streets of Baghdad” Iraq 2003 look like pure political and military genius in comparison. Why? Facts, not assumptions. - The scale and scope of this military operation was risked by its very own ambition. The levels of friction of a WW2 scale invasion with a fraction of the forces are immense. Ukraine would not need to resist much for it to come under enormous strain. Russia has a large and expensive intelligence service that should have been working for years in this, the idea that it did not know the UA was set up for a hybrid resistance and being fed US ISR is laughable. No, the political level did not want to hear facts on the ground, it was a delusion. - the most likely Ukraine COA was to resist unconventionally while the political mechanism retreated to a safe country. This means at a minimum Russia was going to have an organized insurgency and very loud external political opposition, while trying to control a conquered nation with 300k troops - aside: Ukraine is roughly 600k sq kms, that is 2 sq kms per Russian soldier in multi-dimensional conflict space. And how long were they going to stay there getting IED’d and committing high profile warcrimes? Did Russia have a stabilization plan or post-war reconstruction plan? W.T.F?! - Russian and Putin completely failed to understand that this whole thing was not about them and Ukraine, it was about the global order (or maybe based on that annexation speech Putin did, and that makes it worse). The West cannot remain “the West” if Russia is allowed to do this war. In short, Putin did the one thing he absolutely should have avoided in the prosecution of this war…we backed us into a corner. That cut through the divisions and entitled ennui very quickly. We had no other choice as the entire global drug deal of the western order hinges on P5/UNSC big powers behaving themselves. Even US exceptionalism took a major hit in Iraq in 2003 as it found itself isolated and the global order fractured…and it went nowhere near as rogue as this clown show. Russian exceptionalism is not a thing anywhere accept in Moscow, they did not have the global power or idiosyncratic points to pull off something that humbled the worlds last superpower. And this is just me on a Thursday. Russia should have had roomfuls of political and military staff, armed with real time intel data. Guys whose entire professional lives is understanding UA field kitchens, sitting next to a guy who could map the twitter feeds of Smalltown Ukraine down to the mayor’s dog walkies schedule - you are about to take on the single largest dice role of a global power since WW2 FFS, taking that on with iron clad assumptions of one 70 year old and a bunch of yes men is not planning it is a suicide cult. Finally, as to Lviv. I have no doubt it had point of failure and one tough bill. But compared to what Russia tried in reality it looks positively pedestrian. A quick scan of the map shows two possible corridors of advance and about 270 kms to try and do a cut off. A tough ask but frankly a much better place to get airborne and airmobile killed. If you take Lviv and then up to the Carpathian Mts, Ukrainian resistance, which will come regardless, is going to supported by a trickle not the freakin flood they have on their hands now. You are probably correct in that Russia thought it too risky but only because of their bizarro world view of reality. Clearly resistance was almost universal and any intelligent organization that missed that was broken, or the political level who ignored them was…delusional. In fact the whole Hard Power option was insane and we are living with the result. So this was a “solid plan” like me becoming a super model is a “solid plan”…I need only drop a few pounds and de-age by 30 years and my dream will come. And anyone who disagrees with me gets tossed out a window.

I would accept this except for teenagers that can turn off the US east coast has supply and cripple Canadian healthcare systems. Trust government to fail where over-caffeinated teenagers thrive.

This may be against western targets but I am talking Ukraine itself. Why hold back against an opponent you are lobbing cruise missiles at? As I understand it deterrence in cyberspace is incredibly hard, so I am also not sure that is what is holding Russia at bay.

It was based on absence of the facts..at which point the plan is really a well constructed delusion. I had heard of the challenges coming out south out of Belarus - they did have forces up there. It looks like a massive swamp. And next to the Polish border. We are talking one hellava risk and some tight coordination to pull it off…but Russia is currently living what was behind door #2. Of course the UA may have simply pulled out the same rabbit they did elsewhere and the RA would have died in a swamp too. My point being that at least it was a viable plan. Simply creeping in the Donbas, solidifying gains and “liberating” was also a workable plan. Basically doing Phase II first while they still had half decent troops. If they did that I am not sure the west would have gotten so worked up, particularly if they played the R2P card and had LRP and DRP leading the charge. Keep it clean and try not to commit warcrimes. Well I guess we will never know which is a good thing.