The_Capt

Russia already did this from 2014-2022 and the sky did not fall. They are very likely to be complete a@@holes no matter how this thing goes. What I disagree with is the idea that Russia is somehow going to be willing to sustain complete Western isolation and grinding losses for the next century. There is a lot of "Forever Russian Bear" myths floating around and this just feeds into them and gives Russia far too much credit and stamina. It also runs paradoxical to other narratives of "backward Russians who wont do anything so long as they are fed vodka and propaganda", because decades of a slow burning war is a lot of "something". "It's up to the loser to decide when a war ends"...nonsense. Gulf War One, Korea, WW1, all of these were ended when both sides decided to quit, not the "loser". Gulf War, US coalition decided to stop at Iraqi border. Korea, both sides decided to sign the cease-fire. WWI, Allies did not invade into Germany for a full occupation driven victory. The loser decides when to stop resisting and the winner has to decide when to stop winning. The history of warfare is full of examples where the winner went "good enough" and tied the thing off. And plenty where the loser refused to quit and slowly petered out until they wasted away and were unable to continue - like the entirety of indigenous resistance in NA. What Russia doesn't have to do is normalize with the West, this is not the same as negotiation. We will very likely arm the ever living daylights out of Ukraine after this war and invest very heavily in its reconstruction. One thing that has stuck in my throat since this whole thing began is a myth that the West is somehow weak and barely holding on against the might of an unassailable Russia. "Russia will win this in a matter of weeks" (they did not), "Russian mass will eventually wear Ukraine out" (it did not), "Russia has escalation dominance" (they did not, we did), "Russia will decide when this war is over." no they won't all sides will have to decide that. We could be fighting a containment and compression war against Russia for years and based on how the last one of those went I would be very concerned to be Russian right now.

You really can if one is trying to negotiate towards a workable victory. I think what a lot of pundits are missing is that the West (US in particular) need Russia to lose - just enough. This drives an incremental approach of slow eroding pressure as opposed to a coherent campaign plan that sees Russia tossed back over the border completely by X date. As of today and the pending Ukrainian offensive the risk from a western perspective is not Ukraine doing enough, it is doing too much or going too far. I disagree with the idea that Russia can sustain a 5 year war. It ignores the main principle of corrosive warfare which is eroding an opponents operational system faster and better than they can repair it. Russian forces would need a serious inject of external support to shore up its failing system. So unless China steps in and gets really serious about reestablishing a level of symmetry, Russian is on the wrong end of a devolution curve. In the 21st century one cannot simply stuff ill-trained and I’ll-supported troops in holes and hold ground. Not if your LOCs remain in clear view and actionable ranges. Your armor is blunted, your AirPower denied and your guns are wearing out. We are about to see how well a conventional defence hold up under these conditions and my bet is “not well”. The risk of Ukraine over-reach is not small. It could create shock and panic at political levels in Russia, and those conditions are when major mistakes start being made. This entire thing has hallmarks of threading a pretty tricky strategic needle. It may feel good to see ATACMS hammering everything in depth but it could lead to an uncontrollable Russian collapse, which we have discussed at length, and clearly regardless of our opinions this is a serious concern to those in political leadership in the West. To summarize - slow motion collapse with off-ramps = good. Uncontrolled collapse in a suicidal game of chicken = bad. The strategy we are seeing is aligned with the first one. The_Capt’s second axiom - “strategy must not only encompass a theory of one’s own victory, it must also encompass a theory of an opponents defeat.”

What happens when you hit a tilt rod mine under the water. When we were doing underwater clearance drills for landings or crossings, tilt rod mines were of particular concern because they could be rigged easily for triggering against silent clearance operations. Impossible to see at night, even with NVGs and could be daisy chained, sometimes with nasty stuff like wire. Looks like what happens is that one gets blown very high into the air and spread over a large area (nod to Blackadder). Always knew they were bad news but never actually saw one used in combat.

Well I guess that answers an age old combat diver question once and for all.

Easy now, it is a new century. I believe "dockside majesty" or "dockside royalty" is more acceptable in these times.

Hit with what? A tilt rod mine?

Look fair points and I do not want to punish counter-thinking, that is not what we are about here. However, it really needs to be based on some fundamental indicators. We would need to see a shift in RA capability on a systems level. A few TU22s with napalm does not an effective CAS program make. In fact given that platform we are more likely going to see incendiary terror attacks because Russia is all “FU LOAC!” - note: see no-normalization, which is no doubt Putin’s plan as he does not want Russia to have a viable out as it would undermine him. I do want to unpack just one thing further - the Putin Line. Ok, so obstacles are basically inert in reality. They cannot move or cause effects at range. They exist solely to create enormous friction on an opponent in a very narrow window. When properly supported this can be decisive as a smaller force can really cut a larger force to pieces. Problem - you need well coordinated and agile smaller forces. When it comes to quality capability Russia has the smaller force. Guns that can rapidly respond and shoot and move. C-move forces that can quickly reposition. The RA has basically been throwing up all over itself for over a year. The quality forces it needs to actually exploit those narrow windows of opportunity are in the minority. Instead they have wads of infantry stuffed into holes and even those are mauled up. When I saw Russia attacking this winter, I was shocked (and probably should not have been). It is pure madness to bleed out a force on useless objectives when one is trying to freeze a conflict in place and play a long game. So now the RA is badly beat up. It has lost a lot of operational connective tissue and enablers it simply cannot make up for. One could argue that Bakhmut was not a Russian Offensive as much as it was a Ukrainian shaping operation. So what? Well they can have mounds of dragons teeth and AT ditches but their ability to actually cover them with effective fires is highly in question. These are really big frontages they have to cover off. Further the west is pushing all the ISR to the UA so they can see the weak points. The UA can also conduct deep strike campaigns to make things worse both before and during the offensive. Then, as has been noted, once the shell is first rotted out, and then broken, there is nothing substantial behind it. Finally, I am not even sure obstacles work like they used to anymore. If I can see your entire operational system and hit it, I could stand back and hammer it until it collapses under its own weight and simply walk over the obstacles. The actual ROI on obstacles as they stand now is in question. This is a lot like back in the Gulf War. People saw the massive, and amazingly professional Iraqi obstacle belts and got really concerned. In the end it did not matter, massed AirPower followed up by GPS enabled manoeuvre made all that work useless. I do not think the UA has the same level of advantage here but they likely have enough to crack this egg and make some break outs, likely in a couple locales. Gonna be one for the books…and stay tuned in right here kids, we will be providing colour commentary the whole way!

You know the more I think about this the angrier I get. This is an egregious double standard against Ukraine coming from the “experts”. The course of this war for Russia - I will invade and crush you…fail Ok, now I will create 20 sieges and crush you…fail. Ok, getting serious now. I will WW1 blast you in the South - we really only wanted that anyway, create cauldrons and crush you…fail. Ok, ok, you asked for this, I will create multiple Stalingrads on defence and you will die trying to take your country back…fail. Alright you have really ticked me off now, prepare for human waves and a winter offensive…fail. That is it! I am all out of patience and now you are in for it. Prepare to die on the Putin Line! (And western pundits are buying into it) Meanwhile “Ukraine is barely hanging on and maybe we should rethink about support because they have not driven the RA into the sea yet.” I mean c’mon, with friends like these…

Well I can’t speak to “smug” - perhaps you meant “informed”, but we have been seeing these sorts of reports since this war began. Some come from a place of honest fear that Russian superiority will assert itself, others from hope that it will (e.g. Macgregor). As to the “hundreds of Russian aircraft”, well the other factor is the Russian willingness to lose them. Unlike mobs of poorly trained men, Russia has a limited amount of effective fix wing aircraft and a big @ss sky that it needs to control, largest sovereign airspace in the world. So I expect, much like this entire war to date, the Russia’s willingness to throw its remaining AirPower away in a denied airspace is pretty damn low. As to your points: - not sure where you are getting “easy” from, nothing easy about any of this. What it won’t be is “impossible” which is what both the OP and articles seem to suggest. Seems like many fear/hope for the opening of the Somme. - We really need to get over WW2 and the Russian defence myths. In this war Russia has failed on defence pretty consistently. We had no siege of Kherson, or Kharkiv. Instead we have seen three operational level collapses. The biggest issue with the “bloody Russian defence” is that they are not defending Russian soil, this is a discretionary invasion war in another country. I am sure some units will dig in but a lot of others - now mauled by whatever this crazy winter assault was - are likely going to buckle early and fast. We should see a new line being drawn somewhere but I suspect it will be a scramble back to the Crimea bottleneck and an Eastern line N-S. - I am a military engineer by trade and frankly have no idea how obstacles will work in this environment. Given the effects of corrosive warfare that we have seen so far, I am not even sure these will work as viable investments. The Russians are clearly thinking “force multipliers” but there are basic calculus’s in the wind right now. - If Russia had the ability to conduct deep operational battle (e.g. static bridges, rail etc) via AirPower, then why has it waited until now to use it? It bled itself white over the winter trying to grab something/anything and we did not see a single coherent operational level air campaign. So now while it is being assaulted it is suddenly going to figure that out? I am sure we will see some weak disjointed attempts but if Russia could do this - do it freakin now before those reported 9 fresh UA Bdes form up on the start line. - Russian EW and UAS will add friction to the attack. But they need to to more than that. They need to disrupt and dislocate. This means Russia need to be able to employ a defensive form of corrosive warfare (the ability to project enough precision attrition and friction on an opponent to create wide systemic failure in their military operational machine). We have not seen this. Russia has been relying almost entirely on old school front edge combat attrition, trading 3 men for 1 theirs type stuff. - Ukrainian formations are green? What kind of shape do you suppose the RA units are in? They are 1) pretty banged up and replacements likely rushed into place and 2) have not had a free and donated western force generation stream to pull on. The UA has experience in conducting operational level offensives, the staffs and HQs that pulled that off are anything but green. All of it rested on an increasingly more integrated western supported ISR and targeting enterprise. In the competition of “who is in rougher shape before the spring/summer offensive of ‘23”. I gotta go with Russia. I am not predicting a rout of the RA back to its borders (but if it goes well enough that is not off the table), but this thing has the hallmarks of another Russian operational collapse in the making - highly eroded operational systems, significant C4ISR asymmetry, and still no sign they can establish favourable strategic or operational pre-conditions in any domain. If they do manage to hold the UA back effectively, then something fundamental will have changed and we damned well will need to understand what that is because it might mean that this war is done pretty much where they stand now and we are out of military solutions. But I am not there yet, quite the opposite, I am wondering how successful the UA will be and whether not it will be enough to keep the west engaged in this. As we saw at Kherson - which many western pundits ping to with disappointment- the bar of western expectations is sometimes unreasonably high, largely because we have no modern experience in wars like this one. Regardless, I guess we will see soon.

Well I think a lot of this depends on which Russia is left after the war. If it is Putin’s Russia, they can expect continued diplomatic and economic isolation while NATO turns the Baltic Sea into its personal swimming pool (except for that weird little Kaliningrad rump thing). Russia signed up to being a demonstration of western global order reasserting itself. That means the “rules” that Putin pooped all over last Sep in his victory speech will be applied very visibly. So think 1) war reparations - work around to link these to turning the oil back on so we are not talking Versailles. 2) War crimes prosecution - do not even try to wiggle out of that one. 3) Regime change - we are pretty much done doing business with Vlad and Co. Now a path to re-normalization needs to be on the table but it will come with a penalty box. Russian Will have to decide to live with that or join North Korea in the “outer club”. That is a soft Russian landing. It goes without saying a total Russian military withdrawal is also a requirement - we can solve Crimea and Donbas as a separate issue but it cannot be done under the barrels of Russian tanks. Now if we have to live with less. Say the Ukrainian offensive fails and this conflict does freeze. Well then we are back to isolation. We were pretty close to simply ignoring Crimea and Donbas - way over there and we still need gas. Right up until the point that Russia started bombing things. Now we care very much about these issues. No way do things go back to normal until things get addressed. In fact they are likely to hardwire as “not normal” pretty quickly, in many ways they already are.

I think I would need to see some clear evidence that Russia can actually achieve air superiority, or even parity in order for them to “stop shows”. My honest recommendation is to stop reading any online “expert” who solely talks about capability. “Look napalm bomb”, “Look a Russian HARM”. Arguing solely from a tactical capability perspective is the hallmark of an amateur. First off the Russian C4ISR system would have to dramatically increase its ability for rapid target queuing and joint integration between air and land power pretty much from tac to strategic. Can anyone point to where this has actually happened? The Russian air war is still happening in glorious isolation of the land war from what we have seen so far. Second, we would need some indication that Russian can establish conditions where they are able to create freedom of action to exploit that C4ISR advantage (which they do not have). We have not. If Russia could establish even pockets of air superiority they would have done it at Bakhmut or any of the high profile offensives they tried over the winter. And third, one would need some evidence that Ukrainian Air Denial ability is slipping. So far we have a leaked report (which may or may not have been doctored) and a few Russian “ARM” strikes. There has been no degradation of Western ISR support, in fact it has gone the other way. Ukrainian Air Denial is more than just Radar AD, the MANPAD situation has driven the Russian’s batty. And more Air Denial systems are coming online - not less. So this one is dodgy at best. Finally, we did not see a Russian Air Apocalypse last Fall during the last two Ukrainian offensives? Have things gotten better for Russia in the interim in the air picture? About the only positive they have is that as they lost ground and while retreating they were in fact shortening the time and distance to air support. Beyond that I do not see why or how the Russian Air Force suddenly becomes a wall of steel and precision fires only 5 months after being totally ineffective while the UA took back about 50% of Russian gains had left after the Northern front fell. I mean seriously, the Russian Air Force is able to stop a major UA offensive now, but they stayed out of Kherson? I have no doubt the Russian Air Force will be in play but it would need full air supremacy to turn things around at this point. That is complete C4ISR dominance, watertight SEAD and a demonstrated ability to integrate air and land battles. And this still would not solve for UA deep precision fires superiority. Why do people keep coming up with Russian “magic rabbits in hats”? Seriously if Russia had one or two they would have used them by now. One does not wait until you are teetering on operational collapse to “finally get serious”.

Heard this one before too. The biggest problem is that Russia did not fall apart back in 90, the USSR did. This was more like the EU falling apart than a homogenous nation. The USSR had a lot of central control but it did not remove the internal governance of the nations states within it. Russia falling apart has no such safety net. The provincial and regional governments can go some way, but a lot more points of failure in that construct. Enough to make me nervous.

Well Door #2 in all this is much worse. A Russia in complete free fall is really risky. We have never had a nuclear power disintegrate below the state-level - the USSR devolved into a bunch of pre-existing states and even then it was touch and go for a bit. So as good as a burning Russia might make everyone feel in a whole "rightful comeuppance" sort of way, it will very likely lead to greater regional insecurity. In the worst scenarios the stockpile of WMDs (and there are a whole suite of them) gets loose and we are talking about Sum of All Fears type stuff. There is the more mundane civil wars leading to massive refugee crisis, starvation etc. The idea that it wont spill over is wishful thinking. We might end up with Ukraine and Europe as a whole in worse shape in the event Russia completely falls apart - a Yugoslavia with nukes. So somebody better be on top of this or we could be just getting the appetizer in this dinner with this war.

Right and pretty soon someone is going to put a little angry/hungry brain on each one of those cluster munitions. Of Russia is hooped, question is how bad and where is the off-ramp if such a thing even still exists? Next war is what I am worried about because Russia is also going to figure all this out, eventually. China probably already has.

Hmm, well it was a matter of time until someone called Russia on its whole “I will take us all to hell so we can shout at the Devil together” BS.

So we should help them by projecting enough energy into the environment it can be seen from space? High energy solutions are problematic as they then need more high energy solutions to keep them alive. And no one has solved for a 155mm PGM round, or HIMAR coming in at Mach 3+. The fundamental flaw with some US (and most western militaries)thinking is that they are trying to citadel their existing structures and treating UAS/unmanned as something to be managed. This was the overall strategy for ATGMs (detectors, smoke, manoeuvres, combined arms and finally APS), which was never really tested en masse but that did stop us from assuming that these ATGM counters would work. Worse, we assumed that these counters would continue to work as ATGM tech marched on. As the Russians have found out 1) next-gen ATGMs are incredibly hard to “manage” in fact for some they really can’t be and 2) UAS in combination with C4ISR are changing the fabric of the battle space. This is not manageable, it requires some deep rethinks on how military power is projected in the future. Strapping high energy lasers on everything and then trying to do Bn TF manoeuvres just like we did in Iraq is going to lead to a really, really bad day…and to be honest most people in the biz know this already. Protecting legacy systems will be required but it will only buy a narrow context of advantages in a narrower set of employment. Point defence systems need to be just that “point” as in last minute “holy crap some got through” not “queue the Disco Star Wars soundtrack and start burning holes all over the sky”. It is the other layers of the bubble that will need to be developed along with new types of organizations and TTPs. But if I know military thinking we will see a 90 ton tank with so much crap slapped on it the damn thing won’t be able to stay upright. Then we will have to do same with logistics and suddenly a viable BCT will weigh roughly as much as Pluto…because gravity does not care about your feelings, cap badge, investments or budgetary profiles

That may work but kinda kills manoeuvre warfare. Unless you could pre-position ahead of an advance. I mean better than nothing but it is not the solution. It may be part of a broader system solution in what is going to become a pretty rapidly evolving rock-paper-scissors space to my eyes. Oh and just noticed no human in the loop? That will drive the lawyers nuts.

There is a point on the circle where the far-left and far-right meet and this is pretty close to it. The mechanics are the same, connect a whole bunch of phenomena, many of them that are in isolation of each other - e.g. homelessness and MKUltra. Then tie them together with logic strings to create a unifying construct - in this case Western Satan. The problem is that 1) many of these phenomena are in fact disconnected as there are no star chambers just people being mean to other people - the red scare violations of human rights is not in the same bin as lynchings. 2) the fact that anyone has access to these historical examples and can openly cite them is proof against a massive oppressive western regime that spans generations, and 3) completely misses all the good and right these western systems have done, worse dismisses it as social background radiation when in fact it was the main effort. This method is a sort of reverse social contrasting because all one is seeing are the lynchings, CIA plots, cop shootings and homeless. If one stares at that long enough it is easy to believe that is the core and not indeed the background radiation of macro-social evolution in the western world. There are societies where these sorts of activities were far more central to maintaining order and control as has been noted. They do not complain about police brutality and cite internet stories to back them up in North Korea because they are living in a truly brutal dictatorship. I have worked defence and security my entire adult life - there is not massive conspiracy led by the far [insert villain] trying to control you through a weird Goldberg-esque complicated scheme. There is a government trying to keep 300+ million primates wired for fear response from killing each other. While at the same time trying to keep the other 7.7 billion scared primates from either killing you, or each other too fast. The good news is that this “sinister and highly corrupt system” has essentially worked. We are better off now than we have ever been in history. Do not believe me? Google stuff like child mortality or literacy, or healthcare. You wanna talk “big unfair prisons” do some research on the 19th century legal system. People are not “seeing the matrix” in spite of nasty government control, they are seeing it because of government protections - as imperfect as they may be.

As was noted before Ukrainian victory must include engineering a Russian defeat. This is tricky. I strongly suspect that the US is working very hard to engineer a just-soft-enough landing for Russia in this war. So what looks like waffling or weak knees is more likely simply due to the fact that for the US there is a lot more on the board than simply kicking Russia’s bum nice and hard - that one is already pretty much covered. There are other less absolute dimensions to this thing.

Driving around blazing at the sky and giving one’s position away leading to PGM artillery killing you….check. Logistical nightmare…check. Better than nothing until C-UAS = other UAS…check. Does it solve for UGS…no check.

Cloning. And then start a war with them…clone wars….(snicker).

Can’t get too far into it but that ball has moved quite a bit since back in the day. Let’s just say that Int staff are armed with more than talc and Stadlers these days. Personally I can barely keep up.

Oh definitely. I think we are past corrosive here, at least in the finish. One could argue the UA has been conducting corrosive warfare all winter on defence - and Oryx lists seem to support this - and the spring offensive is more egg cracking. Ukraine needs a big win and Russian defence sector collapse again as a min (they pulled off two last fall). The RA seems prime for it. I doubt they really can do c-moves quickly and are so beat up in some sectors that they are relying on obstacles in some sort of weird mass-force multiplication sense, but warfare is moving past all that or at least how we understood it to be. We wont have to play "Who do We Eat First" for much longer I think.

Some interesting tidbits in there. The RA is clearly pretty banged up in some areas. The employment of Spetsnaz as front line infantry is particularly telling, however employment of SOF in those whole war has been different. Spersnaz are supposed to be the Russian military Tier 1 guys. Simply sticking them on the line as infantry is pretty odd. Based on their assessments of RA line strength Russia has pretty much burned itself out over the winter. If the UA is sitting on 9 fresh and fully gunned up Bdes this spring offensive could be a real barn burner. Looking at the map I am honestly wondering if the UA is not going to go for the Dnipro river crossing assault. Risky and tough to secure but the RA is extremely thin and broken on that front. This is likely due to risk-creep around the river obstacle. The RA looks pretty weak on the far east of that line too.

This does assume that the RA can swing those guns to and from Close and General support quickly (building on your note #1) Based on what we saw at Severodonetsk last summer RA fire planning seems pretty linear, which may lean more the way Steve added it up. In fact I would bet good money that have plotted out rigid sector fire support that is pretty static compared to western doctrine. RA C2 has not shone in this war, I have my doubts as to it somehow stepping out of the phone booth now. Of course the UA should help this along where they can.