The_Capt

Operational “combined arms” is really “joint” and about integration of domains/dimensions. Even operational land warfare is about joint integration. Combined arms is a land domain term that essentially integration of land effects into a framework that offsets weaknesses of each arm and maximizes strength. Problem is that I think that what that used to mean has changed for a number of reasons. As to why the UA may be nibbling vice chomping, this likely goes back to “what is happening with mass?” Obviously concentration of forces without air superiority is dangerous for both sides. The RA learned this the hard way, which we have seen many, many, examples. I suspect the UA has too. With “63,000” US trained troops, even with the frontages we are seeing, should allow for something larger than a battalion or company raid, somewhere. So the UA is likely not doing this for a very good reason - concentration of mass without setting conditions is suicidal. The “learning” is determining what those “conditions” actually are for any given scenario.

So in this scenario UA ISR does not see a few tanks/BMPs tens of kilometres out? - which they would because a bridgehead is very valuable real estate. And then hit them before they can even get near the infantry bridgehead by any number of systems that can do so at tens of kilometres (PGM artillery, Switchblade 600s etc)? For the Javelin it range seems to depend on the CLU. The lightweight CLU can hit out to 4,000 m and the terrain, plus UAS can support those shots. If the UA knows “sending a Coy tanks over a ridge is a good way to lose a Coy of tanks” then why are the rules different for the RA. In fact from what we have read and seen the most likely involvement of RA tanks will be as mobile indirect fires. You could do this scenario in CMBS right now. Just beef up the Blue ISR and give them all the UAS, and see how it goes.

You mean like they had north of Kyiv when they stopped them cold? Have we seen an actual “armoured counterattack” in this entire war? That and as soon as the RA formed up to make that c-attack they would be lit up by ISR and pounded. I suspect the issue is not RA armor but RA fires, enabled by ISR that are the major problem. Likely why the UA seems intent on killing as much RA artillery as possible. It is looking more and more like a cat and mouse game with the Russian guns. I knew they looked tepid from what we could tell, and hoped it was a sign of systemic failure, but perhaps they are holding them back.

I guess my problem with the whole “combined arms is their problem” narrative is that it misses the overall trend lines. The RA was noted at the beginning of this war as failing to properly conduct combined arms. This was a little odd as the Soviets essentially invented combined arms at scale and the RA was constructed around combined arms doctrine and concepts. But we all agreed that “Russia Sux, LOLZ” and watched war porn streams with glee while yammering for “more Leopards!!”. Now the UA on the offensive is also “failing to coordinate combined arms at scale” after extensive equipping and training by western forces. So to my mind either two completely separate militaries coming at the problem have both mystically failed to grasp and execute the essentials of combined arms. Or there is something fundamentally changing about the concept of combined arms itself. As to armchair quarter backing the UA in mid operations, well sure anyone with a podcast and a half decent academic background can nitpick. It is called friction and it has always been in every war, forever. Why? Because human systems are filled with nasty human agency and perception, and error. To point to a slow operational offensive “because units missed timelines” is weak and amateur analysis. The biggest problem with trying to get professional assessments is that those able to do them are in the game and not going to speak publicly about what is actually going on. What that means is that the calculus of this war remains opaque until the thing is over for a few years and we can get access to what actually happened - “How Did This Thing Get Hot?” thread coming hopefully soon. The rest is academics and pundits trying to promote a bunch of angles. We heard the same stuff at Bakhmut, Kherson and in the early days. The fundamental questions are more along the lines of “can the UA translate corrode to breakout without air power as we knew it?” “Has Defensive Primacy actually happened (again)?” “What the hell is happening with mass?” This is not pro-Ukrainian copium either. The reality may be simply that offensive operations in this war do not work anymore. We could be looking at the beginning of a frozen conflict line a la Korea. But why offensive operations may not work is not because a UA unit had their map upside down anymore than when the RA stopped using their tanks as tanks and made VBIEDs out of them. That all said, my own assessment is that this still feels like shaping. I nice little feel up before heading to paradise. It lasted for at least two months at Kherson. I suspect we have the rest of the summer with this weird Grade 9 gym dancing until something gives and the UA drops the hammer and goes for it. In fact we have not seen a full scale formation offensive yet - as has been noted - the reason is more likely because conditions have not been set. Now another big question is “are the UA shaping or leg humping?” Well given the C4ISR differences between the two forces my money is still on operational shaping, but we will have to wait and see.

So would not this: Be a result of this: And why they are doing this: ? Also, why would the RA be rationing artillery ammo? Finally, does anyone think that maybe the UA is fighting in a more distributed manner (pretty much from Day 1) because that is what works on the battlefield now? Large concentrations are highly visible from way back and can be hit so they are in fact a liability. The RA is the low bar of precision in this war but it looks like they are still able to disrupt UA mass even with the sub-par ISR and dumb artillery mass they have. This is not a coordination or training issue it is a modern warfare reality - precision beats mass, mass precision beats everything.

Bag of flour with a kicker charge + slight delay incendiary in an enclosed space = BFB. Seriously one can blow up a concrete bunker. Now if you really want to ruin someone’s day get some aluminum powder.

Here you go.

The question facing military professionals everywhere out of this war are: - "What is unique to this war?" - "What is universal to all future wars?" We had a whole thread going on the General Forum on development of warfare over the 19th century and I believe modern militaries are facing a similar conundrum. "How would NATO do in this war?" Well it depends which side we are going to be. As Ukraine against Russia we would likely have seen a shorter sharper war but the costs would have been a serious shock to the western world. [note: let's not get dragged into another nuclear equation discussion, we can just put that one to the side] We are talking likely tens of thousands of casualties and a lot of expensive kit lost. Why? - Air superiority. I do not know what this means in a modern context. A2AD capability is rapidly becoming distributed and highly portable. We may have been able to gain air superiority over 20,000 feet but below that we would have been taking serious losses as there is not such thing as SEAD for MANPADs basically everywhere. Modern MANPADs and IADs can operate independently all over the battlefield. Further they can deny airspaces at much higher altitudes and higher ranges. Why? Because while we were stonking Iraq, Libya, Serbia and a bunch of dirt farmers in Afghanistan competing states were taking notes and investing heavily in the tech. Take away our air supremacy and the western way of warfare is immediately in trouble. And, shocker, places like Iran really don't like us and do not want to be invaded. Below 20,000 feet it is the freakin wild west right now. I do not care how many lasers we strap on every tank, IFV or truck. I do not care how much EM is pumped into space - birds f#ucked up for the next 20 years. Unmanned systems are 1) cheap, 2) highly effective and 3) everywhere. Whether they are doing ISR or strike they have changed the fabric of warfare between about 3 to 20,000 feet...and they are just getting started. Air superiority below 20,000 feet does not exist as a concept right now. Hell we lost it below 2000 feet in Iraq to freakin ISIL, who were basically the lowest bar one can get with respect to conventional warfare. If we were fighting the RA the UAS problem would be extremely costly...as in freakin nations pulling out after losing too many people, costly. Can anyone imagine if the Taliban got their hands on this tech and started dropping old cluster munitions right on our heads back in the COPs and FOBs? I slept for weeks about 200m from a 50,000 gallon fuel bladder that was resting under an open sky ...let that sink in. So what? Well "wither goest Air Superiority" is one of the biggest questions of this war, and as you can see it is a multi-dimensional one. - C4ISR. Russia does not have a world class C4ISR architecture. But even with what they do have the principle of "making them go dark" to establish C4ISR superiority - far more important in this day and age then any domain superiority - is also in question. With everything being a sensor hooked into crazy comms and networks - hell with hotspotting everything can be a node in a comms network. So I am not even sure how to make an opponent go dark anymore (see unmanned). I am sure we got people working on it but the fact that an even poorly armed opponent can see me tens of kms out makes me nervous. Worse, they can see my logistics train as well. The fact they can record all this and stream it all over the planet in real time turns really concerns me. A half decent opponent would be broadcasting every screw up and horror show, which makes sustainment of national will a big problem. - PGM. Artillery, ATGM...insert whatever nightmare comes next. No one is ready to face this. I cannot begin to imagine trying to do an obstacle crossing when my opponent can hit me at 3-4kms with an 80% success rate with ATGM. "Oh that is ok, we have APS"...fantastic, right up until someone comes up with workarounds like sub-munitions or EFP. And even if we do magically put bubble wrap around ourselves, nothing on earth can stop artillery round that can land directly on my head. Oh and this is while I am still trying to deal with old stuff like mines, and new stuff like UAS. All of that adds up to some very disconcerting calculus. As in "is combined arms dead as we know it?" type of calculus (someone is going to try and answer this, someone always does...just don't bother. I do not post my mil quals for some very good reasons but trust me when I say no one has this figured out yet). Now here is the punchline: this is all if we were fighting Russia. I, frankly, am far less concerned about fighting Russia - now more than ever. I am very worried about fighting Ukraine. If we get stuck on the wrong side of a proxy war and our opponent is armed with C4ISR, PGM and A2AD like Ukraine is right now, we are in very serious trouble. "Well we just won't fight those wars." Ya, that is not how it works. We don't get to choose the wars we decide to fight, gawd that is a post-Cold War perception that needs to die, and fast. This is the nightmare scenario and I do not know if you guys have been paying attention but we kinda been doing a lot of expeditionary operations in all sort of places to push the brand. What happens when Chinese space based ISR start lighting us up? We wind up in a hybrid fight with the other side armed with HJ-12s? I do not know. This is a big reason when [insert talking head] says "Ukraine needs to do this" "We need to give them that"...and the war will be over in a week. My advice is to stop listening. No one in the west has been in a war like this since Korea and the freakin needle has moved miles since Korea. I say this without hyperbole, we are going to be spending the rest of this century trying to figure this all out as things like UGVs start coming online. Tell your (grand) kids to get into the sciences of killing because it is a major growth industry. For now, the best we can do is watch and learn. Both the UA and RA are feeling their way through a war unlike any we have seen before.

Typical academic - "be more combined armsy!" Ok great, hey Sergeant Major go tell the guys to be more "combined armsy"...what? No seriously, that is what I got.... You threaten to retire at least once a week, you know its a job you love to hate.

This is a cop out line that gets tossed when people cannot think of anything else to say. Training can always "be better" and combined arms "better coordinated", this applies to any military on the planet and you are going to see it in AARs almost universally. Problem is that it is essentially meaningless. So what is the training standard that will guarantee UA success in their current situation? "Well more until they succeed..." I also suspect it misses the new realities that the UA (and RA) are facing, instead clinging to a superior way of western war that has never been tested in the environment these two forces find themselves within. These narratives completely miss the trees because all they can see is forest.

Very solid point. In the biz we call it “culmination” and the UA is not even close yet. It would be premature to start thinking about a sideways exit until the UA offensive has fully developed. If they achieve their operational objectives, double down and keep going to next phase. If it fails…well then the harder conversations will happen.

So sure NATO could play politics or lawyer with article 5 - "well technically, and so forth". At which point how fast do you think NATO will evaporate? "Oh welcome to NATO Ukraine but we are not really going to do anything about a NATO nation being hammered by an adversary illegally...oh look Russia is firing missiles at Latvia...well technically". Deterrence only works if one can clearly demonstrate that you intend to follow through with either punishment or denial. So "yes" basically if you illegally attack a member "we all declare war and march against you". That or NATO stands for nothing really and then it all falls apart. This reality is likely why we are avoiding an Article 5 about as hard as Russia is at any given moment. They do not want it coming back at them as in their current state we are talking very rapid escalation, possibly out of control. And we don't want it because it might fail and the Emperor's doodle is out.

So this is the rub. By saying "Ukraine, no NATO until war is over", we have basically incentivized Russia to drag this war out for as long as possible to achieve on of their key strategic aims - halt NATO encroachment into their Near Abroad. Of course we are in a dilemma in that if we took Ukraine in now, and they immediately declared an Article 5, we either go to war or the whole freakin scheme falls apart. So political leadership did what they always do...risk managed, push to the left and choose bad over worse. Ukraine could absolutely cut the occupied territories loose and we all redraw the lines of recognized "Ukraine" - they are lines on a map. Further they could dump the occupied territories on the international community and say "Ok UN, now they are your problem to negotiate with Russia." As has been mentioned more than once, there are not likely many actual Ukrainians in some of these areas and a whole lot of people who do not see themselves as Ukrainians which is a potential post-war issue. The biggest reason to not push any of these buttons yet (and yes, this would be a form of diplomatic escalation that we do indeed control) is that we are not sure who is actually in charge in Russia right now. So trying to assess agendas and calculus is extremely hard. Maybe those behind the curtain actually know what is going on but sitting in the cheap seats it is become just bizarre.

So I think we mentioned before that this sort of thing is an indication of stress and strain on the RA military system. The question remains “how far and deep” does this go? Militaries are funny things, big collective organisms. And like any complex collective organism failures can be isolated or cascade into something bigger. Two thoughts on this: - Militaries are not symmetric. We strive for uniformity but every unit is different, every echelon is different. So we might have units refusing orders for different reasons. The only thing they can agree on is that “this ain’t working”. It is a serious thing to disobey orders, an offence under military law. One can go to jail and in extremis face capital punishment. So for this phenomenon to be seen widespread is a clear sign that something is not going well with the RA at a genetic level. Further, the thing about systems is that they are also interdependent. So we could have an entire battalion that is still raring to win the war but if the supply/transport company says “no way” the thing still falls apart. So what we are not seeing are the cracks and fissures between RA sub-systems which erode trust and overall effectiveness. At it worse entire militaries will simply mutiny but I am not sure we are there yet. - Corporate learning turns into corporate culture. Some very good lessons on this from Vietnam. Basically old timers teach how to “dodge and avoid to survive” to newcomers, who then pass on when they become the old timers. This sort of corporate culturalization is incredibly hard to root out as it tends to take root within informal leadership systems which do not show up on a chain of command diagram. I suspect that after over a year and half of desperate and high loss warfare the RA has adopted aspect of a survival culture and this is an example of it. One can fire generals all day once this ting sets in but it won’t make a bit of difference, troops will have elevated shirking and dodging to an art. Usually the only thing to break this sort of thing is a massive win or loss. A massive win tends to change the salinity of the social waters, while massive losses get everyone killed and you basically start from scratch - one hopes for that first one. If verified, this report is way bigger news than that explody bridge.

(Assuming not a post production effect) Technically no: https://www.advancedplasmasolutions.com/what-is-plasma/#:~:text=Source The core of plasma,its electrical properties and behavior. https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/49/103/49103575.pdf So plasma come in at around 11000 F and an HE explosion (they used datasheet) is around 3100F in the center. This effect appears on the outer edge of the explosion where is cooler. My guess is an incendiary flash following the shockwave. Something got blow up and away with the initial shockwave and then flashed up behind it.

V1 is back baby!!! Can’t keep a good doodlebug down.

1800 guns along an 800km frontage comes to about 225 guns per 100km. Assuming they have them all serviceable and committed to the Ukrainian frontages. I would bet it is maybe half the posted maximum so maybe 110 guns per 100kms. Then there is the ammo and C4ISR. If I recall they had something like 900 guns at Severodonetsk last summer, it was nuts and very near WW1 concentrations. They do not have that now and massed static fires do not work as well on the defence. The point being Russia may have a lot of iron but it takes a lot to make it effective. The question remains as to whether the UA poking and prodding can turn into a major breakthrough?

Then where is it? Ukraine is pecking away and all we hear about are RA artillery shortfalls and tepid responses. I have yet to see a single crushing indirect fire response from the RA side yet. I can understand the UA keeping a lid on these sorts of things but the Russians are feeding every success story they can into the info-verse, they would not be shy about crowing on major c-fires successes...yet we do not see them. Something in the RS fires system is off.

So I made up the whole love story thing but it is starting to make more and more sense. I mean what the hell else does Prig have on Putin? The guy blew aircraft out of the air and marched on Moscow. Who is on whose leash?! That or maybe Prig has a sudden heart attack soon but he would have to be phenomenally dumb not to see it coming. Seriously who is running Russia right now?

Oh I think there are several dozen trillion reasons why this war is about the West: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-94-trillion-world-economy-in-one-chart/ I do not believe for an instant that the West was outside the Russian calculus for this war. Russia did not need Ukraine to survive - politically or economically. Putin’s regime has been shown to be robust so I doubt it was teetering in Feb 22. So why then did Russia decide to invade Ukraine in the first place? A whim? There were definitely internal reasons but it would be very shortsighted not to see this entire war as a statement against Western world order - hell, Putin said so last Sep…it is not like it is a secret. This is not about being all about the West, it is about great power competition. Again if Ukraine were Uzbekistan we would not even be having this conversation. And frankly before this war most people in the West could not find Ukraine on a map, let alone really care deeply about Ukrainian independence or democracy - we do not fight wars because they are righteous, we fight them because they are in our interests. And right now Ukrainians are fighting and dying for Western interests. The second that our interest divide western support will dry up overnight. And frankly none of this is the failure point. The failure will be losing interest after the war is over: “oh the NGOs are handling it”. We can dump boatloads of weapons onto Ukraine but it won’t mean a thing if they do not have an economy after this is over.

I actually suspect it was for one of them: Russia. Russia’s reasons for starting this war are opaque but we do know they did not need any of Ukraine’s resources, the line of conspiracies (bio labs, or whatever John Kettler was going on about may he rest in peace) has dried up and if it was to shore up the Putin regime this is one helluva way to go about that. I suspect this war had a large portion attributable to Russian need to push back on the West and western “encroachment”. Along with basically declaring the global system of order no longer valid because if you are a revisionist state…you revise. So for one party the root interest for this war does kinda seem to be centred on the West, Ukraine got caught in the middle in a lot of ways. All war is communication and in many ways Ukraine was (and is) the medium, not the message itself.

It can (and is both), most proxy wars are, at least the defensive ones. Ukraine definitely represents Western interests in this war, which also overlap with their own self defence. See all the wars where those overlaps did not happen and exactly what we did about it. If Russia suddenly did not matter to us or Ukraine kicking their butts on our behalf did not matter, watch how fast support would dry up on what would be viewed as a "border skirmish in Eastern Europe".

Well that and the Chinese invasion of Vietnam was in 1979...I mean seriously who in the US was going to support Vietnam against China back in 1979? This entire war was viewed through the Cold War lens (a very different world order) and was basically "commies killing commies...fine." Ukraine is a European nation bordering on a NATO nations. I strongly suspect if Russia invaded Uzbekistan we likely would not have raised more than the usual fuss and stern looks. However Ukraine is in our sphere and as such was a direct affront to the "system" - tell me Putin was not thinking exactly this when the bright idea fairy landed. If Ukraine had folded up, I strongly suspect we would be supporting one helluva insurgency right now a la Afghanistan 1980s. Same reasons, longer road. There is no such thing as a "humane war" or war for "humane reasons', we learned that one the hard way in the 90s during our Savage Wars of Peace days. Political, strategic or cultural interests always get in the way.

This would be the part about how this war is about a lot more than Ukraine trying to defend itself. To be entirely brutal (yet accurate), this was became a major opportunity after about Apr 23. An opportunity to knock Russia back in line with the international community and a global status quo that has endured for about 30+ years. Russia was dumb enough and ill-prepared enough so the West scrambled for the chance at a nasty proxy war that 1) would not lead directly to NATO being pulled in/WW3, 2) could be contained to Ukraine and not blow up and out from there, 3) shore up NATO in both membership and funding, 4) result in regime change in Russia that we could do business with but not risk security everywhere, and 5) did not turn Russia into a complete freefall. Not a great or easy opportunity but there it is. The other option was to simply let it happen but that was simply letting things slide too far. This is why we are doubling down on Ukraine - intersection strategic interests. Not because we like them so much, or really care about their suffering. There are lists of nations who were (and are) burning right now that we averted eyes and changed the channel. There are conflicts that we stayed out of that were worse than Ukraine but that happened on the periphery. Russia in Ukraine is right smack dab in the wheelhouse of challenging how we thought the world works. We thought that nation states negotiating with war was over. Intra-state and non-state, sure and nasty business "over there". To have an international great power go "nope, we like the way of the gun and there is nothing you can do about it" risks the entire scheme. So, no, we are not sending billions in military support or opening up our entire ISR architecture to Ukraine because it is the right thing to do in defending "the little guy". Politicians are going to spin it that way because people buy it. But this is harsh calculus time - we defend the scheme or risk it failing entirely. Ukraine was the opportunity of a generation to have a war with Russia without really having a war. Don't believe me, if Azerbaijan invades Armenia again does anyone think they are going to see this sort of heat and light? Why? Because the rules based order can tolerate small side powers scrapping away, but one of the big boys...nope.

Steady as she goes gentlemen.