The_Capt

I probably should have been more clear, my bad. All militaries have to negotiate with their political level to a greater or lesser extent. We shine it up and call it “military advice to policy” but it is really negotiating their political needs with military strategic ones. What is weird in the Russian dynamic is the risk to that “ability to negotiate”. Especially to the point that is becomes a CoG consideration. Most militaries have it built into a national legal framework but in autocracies the reality of a political amateur essentially “taking over” and making the military negotiation position null and void is somewhat unique -and even then it is not often done, see Stalin. In this case the Russian military is being forced to fight-for-success or that bargaining position may simply be take away. And if Putin as CinC means that, then it has already happened.

So by my math the Russians are quickly coming up on about half of what the Iraqis lost in Gulf War ‘91 and their force was much larger than the Russian one at about 650k. The online experts can talk about new recruits and parks of T62s all day, no modern military can sustain these losses for long. At some point the entire system just buckles under its own weight.

This is what they have been doing in the defence but I think you are right, they are going to hit the operational length along several points, then likely pick one where they figure they can get the biggest bang. Off the top of my head, cutting that strategic corridor between Crimea and Donbas looks like a promising gain. Also, for the bolder operational types, a river crossing East of Kherson and a sweep around the back of the city would also be bold but risky as hell as you could wound up cut off. The real question is how to crumble the whole Russian position in a sector. It looks like they tried near Kharkiv but it looks like it faltered. Or maybe they don’t do bold and simply give the RA a death by a thousand cuts everywhere.

Well we have been talking a lot about the Russians, I think a discussion on “How Ukraine is going to win this thing” is long overdue. I think Ukraine will establish pre-conditions before moving out. It will likely have information superiority from the get go. It is working on firepower and deep strike. Air is a toss up, to the point that I am not sure what it means. EW is interesting, in all this kit coming from the west not much mention of that? Then the UA may do a bunch of shaping and feeling up of Russia positions, I suspect they are already doing this. A properly developed recon phase that figures out what to pin and what to crush before crossing the start line. Then, with all that set up, a relatively small but highly lethal formation may very well be capable of crashing the Russian line and sustaining it. The question is where?

The only factor in favour of the Russian's right now is the fact that the UA has not been able to pull off an operational level offensive. I think this thing down by Kherson is approaching that and it looks like they took a swing at it near Kharkiv but these still look like tactical gains. If the UA can crack the code on a successful operational offensive/manoeuvre the whole rotten house of the Russian force might just cave in.

Bam. If the military is no longer in charge of the Military Strategic space then this thing just got a whole lot worse for Russia - I know right?! Is that even possible? At this point Russia needs to pull a rabbit out of a hat, or Ukraine needs to stumble in a very big way in order for this war to swing from its current trajectory. On its present course the Russian offence will likely collapse and its ability to defend what it took will be at significant risk. I also am betting that Ukraine knows this, that is why they are taking a harder line at the negotiating table, which is the battlefield right now.

This was a major error in initial war estimates. Everyone was counting BTGs vs UA formations and coming to conclusions. While if one were to dig into these BTGs it was pretty apparent that they were disadvantaged from the initial design, which we have discussed at length, compounded by internal attrition due to a whole bunch of factors. Add to this other soft factors like leadership and morale. Add in the lack of operational pre-conditions and this whole thing gets a lot more predictable. Finally add in Ukrainian performance and approach against an already eroded Russian system that was not even given the opportunity to play to the strengths it had, and it gets even more pre-determined with respect to outcomes.

Oh, to my post above I would add “massed fires” to the Operational CoG as well in order to capture that dynamic. Russia has been artillery-centric since WW1 so that has to be on the Operational CoGs list.

I did not want to let this one slip by because once again it leads back to Russian Centers of Gravity. I have proposed the political ones previously but we have not really discussed the Military Strategic and Operational: Military Strategic: - Ability to generate and project conventional military mass into Ukraine. The entire threat of the Russian military is based on this key factor. - Ability to control the strategic military narrative in Russia. This overlaps the political CoGs, but is also has to do with sustaining the Will of the Russian people and support for military action. - Ability to negotiate with their own political level. A weird one as most militaries do not find themselves in this position but...Russia. The Russian military has likely been negotiating with Putin throughout this thing and will continue to, the only way they can do that is if they remain in control of the Russian military. Speed of Success is key here as faster is better because time is not on their hands. Operational - Ability to project coordinated mass into Ukraine to deliberate effects that lead to decisions. - Secure and open LOCs back to Russian SLOCs. -Ability to secure terrain objectives and demonstrate success. This is my best guess with what we have so far and these are odd in comparison to normal western thinking. But you can see how both the Strategic and Operational CoG center around military mass. This is all that Russia really has to bring to this fight. It has not been superior manoeuvre (exact opposite) or integration, it has been a lot of mass to grind down Ukrainian defence; this is a war of attrition if there ever was one. So What? Well to answer your question above, reset and refit take time, and for really mauled organizations they take a lot of time. So all of these units in refit subtract from Russian mass, which is at the heart of their strategy. Based on the overall strategy, Russia's war has become "mass at all costs". Doesn't matter if it is bent or broken mass, brittle mass or even dumb mass...troops and equipment all pushing at something...all the time. Rest and re-fit do nothing for this in the short term. So why the rush? Isn't time on Russia's side? Can't Russia simply drag this out in a long war? I don't know but based on their actions I am guess the Russians do not think they have a lot of time left. That is probably why this thing in the Donbas looks more like a land-grab than a deliberate attack.

So Russia does not change its military approach, even when facing an existential threat, in anything less than years. This tracks because some of the issues we have observed here take years to fix, like the re-creation of a formation layer over BTGs, and Joint integration of effects and C4ISR. And although Putin is convinced it is existential and for him and his regime it now is, does the Russian military and the Russian people? The answer seems "kinda". So the deduction here is that dramatic changes to Russian operational/tactical warfare are not going to change in the 3-4 weeks they have had, and all signs point to this (e.g. lack of recon phase, still failing to establish operational conditions etc). So a lot of narrative we hear on mainstream analysis is that by appointing a single commander (even one without any experience in this type of fight) and stuffing more mass into the problem that the Russians are going to walk out of the phone booth and suddenly become proficient in combined arms and joint warfare, and be able translate that into major gains, appears somewhat mis-aligned with our assessment of the reality of the situation. And this is another excellent point. In order to really create major change, the Russian military would have to admit failure, and nothing points to them as willing to accept this, particularly in an unforgiving autocratic regime. So What? Well this all adds up to what I think we are seeing now - more of the same from part I of this war, but louder. I am still half convinced that this is all RA theatre and they have no intention of attempting a full on operation here, and this is posturing for the political audience. However, I could very well be wrong and the RA is actually going to try to make a move, I guess next week will be interesting. What is becoming clear is that the probability of outcomes is far more likely to mirror part 1 of the war; initial RA gains on the back of horrendous causalities and raw mass, and then the RA being unable to exploit or even hold those gains due in large part to heavy attrition and weak logistics. Primary reasons are consistent throughout this conflict: - Russia brought the wrong military into this fight - Russia applied the wrong doctrine and strategy to this fight - Russia is insisting on continuing to fight the war they wanted, not the one they are in - Russian Centers of Gravity: Stable government regime, Russian military able to sustain itself overtime, and protect its economy, are all being eroded. - Ukraine CoGs of: sustain a will to resist, deny Russian successes, and sustain western support have been made stronger not weaker. - Russia seems unable to effect Ukrainian CoGs, or constrain their options spaces, while the exact opposite it true of the combination of western power and Ukrainian defence against Russian CoGs. Did I miss anything?

Does Russia really see this war as existential? Survival is one of the biggest energizers of change. Back in WW2 the Germans were literally at the gates and Russia was close to ceasing to exist. In this war the stakes are high but I am pretty sure most Russians are not afraid of a Ukrainian invasion. They may be afraid of a NATO invasion but even a total Russian idiot can still see the nuclear equation. I am not sure the survival driver is there for Russia, now Ukraine is another matter entirely.

This comes back the what I think is at least one of the major strategic flaws in this whole thing: the Russia perception that this was a security operation in a rebellious “province” and not an invasion of a conventionally capable sovereign state. This is clearly where their heads were/are at based on their behaviour. Further, all this talk of Russians invading Poland is also utter nonsense, as is “30 hours to Riga”. This Russian military we see is built for defence and internal security, it is not an expeditionary force.

And this raises the another "huh?" in my mind; what in the hell have the Russians being doing for the last 3-4 weeks in this sector? They had a month to do recon and ISR work before they started all this "probing". That is enough time to put special recon in every haystack and put UAVs (even crappy Russian ones) all over the place. Why do the Russian's need to probe now at all? That is why the lack of a deliberate assault is baffling to me. These frontages are huge and the UA has a lot of ground to cover off, the idea that the RA couldn't push recon well beyond UA lines is beyond me. They should already have Ukrainian logistical nodes, engineering infra and troop concentrations at least broadly locked in because they had three weeks to infiltrate...so why all the knocking around with BTGs at this point? The only answer is that they did do this phase because any special recon is 1) dead, or 2) did not exist in the first place. So this is a cold-hard-knock job, which of course history has demonstrated that nothing could possibly go wrong.

Ya, my guess as well but "probes" are supposed to be more than junior high school foreplay - both humorous and unfulfilling. They are supposed to not only inform where the enemy is vulnerable, they are also supposed to shape the battlespace through a lot of inductive effects. I am not seeing any real design here on the Russian side, I see a lot of poking resulting in loses of up to a BTG per day but not a the jabs before the main event. How the RA is expecting to set up a main event and not get spotting, considering that the amount of layered ISR over this region is likely able to cook an egg, is beyond me, but let's not let that get in the way of ambition. I guess we will see next week. My instincts are telling me that the RA will pick a main axis and get on with this but it will be a mad bull rush Russian Frontal (seriously do they only teach this manoeuvre?) of fire and smoke without the ability to quickly follow up. They may even take Slovyanks but they will then run out of gas (literally) while they try to "re-probe" for the next stage, again because they do not have what looks like a recon-battle here and it is sapping any momentum they can muster.

And they gave themselves about a 3 weeks to to do it before rolling into this fight. This has been our fundamental disagreement with mainstream assessments: the things broken in the Russian military as demonstrated by phase 1 of this war require years to fix, and as such the outcome of this thing does not change based on Russian shifts to date. This is likely because we (collectively) see war at a genetic level in CM and that is where things screamed out the loudest from Day 1 in this whole thing.

It is in who is doing the probing, normally one does not do probing with the main organizations that comprise ones combat power. There are many reasons for this but the primary ones are visibility and cost. BTGs are highly visible, especially in an environment where their opponent is winning the ISR fight so that makes them sub-optimal for probing unless you can quickly follow up with more structured mass. Further the losses one takes trying to use a force designed to “fix and finish” in “finding” the enemy is bad battlefield economics. As @Combatintman points out, there are circumstances where this will work but you need a highly switched on formation level C2 structure that understands how to synchronize the follow on forces. Even with that it is sub-optimal as there are organizations equipped, designed and armed with doctrine who are supposed to do this job, we call them reconnaissance. In the west recon troops have a combination of long range ground sensors like FLIR, UAVs combined with close recon scouts that come more heavily armed but are not designed to take and hold ground but outline where the enemy is, or is not and survive that “bump in the dark”. To this artillery and joint fires are highly integrated, along with CAS and tac aviation. The only way the Russians are doing it now that makes any sense is if this is a feint. Then “probing with no intent to take me to church” kinda makes a bit more sense but operationally that also makes no sense here either.

I have used this Russian war as an example of “what wrong looks like” to a whole bunch of up and coming brass. The one thing about war that is constant is that it does hinge on the qualities of the people waging it, and how well those in charge can stay out of their way. Speaking if tea, I spit some all over the keyboard when I heard on assessment of the Russian officer corps as “on par with any in the West”. Further the Russians do not have an NCO Corp, they have a collection of people wearing the ranks.

Ya, whatever this thing is, it aint working. It feels like an unholy compromise to be honest. I mean if one beefed it up, layered a next-gen unmanned system and hooked into a integrated C4ISR system, one could make an argument for a more self-contained tactical organization. One that when employed on concert with others could see daylight in the whole dispersed and distributed operations idea that the west has been toying around with. Not sure how one solves for logistics as that is the tether that never goes away but you might be onto something. As built the BTG looks more like a "medium weight" institutional cop out. Looks good on a power point as one could argue it can swing heavy or light but without the formation-level enablers light is going to be tepid and heavy too slow and vulnerable. It looks like the Russians experimented with distributed mass and did not land on it at all, in fact they managed to invent distributed-weak-dim-mass. The UA on the other hand, at least in the defence, has clearly locked onto something with distributed-smart-sharp mass; however, we have not seen them able to translate that into large offensive operations either. Let's face it, this has been a Defence war. Defence has had primacy pretty much the entire course of it so far, which kinda throws things for a bit of a loop. I may even go further and say that this has been a Denial War, with most of the denial being inflicted on the Russians; a lot of null and negative decisions being forced on the Russians as they seem unable to solve some riddles here, while bleeding on everything. This is ironic as hell considering a major political objective of Putin's was to undecide the outcome of the Cold War...insert ironic "wah, wah, waaaah" sound here.

So this and the actions around Lynman-Zarchine all point to Slovyanks as an operational objective for this thing along the North-East front of the Donbas, but the Russian are going about it very strangely. This looks like some sort of recon-in-force as they are trying a lot of different tactical axis probes, and those are expensive probes. It kinda looks like the Russians are using BTGs to try and find a hole in the UA defence instead of a recon screen based on the battlefield loss observations. So in the "have the Russians found a new game?" question, I am not seeing it to be honest. They still appear to be road-bound, their recon phase is a bit of a mystery-date game, and the whole thing has the same fumbling feel as the offensives in the first phase. I think they are more intense and they can definitely mass fires as we have seen but it looks like they are trying to old playbook here of "find a hole", as opposed to making one and then pushing echelons through as coordinated use of mass. Or maybe that is what next week will bring? Again, I am not really seeing the set up for the massive sweeps still being predicted in the mainstream. All we can see is that Russia is still on the offensive in the Donbas and it is moving pretty slowly and costly [aside: perfect name for this operation, can we get a Russian translation?] for the first week.

I think there were some interim steps in there but that pretty much captures it. I guess it comes down to "want vs reality" and this is all Putin negotiating with Putin while thousands die...yep, checks out based on historical references. There is a breaking point for the Russians here, the question is "where is it?"

In order for this to be anything more than posturing the Russians will need to demonstrate a few things: - Putin's centers of gravity - Stability of his regime, Russian militaries ability to sustain itself over time and the Russian economies ability to support those first two - would have to be secure. Everything happening so far has eroded these CoGs and taken the Russian strategic options spaces with them. - The RA in the field would have to demonstrate actual gains. I am talking about taking operational objectives and hold them in something that resembles a campaign design that lead to achieving these strategic military ends. And to do that they would need to re-tool their entire military enterprise, and appointing a single commander (who also has no experience at this level) is not enough. - That Russia is somehow influencing Ukrainian CoGs - Unified will to resist, sustain western support and the ability to continue to deny the Russian military it operational and strategic objectives. The Russian have really failed to do any of this and in some places have actually reinforced them. My sense is that no matter what the Russians say, this is a race to nibble off enough of the Donbas, keep a land bridge to Crimea to call it a win, establish a puppet government and go home. I am pretty sure there is no long game in the Russian thinking right now, such as "how do we possibly re-normalize after this?" or "how do we keep our economy functioning in 5 years and not be a Chinese gas station", pretty sure those are problems for next month. All war is negotiation, with the opponent, stakeholders, your own people and with the future. Ukraine's strategy has been crystal clear here, even as it evolves. Russia's strategy so far is makes no sense, and all seems to hinge on just how big a lie one nation can hold on to.

ISW weekly is up: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/ukraine-invasion-update-24 Key Takeaways April 15-21 Russia and Ukraine are unlikely to resume negotiations in the coming weeks. Both sides await the outcome of Russia’s ongoing offensive in eastern Ukraine. Kyiv likely assesses that its military has the potential to push Russian forces back to their pre-February 24 positions and is unlikely to engage in negotiations until that outcome occurs or becomes significantly less likely. The Kremlin is increasingly describing the war in Ukraine as a war with NATO to the domestic Russian audience to explain slower-than-intended operations and mounting casualties. The Kremlin likely intends to create one or more proxy states in occupied southern Ukraine to cement its military occupation and set conditions to demand permanent control over these regions. Russian and Belarusian officials seek to frame Western sanctions as predominantly harming European economies while playing up the efficacy of their sanction-mitigation efforts. The Kremlin is failing to deter NATO expansion and failing to disrupt Ukraine's military alignment with the West. The Kremlin remains unlikely to use a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine in this phase of the war

I agree that the first two are obvious and not much of a change, that third one of “deny Ukraine the Black Sea” is just plain nuts. That is an over 200km advance that once again they have to take. And then hold while being attacked from both sides. I mean maybe the RA staff sold it as a good idea but they cannot believe it. The Russia “stated aims” in this war have shifted and turned on a dime. I am not sure I believe this signal as anything more than posturing. I still think this is all smoke at this point, at least until the RA demonstrates some real gains that it can take and hold. One operationally decisive outcome in the RA’s favour would be a start. Right now they appear to be fumbling around like a teenager on prom night striving for paradise by the dashboard lights. As follow up: if Russia had started with this plan maybe we could be talking business but they spent that high ready force in the last two months.

Do we have this anywhere but that one Russian GO? I am not sold, could have a bargaining thing, could be an attempt to draw forces into other areas. They tried that whole Odessa thing the first time and it failed, not sure why they are signalling another grab. Whole thing smells fishy.