The_Capt

This is a translation of that tweet thread? Lot to unpack here and I am not sure I agree with all of it - for example we have no idea what the Russian losses around Severodonetsk have been, so “minimizing risk for gain” could be way off. One thing I do not see on the Russian side is an actual strategy. For example, if the strategic end is to “take the Donbas and declare victory”, what is the Russian plan for the very real possibility that Ukraine won’t let them hold it? Russian strategy has been and continues to be in this war, entirely in isolation of reality and largely based on hope. Do they hope Ukraine has had enough and taps out? Do they somehow figure they can call the Donbas “mother Russia” and go nuclear? The reality is that it is taking just about everything the Russian have to take very small chunks of ground right now. I do not think they will be able to actually take the Donbas, Luhansk maybe, but not Donetsk; however, even if they do will they have broken the will of Ukraine to resist? The West? The West cannot not allow Russia to gain from this in anyway. Russia at a min must be economically punished, back to 2014 lines or better and with new internal power structure, one we can actually negotiate with, in place. If we cannot do that the western global order has failed…and China is watching. Ukraine has all the hallmarks of a nation that has embraced a war to the point it is now part of their culture. You do not defeat a nation in this state by taking a few hundred square kilometres of real estate, you would need to break their backs and shatter that unity or completely exhaust them. So long as the West keeps supporting, Ukraine will keep fighting…and we have reason to keep supporting. So back to Russian long game…and we have been over this. How do they defend what they have taken while Ukraine continues to mobilize and modernize, and they are heading in the opposite direction? How does Russian defend an extremely long front without enough troops against a very motivated opponent with increasing capability? Beyond that, how does Russia renormalize to remove sanctions, scare Sweden and Finland away from NATO, get NATO national to not spend trillions on defence and wipe humanities memory of their complete gong show so they can re-emerge as a great power? Short answer is that they cannot. At best, the Russian government may convince or cow enough domestic population in order to stay in power and basically get to sit at the same lunch table as North Korea for the next 25 years. That or we fail and the global order and all it pays for is at risk - and for the record, this is what happens when you let things slide. We failed in 2014 and here we are, we fail again and what does 2030 look like?

Where is the throwing up emoji on this thing…? Found it.

@Bil Hardenberger did up the NTC Campaign with the help of @George MC. For CMCW we made a deliberate decision to stick closely to the doctrine of the period for both sides. We did do tweaking for play balance but on the whole the aim was to give each side the forces they would have had back in 79-82. The short answer to your question is most likely: because that is what the Soviets would have had the capability, doctrine/training and intent to do within that scenario. Bil H was at NTC back in those days so I will let him fill in the details.

Ok, let's try this one on. I am guessing the "pretty smart" folks you are talking to all went to some graduate strategic studies schools where Colin Gray is their god...maybe with some SAMS folks tossed in for flavor. Well "I ain't no senators son" so I will give it a "best-shot". I don't think escalation dominance exists as a viable or workable strategic military concept, or strategy - at least not in the modern era. It is a "pipe dream" a unicorn with a 38 inch bust....weird, slightly erotic and pure fantasy. So if I recall the term basically describes overmatch. My own thoughts on those metrics: Parity - all things being equal, decision spaces are symmetrical and outcomes determined by chance as much as anything else. Asymmetry - Your opponent is in a state of dilemma with respect to decision space and are forced to pick the "best bad". Overmatch - You opponents decision space is irrelevant because all outcomes are the same. That is a scale/spectrum with lots of sliding distance but to my mind lays out the strategic states with respect to conflict. In my own terms, if warfare is vision/certainty, communication, negotiation and sacrifice - you basically take the opponents voice away by leave zero negotiation space and driving sacrifice to infinity. So in this case we would be talking about the Russians being able to create a condition of strategic overmatch on the Ukraine...and this is simply not attainable. Why? Well: - Russian strategic escalation is bounded and restricted externally by the West. If the West/US had stayed neutral, or did not exist, Russia would have likely escalated already. They talk a good game but they know that escalation against the West is a dead-hand game of chicken that no one wins and it is directly connected to the current war in the Ukraine. The only way Russia achieves dominance in this area is if we fail to act. - Conventional escalation in the form of a formal declaration of war and full mobilization is restricted internally and externally. Internally, there is domestic pressure - and it is real, as Russia is tying itself in knots to not mobilize while pulling on every other resource it can...so bounded. Then there is the possible Western reaction to full Russian mobilization..."Ok, Vlad, you want to raise a million man army...how about we give Ukraine 400 HIMARs?" That is an external bounding; this war is not happening in an isolated bubble. - Unconventional escalation. Here the gun is pointing the other direction. Ukraine could escalate unconventional warfare and the West could as well. This has all sorts of options from leveraging power brokers in the back field, to sabotage, to subversive warfare, to cyber/information. These things are likely already happening but the escalation ladder is not in Russia's favour in this space, why? Because they did the one thing they absolutely should not have done in thru this war - unify people against them while dividing their own. Unconventional war relies a lot on internal divisions and this war has narrowed them in the West while widening them in the Russian sphere. Finally, as to the term in the modern era...impossible. Why? Because tangled and relative rationality. The USA has the largest military in the history of humanity - more destructive power than Ghengis or Alexander even taking into account population differences. And the US has never been able to achieve "escalation dominance" in the modern age. Terrorism and terrorist groups demonstrated this in spades. In a modern entangled world completely stopping asymmetric escalation in other dimensions is impossible - it is the superpower dilemma of the 21st century; the only way to preserve the world is to destroy it. During GWOT it was AQ/ISIL that "escalated" and threatened to escalate all the way up to WMDs, if they could. All the US hard power was completely dislocated by a tiny group that was using an idea, the internet and a shoe string budget to make attacks on the US homeland. After a lot of effort we regained parity and even asymmetry against terror groups but we never achieved escalation dominance and it was dangerous to even think we could deter them through this strategy.' My problem with Gray (and Clausewitz for that matter) is that these strategies always assume a rational actor and we know that in war those are hard to find. Rationality becomes relative very quickly. So the idea of - shooting each other when we have already jumped off the building together ("I will die but you first!") - makes perfect sense locally even though it looks insane to an outside observer. Escalation dominance does not work on a suicide bomber, never will; they are already at the sacrifice infinity point. Not saying Ukraine is suicidal; however, if driven to it, Ukraine will fight and escalate well past an outside rationality point - even if it means massive losses...because "it is better to die on your feet than live on your knees" short-circuits the foundational logic of escalation dominance as a strategic theory...and it is in play. So what? Well we have an escalation system in parity by my eyes. Russia is bounded as I described but Ukraine is as well. The west will only tolerate so much - for example Ukrainian terror groups active in Russia killing civilians is not going to fly with us. Nor would giving Ukraine nuclear weapons as we fear if things get desperate enough for them to use them. Ukraine has no mobilization escalation bounding, they are already there. Conventionally we are slowly negotiating what strikes into Russia look like, but it is not zero. Finally, I suspect what we are really talking about is comparative strategic options spaces. And here Ukraine does not need to escalate, they need only sustain theirs, while Russia is doing a glorious job of collapsing their own. There will come a point when Russia starts to think about irrational escalation as those options spaces collapse, even in the face of Western power...the trick is knowing where that point is and ensuring we get off this ride first. I suspect it is the Russian land border...Crimea is a question mark. But one second to midnight at a time....

Non-professional?! Bil,..ouch. Unpaid maybe. There is a lot of professionals from a lot of fields here, it is what makes this whole thing work in my opinion. That and "the professionals" really haven't done much better as far as I can tell...and I am being kind in some examples.

Slowing is one aspect but I also think they can influence the RA OODA loop to make bad decisions quicker. I also suspect, as you note, this has been what has been happening at the strategic level all along...in fact if the Russian political OODA loop slowed down it may perform better. Doing it on the battlefield may be killing the right leaders and leaving the impulsive and weak ones in place. This is an extension of where we wound up in COIN/GWOT...leave the idiots in charge, take out the talent. Otherwise you risk positive Darwinian pressure on your opponent, when you want negative pressure. I also suspect this is where cyber could come in. If you could corrupt the data, then the Russian system has to work harder through it to create knowledge. Or conversely shape it so the Russian see what they want to see and act impulsively on it - Bil H does this to me all the time. The Russians do have a history of being able to learn quickly in war, especially when they are losing - thing is, I do not think they are willing to admit or recognize that they are losing. I do suspect the Russians are close to burning out. We have been calling it for some time but the signs were there before all this and after nearly two months of intense combat the Russian forces have to seriously be eroded. There are signs along the front that in other areas they have already moved to operational defence, they are only able to really push in that one sector. The key indicator will be if Putin declares "victory" if they can clear the Luhansk Oblast. I do not see them having the gas to take all of Donetsk as well, unless the UA suffers a major set-back.

Well when you put it that way it seems like a silly thing to get heated up over. Pulling this back to the topic at hand; what this vignette does show is effective integration of systems within the UA- indirect fires, infantry/recce and ISR - no matter what we call it. This has been a theme since pretty early on, while the RA has noted shortfalls doing the same. This gets me thinking about metrics again and the tension between old ones and new ones. We discussed firepower and mass, which has been the primary driver in a lot of mainstream assessment. To which I added smartness and distribution. We should now add integration to that list - which is not new in the least but must be part of the mix when assessing forces. Finally, this seems to be a quality in the UA at the operational and strategic levels as well. While the RA has seemed disjointed and counter-purpose: this is like watching the biggest guy in the bar trying to fight while having a seizure. So building a working theory here - the UA was able to apply friction/attrition on the RA operational system, which was already prone to self-dislocation, and widened those fractures to the point of breaking across all levels of warfare. The UA did so by distributing the forces they had across a very wide area in a self-synchronizing C2 model, empowered with significant ISR advantage, and integrated those systems...frankly brilliantly...in order to overwhelm/overheat the Russian system. This forced the RA to concentrate mass to pre-mechanized warfare levels, largely artillery/EW/AD based, in order to re-establish equilibrium in a much smaller area. Further ceding initiative to the UA, who now appear to be doing lateral c-moves to push and pull Russian forces horizontally...further stressing their system. So What? What is critical here is "how fast can the Russian's learn", or "Can the Russians learn fast enough?" A major LOO/objective in the UA op design has to be "keep Russians stupid", which I would pay good money to get a peek at.

Huh? So beyond mashing a lot of terms that describe everything from types of warfare theory to campaign themes to a joint operation - of which maybe only one applies, you are kind of losing me here. Combined arms is what land forces do inside each one of those - it is an inner working gear of the several clocks you just put up. Well I am not sure how you can be helped then. I presented the doctrinal definition...no good. Then a description of how it applies to this war, or at least how it has been unfolding, meeting the terms in that doctrine...no good. A combination of dispersed light infantry positioning forward through manoeuvre, and artillery supporting them through fires...is a combination of arms. I opened up the aperture to offer alternate and emerging forms of what an "arm" is, normally contributing to firepower and manoeuvre effects but we could do well to perhaps widen that definition. For example, at what point are unmanned aerial systems to be considered an "arm" in the land force, much like tac aviation? So right now we seem to be lacking what your personal definition of "combined arms" is, and is not. You are entitled to your opinion of course; however, I am going to have to go with modern military doctrine as opposed to "some guy on the internet". However, I did some searching around and maybe NATO agrees with you: In land operations, relating to the synchronized or simultaneous application of several arms to achieve an effect on the enemy that is greater than if each arm were used against the enemy in sequence. (https://nso.nato.int/natoterm/Web.mvc). We (Canadians) do not go with this one either, we follow the US one because by this definition infantry and armor together are not combined arms - several meaning more than two but not many. The important part is not two, three or more, it is: synchronization and the ability to achieve greater effect together - both conditions well met by the examples provided by Steve in the Ukraine.

To clarify, I mean crazy by modern mechanized warfare standards. 900 guns on a 30 km frontage is WWI levels of concentration. How successful it will be versus the cost is still an outstanding question; however, based on the pretty slow Russian grind I am not entirely thinking it is doing the trick. It is the fact that the Russian had to do that level of concentration in order to even get moving on the offensive that is telling. It is how the RA had to adapt that is the interesting bit.

Not sure what you mean by "one scenario", campaign? I mean unity in command and design. This looks and feels like three separate, non-mutually supporting fights but maybe you have more.

So I have to wonder...if the plan was to surround Lysychansk from the south...then why do the whole thing at Severodonetsk? The Russians have been at Popasna for weeks and could have done this operation without slamming their heads against the wall on the other side of the river. This whole thing feels disjointed and ununified. Well people were waiting for the bold Russian pincer operation - a roughly 10 x 10km area done in slow enough time to allow for a UA withdrawal, and it only took nearly two months.

A: I saw enlisted members of a recce platoon directly involved, in the field, in identifying a target, feeding that data into the system, and adjusting fires. It took them a couple of minutes to work out exactly right grid location they wanted because it was hard at some points to see into the woodline with the drones. The time lapse from first called shot to spotting round strike was less than a minute and at least half of that was round flight. It is not how a thing is done, it is what it does to an opponent. By changing the range and speed of this narrow slice, the UA has overstressed the RA system (Doctrine, Organization and Equipment). This has been enough, particularly when employed in depth, to stall every Russian offensive so far, even in open country...that is a lot more than a minor nuisance. Adding in self-loitering, smart-next gen ATGMs and "combined arms" takes on new dimensions. Finally, "narrow" is also not really accurate. Tactically, on the surface, it appears as light infantry and artillery; however, there is an information aspect here which is having operational/strategic effects. Showing the world in near-real time those Russian systems getting hit has paid off well beyond the losses of Russian offensive momentum. Add to this space-based ISR and "combined arms" starts to stretch. Maybe we are reluctant to recognize it as "combined arms" due to lack of armor - how many major tank battles have we seen in this war? As far as we can tell the Russian have abandoned major armored manoeuvre as well. Now before this turns into "the tank is dead...no it isn't!", I suspect that the tank may make an appearance when one side breaks after the attritional phase. My money is on the UA, who have the logistics for it and the fact that the RA has not developed the same dispersed smart-mass defensive system. They have gone with mass (they cannot sustain) or likely more traditional "digging in". Once those RA lines give out, we may finally see massed armor but it will have to contend with air power - I can't see the Russian Air Force being able to sit it out in the face of a major UA offensive. The cry will be for more western AD then. In fact one can trace this ware by Ukrainian requests for support. First it was ATGM/MANPADs and ISR, now artillery and deep strike, AD and offensive systems should be a good indication of moving to the next phase.

Doctrine is doctrine - but if you want to get into it... If you look past the tactical vignette the dilemma is the same as it has been for ages; however, how it is delivered is different. Those "recce dudes" now have eyes in the sky that stretch for kms in all directions and are linked to quick response (and pretty accurate) indirect fire. So the Russian forces can either stay dispersed and hidden - and have their combat power dislocated and/or static. Or they concentrate that combat power to manoeuvre, get spotted at much longer ranges and get hammered - Finding beats flanking. Do that in enough locations across the Russian positions (and indications are that is exactly what the UA was doing - this account sounds very familiar), and now they can because "eyes", and you have attrition across the Russian system, which can (and perhaps did) cause collapse. It is a form of attrition-to-manoeuvre, as opposed to the other way around, which we have been slavishly adhering to like a religion for years. Infiltration - even if by UAVs - and attrition is not a "mere nuisance", over time it erodes the physical and moral elements of combat power (upscale it and you can strain the social as well). Which means more rotations of units to and from the front, which leads to more friction. The only way out of the box appears to concentrate your mass to such a ridiculous extent that you overcome the artillery through sheer bloody-mindedness - a Zap Brannigan strategy if there ever was one. It will gain you a few kms of ground on a narrow front but you will pay dearly for it. The force ratios the Russian are having to employ to do this are crazy - e.g. Severodonetsk - 900 guns to cover a 30 km frontage is just insane...and that got them to inching. The old MRD had, by my count, about 216 tubes and was expected to cover off 20 kms ( see: https://irp.fas.org/doddir/army/fm100-2-3.pdf, pg 4-39, and: https://irp.fas.org/doddir/army/fm100-2-1.pdf, pg 5-19). Even with a second MRD in depth, that is about double the gun density for frontage being employed compared to what the Soviets had planned on to invade West Germany. So What? Well if that is what it takes to create enough mass to attack in a box while staying secure from those "nuisances", then I would say that the combined arms tactics being described are pretty damned effective.

Yes it is. combined arms – The synchronized and simultaneous application of arms to achieve an effect greater than if each arm was used separately or sequentially. (ADP 3-0) combined arms team – (DOD) The full integration and application of two or more arms or elements of one Service into an operation. (JP 3-18) Referenced in ATP 3-01.81. https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN31809-FM_1-02.1-000-WEB-1.pdf Further it is also the more likely 21st century version - infantry, unmanned systems and indirect fires.

Given the Russian C2 goat-rodeo so far, you may be correct. They are desperate for a win, but are leaving themselves to be pulled all over the map by c-moves - which suggests that they do not have enough forces to defend what they have taken and wage an major offensive simultaneously. They are trying to cover their nude shame with a tea towel and it ain't working.

The Russian offensive looks more like a single operation aimed at Lyschansk, while the UA c-offensives are separate operations in themselves. This reinforces the idea that the UA is stressing and testing the RA horizontally by forcing them to shift to react. This does take pressure off of the Severodonetsk-Lyschansk fight but I think we are all focusing too much on that engagement. By forcing the RA to pulling forces to-and-fro across broad ranges, this creates offensive pressure on the Russian operational system through its own organic internal friction.

Wanted to come back to this one as well. I think we are muddling some issues here: - Cost. A strategic issue that many countries are wrestling with but a UAV with a Stinger was what I was talking about to deny manned aircraft and here the cost is upside down for the traditional manned aircraft. Counter-drone, or drone-v-drone warfare needs a new set of cheaper weapons, which they will be because they don't need the same HE payloads to bring down...finding and hitting them is the primary issue. - Unmanned warfare. We are coming up to 120 days of this war and drones are not going anywhere. In some areas it looks like Russian EW is cooking the sky enough to cause problems for everyone - I would love to see how many EW emitters have been hit. A shooting drone-v-drone war is going to last a lot longer than a "couple of hours". Why? Because if you run out of drones in a couple of hours and your opponent has not, you are basically screwed, this war has demonstrated that trend. Unmanned systems will not be a niche layer we rub on the old one, that once "shot away" allows us to go back to the "good old fashion", there is too much competitive advantage in these systems. So rapid production and deployment of unmanned systems (of all types), integrated across the depth of the battlefield is going to be a primary driver. - Good 'ol CAS. It brings payload and range, I will give it that. However, it is big and visible - stealth may help but I do not think modern Stealth is built for the ISR environment we have found ourselves within. So even if you manage to destroy an opponents UAV AD layer, which will not be an easy ask, you still have ground based systems in depth which is what the Russians are facing right now. Those MANPADs are only going to get smarter, more lethal and able to hit higher. This is likely why the Russians haven't found "air gaps" on such a large frontage, MANPADs everywhere means there is really no gaps unless you make a major push, which could get very expensive very quickly. Back to cost, time is a resource as well and one can produce cheap lethal unmanned systems much faster than modern manned military aircraft. I argue that it will go the other way...manned CAS/Strike/Air Superiority will rain down for the first couple hours - or basically get left sitting out - and then everyone will be relying on unmanned systems. I keep getting the sense that the big powerful predators of the battlefield are in trouble. And it is integrated small cheap nasty bite-y little things that are hurting them.

So this makes a lot of sense and likely explains why the UA is sticking put in Severodonetsk/Donbas and "taking it", when terrain-wise they really do not have to. In Phase 1 of this war we saw the projection of what I call vertical friction - the UA projected enormous friction along the length of the Russian system from the front to the SLOC entry points. They did so through attrition and threats of strikes which ultimately caused the Russian operational system to over-stress for what it was designed for, and fail. Or at least that is a working hypothesis. In phase 2, by pulling and pushing Russian forces to and from crisis points, the UA is projecting horizontal friction on their opponent. The strain on Russian planning and logistics to do this is significant. Constant "reacting and surging" on someone else's timetable creates wear and tear on staffs and field forces (logistics, maintenance, etc). It also has a major impact on morale; soldiers are like any other animal, they get used to their environment and get to know its patterns, constantly forcing them to re-adapt to a new location on the line has negative phycological impacts (e.g. "we lost Sergei over this lump of dirt last night and now we are leaving?!"). Finally, this sort of action - and why the initiative is so important in war - feeds the Ukrainian military learning engine. Given that the battlefield is basically fully illuminated, the UA is able to see how much stress this constant to-and-fro is causing and further, they can gauge the speed and effectiveness of Russian reaction over time. As it grows more sluggish and strained they will be able to see it. In effect those 500 troops per day in the Donbas could be providing the UA with a learning advantage, which is significant and supports cognitive advantage. What happens next? No idea. The UA could be waiting for their moment to do something big, or this is truly an attritional fight and they are just watching the Russian system strain until it eventually does fail. It is too early to confirm any of this, so take it as an educated hunch...but it is freakin brilliant if this is deliberate and I think we have seen this at least three times now - Kherson, Izyum and Kharkiv (I think I am missing one).

This is another good one; what in the sweet name of Billy Bishop is going on with AirPower in this war? We have discussed at length the realities of unmanned systems, which are making air superiority at low levels simply impossible. MANPADS and AD seem to be making any air superiority at medium altitudes also nearly impossible. We have been holding out for SEAD but that is not a cheap or easy capability, that does not work against MANPADS that can hit at 20k feet nor UAVs. Like heavy mech I also suspect that air cannot deliver on surprise and are being picked up well out from the areas they want to effect. I keep wondering if this is not some weird air asymmetry situation we have not accounted for because superiority, let alone supremacy seem like a fond dream of a gentler time. I am not sure what to make of traditional AirPower, and it is a matter of time until someone figures out how to gun tape a Stinger to UAV. A swarm of short-range MANPADS on UAS, sounds like a freakin 21st century nightmare. We are definitely entering into an age of denial and firepower, which may mean the Defensive may be shifting towards primacy…or until a week or two from now when someone pulls off operational offensive and we all wonder “what the hell just happened”…again.

Thanks (I think),however, I am likely about as close to the political level as I am going to get. I basically sit behind one of the guys “in the room”. Any further though is in the opposite direction I want to go - which is into a quiet retirement making pc war games. But events don’t always give us what we want…

1. Likely a combination of both to be honest. On those initial axis of attack the RA had superiority in concentrated mass in both firepower and manoeuvre, it is likely how they managed to penetrate so deeply into Ukraine in the first couple weeks. Technically those were pretty bold and rapid advances - the one north of Sumy was over 200km long. Problem is that Ukraine did not go all "paralyzed" and collapse like they were supposed to, they spread out and hacked the Russian LOCs to pieces. The dirty secret is that the RA operation did not look much different than how we would have done it, so our immediate reaction is "well they did it wrong"...and not "what is wrong with 'it' in the first place?" Russians are using arty in Donbas right now in the tradition of WW1 by the looks of it - hammer, advance by inches and repeat. We are all focused on Severodonetsk but in all that open rolling terrain south and west of Izyum, and up from Poposna the Russians also stalled, likely due to the UA light infantry-arty-ISR system, which massed artillery cannot seem to solve for either. 3. Now that is a solid point, Ukraine had a couple hundred kms to trade and stretch out RA forces, for a smaller nation things like swarming will still work but you would need to really look at pre-emptive strategies and hitting a massing force while it is forming up. Or take mass integrated precision fires to a whole new level at the front end. 4. As per point #1, I agree, the RA did actually employ manoeuvre in the opening phase of this war...and it did not really work. At least not enough to achieve their over all strategic objectives. They took some ground and then stalled and had to fall back as focused attrition and imposed friction took its toll. Now if they had really upscaled, say 1 million men and applied the same game plan it may have worked - they still would have taken significant casualties but they would likely have had enough "oomph" to at least go with the "sieging cities" option. The implications here are not small. Everywhere-ISR with resilient communications systems, low cost small smart munitions with ridiculous ranges and lethality, and unmanned systems might very well mean that the fast-light-short-decisive wars we have been chasing for over 30 years by embracing manoeuvre warfare might be a pipe dream. I mean it looked like a great idea, smaller but highly professional militaries are cheaper than massive ones even if they have more expensive kit. Low impact on society as you do not need to conscript anyone. Nice clean decisive wars where we assume our opponents will play freeze-tag and surrender once we take their capital (which they never do). Instead we got very long unwinnable insurgencies or in a near-peer environment whatever this thing is turning into. It is far too soon to be making bold corrections; however, there are enough question marks around this thing to at least force us to revisit our western way of war at a fundamental assumptions level.

No argument on firepower, in fact I suspect we are entering into a new firepower centric age of warfare. Long range fires across domains is likely smart money, so long as it can be integrated into a smart system. I have been wondering if there is not an add-on to Arquilla's three new rules of warfare: -small many beat large heavy few - Finding beats flanking - Swarming beats surging - Mass beats disconnected isolation, integrated precision beats mass, and mass integrated precision beats everything.

The only takeaway lesson from this war I am drawing is - nothing is working like it was supposed to. Airpower, cyber, armor/mech, and yes, artillery have not performed anywhere near what we thought going into this war. No matter how hard we try and tie reality into knots to explain it, we likely will not know why for some time...and even then we will likely ignore it if history is any indication. Worse, I am hearing this is in military circles and moves to tie this to military procurement as politicians scramble to "spend more" in order to demonstrate collective resolve. While military services are using this war as justification for stuff they have been wanting to buy for years without actually looking at what is happening on the ground. Let's take artillery - "the king of battle" (talk about 'presents well'), no it has not been the ruling monarch in this war. It has been the "king of attrition" but it has not been decisive in the least. If massed artillery fires were still decisive the Russians would have taken Kyiv by now, let alone this small rump in the Donbas. If "more guns" was the solution then Russia would have already taken their operational objectives instead of this war-by-inches bleeding out. The one instance we did see decisive use of artillery was in the first phase of this war by the Ukrainians, and that wasn't any of that sexy western stuff. It was highly integrated and linked to a superior UA C4ISR/information system so that the smaller artillery was hitting the right targets to cause the most stress to the Russian system - decisive attrition has been the "king of battle" if anything has been in this war so far, and even that is weird because we were supposed to be seeing the dominance of manoeuvre a la Gulf War. Back to procurement; we are already hearing services drooling over "investment" in "new capabilities" we have had since WW2 and using this was as "proof". Right now the only "proof" I have seen is for: unmanned like crazy including all forms of next gen ATGM/MANPAD systems (NLOS, self-loitering etc), dispersed light infantry that one can generate from reservists very quickly, resilient and pervasive battlefield communications systems that include crowdsourcing, new forms of logistical systems that look more like Amazon than what we have, C4ISR that includes space-based assets to tie it all together rapidly. And all that will buy you is an ability for large scale defence-thru-denial that may force an opponent's system to collapse under its own weight. We have no idea what works for offensive operations because neither side has been able to do it yet. "Tanks, guns, IFVs, F-35" are what are being pitched right now and that is billions of dollars into tools that Ukraine did not employ decisively to defeat the RA, but they are the capabilities that Russia invested heavily in, brought to this war, and are now scattered all over the Ukrainian countryside. One thing I am seeing out of all this is "we have to understand what 'fighting smarter' really means". And it does not appear to be more expensive singular platform centric-warfare. This is like France '40 - the French had more, better tanks but they had not created a smarter integrated tank-system - the Germans did (often in spite of themselves). All domain systems integration, while denying the same to your opponent may be the future "king of battle" [when you really think about it, maybe it always has been] but again we have only see it work decisively on the defensive, so the jury is still out. I am hoping that the UA is employing this whole Severodonetsk thing as an attritional honeypot to bleed the Russians white in order to open up options for some old-school operational manoeuvre in Phase 3 of this thing. My guess is this may occur in the western side of this theatre around Kherson-Melitopol as the Russians over-commit more and more to this baffling fight in the Donbas - "Lure your enemy onto the roof, then take away the ladder."

We knew this while we were still there, which made prosecuting a war a little difficult. I can recall being at the outdoor market in outside the airfield in Kandahar in '07 and seeing old Martini-Henrys (likely knock off), Lee Enfields (Indian knock offs) and real Soviet AK 47s and guys joking "in ten years there will be M4s and Canadian C7s hanging up there for sale". Why and how the Afghanistan mission failed could fill a thread of its own so I will summarize: - The West was never going to either do or stay enough to make the changes we were looking for stick. - The Afghans had no interest in making the changes that were need to stick either. It is impossible to heal a patient who does not want to live. - "Forget it Jake, its Chinatown"...we picked the wrong side in a country where there was no right side and likely will not be for some time. At best, we were keeping people busy who would cause trouble elsewhere and killing the right people who needed it (most of the time) - global custodial work: keep sweeping the garbage into the right piles, make sure the fires stay small and shoot the odd rat to keep their population down.

Its the den mother and she has the flashlight...hide!