The_Capt

The problem will be the “flash”. You will need to concentrate faster than an opponent can see and counter-hit, which frankly the laws of physics do not support well. Artillery simply flies faster than a ground unit can move. Another option is to stay distributed entirely and rely on corrosive warfare but speed up attrition and precision.

Not a crazy idea but how do you support this? Logistics is normally a series of centralized nodes (e.g. Resupply points). The further one distributes mass the wider the logistics network has to become. And like everything else if you concentrate logistics you wind up just becoming targets. We will need to be rethinking a lot of things in this sort of scenario.

Game difficulty settings become the battlefield: I want mine to be Recruit while forcing my opponent to play Veteran.

This is fundamentally the modern warfare problem. We have a lot of our military capabilities on things that have evolved too slowly in comparison to the technology able to find them and hit them. We have ISR systems that can see far better than we can hide, and shooters that hit much farther away with greater precision. Worse, the things that can still hide the best are also the things that can do the seeing and hitting. This puts us into a massive Denial dilemma with current capability. Now I think the RA has been so eroded (or will be) that traditional conventional mass may work, but we cannot count on this for the next war. The tank being dead or not is irrelevant - concentration of mass has become toxic which shifts some pretty fundamental concepts of warfare.

Goes some way in explaining why no one is protesting this war in the streets of Moscow. Putin has clearly been building this internal security architecture, and likely using it for years. The difference now is that it is under new levels of strain. Russia is a big country and the potential blowback from this sort of system failing is not small.

Good lord, the damn things will be knocking on the hatch soon.

And the Javelin is last-gen tech. This is just one reasons of many that we need to rethink combined arms and the concept of mass.

"Within each town the TOG would appoint a garrison commander from the Russian military who would have an assigned detachment of garrison troops. These troops would occupy a building – usually the police or fire station – and set up facilities for detention, processing, interrogation and torture.70 The fact that the layout of these facilities is consistent throughout the country, and the equipment used in torture chambers, including specialised electrocution machines, were the same across multiple oblasts demonstrates that this was a systematic plan and not improvised sadism." https://static.rusi.org/202303-SR-Unconventional-Operations-Russo-Ukrainian-War-web-final.pdf.pdf (pg 22)

Among the other tasks that Major General Kulinich is alleged to have received from the FSB through Sivkovich was to exert influence on the higher political leadership of Ukraine to convince it of the need to abandon the course of joining NATO and to adopt a neutral status just prior to the invasion.30 Refusal to join NATO, according to the Russian special services’ plan, along with other Ukrainian concessions to Russia, should have been the impetus for anti-government protests, similar to the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, when President Yanukovych refused to integrate Ukraine into the EU. Mass protests were intended to simplify the task of the Russian special services to destabilise Ukraine internally and paralyse the system of state and military administration, providing the conditions for a Russian military invasion. https://static.rusi.org/202303-SR-Unconventional-Operations-Russo-Ukrainian-War-web-final.pdf.pdf (pg 9). So when your opponent is working this hard to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and EU...we should probably do exactly that. Further this piece is presenting a lot of evidence that Russia was going to do this thing one way or the other. Once does not defensively build decades old networks and cells aimed at the level of general political buggery happening here - and even if it could be sold as defensive, one normally waits for an actual crisis before pulling the trigger, not a Tues in Feb because "reasons".

This is pure gold.

Depends on the dog, there are some pretty shady dogs. To this list I would add “Identity” - who we are. So much of this war has been about Russian internal identity that I am beginning to think of it as the major cause. Ukraine was one of Russia’s best customers: https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-country/ukr/partner/rus And this was even after 2014. We have already debunked the resources grab argument. There is no real ideological difference here. And ethnicity is also pretty weak as they were essentially the same ethnic parity as Canada and the US. So we are back to identity. Russia started a war because of who they think they are and a driving need to sustain that certainty. It was in direct collision with Ukrainian certainty about who they are. And here we are.

Any number of military FLIR and SAR type systems. What is weird about this thing is that is sounds a lot like it was written by ChatGPT or somesuch. A lot of technical terms and buzzwords (Kinetic Action) being used out of context or in an odd context.

Someone is going to claim it was UA SOF because they could operate that deep. No western trained SOF is going to blow cover 30 km behind enemy lines to scare a couple civilians. ”The Statue of Liberty is kaput!”

It was a trick the Taliban taught us back in the day.

Do it know as to #2 but as to #1, good question. Both sides have smoke ammunition but we have not seen it being employed that often. My guess is that smoke on the modern battlefield acts as a big flashing sign “hey look over here!” If both sides have tac UAS and ISR a bunch of smoke anywhere is going to draw a lot of attention. It may blind locally but once it pulls in a half dozen UAS any advantages kinda go out the window. What I am interested to see is if either side starts using smoke as a feint mechanism drawing attention in one place while putting main effort somewhere else.

1. The author is an intel guy, which should make one’s skin crawl a bit, and these guys have a somewhat “different” view of the world at some pretty fundamental levels. 2. He is not wrong, but he is also not right either. Military the question on the table is one of culmination. Has the UA culminated? Has the RA culminated. These are the driving factors of the ongoing negotiation space of this war. 3. Unlike the environment this guy has been operating for his entire career, military power is dominant within context of this conflict. So somewhat slimy back door “good enough” deals are not how the game is played. Things are more stark than that. All war is personal on a massive scale and this one is very personal to both Ukrainians and Russians. So half measures are getting harder and harder to pitch. 4. There will need to be a hard “friendship” conversation in the future but it is not the right time. Why? Because if it happened now both sides would be left with wondering “what if” which will lead directly to the next war, one way or the other. A clearer end state likely needs to be established. It is obvious that the UA is not done yet. The list of equipment being pulled in is looking very offensive-y (assault engineering). So they are looking to keep going. 5. Russia is still getting weaker not stronger, Ukraine is going the other way. The argument that “Ukraine is as strong as it is going to get” does not track. Until the UA and western support culminates the actual negotiation strength remains in the wind. 6. The only thing about this guy’s narrative that makes sense and he does not say is to try and engineer are soft defeat for Russia in order to avoid worse. Again, I am not sure we are there yet - Russian infamous resilience may work for us on that one - or that it may not even be possible given the political situation. 7. The hard friendship discussion will center around Donbas I suspect, maybe Crimea. But it will happen after culmination, not before it.

Pro: At least we seem to be agreeing that Russian defeat is the strategic objective. And we have the escalation advantage here. Con. Beyond the somewhat challenging scenario in manufacturing Chinese attribution for airstrikes in the Russian west, blabbing the plan all over Texas is sub-optimal.

Well they really, really wanted that trench. A whole lot going wrong for the Russian assaulters, not to mention some pretty basic errors and missing pieces (e.g. No fire base I could see - did not “win the fire fight”, bunched up on the advance - which went bad when mortars came in, no indirect fire support of their own, no AFV or Armor support, likely little to no ISR support, big losses and not much to show for it). This little action looks like it could represent the entire Russian Winter offensive.

The man is a saint in my country now. Well most of it. https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/u-s-president-joe-biden-says-he-likes-canadian-teams-except-the-leafs-1.6328028

So when I talk about stuff that is not going to be replaced.....

One thing that is becoming increasingly clear to me over the course of this war is just how decentralized Russia really is, at least culturally. Any nation is a collection of "us and them" but things like egregious casualty asymmetry by internal region highlight that there are parts of Russia that really could care less about each other, beyond some weird "We are us because if we were not everyone would kill us" narratives. I have no doubt that if Russia was invaded that tac nukes and chemical WMDs would be on the table; however, strategic nuclear use is a big step. I think Moscow would be will to trade rural border regions for negotiation space if it came to that - likely why a lot of their nuclear infrastructure is still central or at sea. This would be akin to a conventional invasion of Canada, sure the US would get in the game but I do not believe for a second that they would start lobbing ICBMs right away. WW3 is likely a slow-then-fast conflagration. The true strategic nuclear exchange threshold is likely pretty high, but it is also a slippery slope as the closer to it we get the easier it is to talk oneself into it. That all said, it is one helluva high stakes game everyone is playing here.

Meow.

Or maybe a bit more to it? https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/russia-s-security-chief-blasts-west-dangles-nuclear-threats-1.6325742 The deep problem with nuclear deterrence is that it only works between rational actors. So before we go all "here is how it is going to happen boiiii!" We probably need a good idea of just how rational Russia is or is not. We have been around this tree a few times and are not going to answer it here but I am pretty sure the current US Administration is all over this question. It is too easy to shout from the cheap seats and score political points (the author in this peice appears to be doing just that), it is another to be in the chair and having to deal with the daily realities.

Maybe South Korea? To be honest there are a lot more bad examples - post WWI Germany, same for Russia after 1917. We have a bushel of failures in Africa. Maybe Israel too...kinda...depending who you ask.

Add to this a complete lack of any reasonable evidence that Russia would have somehow left Ukraine alone had the West not allowed Eastern European nations into the organization. A lot of people have brought up the Budapest Memo as evidence the West left Ukraine hanging, but the violation of that agreement by Russia, first in 2014 and now is clear evidence that Russia was never going to "let sleeping dogs lie" if we had kept our hands off. I argue we likely saved more lives by pulling in Estonia and Latvia (among others). The only reason to frame this discussion as somehow a result of Western aggression is to try and justify Russian motivations, and the OP has a history of doing exactly that in a somewhat ham-handed anti-US/western narrative. Putin is a genocidal monster who is waging an illegal war well outside the bounds of the LOAC. Any righteous casus belli Russia may have had (and it didn't) prior to this war flew out the window at Bucha and the extremely long list of illegal warfare Russia has waged - to the point the ICC has indicted a sitting head of state. So even if we except this bizarro logic, it is irrelevant to any future analysis, beyond informing us that a strategy of appeasement 1) won't work and 2) We probably should have worked harder to contain Russia, not less because it is pretty clear their military, at least, is operating on a medieval warfare framework. I would also say that whatever box we put Russia into after this is over needs to be airtight, at least until Russia as a nation can demonstrate that it is ready to join the rest of civilization. Post-war I am extremely worried as the viable strategic option space that sees Russia as a functioning nation heading back towards some sort of rational normalization is getting smaller and smaller. Our ability to create a soft landing for Russia that it will not simply try to exploit is also getting harder and harder to see. Dumping the whole thing on China's doorstep is not a bad idea but re-containment of Russia will have to be on the menu, right along with regime change. Trying to engineer a nation is extremely hard, but that is what this is looking more and more what is going to be required in order to secure Ukraine and ensure Russia does not completely fly apart and make everything worse.