The_Capt

So at the beginning of this we talked a lot about Macro masking - how high level analysis missed the growing bow wave of counter-factual little details as the war unfolded. This led to wrong conclusions and deductions that took some analysts months to get over. The meme social media phenomenon were are seeing now is going the other way - Micro masking aka confirmation bias. Every streamed engagement is confirmation of what we want to happen, not what is actually happening. Here I tend to focus on results and broader trends with a healthy dose of context. We are maybe just getting into the UA offensive and the actual operational effects are unclear. We will know once they are because we will start seeing them on the ground and broader battle spaces. Until then propaganda amplification is going to happen on both sides. This would be why I do not really observe the progress of this war other than here and ISW. The noise leaks through the walls here too but we do try and maintain a semblance of sanity. We definitely want Ukraine to succeed but if we are seeing these same actions in three months with no real progress, we are going to have to admit the UA is spent and this war is going to take a different trajectory to conclusion. No amount of meming is going to change the facts. If we see major success and signs of RA collapse then we will know the other way. We spent a lot of time crystal balling, now is time to simply try and figure out what is actually happening.

There have been a number where AirPower was left out as a factor either by absence, parity or denial - Iran/Iraq War, Former Yugoslavia Civil War, Fall of Afghanistan/Kabul 2021, off the top of the head. Why it was left out varies, example: https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/AUPress/Books/B_0025_BERGQUIST_AIRPOWER_IRANIRAQ.pdf We tend to think of airpower as sacrosanct but in reality it is not. What is weird about this war is that we have both Denial of the conventional manned platforms, and Parity in the low altitude unmanned systems. This has led to a condition where airpower is highly active; however it is not deterministic of outcomes in the land battle. At least not yet.

Well to follow up you got one right there - listen to the doc. A human brain is a machine that runs on electricity and chemicals. Combat will mess up both of those, sometimes permanently. Get the head checked during (if one can on trips off the line) and definitely after. This is not weakness anymore than someone who get their legs shot off is “too weak in using a prosthetic”. Treatments vary, use them. The aim is to win the war and then become a functioning member of society when it is over…need to work on that last part as hard as one did the first part.

So recall the UA Fall offensive took about 3 months to shape, form up and culminate. Early days in what is likely going to be an operation that will last all summer. These guys are operating in a different war…things will likely go slow until they go fast. Unless the RA is so rotted that they shatter early but we will see. This whole thing right now looks like probing and prodding to be honest. This is not to see the enemy - the UA can do that already - it is to see what the enemy can and will do as a reaction. My guess is that we have moved into a more active shaping phase, the main assaults have yet to come.

Good lord that is a tough one. So are we talking leadership training? Sounds like it. Battlefield leadership and resilience is a big freakin topic. If I had 15 mins before jumping off the truck and running into it: - Don’t get pulled too far in. Combat is pretty wild and it is easy to get pulled too far into a single crisis. The reality is that is all crisis. A tactical line leader needs to keep one step back and try and see the system of crisis as it unfolds. If the leader is pulled in too far they lose the picture they need to sustain in order to give their people the best chances and to keep the pointed at the enemy. - Don’t get pulled too far back. Fear and shock is normal but once the initial contact is made leaders cannot suck too far back. You do that and the troops feel abandoned and you start to lose the ability to get a feel of how the whole machine is holding together. - Combat is a longer game than people think. Once the initial actions and shooting start, the drama starts to normalize. Leaders need to stay on top of that. Normalize can mean troops get sloppy…they got into combat and did not die…so now what? Also the need to watch out for sustainment. Modern western troops were set up for about 20 mins of sustained combat before air or indirect firepower came to the rescue. The UA guys do not have this, so they might have to settle in and make their ammo last - so back to basics like fire discipline and marksmanship (yep they still matter). - On Basics - build them in as priority and stick to them. Once the lead starts flying and people start screaming everything else strips away. You are left with relationships and trust you built up to that point (ie each other) and the basic skills you have beaten into their brains. Something as simple as IAs and stoppages and simply keeping you weapon in operation can be really hard under fire unless it is beaten into muscle memory. Have the troops practice the most mundane things, hundreds of times. - Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Be deliberate and as calm as you can be at all times. Calm like panic is contagious. If the leader is not freaking out, the troops likely won’t either. Be deliberate, take the few extra seconds to pull order together. Get past scared, get past mad and get cold. You should literally feel cold inside - once you get there it gets a lot easier. People become systems. The enemy is a metric. Really hard to describe this space but you have a mission and everything else, including you are simply means to that end, or a obstacle to remove. - Build trust and use it. As a ground force leader your weapon is the unit. It is only as good as you kept it before the shooting started. In combat let it do its job and try hard to stay out of people’s way. There is an art to knowing when to step in and when not too. - Leadership is nothing like the movies or even the BS fed in basic. It starts with whipping the troops in training while driving them in front of you, then it shifts to walking with them under fire - lean on each other. In the back end you will be out in front pulling, sometimes begging and pleading to get them across the finish line. Again quiet calm is the norm. Then when you do yell or swear everyone really pays attention because it is so much out of character. - Establish depth and redundancy…everywhere. Everyone has a 2 IC, 3 IC and then last man standing. I cannot describe how fast the famous “chain of command” can fall apart. So build it deep. Also leave room for informal leaders, they will emerge. - Don’t be a hero, your people do not need one. Some guys go in looking for that hero moment but that often only gets people killed. A hero gets in and gets the job done while keeping as many of his people alive as he can. Take opportunities if the come but don’t lean too far forward at the expense of peoples lives. - Little things matter so much. A joke, a quiet word a little luxury and a small sacrifice. For some troops when they get ragged these little things make all the difference and can sustain them. - Finally, and this is the hardest one, do not forget that you and your people are ammunition. Your job is to spend them on problems. Worse, your job is to convince them that it is worth it. Once the war is over you are going to be living with this fact for the rest of you life. You only get to put that one down at the end. You will spend those years writing reference letters for jobs they are applying for, checking in on the survivors and people left behind, and re-living every decision you made. Just accept that and move on but never forget the weight of this thing, that is your end. Beyond that, resilience is a lot about understanding what is happening to you. If you can name it, you take its power away. You need to be really self aware and do self checks, Cannot stress the importance of the lead NCO and officer team in this. You and your troop or company NCO need to really be able to gauge where each other are at as a check and balance system. And none of it makes sense. You might get into three firefights and are fine, then once fourth you freeze up. Why you froze up could be anything in the human soup. You need to understand it is happening and hand off as quickly as possible. Then get over it because it may never happen again. If it happens a lot or all the time - you are not a coward, you are simply too evolved for this business. Time to get pulled off the line and go do an important job somewhere else. Perhaps you are a brilliant staff officer or analyst that can save hundreds of lives. Everyone will break eventually (well anyone who is not a complete psychopath) it is a matter of when, not if…even you.

Again?! I mean how did Operation Canuck Freedom go last time? https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/war-of-1812 Of course the old adage “History is written by the losers who only remember New Orleans, and left unchallenged by the winners who are too polite to bring it up and still feel bad about burning the White House” applies here.

Just to pile on and follow up. I can see no real reason why the UA would do this as an inside job to be honest. I mean technically it might drive RA back a bit from flooding but we are talking a few hundred meters, it does not threaten RA supply lines and manoeuvre beyond the strip of the flood zone. Beyond ravaging their own country, the flooding will make their own ops there more difficult in the short term. A UA defensive angle makes no sense as the RA has shown no capability or intent on offensive ops back over the river. So we are down to weird “spoofing” scenarios to try and convince the RA they are safe to pull forces from that sector. These are stretching things a lot. Given the post war reconstruction cost, I am pretty sure there are better options to pull RA out of that sector, you know, like supporting Russian insurgents on the other side of the front?

Dave, brilliant nuclear analysis (I do not even want to know what your hourly is) as always, but you are talking to a ghost. Of course he can still read it from the side…wow, I think you might be the first nuclear medium in history.

I have been pulled away and will be for the next couple weeks but if anyone can take a hard look at these videos (and there will be more), keep an eye out, and look closely for RA indirect and direct fires. From what I can see, this minefield was not being covered by RA fires (but I could be wrong, there could be ATGM and PGM). Minefields not effectively covered by fire are actually good news on the larger picture because it means the defender does not have enough troop density to do it, and cannot react fast enough for counter actions. Again, it is not just about what is there, it is also about what is not there but should be.

This one is really weird. Making a water obstacle harder cuts both ways, now the UA can also also thin out in this sector because the RA is also not going to be able to threaten it. As to IDPs, I am wondering how many people were living close to this river to start with as it is essentially a front line? I am sure there are some but have we seen mass columns of refugees? Finally, without data on how fast that river is moving it is hard to say just how much harder this stunt made a river crossing operation. The width of the obstacle just went up and one is seeing more debris but this was likely a ferry crossing operation to begin with - the RA withdrawal but now the UA attacking. Blowing the dam made defending the RA bank a lot harder as well. Any minefields they laid on the bank approaches are likely well buried under water and silt, so now ineffective. Positions would have been moved back (an easy way to see who did this, just track who moved OPs before the explosion - if no one did, it was likely unplanned). And by blowing the dam you are also redrawing the river in very unpredictable ways. One could wind up making new viable landing sites. One thing is certain, the RA was worried about UA action across that river if this was deliberate, and they probably should still be.

Ok, so this is really starting to look like a strategic shaping op. The Russians are clearly rattled. Guess we are calling BS on the whole nuclear threshold line.

Was wondering why everyone is talking about UW all of a sudden.

This is 2023, if the RA bagged that much UA hardware there would be video of it all over the internet. It is pretty clear the RA has not established fully effective ISR as they are seeing “the offensive” all over the place right now. More likely these are UA probes designed to keep them guessing where the main effort will fall - Interestingly all quiet at Kherson/Dnipro sector.

Well the fact is that the 13 year old kid is the battle hardened veteran in this scenario. There is a line stretching back eons of human civilization of old men saying exactly what you are here - “Back in my day we smashed each others heads in with rocks. Now these kids are throwing pointy sticks!? Oh humanity!” Insert muskets, machine guns, artillery, aircraft, ATGMs and now UAS, same thing. Best advice from history is “get over it, fast.” Warfare does not care about philosophy, it only cares about victory or defeat. Ukraine can figure out what to do about its individual qualities once they establish that they are able to survive.

Ok, now I am stealing a quote.

I have a weird sense about that western axis. Most are writing it off because of the river crossing requirement but there are a lot of pluses for doing the big shove here - Russian force strength are weakest in this area because they also think the river will make it too hard - Right flank is the Black Sea as opposed to double flanks just about everywhere else. - Bottle up the RA in Crimea and then push left towards Melitopol makes a lot of sense. - several MSR options that could support at least 3 axis of advance If the UA could get across that river in several locations and sustain it, they could crash in on that front, and then do a push down from the north in the center simultaneously it would likely paralyze the RA.

Wasn’t a stronger and more photogenic Chamberlain, Churchill?

On the drone strikes in Russia: - far too soon for direct attribution back to Ukraine. Even if those drones were Ukrainian made that does not mean they were targeted and executed by the UA. Ukrainian government appears to have denied and Russia has failed to attribute sponsorship or direct operation. - these strikes could just as easily be Ukrainian sponsored but carried out by Russia resistance/insurgents - this scenario is far more disruptive and undeciding for the Russian government than a direct UA attack. - these attacks could also be Russian government sponsored and carried out with captured or re manufactured Ukrainian systems. Given the light damage and lack of any real noted casualties, this could easily be a scare tactic by Putin on his own people to drive support narrative his way. Right now there has been no conclusive evidence either way. - if this was a UA directed and executed strike well it was both impressive and not. We are either looking at a behind the lines op with a lot of moving parts or a 500-600 deep strike. It is not impressive in that it was imprecise and hit no serious targets beyond breaking some windows and rattling shingles in a “rich neighbourhood”. This is what lend me to think it was third party or inside job. Ukraine has demonstrated significant precision in its deep strikes - Kerch Bridge, airfields in Crimea, and those ships on the Azov in port. So to suddenly be “blind lobbing” into Moscow is off trend. - As to the legitimacy of the targets, well what were the actual targets? We do not know. Those drones could have been aimed at a number of military targets but Russian EW drove them into those neighborhoods. Those “rich people” could be leadership in the Russian government or military which would make them legit and any civilians as acceptable collateral - and here it gets into a whole lot of targeteering and legality issues. - Effects. Well a lot of them and more than a little muddled. Ukrainian moral will be buoyed as they are finally hitting back so there is a symbolism there. Russians will be scared as their war comes home to roost; however, this is hardly “shock and awe”. This will likely drive a lot of support Putin’s way to protect his people and do whatever it takes. It will also likely provide fodder for anti-Putin sentiment as he did not protect them and drove Russia into this mess. The targeting of “rich neighborhoods” is interesting as it sends a message of class divides - this is more likely sign of insurgency, an inside Russian false flag job would have targeted common folk. In the West we will raise an eyebrow and scratch our heads a bit. I mean we start seeing dead Russian children and there will likely be a backlash (two wrongs not making right in many books) but this was not that. Ukraine does need to tread carefully here (and has), no point conducting operations that enhance anti-war support in the West. Militarily it could pull more AD assets back into Russia proper and away from the main theatre, so in that way it could be shaping. So overall a bit of a mishmash really. All negative decision pressure but some could work for Putin and gang, while others do not. Gotta be honest, to my eyes this looks a lot like third party backfield pot stirring - central question remains “by whom?” Effective attribution is three layers deep: What happened? Who did it? (an entire chain there from operator to sponsor). Why did they do it? Right now as far as I can see we do not even have the first one covered fully.

You are welcome. And for those that want to really get into the deep end: https://www.iwp.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/The-Strategy-of-Subversion-Manipulating-the-Politics-of-Other-Nations-by-Paul-W-Blackstock.pdf Really is a lost art in the West, and one we will likely need to re-learn

Kind of a Capt Special but I borrowed heavily from “US political warfare doctrine” started by Keenan (just type that in and you will get lots). For the Russian angle I would start with Russian Hybrid Warfare by Ofir Fridman. The steps are my own framework which is a simplification of some far more complex ones.

We are definitely in Step 1 and likely Step 2 - part of exploiting fractures is to increase influence and pre-position as a result of those exploits. The fact that we are divided politically on what to do about it is not a good sign. One has to keep in mind that an opponent does not need to do all 5 steps. They can simply rattle in steps 2 and 3 indefinitely and render a target nation pretty paralyzed and ineffectual which is often enough for strategic ends.

Honestly my guess, and I stress guess is that Grey Zone/Subversive warfare can have a counter-effect in the people space if done too fast or clumsily. If people think they are being actively subverted or manipulated then it can essentially change the salinity of the water. Suddenly everything that happens is attributed to the Russians. They run out of manoeuvre room because they have already burned too much of the conative forest, too fast. I am sure Russia had bushels of self-interested collaborators, plenty examples of this; however, that does not translate into dislocation of micro-social networks at scale. The people on a micro-social level decided "no". Russia did not set the conditions to ensure that answer was a "maybe", if they had they may have pulled this thing off. They did not have enough of the Ukrainian military in pockets, or critical infrastructure or government institutions. They look like they made a lot of assumptions that did not translate. Crimea and Donbas salted the water to the point that Russia became vilified and subversion does not work well when you have united a people in their hate and mistrust of you.

Surprised there was any doubt at all: https://www.duvarenglish.com/turkey-ranks-103rd-among-167-countries-in-global-democracy-index-news-61772 Of course it does not matter who was right or wrong - this is not grade school. What matters are the geopolitical implications both within Turkey and outside as a result of this outcome.

So Ukraine deep strike capability maybe not so much neutralized?

So if one looks at Subversive/Political Warfare Doctrine to my eyes Russia was attempting a Step 4 - Create Puppets. This can be done covertly or overtly, they went for overt. Normally one has already done Steps 1-3 (Mapping, Exploit Fractures, Build Cancers) to a point where you have already gotten your own people in the right places and hijacked the central nervous system of the society. Step 4 can happen as a sponsored coup a la Crimea/Donbas or something a little more aggressive but the key component is a rapid fall of existing macro social structures that you have eroded to dysfunctional and replacement with your own, which are often just waiting to step in. So to my eyes this is less about “Grey Zoning It” and more about moving forward in a Grey Zone strategy well before you have set the conditions. Russia did almost zero shaping internationally as far as we can tell. We had months of “we are only on exercise” which we even saw here when the pro-Russian crowd weighed in. But no real mechanisms that would sow seeds of western doubt beyond some clumsy attempts. Clearly whatever they had ready in the wings was nowhere near ready to backstop the move. The Ukrainian military was clearly not on board and neither was the people space in Ukraine itself. So if one tries for Step 4 before establishing conditions you get exactly this: Grey Zone gone Dark Zone, because you have not fundamentally undecided the issues both outside and inside Ukraine enough. Your opponents are not under effective Reflexive Control. While at the same time you are not set up for Dark Zone open warfare. From a professional point of view this was sloppy as hell and a sign of serious disconnects within the halls of power in Russia - a fact that has been borne out by prosecution of this war itself. Russia was basically running into the night without a flashlight at that point. So high on their own supply that progressive unreality set in and all sorts of assumptions became hard facts in the calculus…right up to the point reality came out of the dark and bit their noses off.