The_Capt

Infrastructure is like any other system. Hit a single node and the system can surge to repair it quickly. Hit more nodes and the system takes longer to repair. Hit enough nodes and the system starts to fail. The ability to repair transport infrastructure relies on transportation infrastructure. Hit it hard enough and repair capability has to “literally” repair its own way into the system. There comes a point when the system fails completely. The question is, “what does it take to push the system to failure?”

Debunked by who? The decisive press of infantry attack was central to European military thinking in lead up and in the opening of WW1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_offensive#:~:text=The cult of the offensive,and therefore choose to attack. Now do not take wikis word for it, note the refs. Azar Gat is one of the leading historians on military theory evolution over the last 200 years. I have his works and we use them as textbooks at war colleges. Snyder and Taylor are now slouches either. Your example of a single RUSI article actually supports my (and their point), militaries do not waste ink on hard doctrinal “knows”. If European observers had seen the character of warfare shifting there would have been all sorts of articles published, because stuff like that gets attention. They were not publishing because everyone already knew what they knew. The same phenomenon can be seen in recent history - we get thousands of articles on cyber but no one has revisited combined arms doctrine since the 90s (recent Ukraine war generated thought excepted). I suspect that militaries were all hoping that rapid offensives would prevent an opponent from being able to dig in and establish hard defensive positions - so double down on offensive…because that was all they were built for. If they knew trench warfare was coming, then why did innovations like flamethrowers, creeping artillery and tunnelling/cratering take time to develop? Why were they not ready on Day 1? I am not sure where this WW1 revisionist history is coming from but “observed well beforehand” and “1500 dead per day” - on a normal day, does not compute. If someone can point to actual historical research that back this up I would really like to see it. I suspect that the senior leadership suspected that something was up, hard to miss really, but the preparations and planning do not match hard doctrinal conclusions. “We saw it coming but had no ideas. So we sent them over the top anyway.” actually makes things worse, not better.

To avoid “two guys talking on a forum” we should start with some references to frame things a bit: https://web.stanford.edu/class/polisci211z/2.1/Glaser %26 Kaufmann IS 1988.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/group/fearon-research/cgi-bin/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/The-Offense-Defense-Balance-and-War-Since-1648.pdf As can be seen this is a pretty deep topic - and a controversial one - that cannot be framed by battlefield tactics alone. For the Civil War, I recommended this: https://www.amazon.ca/American-Civil-Origins-Modern-Warfare/dp/0253207150 As you note these are more themes of strategies of exhaustion vs annihilation and which one plays out better in a given time in history. Regarding the US Civil War and as to whether it signalled that a shift was afoot. I think it is clear that the North and South we both trapped between the classic Euro-centric doctrines that had been taught to entire generations of generals on both sides and the realities of 1) The scope and scale of the war - e.g. Gettysburg had 2.5 times more troops engaged than Waterloo, 2) the size and type of terrain being fought over, and 3) The introduction of industrialization and technology onto the battlefield. Both sides struggled with a massive mobilization challenge while also trying to build the systemic backbones of then-modern militaries. What we becoming very apparent to the generals fighting the war - and was preached and developed before the war by Denis Mahan, an influential professor at West Point - was that war in American, in that time was different than the Napoleonic wars from 50 years before. The driving military theory, as reflected by theorist such as Jomini and Clausewitz was concentration, offensive action and decisive engagement. These ideas created a cultural mindset - something tactical analyses miss. A cultural mindset that once embedded is incredibly hard to break out of. Militaries will keep doing things well past the point they make sense as a result of this phenomenon - the history of which is well recorded going well back before the time periods we are discussing. One could argue that failure to adapt has lost more wars than any other factor, far exceeded “adapting ahead of reality”, which does happen but I argue nowhere near as often. So back to “Was the writing on the wall?” I argue “yes”. Your examples of “close order massacres” were also seen in the battles of the US Civil War. The evidence that lethality and range of firepower was changing the requirements to mass effects was there, yet militaries of the day clung onto “the press of the bayonets” as a central doctrinal concept. Even though in the Age of Rifles this was already an antiquated idea. Defensive and Offensive primacy are really about relative costs as much as they are about culture. The cost of mass on the Offensive vs the cost of equal mass on the Defensive. “Cost” is a significant concept that goes from institutional to operational - in the end we dumb it down to ratios. So to oversimplify, Offensive primacy appears to occur when cost/benefit projection of effective manoeuvring mass outweighs static mass. And Defensive vice versa. I for one cannot see how one can view the key battles of the US Civil War and not see the trend of projected manoeuvre mass failing. The war started with Lee’s operational offensive approach dominating the Eastern Theatre. As the War progressed it became more clear that rapid projection of mass was not working. In fact the costs were outstripping the South’s ability to force generate replacements. The North adopted the slow grinding war of exhaustion - it first great victory was a defensive one at Gettysburg. Even as Grant took over the war took one a grinding attritional nature to it. Of course Defensive primacy does not mean “defend only”. It does mean that offensive strategies are going to be different. They tend to be grinding and attritional as opposed to decisive - we can see symptoms of this all through 1864 to the wars end. I disagree that the Franco Prussian War was a counter-example of offensive action. The war began with rapid force projection, seeking decisive battle (which the Prussians found at Sedan), but ended in long sieges - Paris the notable one. In many ways the Franco Prussian War was a WW1 teaser - opening with rapid force projection and manoeuvre which gets bogged down in sieges as the modern realities of capacity, organization, communication and firepower set in. As to WW1, I think the latest wave of revisionist history is too kind by a half. But to be fair, and to your point, the generals on all sides were not stupid, they simply did not have other viable options. They were trapped in a reality no one was prepared for - Defensive dominance. No force ratios were enough to breakthrough. Even if they could, they could not move fast enough to exploit compared to the rail lines and their opponents ability to mass defences. This was all a culmination of a trend going back to the US Civil War - effective manoeuvring mass was rendered inert. Grinding exhaustion was the only card left in the deck. First it worked on the Eastern Front, then the Western. Manoeuvre was not dead, it was still being applied in farther flung theatres but as soon as mass was created, it would bog down in places like Gallipoli. I will only pull on this one quote (I hate quote by quote debates). It is the fact that they still had a pseudo-Napoleonic system, after US Civl War, after Franco-Prussian, after the Boer War, after two Balkan Wars, after a Russo Japanese War that is the issue. Why they still had that “pseudo-Napoleonic system” after all of those data points is not excusable in my opinion, but it is explainable - military cultural mindsets. They invented “modern warfare” in four years because they had largely ignored, or saw only what they wanted to for previous 50. And we stand here once more. Evidence is starting to pile up that war is shifting again. We will likely cling to Manoeuvre Warfare and Mission Command as tightly as pre-WW1 clung to bayonets and the cult of the offensive. Despite the evidence we are seeing suggesting warfare is evolving in other directions. Manoeuvre is becoming Corrosive, Mission is becoming Hybrid, whether or not western militaries are able to evolve at pace remains to be seen.

Been wondering the same thing myself. I am guessing it is a bit of a recency effect in the face of some high profile videos of UA losses. How is Russia learning exactly? Laying a bunch of minefields and lackluster covering by fires is not "learning". Pulling UA into cul de sacs and killing in detail with c-moves and dialed in fires would be "learning". Integrated massed airpower would be "learning". An on-wheels logistical system as opposed to exploding dumps is "learning". Something that resembles a coherent operational/strategic missile campaign vice lobbing at apartment buildings is "learning". The RA has not really evolved at all in this war as far as we can see - in fact it devolved. It EW game has reportedly been upped but still a lot of UA assets in the air and no reports of widespread UA comms. Strategy wise this is the same one they fell into last summer - dumb mass either pushing very slowly or trying to hold on while the back end that supports that mass gets mauled.

Good lord I have seen some weird stuff in warfare but this one is new. That shockwave may have killed the RPG team depending how close they were. Wouldn’t have even thought the interior of a T55 had enough room for 6t of explosives.

Did said retired SEAL 03/screenwriter ever attend a war college? Did he serve in a JTF HQ in a conventional peer war? Does he have a PHD in defence sciences? Military history? Did he ever serve in a J2 shop? This is the problem with people throwing quals around online…most people reading those quals have no context for them. Right now the only people in the west with insider knowledge of this war cannot talk about it (but gawd I hope they are writing stuff down). Online one need only go “Insert SF quals” and suddenly they are a credible source followed by thousands. And then there are the qualified people who are full of it. Col Macgregor is very highly qualified - the guy is a SAMS grad no less - and he has been repeatedly shown as completely wrong so many times I do not think anyone is counting anymore. My point being is that it does not matter one whit if this guy is who he says he is, because that “is” does not make him able to provide credible assessment and analysis. Now maybe he got that map from someone else (no refs and citations tell me he never went to war college) but as a credible source I am pretty doubtful and it would matter if he was the guy that shot OBL in the head. The people who can make more accurate assessments are in boring jobs and have resumes that will never be turned into a screenplay. Take a look at Perun, the guy is not always 100% but he has never really gone into his background - my bet is defence scientist or institutional policy type. But his stuff is generally solid. It is likely built on years of boring office jobs in defence acquisition or force development, not “Delta Ranger Seal”!

FFS how many of these guys have come out of the woodwork in the last 18 months? 1) his claimed experience is impossible to verify because - classified. 2) what in the hell does a Seal Team Six NCO know about high intensity peer-conventional conflict(?), and 3) if he was what he says he was, and is still hooked into western intel...he should know better than posting updates based on that, on freakin Twitter. Claiming SF gets a lot of views but it that experience has little to do with the actual war unless they have served forward in Ukraine...and they cannot talk about it if they have. I have watched a lot of guys with SF patches pretending thy know what they are talking about...and they do not. Even the trail of former Generals are often off the mark because this war is so far outside the experience of any western military since Korea. At this point all we can do is make best guesses by applying basic military assessments. I have seen so much weird in this war that I feel completely lost at times.

The offset to low troop density on the defence is ISR superiority, long range fires integration and C2 enabled rapid counter-moves...you can see why I am really not worried about the RA "Putin Line" so much. The one advantage the RA had, they pissed away on this winter offensive...dumb mass.

That is ridiculous. They are the point they need to bubble wrap a tank and build a barn roof on top of it.

Hard to tell for that video - may be Nepalese (or another Asian country for that matter). Definitely not Gurkhas, they would not need “training in Belarus” as they are already among the best soldiers on the planet. Gurkhas would more likely be training other troops.

That is pretty much a description of corrosive warfare. Add to it “continually hit support and enabler nodes as they appear” and they are setting up to create the conditions whereby the RA operational system buckles under its own weight…again. Question is where? The difference this time is that it looks like the UA has built enough combat power to better exploit an RA collapse.

I so want the UA to do an assault water x-ing op south of Kherson. There are a lot of pluses to this op - bold and dramatic for international audience not being the least of them. However, it is the pre-conditions that remain the rub. The UA would need local air superiority, or at least total denial - including UAS, which is really hard. They would need to effectively silence the guns on the RA side. And then there are c-moves which is a campaign of deep strike. Finally the ISR problem, they would need to make that sector basically “go dark” for RA ISR. If they could pull it off it would be epic and likely collapse the entire Kherson front and maybe even roll up the RA in the centre. But it is a very tall ask, maybe outside the envelope of the UA…but a boy can dream.

The Storm Shadow is specifically designed to take out stuff like bridges, unlike a truck. The system is going to come in horizontally and likely strike perks, which weakens the entire structure. It ability to penetrate and then blast is really bad for load bearing concrete structures. The weight of the structure under these circumstances just makes it worse. So I would not worry about that bridge too much and the RA should not count on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BROACH_warhead

I tell my students exactly this - what has really changed and what is an anomaly? That is the key question of this war. I definitely have seen the power of diverse collective analysis on this forum. In many ways the analysis here has been ahead of the professional military one, even though we have access to less information (but probably not as “less” as people think).

Gotta disagree, but not vehemently. There is plenty of evidence of failure to translate the evidence of shifts in the wars prior to WW1 to actual changes in doctrine and structures that were not simply “missing details”. For example the Austrian Calvary on the eastern front rode out in 1914 in parade dress complete with shiny breastplates. The key lesson that was not taken aboard was the fact that warfare had shifted towards defensive primacy. The evidence was hinted at in places like Gettysburg and more loudly at Petersburg. They definitely should have gotten the memo by the Franco-Prussian War - the US commanders expressed the same reticence to digging in as a “morale issue and hindrance to the offence” in 1863, and had the massacres to prove it. Further in places like Culps Hill where Union troops dug in, it was bloody obvious that this had a significant impact on force ratio calcs in favour of the defence on Day 2 of Gettysburg. Your point on learning the wrong lessons is sound; however it also has to be considered in light of military culture of the day. The militaries of the 19th century were still living under the shadow of 1812, which was a high watermark for formation manoeuvres and firepower all backed by the spirit of the offensive…in fact that was Jomini’s entire point on concentration. Clausewitz gave it some breathing room but neither of the old masters can be considered as Defensive proponents. The militaries of Europe build an entire culture around offensive “press of the bayonet” that set them up to learn the wrong lessons as they unfolded in front of them - and we are not immune to this either. They talked themselves into half-measures and failed to see the shift completely. Your example of close versus extended order is simply rearranging deck chairs in a kill box. It definitely hinted at from the slaughters of Pickets charge that the answer was “no orders of infantry…dig”. Once machine guns and fast firing (and coordinated artillery) came into play what order ones infantry was in was an argument in relative obsolescence. They slaughter millions on the western front learning and re-learning that one. So, sure “wrong lessons and spotty implementation” but why that happened was built on a mountain of European military culture that had a lot of blind spots…and we have the same dynamic today. Our culture creates lenses in seeing only what we want to see. I have been in meeting where army officers are using observations from this war to double down on heavy formations, we are trapped in boxes of our own thinking. I argue WW1 happened because western military culture created conditions for blind spots and learning wrong lessons. As well as stifling any imagination on changing force structure or doctrine - and again, we see that today.

This is the problem of where we were as western militaries; we never thought this sort of war would happen again. We have been fighting dust wars against VEOs and insurgents for nearly 20 years, before that were interventions against opponents that had all the capability and operational art of a tethered goat with learning disabilities. So here we are neck deep into a peer-on-peer proxy war of extremely high intensity sustained combat....who would have thunk it? So defence industry and militaries have a complex relationship. Those on the left would have us believe it is all the corporations "being corporationy", and there is some truth to this but in reality defence industry takes signals from defence itself and invests and develops in these highlighted areas. We highlighted "demining" and AP threats and promptly forgot all about major combat breaching operations because ISIL does not build mine belts km long. So now we are pushing what we have into Ukraine but a lot of it is last gen and sub-optimized because we are sub-optimized for this sort of war. The big question after this war will be where to completely re-tool and where to be more conservative. If history is any indication, we will talk ourselves into "well it is an eastern European anomaly", "Russia Sux" and "We would do it right", so we really do not need to do major overhauls. The European powers did the exact same thing after observing the US Civil War (except it was "America Sux") which led to that little whoopsie we call WWI. Here is hoping we go in other directions.

So what is supposed to happen if the breaching vehicle gets hit is to either abandon the breach completely - this is what it looks like they did in the end. Or dismount any infantry and keep pushing straight down the same breaching lane. One is going to lose vehicles but you can possibly simply bull push through trading vehicles for distance. Do not get me wrong, this is all bad and the abandon option is used far more often. As to unmanned systems, definitely a good idea but as far as I know heavy unmanned breaching systems really don’t exists. What we are seeing in Ukraine is likely the first mechanized breaching operation in contact since the Gulf War (maybe a few other examples in side shows such as FRY but not like this), so a lot of theories are being tested. What I suspect will happen, if it is not happening already, is we will be JDAMS-ing existing veh fleets - unmanning them and putting AI onboard. A modern MBT for example is already driven by buttons and switches inputs, the only real human-dependent function left is the loader and that can (and has) be replaced. So replacing crew with an AI box is a viable solution in the short term while they invent whatever comes next.

So what I am really wondering is if the UA strategy of creating friction and eroding key nodes on the RA operational system can create another operational collapse. This will be key to understanding if Defence has primacy or exists in relative parity with Offence. The UA targeting a key leg on the arty-inf/ATGM-ISR stool is a good step.

Ah, well in typical male-fuelled fashion..cool, let’s watch together and try to figure this thing out as it unfolds as a team.

Ok, trying to sort this out. So we have a bunch of probes and pokes in the run up. The RA revealed themselves too early and as a result got hammered…badly by the sound of it (48 guns ?!). Is this why the RA artillery seems tepid? Being dead does create significant delays in fire support.

Ok, well I get the no echo chamber part but I also should be able to make professionally based observations without being accused of being a blind apologist hooked on “copium”. And then when challenged by very weak counters and counter-challenge, I should not be accused of being a “commissar”. You are of course free to have an uniformed opinion but I am not evil because I point it out. This entire thing is an observation that on a UA mine breaching disaster - no debate on that, and trust me I have forgotten more about mechanized minefield breaching than just about everyone else you may meet - that RA artillery was tepid to the point of being odd for the context. That suddenly turned into a crisis point of blind pro-Ukraine echo chamber building because in your opinion this observation was unmerited. You did not back that up by any hard facts and have even admitted it is too early to tell. Then when the freakin RA commander says through Russian MOD controlled media that his own artillery was very effective, your response is to crow on how that validates your own position. When pressed your response was “why would Russia lie about such a thing?” To which I provided 4 different reasons…and now I am an echo chamber commissar. FFS, you brought the weak arguments to the table and now we are to be punished for pointing that out…how is that not creating another echo chamber of its own? We have been hearing reports of problems with RA indirect fire for months, this could simply be another data point - not a verdict on the entire Russian defence. We will see in due time whether or not corrosive warfare will or will not work again. Not every counter-RA observation is pro-Ukrainian or vice versa. However, if you are going to start beaking off the least you can do is bring some actual facts or coherent observations to the party. Unlike whatever social media, school or your friends/family or whatever told you, your opinion is not worth its weight in gold. We do not respect it simply because you posted it. It need facts, experience or something to support it.

Good lord what an incoherent mess: https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/putin-mixes-threats-of-new-offensive-in-ukraine-with-offers-of-peace-talks-1.6439951

Riiiight. So the Russians do not have a history of lying about things in this war? I mean why would they lie about this..hmmm, let’s see. Well to hide their operational shortfalls and weaknesses would be the first big one. The second would be to over inflate their success for domestic consumption. A third would be self-interest, the RA commander definitely does not want to highlight any issue he may have had in this fight. A fourth could be simply…it is the Russian narrative method - the same folks who brought us hundreds of destroyed Abrams and “those warcrimes were crisis actors”. Look, your point on us not becoming a pro-Ukraine propaganda echo chamber is taken. However, I am not ready to take the RA commanders record of events after it has been pushed through the Russian state media machine as a reliable data point. Particularly when the visual evidence does not support it. An interesting thing about the 10th man principle is that the strength of the devils advocate position is a key consideration - and so far it is fairly weak.

Seriously? So the RA Commander reports that his defence was well orchestrated and supported…and we are just going to roll with that as fact? The Russians were aware a Ukrainian advance was underway. It was possible to cue artillery fire effectively. In Romanchuk’s account: ‘artillery units intended for counter-battery combat suppressed enemy artillery in firing positions. And then they continued to hit the forces and means of the first echelon units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.’ Artillery fire starts landing on the Ukrainian armoured infantry company. The video shows that one unidentified vehicle detonated. Another two started smoking. Source: Russian MOD