How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Haiduk]

Borozenske village is liberated. Likely yesterday.

Zaluzhnyi claimed for 9th November Ukrainan forces liberated 12 settlements. 

On the photo are soldiers of 515th separate special force battalion of 1st Special Foces brigade named after Ivan Bohun. This is new-formed brigade, being established in March. It includes four separate special forces battalions. In this battalions served not only Ukrainians, but also foreign volunteers. Despite this brigade has a status of "special forces", but it subordinatws not to GUR, but to Operative Command "North" of Ground Forces. So, they are not real SOF, but just some sort of "rangers" 

 

Edited November 10, 2022 by Haiduk

[Haiduk]

19 minutes ago, Calamine Waffles said:

That narrative is already forming with even Kadyrov praising the decision to withdraw.

Likely just because Surovkin is a guy from their club 

Lapin surrendered Balakliya and Lyman - he is a traitor!

Surovkin is surrendering Kherson - this is a wise man decision! 

[Calamine Waffles]

1 minute ago, Haiduk said:

Likely just because Surovkin is a guy from their club 

Lapin surrendered Balakliya and Lyman - he is a traitor!

Surovkin is surrendering Kherson - this is a wise man decision! 

Yeah, but I imagine next they will justify it by saying he's as smart as Barclay de Tolly, drawing the Ukrainians into a trap like Napoleon in 1812.

[Beleg85]

2 hours ago, The_Capt said:

Very good point here and there is a precedent-Mosul. The combined Iraqi and western forces used a very incremental hybrid approach in that battle.  The city was largely destroyed and it took 9 months but casualties were minimized compared to other urban nightmares.

In the light of possible Kherson defence, anything resembling such long and brutal urban battle would dimnish Ukrainian sense of victory almost completelly; which will be, I am afraid, what Putin will be aiming for. Kherson city so far was almost unscratched, there is probably growing expectation (or at least, hopes) on Western/Ukrainian population to remain as such. Note it is also very important industrial center and logistical hub, serving all water movement along Dnipro river. Destruction of port facilities would be severe blow to future UA economy.

28 minutes ago, Zeleban said:

Many on this site talk about the strong moral decline of Russians caused by the abandonment of Kherson. I do not think so. I am sure that soon we will hear statements from Russian propagandists about the brilliant victory of General Surovikin, who did not allow the troops to be destroyed on the Kherson bridgehead.

They were spreading these rumours for several weeks already, so it is surprise only for die-hard Russian nationalists like Dugin (who already announced it as worst tragedy from fall of USSR). The worst shock may still come if Ukrainians would be able to cause concentrated bloodbath along river' shores. Otherwise, if Russian indeed will manage to withdraw gradually over protracted timespan, I don't think whole operation will be considered unsuccessfull.

[Haiduk]

57 minutes ago, Zeleban said:

 

One more video from Kyselivka - liberated by troopers of 28th mech.brigade

 

[Haiduk]

9 minutes ago, Beleg85 said:

Destruction of port facilities would be severe blow to future UA economy.

Kherson port is minor relatively to ports in Odesa, Pivdenne and Chornomorsk 

[Beleg85]

6 minutes ago, Haiduk said:

Kherson port is minor relatively to ports in Odesa, Pivdenne and Chornomorsk 

It is smaller, but important for river cargo. I would need to check volumen from before the war, but I think it served as main transhipment hub for most vessels on Dnieper river.

Rumours about Ukrainians fighting already at Charnobaivka airport....very interesting.

Edited November 10, 2022 by Beleg85

[kevinkin]

Is Ukraine under any pressure to relieve Kherson of standard issue artillery attacks by pushing the RA back fairly soon? The city had / has a civilian population and eventually will be useful economically. Russian can use buzz bomb and cruise missiles from a distance, but long term artillery fire is another matter. 

[Beleg85]

More good news coming, still very fragmentary but so far situation does not look bad. We will yet to see how much of it is just Muscovites rear guards :

 

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, Zeleban said:

Many on this site talk about the strong moral decline of Russians caused by the abandonment of Kherson. I do not think so. I am sure that soon we will hear statements from Russian propagandists about the brilliant victory of General Surovikin, who did not allow the troops to be destroyed on the Kherson bridgehead.

I agree, but many Russians are not stupid.  Somewhere, even if in the back of their minds, this is getting chalked up as a loss.  Pride and regime censorship might mean we don't hear or see it, but it is there.  Whether it becomes meaningful at some point in time is unknown, which means it might not matter any time soon or at all.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

3 hours ago, The_Capt said:

Very good point here and there is a precedent-Mosul. The combined Iraqi and western forces used a very incremental hybrid approach in that battle.  The city was largely destroyed and it took 9 months but casualties were minimized compared to other urban nightmares.

This is where we have to put our CM hats on and think of the difference between defenders who are Fanatics and those who are Conscripts.  ISIS fought to the death because they were, in the words of many analysts, a "death cult".  Meaning, they viewed dying for their cause as a goal (in a sense).  I don't think there are many Russians that believe dying in Kherson just to take out a couple more Ukrainians is a good thing.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

5 hours ago, kraze said:

Just to put some things into perspective about how our army still was at the time of Debaltseve

One of my friends was serving in the battalion of Kulchytsky at the time. Because it was the first 'new' battalion of the army that came to be and started enlisting as early as March of 2014 - it was also the longest target for all the volunteer help, so guys had the best personal equipment among whole AFU in 2015: american uniforms and boots, consumer grade IR vision, hunting aiming sights, piccatini rails for AKs etc - basically anything a civilian could legally buy here. You can tell they looked impressive compared to most of the army wearing Dubok and old AKs.
So during the battle of Debaltseve in the middle of the night they were called to the local HQ on short notice - turns out a superimportant general had a secret visit to share the battle plan that will be put into action immediately. So that general and whatever supporting officers were showing everybody present the map and talking about how different types of forces will do A, B and C depending on the role. And the most important and toughest task was to be performed by specops that included high risk behind the lines sabotage. Because it's so important - everybody is ordered to leave but Kulchytsky's guys, so the general absolutely seriously explains their "specops" orders to them then says "godspeed" and leaves.

Apparently he was told they had specops guys in the area by a whatever guy in the chain of command that had to organize the presence of said specops but because actual 'specops' were in short numbers to put it very lightly - he simply pointed at the best equipped guys they had that did look like specops. Kulchytsky's were yesterday's civilians with 8 months of combat experience gained with little to no prior training in the very best case.

Of course he was laughing while telling that story after the fact, but obviously you can tell at the time anything in AFU was held together nigh literally by the yellow duct tape and it was quite grim.

Thank you for that anecdote.  It is not only meaningful in terms of remembering what the situation was in 2014/2015, but also how it relates to the perceptions of Russian forces by Western analysts leading up to this war.

In Crimea we all saw Russian forces that looked like very well equipped, well disciplined soldiers that were competently led.  This was no accident.  Putin's regime deliberately put on a show for us and the analysts lapped it up.  Score a success for Putin.  Unfortunately, Putin appears to have lapped it up as well

When I saw the forces taking over Crimea I was also impressed.  However, I constantly questioned if what we were seeing was real or to some extent Russian "maskirovka".  For sure we knew the Russian forces in front of cameras were their "elites", so that begged the question of how much these few thousand troops were representative of the Russian military as a whole.  There was absolutely zero armed resistance, so how well would these guys perform in combat?  The planning was all done in typical Soviet/Russian fashion of being carefully coordinated without any test of resiliency.  Sure, the equipment looked good (very good, in fact), but was it like so much Soviet and Russian equipment before it where looks weren't reflective of function?  This is what I was asking myself during Crimea, and with good reason.

We saw ample examples in this war of Russians looking far tougher and more capable than they really were.  Kadyrov's TicTok Warriors are the most obvious example.  They LOOK fierce, well equipped, and well motivated.  Just like the Chechens of Vostok that road confidently into Donetsk airport only to be SLAUGHTERED (literally) moments later.

As the old saying goes... looks ain't everything

Steve

[The_MonkeyKing]

https://www.scribblemaps.com/maps/view/The-War-in-Ukraine/091194

looks pretty bad.

Edited November 10, 2022 by The_MonkeyKing

[Haiduk]

This Russian apparently has seen "Saving private Ryan", but... something went wrong %)

 

[billbindc]

2 minutes ago, The_MonkeyKing said:

https://www.scribblemaps.com/maps/view/The-War-in-Ukraine/091194

looks pretty bad.

From what is out there already, I'd be less worried about some sort of Stalingrad occurring. First of all, Ukraine does not have any pressing need to take the city immediately. It can wait. Second, it seems at the moment that this is less a retreat now than the entire salient coming unstuck.

[The_Capt]

3 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

It was clear to me before the war, and clearer to me now, that Ukraine learned a lot of lessons from the 8 years of fighting against Russia *and* translated those lessons into meaningful policy and implementation.  Russia, on the other hand, seems to think everything went so well in 2014/2015 that it didn't need to change much of anything.  The analysts bought into the Russian view and that was the wrong thing to do

{Apologizing for a very long post up front - proceed at your own risk}

Ok now we are getting somewhere.  There is ample evidence that in 2014 the RA surprised the world in that it did not actually suck, there is your citation above and then from the references I posted:

"The Ukraine conflict has been described as “World War I with technology.”11 One aspect that stands out in the Ukraine conflict is the Russian employment of indirect fires. Combining separatist and regular BTGs, Russia has effectively degraded Ukrainian military forces with long range artillery and rocket fire. Russia’s preferred concept of operations has been to keep its fires units at a safe distance, while relying on drones, counter-battery radars, and other intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets to target over the horizon.12 The observed combination of increased range and precision tracks with a general trend noted worldwide, particularly with multiple rocket launchers. As a result, Russia has on numerous occasions successfully blunted Ukrainian operations while avoiding significant casualties. Ukraine, on the other hand, is estimated to have suffered 80% of its casualties from artillery fire.13 The increased lethality has required fewer rounds, yet Russia has also demonstrated that it retains the ability to mass large volumes of fires when necessary."

"A defining feature of Russian fires has been their speed. Ukrainian units report that once a
Russian unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is spotted they may receive artillery strikes within
minutes."

https://nsiteam.com/social/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/NS-D-10367-Learning-Lessons-from-Ukraine-Conflict-Final.pdf

 

These by Karber - there is no grey area here and plenty more which we could fill pages with.  Yes, the Russian proxy forces did suck but these were not Russian "hybrids" by any stretch, it was not until summer '14 thru winter '15 that RA conventional forces got fully in the game, and even then highly constrained because - denial.  Once those conventional forces got into the game they appeared to largely dominate the battlespace and a series of major reversals on the UA ensued.  

This surprised the hell out of everyone - I was in FD at the time - because exactly as you note "Russia has been sucking" at conventional war since the end of the Cold War, from Chechnya thru Georgia.  Suddenly this yokel military was doing things that we could not do, particularly with integration of tactical fires.  But...and it is a big "but" (tee hee) even Karber saw some holes that point to the fact that all was not sunshine and roses on the RA side:

Ah ha!  To my old eye this speaks to 1) lack of PGM integration and 2) a rigid system that can deliver very fast but lacks agility to switch on the fly.  So what?  Well in the intervening 8 years the UA adapted to highly dispersed and more mobile warfare.  There is a lot more out there on how in 2014 the Russian's did not suck tactically and even hints they got their act together operationally - but nowhere near enough for 2022.  Finally the results also speak for themselves as the outcome of the war was clearly a Russian win - even with only gaining half of the Donbas, the Russian failure was translating a tactical win to a strategic one.  In fact it appears that Putin simply "post-truthed" the entire thing and called it a strategic win, when it was not.   We could fill a lot more forum space on this but in the end Ukraine was not cowed and subserviently accepting Russian dominance, they pivoted heavily to the west - we started our training missions there then - and conducted major military reforms exactly because they had suffered battlefield defeats.  It is on Putin and Russia for 1) giving Ukraine the breathing room and 2) convincing themselves of their own superiority.  Both factors led directly to the debacle of this war.  In fact Putin likely set in motion the very reasons for this war - a westward facing Ukraine looking seriously at NATO.

So rather than playing "Russia Sucks" and "No It Doesn't - UA rulez" because it is frankly going to get us nowhere lets have a conversation on what the real issue is in the early assessment of this war and why it went largely wrong.  I offer it had nothing to do with "Russia Sucks" or "Russia Rulz" and everything to do with two key factors in the analysis - context and scaling, the pitfalls of effective military assessment. (that is right folks, the deep truths are very often the least sexy).

So the primary issue with pre-war assessments - and I am talking for both the west and Russia - as far as I can can tell is that they took the tactical performance of the RA in 2014 1) out of context, 2) failed to properly understand the challenges of scaling and 3) applied very poor alignment of that scaling.

So what is The_Capt talking about?

Well context is the first daemon people did not slay.  Karber glanced off it and many cautioned against directly translating the phenomenon of 2014 over to this war but it looks like everyone did it to some extent anyway. 

In other work we studied global pandemics for various reasons, the fact we were in one being the primary, and we found that pandemics are not unlike wars when looking at macro and micro social constructs.  It causes similar tensions, vertical and horizontal, and reaches deeply into human psyche.  But that is not my point here, the major conclusion was that pandemics are like wars in that each has commonality between events but also is each unique in its context.  There will only ever be one COVID-19 pandemic.  In ten years COVID could take a twist to the left and do its gig, but the context will be very different.  Primarily, it would occur in a post-COVID 19 world.  The trick in pandemics and wars is being able to identify what is a trend and what is an isolated phenomenon, and how we do this is through careful analysis of context.  

So the 2014 war was very small by the standards of this one.  Russian involvement at the strategic level had major issues - one of which I just explained up there.  Russia demonstrated acumen in strategic subversive warfare - and frankly I have read and heard plenty that we probably over estimated this as well - however, they had no strategic follow through and displayed a lot of poor assumptions and biases both going into and out of 2014.  It was no strategic masterpiece and we should have expected a strategic mess in this war as this was a visible trend from way back to Chechnya.  Further it was made unfixable largely due to political interference.

Next, there were signals that at the operational level the RA was still operating under an old ruleset.  My take away from Steve's posted citations was likely problems with the RA logistical system and the lack of operational enablers.  The Russian issues with operational level of warfare were not really that evident but there were plenty of indications that all was not perfect either.

Tactically, we have already discussed at length but here is where context left the building.  Ok, so 4000 RA conventional troops summer '14, which is what? about 3 BTGs? - managed to score some pretty impressive points against a military that was clearly not prepared for what they brought.  But this does not immediately translate to the entire RA, nor does it mean the RA could do this at a different scale.  Assessing tactical success or failure without context is nearly useless - we learned that in places like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan the hard way.  Further onto the real punchline - tactical success or failure without full understanding of scaling is not useless, it is dangerous as hell.

So scaling can go up or down, and the major failure in understanding this war from a lot of the experts was the assumptions on scaling the RA in both directions.  First there was taking the tactical performance in 2014 and upscaling it.  It was a huge leap, and frankly pretty amateur for the pay grades of some of these experts, to take the observed RA tactical "wows" and upscale them through the operational level to the strategic. The level of complexity and investment to make those "wows" happen on a larger scope and scale, let alone synchronize them is a challenge for the US military who is spending the most on military capability in the history of our species (ok, and before the Prussian, Mongol and Spartan lovers jump in...per capita exceptions accepted...gawd, I hate all you so much).  It was an enormous leap of logic to think that Russia would walk out of phonebooth as a super-military able to do something the US and western allies would think twice about - the upscaling challenges were (and are) frankly humbling.

Now because chaos rules in this universe, it is a bit less of a leap to say badness upscales, I will give you that; however, it is also a risky venture.  Less so for outcomes but it masks a whole lot of the macro-issues, which frankly if Russia ever did solve for, we should be concerned because by definition it will mean they understand their weakness and can learn from them.

So at the beginning of this war, we had a lot of experts who had spent 8 years upscaling 2014 and then failed to down-scale when the war actually happened...seriously?!  A whole lot of wargames and operational research showed the RA in Kyiv in less than a week.  Wargames in the Baltics showed the same Russian blitzkriegs.  So, ok, lets forget that Russian superiority at the strategic and operational level was in doubt even from 2014, failure to downscale and actually test the Russian "wows" against what they were going to be facing at the tactical level (and we had a very good idea what the UA was capable of at the tactical level - we had been training with them for years).  In the business we call this macro-masking, which is where macro calculus fails to take into account micro-phenomenon across a broad range of samples. 

For example, if all the experts had loaded pre-war scenarios into CMBS they would have seen that battlefield friction had gone up significantly.  So if your dice rolls at the operational level say "the RA will advance in three days", well test out that advance across a range of tactical vignettes and lo and behold it did not go so well because it turns out that global ISR advantage, plus smart-ATGMs, plus PGM against what the RA could bring to the party pointed squarely to rethinking those stupid operational dice tables. 

So what?  Well over here in CM land we were looking for other things than those at the macro-table.  The (very expensive) experts with lot of letters behind their names were watching the big red lines on the country map because that is how they played their games.  We were looking at a lot of abandoned Russian equipment - and I mean a lot of very valuable equipment.  We were seeing a steady stream of hi res UAS video coming out of Ukraine on a daily basis when we should not be seeing anything.  We saw RA combined arms fall apart, right along with their logistics as demonstrated by F ech vehicles out of gas and burning re-fuelers.  It did not take a major leap at this altitude to know there was really loud dangerous sounds coming out of the RA engine room, while mainstream was waiting for Kyiv to fall.  However, we also understood upscaling as well.  The effect of the tactical mess spread along most operational axis was consistent - as was the complete lack of operational integration.  Targeting, air support, logistics and the list goes on - the RA was fighting 5-6 separate 2014s, not a coherent and integrated joint operation designed to collapse Ukrainian option spaces.  

So, so what?  Well sitting around and patting ourselves on the back is about as helpful as circle-jerking does for procreation. I think we have established we were, and still are to some extent ahead of the curve - no point dancing a jig on that one.  What we need to do is fully understand what is happening on the ground on this war, what is a trend and what is isolated context.  I am not really interested in what I think I know, I am interested in what I know I do not know.  For example, the old Capt has gone on about mass...at length.  Well if the utility of military mass has shifted, even slightly, the repercussions are profound - one need only study WW1 and WW2 to see why.  Do the principles of war even still apply?  Is conventional manoeuvre warfare still a thing? Is the tank dead? What the hell just happened?  

The point of a highly distributed collective "brain" as we have developed here on this little forum is to try and understand the events better - to inform and create cognitive advantage.  So this is not about sitting around and feeling good watching RA soldier have a bad last day, nor self-validation or promoting/reinforcing echo-chamber; it is about collective learning about war through what is happening in this one...and what better place to do that than a bunch of computer wargamers with far too much time on their hands? 

  

 

 

Edited November 10, 2022 by The_Capt

[Beleg85]

4 minutes ago, billbindc said:

From what is out there already, I'd be less worried about some sort of Stalingrad occurring. First of all, Ukraine does not have any pressing need to take the city immediately. It can wait. Second, it seems at the moment that this is less a retreat now than the entire salient coming unstuck.

As to the second part agree, it seems something goes very bad for Russian forces. Entire Mykolaiv region liberated.

 

[Haiduk]

Chkalove liberated

Stanislav liberated

[Battlefront.com]

15 minutes ago, The_MonkeyKing said:

looks pretty bad.

And by "bad" you mean "great!"

Steve

[The_Capt]

39 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

This is where we have to put our CM hats on and think of the difference between defenders who are Fanatics and those who are Conscripts.  ISIS fought to the death because they were, in the words of many analysts, a "death cult".  Meaning, they viewed dying for their cause as a goal (in a sense).  I don't think there are many Russians that believe dying in Kherson just to take out a couple more Ukrainians is a good thing.

Steve

So how fast can a conscript become a fanatic?  They likely have similar levels of training and equipment - but as you point out motivation is the key. 

I am not sure but the RA seemed to be able to hold onto the wrong side of a river for "reasons" for a couple months.  Not sure what the calculus of RA defenders in Kherson would be thinking.  Some are likely going to be "screw this", frag their officers and surrender. Others might be a little more hardcore, especially if they have been on the wrong end of the UA previous to this.  All war is personal, is a major point Clausewitz missed.

The narrative on the RA tends to migrate based on how people want to cast them in the worst light.  They are savage drunken mad dogs who need to be put down in one context, bumbling idiots over here, and now at Kherson a bunch of surrender monkeys each with white flags in their packs.  My bet is that the RA is a combination of all three and maybe a pinch of troops that actually know what they are doing and are fine with killing as many UA as possible, largely because the UA is trying to do the same to them.

Regardless, unless the UA can jedi-mind trick the forces in Kherson into an easy surrender (and given the treatment of Russian PoWs I would not rule this out), caution will be merited if they even to decide to take it on...which frankly I am not sure they need to for military reasons.

[Haiduk]

Harvesting of abandoned Ruissian armor in Kherson oblast

 

Edited November 10, 2022 by Haiduk

[danfrodo]

Wow, things are moving fast in Kherson.  And now we all wait to see if the alleged orderly withdrawal turns to panic.  Once the cannons are in range of the ferry crossings I am betting a lot of panic.  

[Haiduk]

UKR SOF destroyed two Russian BMDs

 

[The_MonkeyKing]

If we compare this to Dunkirk in troops and the distances the distances are similar but the troops amounts are about 10% of that in Dunkirk. Timescale seems to be similar.

 

 

Map of France overlaid:

[Haiduk]

3 minutes ago, danfrodo said:

Wow, things are moving fast in Kherson.  And now we all wait to see if the alleged orderly withdrawal turns to panic.  Once the cannons are in range of the ferry crossings I am betting a lot of panic.  

Most of Russian troops already on left bank. UKR troops advance with cautions, because many mines on the roads, destroyed bridges and hazard of anbushes