The_Capt

Now it was a story line in a really crappy 80s mini-series (I actually remember watching this as a kid) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_III_(miniseries) "Out of the plane, the Soviets launch a secret incursion into Alaska. The Soviets have inserted a cold weather Spetsnaz assault force of approximately 35-40 KGB desant ski troops led by Soviet Colonel Alexander Vorashin (Jeroen Krabbé) into northern Alaska with a track-driven armored vehicle. Vorashin's orders are to seize control of a strategically-located pumping station along the Trans-Alaska Pipeline to threaten the placement of floating explosive devices in the stream of oil and to destroy substantial portions of the pipeline. The operation is being conducted in response to the US grain embargo of the Soviet Union, just as the 1980 grain embargo was in response to the 1979 Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan." Now was this fiction being remembered as truth, or truth that wound up in fiction?

Ok you got to back that one up...please. I mean that is one helluva story but it sounds like myth. Edit - and I want it to be true.

Like what? Say China quietly backs another side in a US led western intervention, how exactly are they going to be in trouble? Russia already did this with bounties in Afghanistan and all we did was make quacking noises. If China decides to supply and support their freedom fighters, our options beyond starting WW3 are limited. Our options against Russia are non-existent. Supplying the other side is a long held tradition in "short of war" space. Russians did it in Vietnam, we did it in Afghanistan (Round 1). That would be the plan, but regional containment has now raised the bill significantly. Imagine Iraq in '03 as a proxy war. We now have to make Jordan, Turkey, Iran, Syria, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia airtight to prevent flow of outside support to the other team. The intervention bill before casualties just went up by an order of magnitude. Not many countries can field next-gen ATGMs and MANPADs, however primary competitors all can, and in Chinas case we already know they have been working very hard at knock offs. We would definitely try and establish operational pre-conditions first; however, I am not sure what that looks like. We lost air dominance below 2000 feet in Iraq against ISIL and they were basically using commercial off the shelf stuff. Information warfare is even more tricky, hell we can't even agree as to what a legitimate military target is or is not in the information space...and that kind of thing can cripple a coalition. In the opening phase of this war, based on what we have seen and heard, yes, very much. In the first month of this war the UA did not have enough artillery to cover a 1000km+ frontage, so ATGMs were likely doing a lot of the heavy lifting. We are definitely in an arty-duel phase now. Regardless, next gen man portable ATGMs with ridiculous ranges and kill ratios have arrived there is enough video evidence of this in this war to prove it. In Iraq in '05, the insurgents brought logistical resupply along the main MSR for the US to a grinding halt. They cut the secondary routes and then IED'd US logistics until it damned near broke - it actually had to pause for a week to re-tool, which is nuts. This war points to a whole other level of projection of friction onto an operational system. This has been brought up before. What we are seeing in Ukraine is consistent with trends we saw back in the Donbas in 2014, in Iraq against ISIL, and in the Nagorno-Karbakh. I am sure some phenomenon are unique to this war and we will be spending some time trying to figure that one out. However, there has been a weird noise coming out of conventional warfare for some time now and this war has just underlined in bold some of that. This week I got some capstone doctrine to review and provide feedback, and right up front "we are a manoeuvre warfare, mission command based military"...and I am think..."are we now?" "Should we be?"

So I ask myself "what if the Taliban had NLAWs/Javelins, Stingers/Starstreak and UAVs all backed up with a modular cell network? And the support of a great power(s) behind them for training, force generation and ISR?" We concentrate forces too and our logistics lines are built on sustaining heavy mass. I think technology may be lowering the cost of what it means to be "peer" at some levels of warfare. Finally, unless we are talking about war in mainland NA or western Europe, we are talking interventions/crisis response wars. We historically have been allergic to high casualties in these types of conflicts since the end of the Cold War. A much smaller power could theoretically become a strategic peer in war simply by creating too high a cost for us to get directly involved. The whole thing points to a re-emergence of attrition/exhaustion as a strategy...although many will argue it never really went away.

Ah, pro-Russian-troll o'clock again. Yay. "NATO filter bubble", you clearly know nothing about NATO.

So this is interesting. First, the war at the tactical level is an energy-exchange view and as such rarely reflects the system view. For example further down the line I am sure there are UA forces dug in and bored as hell because they have not seen any action in weeks. While a few kms further we have units that are terrified and getting hammered. One needs to see system-level phenomenon to make conclusions, that or trends at the energy-exchange view that are consistent across a broad set of sampling. Next, what is being noted about the Russians appears to be a more in line with a systemic trend as it has been brought up before. The Russians appear to have abandoned manoeuvre warfare at the front entirely. This is attrition-to-manoeuvre warfare, and it appears that like the UA the RA has adopted a hybrid approach as well. If valid, those are enormous firepower overmatch ratios, and given Russian doctrine not that surprising. The Russians have also integrated UAS into their tactical battle in what has become a series of Find-Fix-Finish-Advance tactical actions. This tracks against the shift in losses from armor/mech to artillery as well. Interestingly the RA is not having much success on the offence either. This is slow, grinding and incredibly costly warfare, akin to WWI. I suspect the Russians are missing a key metric (as is Freeman) - smartness. Again, this is how well an operational system can generate and employ knowledge. Within this concept lies precision, which based on the Russian use of massed firepower is also lacking. Once again "dim-mass" is not working on the offensive or at least working at a glacial pace, no matter how many UAVs one rubs on it. Why are the Russians lacking in smartness? Not sure to be honest. There has been a lack of C4ISR integration on their side throughout this war tactical-to-strategic. Considering the rot in the Russian system with respect to material, it should not be too surprising that it also exists within the cognitive sphere. I keep coming back to the idea of smart-mass and massed precision in a attrition-to-manoeuvre-to-attrition cycle. This may seem minor but if one does the math, one has to ask "is manoeuvre warfare as we know it, dead?" How does one achieve conation shock, leading to physical collapse when your opponent can see everything you are doing well in advance? [aside: JasonC has to be loving this] Ukraine did not do this in the opening phase of the war, they instead they used a form of corrosive warfare that led to the physical collapse of an already conative-fragile Russian system. My point to the Freeman hypothesis is "look under the hood as to why there is something going on between mass-firepower-manoeuvre".

Prophetically misspelled…sigh. Fixed it. Wow, that was on page #32! We have covered a lot of ground since then.

Very interesting question but it needs some context: So this graphic is interesting - it is built from some research done at Georgia tech, for the real nerds the excel sheets in detail are avail at https://brecke.inta.gatech.edu/research/conflict/. We have had periods of "great peace" before as you can see. What is missing from this graphic are the Mongol Conquests that occurred between 1200-1400 AD, which still ranks only second to the Three Kingdoms War (182-280 BC) as the most deadly in history as percentages of the overall human population at the time (and this does not give full credit to the Mongol Invasions contributions to the Black Death). So before 1400 there was a major spike and then between 1400 and 1600 we basically had a lot of small wars between fiefdoms but overall deaths were kept low. (Also note that the deaths as a result of conquest of the New World are also not included, which by some estimates were obscene). Then right about the time we had the "Peace of Westphalia" deaths by war went on a bit of a wild ride with spikes about every 50 years, right about the time the generations that fought the last major war died off. This is pretty consistent, we get a big spike as the 3rd post-last-war generation tries to re-order things, then an exhausted peace, then another spike...and then the 20th century happened. If we go with anything less than 10 deaths out of 100,000 globally as the "peace line", the 20th century was a Season of Mars, and this after one of the most peaceful stretches in the late 19th century, right after the US Civil War. So for higher resolution of more recent history: So we have the Chinese Civil war there, ending in '49. Korea, and then things do start to drop as we enter into the time of intra-state wars and wars of intervention of the Cold War. Still pretty active but below that 10 per 100,000 line...and then 1989 happened. It is hard to believe, based on how busy our militaries have been but we definitely have been living a "great peace" between 1989 and about 2012 as the world enjoyed a single super power order and we basically only had small little savage wars to deal with, not unlike the much briefer period in the late 19th century. Neither of these charts take into account the Russo-Ukraine War, which is vicious but still a smallish war by earlier standards. So as to the original question...my guts says "yes" we are entering a new phase of something. You can track all these charts directly to power competition, which has largely been dormant since the end of the Cold War. We argued a lot but most of the nations who "won" the Cold War have not had a civil war, or engaged in a state-based one, we all got rich instead. The dirty little wars on the margins continue but they were largely civil wars or nasty little regional affairs. Russia has signaled that it is willing to pay a blood price to re-order things, and here we are today. I am betting we will see more proxy wars and look more like the 60s and 70s and some state-on-state clashes. Will we go back to the old model of great big wars every 50 years like we saw between 1650-1945? Doubtful, as we will likely see the biggest spike in history in the form of an escalated thermonuclear exchange if we try that out. My bet is some form of nasty power competition as East and West rebalance.

Not wrong, but not entirely correct either. Ukrainian defence was brilliant in the opening phase of this war. We don't know much and likely will not get the full story for some time, however, the plan for the Phase I defence was decisive in itself. If the UA had tried to fight the same way as the RA and sought decisive battle, it could have gone poorly. Instead what we saw was a hybrid warfare campaign for the history books. First Ukraine had (and still has) information superiority. They are on their home ground and were also being fed western intel from before the war started. This mean that in places like Hostemel, they could concentrate and defeat the RA initial moves in detail. I think Hostomel is also a battle for the history books and was decisive in this war. The RA tried to use SOF and Light in concentration and failed enormously, once again underlying that when misemployed SOF and Light are extremely vulnerable [aside: it is odd on all the talk of the "death of the tank" but we have not seen a lot on the "death of airborne/heliborne]. Russia made that airfield snap central to their main effort, it was their Plan A, and it collapsed in a couple days. Second, Ukraine set up what I can only describe as an unconventional warfare defensive campaign. This was hybrid in nature (a mix of conventional and unconventional forces) and looks a lot like what the Norwegians have set up in their Northern districts - for obvious reasons. Basically, we had TD and irregular forces defending their local regions, backed up - and very importantly linked by UA SOF. These forces were already in location along that very long initial front line and armed with next-gen smart-ATGMs, UAVs and comms. Those comms linked them back to UA artillery creating an entirely distributed defence network - or at least that is my working theory. The Russians sticking to road networks, lit up by ISR of all sorts were then hammered all along their own system - F ech, A ech, B ech and all the way back to SLOC nodes. All that Russian armor/mech, the ready-force of the RA was cut to pieces in the first month of this war by that system; this wasn't "war amongst the people" this was war of the people. Third, Ukraine's political level, assisted by a massive social media effort allowed Ukraine to win the strategic narrative, even before the war crimes. We all started to cheer for the little guy and realized that this war was an political and strategic opportunity. All that money and aid, essentially the military industrial complex of Ukraine, was riding on getting this part right...and the Ukrainians did it very right. I am not like Steve to be honest. I had no idea how this war was going to go before it started. It wasn't until about 72 hours in that it became very apparent that something was happening that no one in the business predicted. That is when the sickness symptoms of the Russian system began to appear. Could Russia have won? Of course, no war is pre-determined. Ukraine could have split or simply failed to resist - they could have ignored western intel, Zelenskyy could have run and/or capitulated. Or the Russians could have had a much better plan - why they did not make the capture of Lyviv and disruption of all western support the main effort is beyond me. But they did not, and now they really cannot. No matter how this little dance in the Donbas goes, Russia has lost this war already. There is no renormalization after this. Sweden and Finland are not going to change their minds, those sanctions are going to stick as economies re-wire. Ukraine is not going to "de-militarize" nor is it going to go quietly back into Russia's sphere with a friendly government. Russian hard power is empty, to the point that I would not be surprised to see more disruptions in it near-abroad- Russia as a state might already be dead, it just does not know it yet.

Agreed. I really wish CM had an operational layer to plug this into.

We discussed this before and it is an interesting idea - a “fog eating snow” highly distributed offensive. It is still “big” but a death of a thousand cuts. It would still need to deliver operational effects and most importantly it must be able to deliver tactical attrition in depth. The aim here is the collapse of the Russian military system, first locally and then regionally. This already happened once in this war and could happen again. The trick is pushing the Russian system past a “recovery point”. The weakness of FEBA tactical actions is that they are localized. Grinding F ech units up in order to break a system is a highly inefficient and long process. If you can take that attrition, once again, along its operational length then system collapse can happen a lot faster. This brings me back to the first phase of this war, the UA needs to strike Russian artillery, logistics and C2 nodes, far more that it does Russian tanks. We are basically taking about a 21st century version of Deep Battle; however, now the aim is to make a Russia defensive system collapse vs forcing a Soviet offensive one to stall.

1. Fair points: technology will advance, the question is will we see a disruptive shock? Answer is likely yes, but we are seeing the tips of it right now in Ukraine. RMAs don't just happen, they build up over time. We act all surprised when they land but in reality (and hindsight) the damn thing was right there all along. Further RMAs are not single year phenomenon, we have likely been living inside one since the late 90s. The impacts we are seeing are finally landing as what was revolutionary goes "mainstream". AI and ML, here I am in the conservative camp. If a roomful of pointdexters gave us mature next gen AI/ML it would likely take us 5-10 years just to figure out what to do with it, hell it would take us that long to get a grip on our data alone. However, if you take the philosophy of "the future is unknowable, because technology" it leads not only to cynicism but also lazy passive thinking: "Since we can't know the future, then no point in even trying. So we keep doing what we are doing and figure it out on the day." That is a weak easy-exit I have seen used far too many times, especially when impacts are obvious and it puts us in a strategic planning reactive posture when that technology does hit us in the face. 2. I think the full impact of this war will take longer to feel in Russia but when it hits the shock could be nation breaking...it was a contributor to this last time. I also think this is a lot more than bodycounts and blown buildings in Russia. One thing that has struck me about the narratives coming out of Russia is this illusion that they are still in control. Warning NATO nations of consequences, warning Finland/Sweden of consequences and acting like they are still a great power. The reality is that beyond the nuclear dead-end, they have no influence left to offer. Economically and resource wise, we are pretty much there in living without whatever Russia has to threaten with, militarily they are a hot burning mess - I would love to see how long those T62 survive in Finland. Some of the most horrific realizations a person or group of persons can have is when they suddenly realize that they are not who they thought they were and Russia is heading towards an identity crisis for the history books - again. 3. I agree that the small wars have been one sided, not so sure about the larger ones. Korea was not one-sided, nor was Vietnam or Afghanistan for the Russians, at least not when we are talking about Will. The Cold War was definitely not one sided. To my mind this war is a bit like the Crimean War, Boer War or the Franco-Prussian War, or even the US Civil War - it is a trailer for what a large fully symmetrical conflict would look like - assuming we could find the right context to have one, that did not escalate. This is a high-intensity peer conflict at the tactical/operational level - with plenty of strategic LL's. This is not full spectrum strategic or total war...I am not sure we could even have one of those and not destroy ourselves to be honest. This one is frankly as close as I would want to get if we have to go this route. The only reason I am even close to making firm calls - and as I noted there is some distance to go here - is that what we have seen in this war has been aligned to a set of consistent trends stretching back at least to Iraq '03 and maybe Gulf '91.

Actually the trends we have been seeing in this war have been building for some time. We have a pretty good idea what things will look like in 5-10 because we are buying it right now - that is how long procurement takes. Everything in this war we have seen elsewhere - how it has been combined and upscaled is new and so are the results. I don't agree with this one. Beyond sanctions, Russia can not take the losses it has, which are now the highest in any conflict since WW2, and not feel it. Russian may not be attacked directly (except all those spontaneous fires awhile back) but I don't think for a second that this has been a clean war for Russia. Everyone keeps raising this one. I think it is a red herring. Once the shock of strikes on the Russian homeland wear off (and they have already happened) exactly what is Ukraine going to be able to do with this? They are never going to get enough weapons to conduct a sustained strategic campaign inside Russia, even if political will was there - hell Russia couldn't pull that off against Ukraine. Hitting SLOCs, sure, but Russian industry or broader targets are well outside the scope of what Ukraine could do effectively with conventional weapons. Here is where cyber should be happening (and might be); however, that is a dimension of this battlefield we do not have visibility on. Ukraine's best chance to break Russia is in the field in Ukraine. Here it needs to demonstrate operational offensive success, which has been limited and non-decisive (at least positively) up to this point. Not saying the can't or won't but we have not seen it yet. They need to crack that one before they get into a missile lobbing contest.

A good start point. I also have been mulling over a lot of these issues; however, I come to different conclusions. My primary induction is that we are looking at this too narrowly; quality vs quantity is a one dimensional set of competitive metrics and we are clearly moving past it in this war. To start these are somewhat vague as what do we mean by "quality"? Is that training and equipment? The amount of money invested prior to war? Quantity, is that mass on the battlefield or broader strategic capacity? Is it both? These definitions muddle more than they really explain. I think there are at least three more dimensions that need to be explored (and I say "at least" deliberately): "smartness" and "distribution", and "capacity". Smartness could just as easily be described as intelligence in the broader sense but the term is already in use. By this I define smartness as: the ability of a force to competitively create usable knowledge in the prosecution of war. This is effectively competitive theory building at all levels of warfare (i.e. the warfare enterprise) - [aside: I did have graphics but the "eeewww PowerPoint crowd" might get ruffled again]. So one can have a very well trained and equipped force but is it competitively smart? Further, can you have a smart low-quality but high quantitative force? Theorists say yes, they call it a swarm. Smartness could easily be called C4ISR; however, I personally think that term gets boxed up as "HQ stuff" which does a disservice to the idea of the overall cognitive ability of a force as a sentient system in itself. In the opening phase of this war the Russian attacked on 5 main axis where they concentrated over 190k troops well armed and just coming off moths of exercises (how effective those were are in doubt), they had the local mass advantage as Ukrainian defence was 1) still mobilizing, 2) in a state of shock at the first punch and 3) was spread out across a very long frontage as no one knew if Belarus was going to jump in or there were more axis the Russians were going to open up. So in the opening phase of this war we have seen a very smart Ukrainian force meet what I call a "dim" mass-based Russian one, and it appears the meeting was decisive in the opening phase of this war. Distribution and capacity speak to mass but how one employs it. Distribution is how we spread that mass around and capacity is how much depth we invest into it. In this war, again in the opening phase, we saw the Ukrainian defence as very highly distributed mass, yet also highly connected and very intelligent. It met a very high density mass, yet also "dim" of the Russian forces...and we saw what happened. The Ukrainian defence created friction and attrition along the entirely of the Russian operational system leading to the collapse of that system on at least 2 operational axis, one of them the main effort of the whole war. So now we can have high quality - smart - distributed/lower capacity mass meeting low quality - dim - concentrated/higher capacity mass, and we all saw what happened. Western militaries will wring their hands over this one for at least a decade because we tend to put out high quality - smart - concentrated/low capacity mass and no matter what the military visionaries, revisionist or conservatives may say, we have no idea what happens when these types of forces all meet - Steve, has nearly shouted himself raw pointing out how wrong the pre-war modeling was, and still can be. Particularly when we have seen what low quality - smart - distributed/high capacity (nearing endless) mass can do to our forces over time, in insurgencies over the last 20 years . This brings me to my last point, which no one really seems to be talking much about either: speed of victory/loss matters. Hypothetically Russia could win this thing if it manages to drag out this war for a century - I am talking Taliban style of constant low level cuts and bites across the spectrum that it somehow manages to sustain. However, by then it may no longer matter. Putin will be dead, the political landscape will have changed to the point that what ever mattered in this war, in this moment has become a complete sideshow. Further, Russia may "win" but the victory completely breaks the nation, to the point that the victor is not even Russia anymore. We know this because this is what happened in Afghanistan. In Oct of '01 it was "a critical blow to terrorism", in Aug of '20 - "*sigh* let's just get this over with". The USA of '01 is gone and the one in '20 was built upon it but did not have anywhere near the same level of investment as fundamental conditions had changed. Back to my main point, western militaries are built for either a quick victory or long loss. We do not know what to do with a quick loss or long victory. Further, the public that send us are not wired for the latter either. Problem is that these could be the wars offered to us and this is a major strategic blind spot. I think this was one of the authors main points, that is particularly insightful as it relates directly to what sorts of forces we have been building. And finally, as if all that was not enough, I am still on the fence as to what is happening between defence and offence. Is this conditions based or are we looking at something more fundamental? Offence in the form the Russians are offering is clearly in trouble. It has become incredibly difficult and costly with the type of force they have employing to prosecute it. We have all been getting "scope eye" on a 2500 sq km postage stamp of terrain - in a country of roughly 604k sq kms - down in the south; however, the rest of the country is also pretty static. The UA has made a couple successful offensives around Kharkiv and now north of Kherson, but these have been modest. This could be, as the author suggests, due to the Ukrainian force and how it is being employed (not western enough?). Or has technology driven us into a different warfare paradigm? Frankly, I do not know and I am sure people have plenty opinions but let me be the first to break it, you don't know either...no one does. We likely won't know until something breaks and one side in this war figures it out. Or maybe they won't and it will take the next war for a side to come up with the answer. The only thing I can say definitively is that the question is in the air right now and the real experts are all watching and waiting.

Very tough questions and I have no idea on #3 - the region seems to have normalized since 2014 under Russia unless I have missed reports on an insurgency. More to the point would Ukraine re-taking Crimea trigger an insurgency in itself? Or has 8 years of Russia love driven the locals in the Crimea away? As to #1 and #2 - Ukraine has every right to re-take Crimea as it was essentially stolen illegally - UN and most the west agree. Should they, is trickier. I would hope that if the Russia front collapses to the point that the UA can seriously look at a Crimean offensive that we are regime change territory because I would be nervous as to what Putin might do out of desperation. If Russia sees Crimea as part of the motherland then it could escalate things dramatically as this would be akin to an operational offensive into Russia itself. Of course if the Russian military and political have collapsed then have at it. And the there is the reaction from the West. We are pretty united right now and doubling down our bets, I am not sure what a deeper offensive by Ukraine into Crimea would do to that. Before warcrimes I would have said “doubtful” but a lot of water has gone under the bridge in the last 3 months. So would a Crimean offensive make the alliance nervous? Likely “yes”, but how nervous. So to summarize I have to admit that I really don’t know. My guess is that unless Russia is in military and/or political free fall a Crimean offensive would be an escalation, and with Putin at the helm a significant one. It would be justice to take back the peninsula and the Black Sea Fleet anchorage/basing at Sevastopol. However for the UA to get to the point that they could retake Crimea, a whole lot has already gone very bad on the Russian side…would it be enough?

The introduction of any new system and its predicted impact on the battlefield remains one of the dark arts of force development, and frankly it is more often than not, wrong. History shows that a weapon system can literally change a war (e.g. machine guns), however, it also shows we rarely accurately predict this. There are a lot of reasons for this however the primary factors are: - What are the capability metrics of the weapon system itself? Are they incremental or are they significant improvement over what is already there? Or are they completely new? This is the end-point of analysis for most people which is well short of what is required. For example, HIMARS/MLRS definitely have longer range and likely higher precision (munitions dependent) so on paper the capability definitely raises an eyebrow but there is a lot more to the story. - Capacity and density of the new capability. So people should not take my musings on mass as "mass is dead", in warfare mass will always have a role, but I am talking mass effects - what appears to be changing in this war, on the defence at least, is how those effects are generated and projected. Most new capability is going to have to arrive with enough mass effect to have an impact on the overall exchange. This does not necessarily mean millions of systems, particularly if the system has wide effects built in, but you still need enough to make an impact. Take the ME 262, game-changing technology, however, Germany could not produce enough of them to get the effects the weapon system was capable of to make a difference. In this war the NLAWs/Javelins and other smart-ATGMs are an excellent example of enough capacity and density to make mass effects possible. I agree that these systems likely contributed to the stalling and collapse of the norther Russian front, however, how that happened was also dependent on the next key factor - - Integration of, or Around. The ability to integrate a new capability into a war is likely one of the most decisive factors in its impact. Normally we integrate new capability into an extant operational system and it makes that system more effective or efficient, or provided more decisive effects and broader options. We also normally get this wrong. You can see it with the introduction of the machine gun, they were treated the same as field guns and brigaded together because we rarely build a operational system around new capability...at first. As we saw in WW1 the machine gun (and massed fired artillery) soon became the core of a new operational system built around them. It does happen (rarely) that militaries take risk and get out in front of this such as the German employment of combined arms warfare before WW2 and US AirLand Battle, all before the technology and capabilities they were designed around came to full realization. In this war, I think the smart-ATGMs were not only integrated into the Ukrainian defence, they became a core/foundational piece. So what? Well for any new capability a very important question is "will it be integrated into, or around?" - Sustainability and enablers. The full realization of any new capability often hinges on the ability to sustain and enable it. Very few capabilities come entirely self-contained and need other capabilities to allow them to develop fully mature impacts. Back to machine guns, useless without the industry to keep manufacturing them and their ammunition. Also useless without rail systems to get them and the troops needed to the front quickly, and also useless without an ability to feed those troops (enter the mighty tin can). - Modularity and cost. Most very successful war-changing capabilities have been cheap and very modular - however here there are noted exceptions and I will come back to these. This not only reinforces density and capacity, it build in a high level of capability agility to allow those impacts to adapt to counter-capabilities over time. It is of little use to simply have a wonder-weapon if in 6 months it has been made obsolete. Modularity allows for rapid add-on to ensure whatever you are pushing into the war remains competitive. Now all this hold historical water and explains why "average" weapon systems like the Sherman won wars. The Sherman tank was not the highest on capability metrics when compared to the German top tier tanks but it easily beat them on almost every other axis. And now for The Exceptions, and there always are. Strategic game-changing weapons are extremely rare but they do happen. Nuclear weapons for example are able to create such massive effects that their very existence has forced a re-write of how wars happen. We were expecting cyber in this war, and even though it is on the battlefield I have yet to see evidence that it is in the league of other war-changers yet. Information has definitely been war-changing in this war - how it is collected, process and utilized, I suspect history will show that C4ISR was one of the decisive capabilities in this war and how it was employed will likely change wars from here on out. Unmanned is also likely in this league - does anyone think we are going into any future wars without thinking about unmanned systems calculus? And finally smart-man portable systems of all types have re-written how we think about denial and superiority - we will be studying that for a generation. I also expect that once the details come out we are in for more surprises but we will just have to wait and see.

Well I can forgive your ignorance then as you clearly have never been to our great nation in the Fall months...its on our flag. As to Sir John, well he was born a Scot, so that one is on your Emerald Isle. As to the obsession with "junk" well I can only go with what I have been exposed to: Add to this hanging with a bunch of British Army goons in a pub and you can see how I might have a somewhat skewed view of what I am sure are your fine cultural perspectives on male reproductive organs.

Ah I see the confusion. I was employing the Canadian version of the term which is different from the somewhat male genitalia obsession of the UK/England/British culture [aside: how many names does one little wart of an island need as it tries to desperately hold onto its former tattered glory?] It all goes back to a Governor Generals dinner in fall of 1878. The GG at the time, appointed by Queen Victoria, was one Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood (seriously, I am not making it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood,_1st_Marquess_of_Dufferin_and_Ava). Our first Prime Minister, Sir John A MacDonald, was a bit of a rogue and not a fan of the continued British oversight of a now independent nation. A the dinner both men stepped outside for cigars and brandy: "Lovely evening isn't Mr Prime Minister, I have always loved your Ottawa in the fall." "Ay, Your Governorship the pretty colors of the trees reflect our burning desire to have greater independence from England and chart our own destiny." *Cough* "I am sorry, I don't understand...or perhaps I misheard?" "Nah, I was only taking a piss Mr GG, the Canadian sense of humor and all..." "Oh, I think you mean you were "taking the piss", you see it is a term that has to with a full bladder and the male phallus. You see..." "No sir, I mean taking a piss...on your shoes!! AHAHHAHAHA!" "Oh dear." And the particularly Canadian idiom stuck to this day...

Oh wouldn't that be a nice proxy action.

Haven't they been saying that for 3 months now? That would be monumentally stupid, so of course it is possible. Belarus's best play is to lay low and stay out of this thing and maybe we will all forget their role in all this. Lukashenko has to be doing the calculus on this and his chances vs Putin's right now (I am betting a lot of people are doing this). Belarus is already shackled to a corpse that is Russia from a geopolitical perspective, doubling down is just insane. Maybe back in Feb when Ukraine was just getting started but now that they are armed to the teeth?

Meh, just taking a "piss".

So...DOOOOOOOOOOM? Well all war is negotiation and sacrifice, so the question will come down to both sides coming to terms with those two factors. My pushback to the "inevitable partitioned Ukraine" is that Russia talks a good game but Ukraine has lived it. Russia is only just starting to feel the pain and like any good nut-sack shot, that pain takes some time to build. Here is a dirty little inside baseball secret - professional soldiers are supposed to die, it is what we get paid for; civilians, not so much. Every society knows this and accepts it. We can lose people who choose this lifestyle who, like mercs, take the Queen's Coin and do the dirty work. We have Remembrance Days and "Thank you for your service"-free coffee but in order for a society to be truly tested in war, it must be willing to feed it people who had nothing to do with warfare before it started. The harsh calculus of regular everyday people dying in numbers is a threshold that we in the West have not crossed in a very long time (e.g. WW2 for Canada and Vietnam for the US). Nor has Russia by this point, but it is approaching it quickly. However, you know who is already living in that stark land?...Ukrainians. They have been "all in" since 24 Feb, to the point that there are no longer "regular Ukrainian civilians", the whole nation is in on this. I see pictures of 12 year old holding a wooden AK properly and that says it all; war, has become the way of life for Ukraine. Out of everyone talking and positioning, only Ukraine (and possibly the folks in the DPR/LPR...many involuntarily by the looks of things) has crossed that threshold. Putin is very nervous of it, and it shows. The US was terrified of it in Iraq, that is why they imposed all sorts of crazy things to try and keep the professional troops they had. So before I pass judgement on the current situation with finality, I would want to see how Russia reacts when the civilian population starts bleeding heavily. They are hurting but it has been a slow burn, and frankly I think Russia is culturally masochistic...to a point. However, despite a bunch of retired Russian warhawks barking from the cheap seats, Russia has not been tested in this trial in a very long time either. Ukraine is the single largest hot-war they have been involved in since WW2. History looks great in the movies and we can all get our pulses up watch Saving Private Sasha; however, watching the guy next to you get blown in half by long range arty when you were working at a now-closed Starbucks a month ago, is an entirely different experience. So no, I do not think Russia and Ukraine or on the same wavelength when it comes to negotiation and sacrifice...at least not yet. As to communication: We have been over the challenge of the Russian Defence, which they need in order to "freeze" this conflict. Right now they are keeping Ukraine busy by this very slow grinding offence, but it has been costly as hell. At some point if they want to "freeze" they are going to need to dig in and let the UA crash upon the shores of the great Russian Steel Wall. Problem is what it will take to build that wall. Did some research and frankly we do not have modern troop density calcs for this sort of thing - we have lots on peacekeeping/making and COIN but basically sweet FA on modern conventional conflict. So we are going to have to make some assumptions here and keep checking them. In warfare the concept of "troop density" is a bit controversial. It is a hold over of the Jomini-esque "war is math" approach. It holds water but it is not deterministic as we already know a lot of soft non-linear factors play into this. With this in mind, all caveats etc lets break this down a bit: - We are talking about 800kms of frontage from the Russian western position around Kharkiv to its position ion the East near Kherson. That is a long active front...very long. In WW1 the Western Front was about 400 miles, or about 640 kms in comparison. - Troop density requirements have decreased over time. It is well documented that weapons ranges, ISR and battlefield mobility have increased the combat influence each soldier has on the battlefield over time. Problem here is that reality cuts both ways. In both offence and defence effectiveness and range have increased, so it is competitive. - Troop density in WW1 - a frozen conflict - was in and around "5000 troops for mile" or roughly 3125 per km: (https://books.google.ca/books?id=nhhlHGWCnzYC&pg=PA30&lpg=PA30&dq=troop+density+western+front&source=bl&ots=WWfd6Y7VIl&sig=ACfU3U1M05Ef9GIbmBAREwu-_obJPnXEpw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi_rO_4jf33AhXvjIkEHRJEDUoQ6AF6BAg7EAM#v=onepage&q=troop density western front&f=false). This jives with the roughly 2 million troops each side had to sustain in the trenches, in depth, replacements and rotation, in order to sustain that deadlock. This does not count logistics and support overhead -which is likely why each side had on the order of 12-15 million troops in total. - Based on WW1 metrics, Russia would need approximately 2.5 million men in those trenches to achieve the same deadlock...and then have the architecture behind them to sustain it, which at a very generous 1:1 (which means a very slow burn war) means roughly 5 million men to dig in and hold that front a la WW1. But as I noted we are not in WWI - although if the Russians tried to force generate these numbers they would probably start looking like they were from that era equipment-wise. - Actual Russian troop numbers as of today are hard to find; however, with the 200k they brought with them and assuming they have kept that force level (big assumption), Russia currently has a troop density of 250 men per km of frontage. This is less than ten percent than the WW1 number. But as we noted modern forces can cover more ground, which makes this a weak analogy. The question is, "versus a very well armed attacker, how much troop density does Russia need to "freeze" this front?" My bet is a lot more than 200k troops, but how much more? So let's tackle this from another direction. Things in this war are challenging a lot of our rules of thumb; however, we can go with the 1:3 ratio of defender to attacker, at least locally. So Russia likely needs to put at least a Company per km frontage. This forces the UA to concentrate a BG on the attack, with all the support bells and whistles in order to make an effective shot at it. This makes sense from a force-space-time perspective for both attacker and defender but I am not sure about firepower in the least [Note: it might be a lot less if things like UAVs and precision artillery are involved. This is one of the unknowns]. Terrain may also give them a break, particularly on the Dnipro, however, they also have urban areas so I am betting things even out. So a Russian Company of say 150 men per km. They will need at least on more company behind them to create effective depth and prevent breakthrough of that UA BG, while also accounting for attrition, so now 300 men per km. And then they will need to rotate troops in and out of those positions. We are not designed to live in the open, under harassing artillery/Switchblade fire indefinitely. So we are now looking at another company for rotation and sustainment. Throw in an armored reserve to plug holes and supporting fires/assets and we are getting dangerously close to a BTG, per km. This would bring the Russians up to about 1500 (a fat BTG) men per km, about half of WW1 troop density. Or 1.2 million men. And that is just the fight stuff and basic tactical logistics. As we know from this war, the Russians like to travel light on logistics and formation-level support, so we can probably add another third of that number, say 400k to build the backbone to keep those 1.2 million men in the field = about 1.6 million men...and they have to sustain that for years, under increasingly crushing sanctions. I have to be honest, if I was an average Russian and I saw these types of numbers I would be asking myself "how badly do we need Putin". Finally, checking the old CIA factbook (https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/russia/#people-and-society) Russia has roughly 37 million fighting aged men aged 15-54 (I am going to assume good old Putin male chauvinism holds and they do not a start tapping women). You can throw out a third right off the top for all sorts of medical conditions etc that make them simply unfit for service. So roughly 24 million men to draw from, in entirety. To freeze this Ukrainian war, to the point that you can force Ukraine to "tap out" you need to commit at least 5 percent of all eligible fighting aged males...up front. And you count on needing an extra 1.2 million just to sustain it over time. Now I can hear the demographic nerds out there pointing out that over time more men come of age...well the news for Russia in that regard is not good either: Russia is in a bit of a demographic hole right now and it is going to take what look like 3-5 years to dig its way out. Worse the big bulges in the 35-44 range are going to age out in the same timeframe. And finally, finally, this does not take into account the the standing military bill for the rest of the country - Russia can make all the noise it wants with Finland and Sweden, everyone is going to be fully engaged on this Ukrainian thing for a few years so you may as well shut down everything else. So What? After all that it comes back to: how much does the average Russian want a bunch of new broken Republics vs how much does Ukraine want its country back? If I were a betting man, I would put my money on the country that has already demonstrated the commitment. If this war goes long, we will likely need to shift from send guns and bullets (fish), to funding the creation of a Ukrainian domestic arms industry (fishing rods) and then figuring out what to do when Russia totally collapses under the weight of this thing.

I wonder if they will get the 600. It can kill armor/arty at crazy ranges.

I thought that is why everyone invested in IFVs? A gas guzzling infantry support gun, sure why not. I mean if that is all one has but the things are still big and hot and can be seen a long way off. On the modern battlefield they will be blind as a bat (they were not that great by 1970s standards). Strain on logistics, now a new set of spare parts and nature of ammo (115mm) is likely not worth it but I think the Russians are scraping bottoms of barrels anyway. Unless of course you put them out front to soak up the ATGMs in a hope the UA will run out. "Shoot and scoot"...it is the scooting that appears to be the major problem so far.

Kofman hasn't been playing CMCW. The T62 can still play...back in 1982. On the modern battlefield it is a coffin on tracks, likely being driven by scared teenagers with 15 mins of training time. And supported by a logistical system that has had the guts shot out of it. So for those keeping score, this point right here is when Russia became the underdog in this whole thing. A very bad underdog...bad...bad...go poop in your own yard!