The_Capt

Or like a whole lot of things assessment of Russian capability was way overblown. I can’t see Russia holding back at this point. In fact it is pretty much too late now. If the US was able to project an airtight cyber defence over an entire nation in days, from banking systems to traffic lights…well I don’t have the words for that - we are talking alien level tech (I knew something went down at Roswell!). If the US can then turn that to offence then why are we still talking about Russia? They should be completely crippled. I have no idea to be honest but cyber really did not show up for this war, going to be very interesting to find out why.

We are going to have to wait until the end of the war but this seems improvised to be honest - I doubt you could find that written down in doctrine or training, especially considering it was SOF. I also recall a lot of stories of light teams just going out and making trouble. In fact it was the UAs ability to improvise and then lean into what works that demonstrates they had the far superior learning system. I anxiously await the post-war Ukrainian C2 analysis because I think what Ukraine did do ahead of the game was to create an incredibly agile system. This was less likely due to perceived Russian weaknesses but instead because they were afraid of exactly what would happen, a massive multi-prong assault with them trying to defend along a border roughly the same length as Detroit to Seattle is you stretched it out. One has to build improvisation and a lot of empowerment for lower level C2 in order to have a hope that hybrid distributed warfare would work. I also suspect we saw so much UA SOF because they were setting up for an insurgency post-invasion. This also partially explains Javelin, NLAWs and MANPADS up front, artillery next and HIMARs later. If Ukraine really understood how badly the RA would perform and how vulnerable they were, they would have asked for deep precision fires first - to be fair Ukraine was asking for everything and anything at the start of this…Feb and early March were nuts. So now we land on an area where Russia sucking was determinative - politically. I think a main effort on Lviv with support attacks on Kyiv and Kherson was possible, remember they made deep advances on 5, the problem was consolidation and security when Ukraine did not fall. By dropping all the Donbas nonsense and whatever that gong-show was around Kharkiv they may have had enough combat power to do it, assuming they established some pre-conditions. Either way the war would have taken a different course. Politically, particularly the interface between the political and military strategic level essentially own this mess. The RA could tactically and operationally be much better but the objectives and mission they were given were completely upside down. In the hands of a different political reality in Russia may have actually been able to align strategy and capability or at least not such a disaster. By being a megalomaniac surrounded by yes-men and all of them smoking their own supply ensured that political meddling and military strategic cronie-ism they doomed this war from the start line. The military apparatus took on objectives and a strategy it could have achieved in the 90s but they were entirely blinded- and still are - to the realities of modern warfare, largely because the guy in charge was a complete amateur. The RA sucking was just a bonus offshoot of a rotten higher echelon. All that ran headlong into an opponent who was ready to conduct next-gen hybrid warfare and then, with support of the west, upscaled it into something else. In hindsight it is very obvious on how this would turn out

I am not a cyber expert but promises where made dammit! I had heard there was elevated activity but it really led nowhere decisive. They did not establish the pre-conditions they needed to through cyber (or anything else for that matter). I am wondering if the problem is what I suspect happened with all the cruise missiles - the whole thing has a disjointed C2 vibe to it, a lot of lower level commanders playing “choose your own adventure”. If the attacks in cyber space were as coordinated then the tepid results make more sense.

Exactly. Through ISR and precision fires it is possible to see the forces defending the obstacle incredible high resolution, from freakin space, and then hammer them hard. Do this is several places, infiltrate on main efforts and the breaching op becomes a route clearance job. This is building on the theme of precision fires as a form of manoeuvre. I personally think that static obstacles that take months to build are fading into extinction. Smart mobile minefields or swarming dormant systems, now we are onto something. Again Russia, in this specific case, is building a very professional looking linear complex obstacle….designed for a war 30 years ago. I think this is a central theme throughout this thing.

Damn autocorrect, well there many days it did feel like a prison sentence so incarceration is not too far off the mark. Ah you see our thinking has already shifted. A modern breaching operation could easily be penetration by light infantry and hammering of logistics and support by PGM. A full on combat breach may not even be required which points to Russia continuing to employ the old playbook rather than re-write one. Russia may all sighted in ready to cover the obstacle when stuff behind them starts exploding and supplies get cut off. They then abandon the position in a reenactment of the Maginot Line and the UA dismantles it administratively. But by the old playbook I see nothing inherently wrong with how they did it.

Ok let’s get some knowledge on this whole Wagner Line thing. I will caveat that 1) I am not even sure a complex obstacle belt will work against how the UA has been fighting this war and 2) I have no idea how long this Wagner line is, or whether it ties into natural obstacles nor what the fire plans are around it. That said, be very wary of the internet. I see a lot of people talking about stuff they have no idea about, particularly in the “Russia sux camp”. I do not go into my professional background too much for many reasons but I will say that one of my military incarcerations over a 34 year career is a military engineer, so take that into account if you like. First, I doubt the veracity of the styrofoam claim very much. Why? Because it would take more time and resources to make a fake dragons tooth than to simply pour some concrete over steel bars. I have heard nothing about Russia suffering a concrete shortage and this whole styrofoam theory sound like complete BS. Second, efficacy of the Wagner line dragons teeth. Dragons teeth need not be fixed or footed, particularly not the pyramidal ones I am seeing in this pictures. They are designed to roll and catch the ground on their points as they do. In doing so they can either belly up a tracked vehicle or de-track it. Either way they act as caltrops for tracked IFVs and armor, looking for mobility kills but these are just the appetizer. Third, these are clearly part of a complex obstacle. The sorts of obstacles are designed to pull combat engineering and key armoured resources forward and expose them the fires. If you can kill them then bull-rushing such a complex obstacle will likely yield in and around 70-80% casualties. It isn’t how large the dragons teeth are, or how much they weigh, it is their placement. I have heard a lot of “well we can just go in and tow them out” or “bring in a dozer and simply push them”. Sure, but you are doing that in the middle of a 400m deep minefield while having ATGMs and artillery dropped on your head. In fact the dragons teeth I have seen in that double row are likely the horizontal safelane markers as well. As you would expect dismounting in the middle of a minefield with crowbars and chains is a good way to turn trained sappers into names on a memorial. Finally, stuff like dragons teeth are hell on mine plows and rollers. The get in between them and mess up the tank. So this means engineers have to bring up technical vehicles like dozer tanks..which are very rare on the battlefield. I have seen pics of these dragons teeth next to railways and embankments, which is really smart as that makes the mechanical clearing job that much harder. About the only expedient way for this is explosive clearing - which I am not sure the UA even have - dragons teeth then should be fixed to avoid being blown aside. But when combined with an AT ditch and some decent sighting that can even stump an explosive breach. So no, there is nothing wrong with those Dragons Teeth as is at least as far as I can see from a picture, maybe not the most awesome I have ever seen but as part of a larger complex obstacle they will do exactly what they were designed to so long as that obstacle is covered by fire and observation. The Russians are going to need about 100kms of these in a triple belt with KZs pre-sighted to get the effect I think they are looking for, which I do not think they can do and shame on the UA if they give them time and space to do this. Remember that diagram I did up a while back, look both left towards effect and right towards capability when seeing stuff like this and always keep in mind the entire picture. And avoid groups who are just seeing what they want to see at this point.

Oh dear, looks like one of the forum old ones has gone off his meds again. “It ok, no the nurse is not here to steal your fillings. No, you and The_Capt are fine…no duelling is against the law now. There you go, now we can watch the tele…hey look Dallas is on.”

This and cyber. What the hell happened with cyber? They were supposed to be able to crawl thru my wifi into my house and wreck up the place - tilting pictures on the wall, dipping my toothbrush in the toilet etc. Instead we got some weak disjointed DDoS stuff.

Ok, but these are also all strategies adopted by weaker sides of a confrontation, some straight out of Mao’s playbook - who he ‘borrowed’ from others. I have no doubt the UA was planning an unconventional resistance and if we recall the early days of this war, they were kinda scrambling. I think what surprised everyone one was just how well it worked. It morphed from a resistance to a new form of defence/corrosive warfare that I am not sure anyone was ready for. Further when Phase I collapsed, recall the RA did withdraw back to the border. Even with all the abandoned gear they were not driven there by any conventional offensive waged by the UA. I am not sure the Ukrainians knew the true state of the Russian military well in advance; I am not even sure the west did to be honest. We could see it here on the forum about 72 hours in (I still have a copy of some of those posts). Jumping to the end - ok, I think we agree on more than we disagree on these points. One area that I do think the Russians did entirely get in their own way and frankly even with the force they have could have done much better, maybe even pulled off what they were looking for, was in the arena of military strategy. They had several strategic COAs going into this from which everything that followed was a direct result. They chose - typically Russian - a strategy of overwhelmtion (yep, it is a word that I did not just totally make up). 5-6 operational axis of advance and massively deep penetration requirements was ridiculous overreach for both the size of the force and the enablers they had available to them. NATO would be really stretched to pull off such a fight - if I recall correctly we only had 3 axis of advance in CMSF. The Russian way overestimated their forces and way underestimated what modern equipped defence could do (they were not alone in that). All of this was exacerbated by very poor operational level targeting and logistics, and as you not abysmal tactical C2 - frankly I am not even sure how the managed the road move, let alone contact. And to your point, this over reach may still have failed if the UA was less capable - I say may because it would have been a much closer run thing, as you note straight up mass and speed still count for something. Now if the Russian military had done two strategic things, this war may have turned out differently. 1) Establish preconditions. This costs time but hitting key transportation and communication/information infrastructure and power production and distribution. Economic/finance systems. And finally actually tried something nuanced in the diplomatic space other than “lie, lie, still lying..and now I am going to prove I was lying…”. To this add build a competitive C4ISR architecture that feeds a joint targeting enterprise and then get some unity of command going to control the whole thing. All this and keeping the political level - with zero military expertise - from micro managing. 2) Isolate Ukraine. Once you make the nation go dark and even with everything Ukraine already had, you focus on cutting them off from all support. I find it baffling that Russia not only did not do this in the diplomatic space, they did not do it as part of military strategy…here Russia sucking was a definitive factor. Put the main effort on a drive to Lviv and cut the western corridor approaches. Reduce the axis of advance to Lviv, Kherson and Kyiv, which is still very ambitious. If they did that from Day 1, I am still not sure they would have achieved success, best case they are fighting an historic insurgency-from-hell fully backed by the west. But this clown show they are in might have had a few less acts. Military strategy is clearly the one area where Russia “sucking” is all on them. Operationally and tactically I think it gets a lot more complicated and frankly the Ukrainian defence (and then offensives) will be studied for years to fully understand what just happened. I am not sure anyone could solve for the Ukrainian resistance to be honest. The fact that the RA itself was a key factor in them failing faster, I totally agree with. I personally think that warfare has changed - the needle has moved - I think it has shifted much farther and faster than we ever expected, which is actually normal. I think things as basic as force ratios and principles need to be revisited (Surprise, for example…what does one do with that?). Seriously, you guys should, start thinking about the Op Research game. Training Cbt Tm commanders is cool, but I think there is going to be a serious market for OR - of course you will need to make CM massively bloated, less user friendly and cost over a billion dollars in order for western militaries to buy in.

I always liked “we brought a gun to a knife fight”.

Ok, you keep mentioning this. Moving several hundred thousand troops anywhere on an offence, even shoddily is incredibly hard. You are really undersubscribing the difficulty of this under ideal conditions, now compounded by the UA who can see that entire line of advance back to the border from space. Further the UA has precision fires and ATGM systems that are fire and forget out to 3+km hitting with 90% accuracy. The fact the Russians got as far as they did should not be tossed aside so easily. You would have to back this up. I have never heard anyone thinking this, nor the UA having the luxury to pull this off while being invaded. What I saw was the UA adapting quickly with what they had and were likely surprised by the outcome as well. That is one helluva assessment and I would need to see some facts before I bought off on it. Have they learned how to exploit RA weakness over time, definitely. But the idea that they specifically and deliberately tailored their operational and tactical approaches before the war because they knew exactly where the Russian suck is a reach with the info we have. And here we fully disagree. Would we have done better, likely. Would it have been easy or would our strategic objectives be guaranteed..I am not sure at all for all the reasons I listed before. Our logistics are just as vulnerable, for example how does one secure a 5km wide corridor for 100kms? Against dismounted infantry? How does one hide mass and ours is just a big and hot as Russia’s. In Iraq insurgents shut down US operational logistics with IEDs for days at a time, here we are talking an opponent with next-gen ATGMs and C4ISR - we would have to bake space to take out their assets, knocking ours out at the same time. UAVs everywhere, hell ISIS drove us nuts with Amazon drones and they were nowhere near this level. AD, we needed full stacks of SEAD for places like Libya let alone an opponent with next gen MANPADS plugged into a C4ISR system the UA have. No, I am sorry but to say “we would be fine and the UA only won because Russia sucks” smacks of western hubris which is exactly what the European powers did with the lessons they observed in the wars leading up to WW1. I could go on at length. And even with setting pre-conditions and actually conducting joint targeting I am not convinced the west would have simply rolled through against an opponent armed, supported and fighting like the Ukrainians. In fact we likely would have stuck ardently to our doctrine which would have gotten us into a lot of trouble when we also ran out of gas, let alone when the body count escalated. See western bias and hubris above. I also do not think Russia would have won this if they “sucked less” because no one (or at least very few) predicted the impact the new realities of the modern battlefield would have. I argue that while we fully agree on the Russian qualitative assessment, the outcomes do not lead to it being determinative. Make the Russians better at combined arms, even joint fires and they they might have lost slower but they were not going to achieve their objectives because their entire system was built for a battlefield that does not exists anymore - giving them a faster horse is not going to make a difference against a bird in a vertical race. Make the UA worse by taking away the advantages they had and their success does some into question, as it was back in 2014. Those two factors alone point to the determinative factor as the performance of the UA in a modern environment driven largely by technological change and not the Russian military sucking (which again was definitely contributing). Hell we can test some of this in CM right now for that matter - fight to emulate a proxy war with someone backed with China. We can’t directly attack Chinese C4ISR and they have outfitted our opponent with all the bells and whistles (UAS, deep strike, PGMs and AD). Let one side fight all modern combat armsy just like out doctrine says, and let then other fight like the UA, now that would be an interesting experiment.

This is a very good question. Having spent a lot of time studying the Cold War - as one would hope, I think it depends on when. The Soviet Army and it “scariness” is really time sensitive across what was a 40+ year period. In the late 80s, say after 1984, my estimate is that “no” the Soviet military for multiple reasons would have failed gloriously in the ETO. Western capability was far to advanced and integrated into an operational system that would have seen the Soviet forces die in significant numbers and achieve very little. In the CMCW timeline ‘79 to ‘82/83 we have the point of last real parity. In this timeframe I think the Soviets could have had a real shot and would have been pretty a pretty close run against the West. Going earlier the Soviet chances get better through the early 70s as western militaries abandoned mass without on offset. The the 60s get weird as western powers still had a lot of mass and the Soviet system was somewhat antiquated. I think we might have even seen a western advantage in the 60s but again close to parity. Post war and 50s by my estimate belong to the Soviets. They had mass and the operational system on a scope and scale well outside the western powers. So short answer “yes” and “no”. I would say that one cannot compare the Soviet Army to the RA in ends, ways or means. I am sure the Soviet military had corruption and poor leadership but they had so much capacity and depth back when it still really mattered.

And to my central point here Russia is still learning - this is a very good listing of evidence for that. However it is not learning fast enough or anywhere near as fast as the UA. The UA solved for operational offence on a battlefield I was not even sure that could be done, they may do it again before the snow flies. Russia also keeps doubling down on old metrics and doctrine. If I were in the RA and got a hold of 600 new UAS I would not be lobbing that civilian targets like they were V-1s in the late 40s. Even their switch to Ukrainian power distribution is too little too late. A definitive factor in this war seems to be the fact that UA has learned very quickly what modern warfare looks like; the UA has adapted their ways of war to this fight while Russia keeps trying for force this war to adapt them.

I am not sure we even know what this still means to be honest. Didn’t JonS and I lock horns over what exactly “modern combined arms” actually means? I would argue that the RA BTG concept, the one they carried over from 2014 is more in line with our contemporary definitions of “combined arms”. In phase I of this war some of those units, flaws and all did conduct some pretty deep advances. The UA on the other hand has not been employing traditional combined arms by any stretch. The appear to have reinvented it by combining C4ISR, unmanned, light infantry and precision fires. My point being that the metric of “modern combined arms military” is in the wind and I would not lean on it for assessments at least for a few years. And I think this is the crux of our disagreement, I do not disagree that at many levels the “Russian Army sux”, peace on that. My point is that this was not the determinative factor in the outcome of this war. It was a lower standard force designed to fight along our former definitions of “combined arms”; however, even at that sub standard level it was not until it ran headlong into something that no combined force on earth would have been fully prepared for that the failures we are seeing became their destiny in this war. More simply put it was is the Ukrainian redefinition of what combined arms really means in 2022 that led to Russian defeat, the “Russians sucking” was a contributing factor not the definitive one. I stand by this thru the simple fact that if Ukraine had attempted to meet the same “sucky” Russian force as they had in 2014 we would have seen a very different result - the failure in expert assessment pre-war was to take this into account. Hell if the west turned off the ISR and cut off PGMs tomorrow the UAs modern reinvention of combined arms would likely be at risk, even against the RA in its current shape - isn’t that what the concern is over US mid-terms? I think we both agree the RA is pretty much done as a effective fighting force now - although I still see some signs of life - the outcome is now really down to where they are tied off, or a compete political collapse in Russia (now here the Russian political system sucking is a definitive factor). My point is that no matter how badly the Russians do or do not suck is secondary to whatever the UA has managed to do here. If the mighty US and it’s allies were waging this war against a Ukraine like entity I am sure we would not suck anywhere near as much; however, our casualties would likely be so high as to scare political leadership and very likely break our sustainment if it went on as long as this one has - our vehicles need gas, our aircraft are just as vulnerable to next-gen MANPADS and last I checked we were no better at stopping HIMARs if they were coming at us. The Russian suck…ok, we got it. So long as we keep that as an factor and not the entirety of analysis we are fine. Otherwise we seriously risk undersubscribing what actually happened in this war and miss the points we need to for the next one.

This is a highly complex question with likely an entire eco-system of possible answers. Fundamentally we have to accept that silence does not automatically equal support. True freedom of speech and a right to lawful protest is a tricky issue even we in Canada and the US are wrestling with. So if one comes from a nation of high oppression the impulse to protest is very often not well understood or even valued. Plenty examples of this; did we see a massive uprising in Latino communities when US policy got draconian on illegal immigration? How much actual diaspora marches have we seen on the Chinese Uyghurs? How about Palestinians and current issues in Iran? There are examples of diaspora weighing in on all of these but comparative to their populations these are very muted responses particularly when compared to Me Too and BLM. Does this mean that these groups support whatever crimes against humanity or injustice that is happening? Not necessarily. Russians are coming from a highly oppressive power structure built on top of even more oppressive power structures - one could argue that the oppression is embedded into their culture at this point, having been inculcate for centuries. In fact, flip that, we all come from oppressive power government roots Russia has yet to shed them. Lets go back to Afghanistan (sigh) - we realized early on that the insurgency was not a nice neat sub-group of Afghan society, it was more of a spectrum. So we worked hard to get the Afghan people to rise up against the TB, which had been incredibly oppressive…and we won the war and went home (heh). In reality most Afghans just wanted to be left alone. Our war with the TB was like the weather, one tried to predict it but pretty much just endured whatever came. Some Aghans took our money, or their money but there was never loyalty to either side. So does this mean that all Afghans were TB and slathering AQ supporters…no. Did it mean that inside every Afghan there was a US citizen yearning to come out…nope. So what? Well micro-social power is 1) incredibly powerful, 2) largely in stasis, locked in routine, culture and traditions and 3) has very short range, like 10km from where one is born type of stuff. So translating that into a massive uprising/protest/movement, particularly in the direction an outside government wants is not really low hanging fruit. I suspect just because Russian are living in relatively safe part of the world outside of Putin’s grasp that they, as a group, do not want to be singled out for anything right now. In some areas they likely support this war and buy into the Putin narrative. In others I have no doubt they oppose this war vehemently. As to protest, there have been some but massive protest movements lie over tipping points that take a lot to build up to especially given the history and culture of power oppression in the region. Leaping to the “they are with us are agin us” conclusion is extremely dangerous as it will quickly alienate those who will be needed to fix Russia when this is over. Those in the “let Russia burn camp” and support this “all Russians are evil…look they are not marching in the streets” are very emotional and letting that cloud the fact that a burning Russia is a fire that will spread quickly. Treating all Russians as collaborators and 5th columnists is even dumber as we need Russian speakers and cultural experts, as well as political opposition for what happens next. People are about as complex a problem as we can come up with - when I hear simple answers I stop listening. Problem is that we are addicted to simple answers, to the point that I argue the most terrible things humans have ever done each other comes down to simple answers. The Russians are using simple answers to try to solve their “Ukraine problem” right now and anyone promoting more simple answers in response is actually part of the problem and not the solution - and I know that isn’t where you were coming from Steve.

That was such a good book. In defence future thinking circles nanotechnology is definitely on the radar.

And I would argue that the point you are missing is that on a strategic and operational level they took that “pretend force” and advanced deeply into the country they were invading and still hold over 20% of it. We can slight their tactical capability all day (and do) and even though they have been a mess strategically and operationally there is nothing Potemkin or “cargo cultish” about the threat they pose or what they were capable of at higher levels of warfare, particularly at the beginning of this war. It is as slippery a slope to under estimate the comparative tactical capabilities, as was demonstrated by many experts before this war. They failed to downscale their strategic and operational assessments and we saw pretty quick the results on the ground quickly failed to meet predictions. Hell three days into this thing we knew all of the higher level assessment were off because of what we saw on the ground. Underestimating cuts both ways. It is just as dangerous to try and take tactical shortfalls and upscale them directly onto the operational and strategic levels. We have witnessed too many brilliantly conducted strategic campaigns with low quality forces in the VEO space to fall for that one. Russian tried a form of combined arms that simply did not work; however, they still translated that into limited strategic/operational objectives. It was the Ukrainian way of war, supported by the west, and some emerging realities of warfare that broke the Russian system. Ukrainian forces learned faster and better. Without western support would we be talking about a Ukrainian offensive at all? Without Ukrainian fast development of capability? No, the RA was a hot mess and is a dumpster fire at this point but that was not the determinative factor in this war. They had enough mass advantage, as ugly as it was, that if this was a battlefield of even a decade ago they might have pulled it off. This is the biggest problem with the “Russia Sux” narrative, it is far too easy an answer. It misses a lot of nuances and complex factors that we have literally been tracking right here. The RA was a fumbling mess but it was at the gates of an enemy capital. They still are resisting and will likely still be on occupied ground by this winter. What I am on the lookout for are signs the Russians are actually learning. For example, they bought a bunch of Iranian UAVs but they are using them as ersatz cruise missiles, not to improve their C4ISR game…which is a good sign they are still not learning. Finally the biggest reason I am firmly against the “Russia just sux” narrative is that it encourages us to stop learning. If that is the definitive unifying theory of this war then all phenomena can be explained by it, we have nothing left to learn. This does nothing to inform us on the direction modern war is heading nor how we need to start thinking about it because it all boils down to “Russia Sux!” Well 1) Russia is sucking but not everywhere, 2) that does not explain everything we have been seeing and 3) there are things happening in this war that “cargo cult” does not explain and we are way off if we start to thinking that way.

I definitely think there was an element of this within the RA, along with corruption and baffling strategic decisions. However, recall that this was the same army that performed in 2014. https://nsiteam.com/social/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/NS-D-10367-Learning-Lessons-from-Ukraine-Conflict-Final.pdf https://prodev2go.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/rus-ukr-lessons-draft.pdf In 2014 it was Russia and Russian-backed that were tearing the UA a new one. I suspect they were using that template for this war when the UA was really Cold War era in capability. The intervening 8 years could be some of the most important in modern history for the region as Ukraine modernized pretty dramatically while Russia sat back and rolled around on Mayday, investing in boutique military capability instead of modernization. Then in 2022..whoops, wrong war Russia. And it has been a mad scramble to try and keep it together from day 1. All the experts were pointing to UA attrition but it was the attrition on the RA that was doing serious harm. Their best troops likely got killed in that first month and as capability eroded military objectives went with them - we have been watching the RA devolve ever since the beginning. I think that if Russia had really been paying attention they would have entirely rethought their approach in Phase I. If they could conceive that the UA had moved so much in nearly a decade and that western ISR was going to make their lives so difficult, they may have tried to prosecute a military strategy that isolated Ukraine from western support first, then went for the decapitation objectives. Their’s was a fault of fatal assumptions and there is much that can be learned from that.

Killcullen is an expert on COIN (or at least as far as we got one in the last round) and was trying to translate that cache into Grey Zone and now modern conventional war. Biggest problem is that none of the theories translate well between those arenas. This is odd given that he wrote about complex warfare in the early days (wiki says he was sole author but in uniform things really do not work that way). He is another really smart, highly educated and experienced expert who got this war wrong, largely because they have been in a war like the in Ukraine about as many times as the rest of us….never. They employed old metrics of success/failure to make their judgements and were way off. I suspect most will be big enough to admit it and the really good ones will spend a lot of time figuring out why they were so off the mark - expect a LOT of post-Ukraine war books. Personally, I would write about this thread itself and how stuff like this was happening everywhere. Open source analysis was all over the place but in some places they got a lot more right than wrong and that is worth following up on why. Was it micro-perspective based on wargaming? Was it the mix of expertise and backgrounds? Was it having the right people like Haiduk on the ground pulling in stuff? I am not sure but even with our recent “Russia sux” leanings this thread was very accurate and often contrary to the experts getting paid to dot his out there.

Now if you want to talk cargo cult militaries…and that one cost us a lot more than the investments in the UA.

You are of course assuming the US or anybody truly understands modern warfare at this point. I think Ukraine understands it better than any nation on earth and there are even things they are stumped by. If you look at the performance of the RA across all three phases of this war I do not see a bunch of pretenders flailing - I think the steady diet of tactical vignettes is skewing the viewpoint on this thread. I do see the RA attempting to fight according to the logic of their capabilities; the problem is their capabilities. For example: - Phase I - they had a lot more armour and air power as well as sea control as well as the element of multiple avenues of approach. They went in looking a lot like the US did in Grenada with respect to a disconnected but attempt at a joint fight. They were using position advantage and the speed /shock to try and overwhelm Ukrainian resistance before it could form up. They were not counting on the UA having access to Western ISR and an ability to hit their entire operational system - in fact no one was. They were instead expecting a front-edge fight which they had advantage upon. They then tried attritional warfare but were severely overstretched and did what made sense and narrow axis of offence to the south. Phase 2 - given that the pretty much destroyed their leading edge in phase I and armour was not (and still is not) working like it should. They had to switch again to a heavily attritional systematic grinding offensive around Severodonetsk using freakishly high density of artillery with infantry follow up. This bought them some ground - again they are focusing on ground and not UA capability, which is old thinking - as they tried to smash their way to something they could call a victory. By end Jul it was clear that they were running out of gas and due to the introduction of HIMARs in combination with Western backed C4ISR they could not sustain the offensive anymore. Phase 3 - The RA has clearly gone on the defensive, they have mobilized for defence and are aligning their defensive objectives to the capabilities they have left. Hell they are even conducting what looks like a withdrawal operation in Kherson right now. None of that was conducted with a qualitatively good military - you get what you pay for - but it was/is not illogical. The fact that the RA has lasted until now demonstrates that they can and have adapted. They just cannot do it apace with the UA. I propose that their major issue is not that “they suck”, although they definitely have quality issues, it is instead that the military they brought was prepared to fight the wrong war. Again roll back the clock to 1991 on both sides and relook at how things could have gone, and the RA starts to make more sense. They still did not have enough infantry and their logistics was not great but their advantages of mass would have likely worked much better. They were in short fighting in the wrong war. The final nail in the cargo cult theory is that if the RA was in fact simply pretending then the UA in their current condition should be at the pre-2014 border by now. No, the RA is conducting a defensive operation, pretty messy and ugly but the cargo cult as described could not start landing planes if they suddenly showed up, the Russians still are.

Very interesting analogy but not quite there to my mind. The cargo cult as you outline is an emulation without actual capability behind it - it looks like an airfield built by people with no idea how an airfield works. I do not believe the Russian military is in this camp…well at least not at the start of this thing. The Russian military has capability and capacity but they appear to be set up to prosecute a war from the 1990s or even the Cold War. Their military doctrine, training and even metrics of success are all from a bygone era. Take this military and drop it into 1991 and we are talking a very different outcome. The UA would not have access to real time full spectrum C4ISR or digitally supported targeting…no one really did. Even in the Gulf War only about 10% of munitions were PGM. No HIMARs, no UAS, ATGMs definitely last gen, so maybe TOW but that system was not going to dominate the battlefield. No, if this was 30 years ago we would likely be supporting an insurgency across the Polish border. We see videos of training goons hitting each other and calling it training, Google some old Marine corp training videos from the 80s, we were not that much more sophisticated at times. No, the issue isn’t that Russia does not have military capability or is pretending, it is that is not learning fast enough what modern warfare actually looks like. Further it keeps doubling down on old metrics of success - mass, terrorizing civilians and holding territory. It keeps building for that and fighting for that. This is very similar to the deadlocks of WW1 where “just one more push” and we will win. We mock but we saw this same logic in places like Iraq and Afghanistan - “if we kill just one more XX leader, they will fold”. So we are by no means immune. I do not think Russia is a cargo cult (which is a brilliant piece of history btw), I think they are a military fighting for the wrong war. The narratives we have heard for months coming from Russia social media reinforce this…they cannot see it, they do not understand why they are losing. Mobilization was supposed to cure everything by throwing more mass at the problem, when it is clear that will not work. Then tac nukes, which won’t work even if they do use them. Oh wait, “stop the restraint” and conduct a blitz terror campaign against Ukrainian civilians like it is 1940. Even those obstacle belts - which look professionally constructed btw- are an old way of thinking that I am not even sure will work even if they build enough of them. These are all symptoms that Russia simply doesn’t not even know what it doesn’t know at this point. Better news is that they appear wed to their doctrine so learning will happen very slowly. What is very important is that Ukraine and the West do not give them time to learn. I suspect it is too late to be honest, and has been since early days. The learning that needed to happen was 5 years ago so that they could invest in a competitive C4ISR system instead of retooling an old one and blowing money on T14s and hypersonic-whatever-those-BS-systems-were-supposed-to-do. It is interesting that this war is not just a collision of wills, it is a collision of collective learning.

Now that is a very good question. I am not sure what the idea of a full visa ban was supposed to accomplish to be honest. I think the theory was that is would provide additional pressure on the Russian people to oppose this war by depriving them the opportunity to go and spend money in another country? There was also some really stretching ideas about stopping a subversive 5th column or somesuch nonsense with respect to national security. As to the first idea - Putin appears more scared of hardcore nationalists and a Russian identity crisis than opposition to the war. I am not sure how a tourist ban will impact that dynamic. Further Putin appears to be running a pretty oppressive regime so locking people who want to resist or at least draft dodge seems a bit counterintuitive. If one wants to create and support resistance, one normally has to provide safe haven not lock opposition in. Letting people run away from Russia is supporting a form of resistance and eroding their human capital base. As to the second - oh dear just stop. If Russia wants to foment, spy and/or cause ruckus in a third nation, particularly one on its borders, a visa ban is not really going to do much to stop it. The apparatus for subversion is likely already in place and rooted in local nationals with an axe to grind. Counter-subversion is a close cousin to counter insurgency/VEO which is a massive enterprise spanning finance, ideology and human networks. For example, information warfare and influence activities online do not need visas. And if Russia really wants to get “agents” physically in, there are a myriad of ways to make that happen from diplomatic visas to false identity/citizenship. So I would probably do a selective restriction on Russian visas to be honest. Draft dodgers, refugees and brain drain..fine let them happen. Resistance needs to be scooped up, vetted, supported and sent back in. Tourists, sure ban some to keep electorate happy and make some headlines. Russian spies and agents - definitely let them in; tag em and follow them in order to map networks with an eye for penetration later. The trick will be getting these groups right, and mistakes will be made but a smart filter could do more damage to Russia than a total ban “easy button”. Of course the West needs to get in the game and start supporting nations in the Baltics on this effort because it is going to cost. In the West itself we have got an enormous border control system with a global intelligence system in place thanks to GWOT, getting that pointed at a new target and the legal authorizations in place to do so is where most of the *** pain is likely occurring right now. So “Total Ban”, because it feels good…no. Smart Restrictions backed up by an intelligence architecture and support to resistance program that make Russias prosecution of this war harder…yeeup.

Oh FFS, gently pointing someone in a better direction is now “ruthless vigilante moderation”? Force generation composition of USSR troops in 1944-45 with no link back to this war, even an indirect one - as clearly admitted by the poster in question - is clearly best resourced elsewhere.

2003!? You are fresh faced babe! I had already lost a couple RoWs by then.