How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Lethaface]

9 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Is it just me, or do people feel the videos show more Russians in one place at one time than in previous points in the war?  Seems like we're routinely seeing platoon sized units being hit, but prior to this it was more like squad sized units.  Totally unscientific gut feeling, of course.

As for the videos, several of the incoming rounds can be seen apparently entering at a flat angle from several different locations off to the left.  But those explosions look too big to be from tank fire.  I was thinking maybe direct 105mm fire, but the multiple angles seems unlikely.  Thoughts?

Steve

125mm HE FRAG looked at from a thermal optic?  But seems there is some arc and the shells seem to be travelling to slow for direct fire tank shells?  

[billbindc]

8 hours ago, danfrodo said:

1762 pages and someone finally references The Exalted One, The Magnificent and Peerless, Greatest of All Gods, Tom Waits

One of my few claims to fame is that of having seen Tom Waits live...three times. I'll show myself out.

[Lethaface]

27 minutes ago, Huba said:

Does the "Western level" even exist in near-peer conventional war setting?

Good question, not on the same level as it was in Iraq/Afghanistan etc that's for sure. Well unless the near-peer airforce is defunct enough to allow helicopter casevac.

But theoretically if NATO goes to war they'll be able to setup decent casevac logistics and at least have enough vehicles etc. 

Edit: @The_MonkeyKing posted a video interview by Lindy Beige the other day which had some anecdotal info about this. Good interview BTW. I often forget to thank people for posting interesting links because after I finished reading /watching it the thread or my day has moved on

Edited December 1, 2022 by Lethaface

[Kinophile]

Making the  "first hour" viable for helo evac is yet another reason for GIVE THEM THE WEAPONS. 

SEAD is a strategic operational tactical necessity. 

[Lethaface]

5 minutes ago, Kinophile said:

Making the  "first hour" viable for helo evac is yet another reason for GIVE THEM THE WEAPONS. 

SEAD is a strategic operational tactical necessity. 

Giving them the weapons requires also giving them the logistics, case in point is the logistics for the western supplied howitzers. Keeping them operational is already a big challenge, let alone if we add brigades of heavy advanced stuff with which Ukraine doesn't have experience / infrastructure in place. 

But I guess this topic has been discussed quite a lot here already.

[Kinophile]

32 minutes ago, Lethaface said:

Giving them the weapons requires also giving them the logistics, case in point is the logistics for the western supplied howitzers. Keeping them operational is already a big challenge, let alone if we add brigades of heavy advanced stuff with which Ukraine doesn't have experience / infrastructure in place. 

But I guess this topic has been discussed quite a lot here already.

Ah now, of course I'm not saying just pallet drop a bunch M1s and problem solved. 

But it is probably more accurate to say:

Give Them The Doctrinal Staff Level Advanced Training, logistical Infrastructure, Systemic Rebuild & Moderninzation, Integration Into Western Procurement Standards & Processes, etc etc

... But I'm lazy 

[Lethaface]

8 minutes ago, Kinophile said:

Ah now, of course I'm not saying just pallet drop a bunch M1s and problem solved. 

But it is probably more accurate to say:

Give Them The Doctrinal Staff Level Advanced Training, logistical Infrastructure, Systemic Rebuild & Moderninzation, Integration Into Western Procurement Standards & Processes, etc etc

... But I'm lazy 

FWIW I read/heard that the recent program by a number of states upgrading/supplying more T-72s was very helpful welcome in Ukraine.

Not that I'm against those idea's but not sure if given the opportunity cost for Ukraine that is now a wise choice (apart from starting up quartermaster efforts / training the future trainers etc). Something I'm quite sure is already done on various subjects.

In this thread we want to know everything but that's generally not how it's done. If we can know everything, Russia does as well. Better keep them guessing.

[Beleg85]

Regarding drone warfare, curious development from Indian army...It would be so ironic if it would work out in real life.

 

[The_Capt]

On 11/30/2022 at 3:42 AM, Kinophile said:

RUSI higher level overview of the UKR and RUS performances in the war so far. 

https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/special-resources/preliminary-lessons-conventional-warfighting-russias-invasion-ukraine-february-july-2022

Jack Watling et al. 

Full Pdf here. 

I knew it was high,  but I thought maybe 75%.  So yah, Drones functionally = munitions. 

 

Definitely wanted to weigh in on this one.  So there was an earlier draft out of RUSI but this is likely one of the most comprehensive analysis/assessments of the first 6 months of the war - outside of our little forum here, of course.  There is nothing in the summaries and conclusions that does not match a lot of what we have been seeing and saying on this forum - at least in the main.  So if you are following this war with us here at BFC, I highly recommend downloading the document and giving it a good going over, you will walk away smarter and with what appears to my eyes a very objective and balanced narrative of the first two phases: Russian invasion & Battle for the Donbas, or perhaps it was really a single strategic phase - the Russian Offensive.

However, I would caution that this is a "Preliminary" analysis, it is in the title.  It is incomplete, and in at least one or two spots that incompleteness is leading to what I think are incomplete conclusions.  Even being likely the best professional analysis we have seen what struck me most about this document is "what it did not say" - there are a lot of gaps here in both scope and scale.  I do not think they are deliberate or a result of laziness at all.  The authors state up front in the introduction "This report is methodologically problematic" because they could only employ data that was provided to them by the UA General staff.  That is not small but that data was filtered - they note this as well - for OPSEC and political sensitivity reasons.  Further there is massive amounts of data missing that will be required for a more accurate picture.  Data from the other two parties in this war - Russia and The West.  A lot of deductions on Russian intent, capability and performance are made here without a lot from those other two data streams, so I am very cautious in accepting gospel at this point.  So that said up front I will dig into this with some initial takeaways/observations for any who are interested:

Pre-Invasion

So this pretty much confirms what we suspected from very early on - Russian had only planned for a 10 day "war".  Russia, like many in the west, way over-estimated the relative symmetry and competitive advantage at the outset of this war.  Russia, like many western analysts, were using outdated concepts and metrics with respect to mass while at the same time were way over-estimating their own capabilities and readiness.  Russian planners were experiencing what has been referred to a progressive unreality, which is a fancy way of saying they built a house of cards on a foundation of shifting sand.

Russian "shock and awe" through operational surprise was a flawed concept in the 21st century.  It appears the UA was initially somewhat dislocated, the authors even go so far to say that Russian operational surprise was achieved by convincing the UA that the main effort would be the Donbas:

"As it became apparent that the Gomel axis was the enemy’s main effort and that another group of forces would
strike through Chernihiv, a redeployment of Ukrainian forces was ordered approximately seven hours prior to the invasion. This took considerable time. The result was that many Ukrainian units were not at their assigned defensive positions when the invasion began and, especially on the northern axes, were not in prepared positions."

So this highlights a really important missing peice from this whole analysis - the role of western ISR.  I have no doubt the authors and UA General Staff scrubbed any mention of this from the data used for many very good reasons.  But given the massive pre-war ISR effort by the west and the open-door policy with respect to intel from the US - how on earth did the UA miss the indicators on the Gomel axis?  This one sounds very weird to my ears and there is definitely a story here that is going to need unpacking.  Was there a failure in western ISR?  Was there a breakdown in communications?  Did UA planners fall for progressive unreality of their own?

It appears that Russia bet the entire farm on "the mighty Russian bear" in a series of increasingly unrealistic assumptions, built upon unrealistic assumptions.  Here we hit the other missing peice - what was the actual Russian thinking?  We cannot know this from data given - although authors lean in pretty hard, and I am not sure we will ever get a full Russian internal picture.  

Initial Invasion

The big takeaway for me here was the serious disparity in RA C4ISR and catastrophic misalignment in the levels of warfare.  There were a lot of systemic targeting problems and the failure to establish operational pre-conditions in favor of operational surprise - destruction of transportation and communications infrastructure.  However the indicators of lack of targeting enterprise integration are pretty bold:

"A critical weakness of the Russian strike campaign was battle damage assessment. First, the Russian military appears to have presumed that if an action had been ordered and carried out then it had succeeded, unless there was direct evidence to the contrary."

This speaks to a fundamentally flawed Russian joint targeting enterprise.  Further confirmation bias is pure poison in warfighting.  It causes can be so deep that there are examples worse than what we saw in the first days of the war.  In Russia's case they seem to be a combination of deep cultural biases combined with a rigid military-political hierarchy where "push back" or critical thinking is simply not a thing.  There is a fear in every military that the worst thing that can happen is "the death of formation" - the military organization collapsing into an armed mob.  Russia demonstrated in the initial invasion of Ukraine that the only thing worse than taking a military mob to war is taking a military cult.  

Based on what I can see the failure in the first three days was a combination of very poor planning and preparation, failure to establish operational pre-conditions and way under-estimating the complexity of the operation while at the same time way over-estimating the RA's capabilities.  In much more blunt terms, from a military operational point of view it was amateur hour.  Russia had not undertaken an offensive operation of this scope, size and scale since the Second World War, and they figured it would be "2014+ a little bit".  When the reality is that complexity and friction do not scale linearly - they do so exponentially; Ukraine 2022 was not 2x harder than 2014, it was 2 orders of magnitude (100x) more difficult and clearly the RA was not prepared for it.

Battle for Kyiv

To my mind this is the biggest blank spot in the document.  Even given the RA poor performance in the first 72 hours, they were able to achieve "12:1" force ratios on the Gomel axis towards Kyiv.  The authors appear to lay the majority blame for the RA stalling and eventual collapse largely on tactical "confusion".  They point out the BTG as a flawed concept - which frankly does not track as it mirrors western Battlegroup and TF constructs very closely.  Very few militaries have permanent combined arms units - they are largely modular by design.  So when the authors highlight:

"In addition to BTGs being units that had not trained together and lacking staff who knew one another, they were also non-uniform in their composition. These deviations did not appear to derive from the tasks they were assigned but instead arose from the equipment available from the units that generated them. Yet, to commanders at higher echelons, the Russian battle management appeared to treat all BTGs as comparable units of action with no tailoring of tasks to their respective capabilities. When military advances are used as a mere demonstration of force this would not have been critical. But once the force tried to transition to fighting, units were now assigned tasks for which they were poorly equipped.

As an example, consider the composition of two BTGs, which operated in almost the same area in the east of Ukraine at the end of April 2022. One of them was from the 228th Motor Rifle Regiment of the 90th Armoured Division of the Central Military District (Svatove district): 23 APCs; six tanks; a 122-mm selfpropelled artillery battery; three MLRS BM-21 ‘Grad’; up to 40 vehicles; and about 400 personnel. Another was from the composition of the 57th Motor Rifle Brigade of the 5th Army of the Eastern Military District (Rubizhne district): more than 30 infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs); 14 tanks; a 122-mm self-propelled artillery battery; a 152-mm self-propelled artillery battery; a MLRS BM-21 ‘Grad’ battery; up to 60 vehicles; and about 800 personnel."

So I find this confusing and lacking.  So how were the 228th MRR and 57th MRB BTG mis-employed?  It alludes to higher level RA commanders treating all BTGs as uniform and failure to "task tailor" and I really want to see the evidence of this.  The lack of uniformity is very common throughout modern militaries all over the place.  When I look at these two BTGs I see one "light" and one "heavy" - so what?  How was the 228th asked to do a job it was not capable of?

Again, what is really missing here is "what killed the RA north of Kyiv" because tactical confusion was very likely a contributing factor but the UA took on an opponent with a 12:1 force ration advantage and that opponent pulled out a month later in tatters.  A lot of themes here to unpack - zombie orders, complete lack of operational/tactical C2 integration, capability misalignment and logistical issues (only alluded to).  But while all of this definitely contributes to operational system strain - it does not blow up the amount of hardware we saw unfold on Oryx.  

From my read the UA held off a 12:1 force overmatch with a couple artillery brigades, SOF and ad hoc TD units - who "did not have enough ATGMs to really make a difference anyway?"  So the RA drove towards Kyiv - its main effort - in a confused and rambling fashion.  Sat on the roads in "tactical confusion" and lack of air superiority for a month while the UA killed them like freakin buffalo, largely with indirect fire from two formations?  Huh?

So here I think we need a lot more depth.  How many RA vehicles were killed by indirect fire and how much indirect fire?  How was that indirect fire targeted?  Where was the RA c-battery: did the RA really just sit there and let UA artillery hammer them without responsing?  How many vehicles were killed by those ATGMs?

[aside: I am pretty confused by the ATGM assessment to be honest.  The UA did not have enough ATGW to make a difference:

"The tactical employment of ATGWs by the UAF prior to the conflict was largely aimed at fixing or blunting enemy armoured manoeuvre and for use in raiding by light forces because of the speed with which units with these systems could displace. There were too few missiles, however, for these to be the primary means of attriting enemy forces."

Ok, well earlier they note that the UA had purchased close to 20,000 soviet-style and homemade ATGMs after 2014.  to which they received about 3000 Javelins and NLAWs.  So what did all that do to "attirting" enemy forces?  What was the effect of "raiding" on an already confused RA.  What was the role of integration of those light forces and indirect fires.?]

On the Battle of Kyiv I am left with far more questions than answers, and a whole lot here is still not adding up.  Again, missing is the role western ISR support played.  RA troops broad casting in "the clear" is not great but it cannot explain the level of precision lethality to effectively cold-stop a military system with the kind of over-match the RA had.  If western space-based ISR was fully engaged the fact that the RA used cellphones is not why they died - it was because they could be seen from space in real time.  While the RA clearly lacked the same.

Tanks?  Critical and the UA had lots...but mostly for indirect fire....WTF?!  There are so many weird sounds with respect to military mass coming out of all this it is starting to sound like a piano being fed into a woodchipper to me.

EW and UAS - wow.  Ok, so clearly this is what the environment looks like with UAS being very effectively countered.  This is not open skies, the RA has been knocking these things down like crazy and yet it has not really helped them as UA unmanned is still being used to great effect.  And again, EW is going to do nothing against higher altitude and space-based systems. 

Battle for the Donbas

Really no surprises here - we did see a lot of this here on the forum.  The political spin on why the UA did not simply pull out and stayed and fought was very interesting - i.e. war crimes in occupied areas effect.   The density of RA fires and essentially human wave attacks really highlight something else with respect to mass - the unbearable weight requirement.  So in order for the RA to achieve enough overmatch they had to concentrate so much that mobility was basically sacrificed.  They appear the limiting factor on the rates of advance in the Donbas because moving all those guns with their ammo could not be done quickly.  This appears to be what "dumb mass" risks on the modern battlefield.

I am stumped however, on why the RA never achieved breakthrough.  The massive sacrifices of the UA cannot be understated here but was that the thin blue and yellow line that held off all that weight?  Or was there something else going on to explain why after literally annihilating ground with HE, the RA was never able to breakthrough and manoeuvre?  What was the comparative UA density in these areas?

After this I am getting the sense that the Donbas was a modern day version of Verdun as the RA broke itself further for very little gain.  The damage to the UA and how much it was able to push-back is incomplete, so the nature of how this contest unfolded is unclear.  What we do know is that the RA lost the offensive after Donbas, and the UA picked it up. 

Conclusions

Despite leaning in hard and taking risks in some parts of this assessment - e.g the inner working of the RA.  The authors are actually pretty cautious their conclusions.  These are all sound but my take away is, again, something happened to military mass in this war.  "No Sanctuary" and "Disperse or Die" are basically the same point - the traditional use of mass is beyond challenged, it has proven fatal to the RA. I am very interested on how the UA employed dispersion throughout this war, particularly on the offensive.  "Fighting for the Right to Precision" is very interesting, and I think hints at the "cloud-based warfare" we have been tossing around: however, it also lacks the effects of western space based ISR.  I am convinced that fighting for the right of precision will extend into space and cyber (which gets mentioned exactly twice in the entire document).  Further as unmanned systems get smarter I am more convinced that "Fighting through Precision" is the emerging theme.

For example I have used the term "anti-mass" a few times.  This appears to be a combination of speed and precision combined to create a pressure wave of smart-attrition to systematically deconstruct an opponents operational system.  Further precision is becoming a key component in survivability.  The document alludes to this:

"Precision is not only vastly more efficient in the effects it delivers but also allows the force to reduce its logistics tail and thereby makes it more survivable. Precision weapons, however, are scarce and can be defeated by EW ."

I am left wondering what happens when precision weapons are no longer scarce and ISR clouds that go from sub-surface to space are created that cannot be defeated by EW?

Finally the "significant slack capacity" point is at odds with precision, or perhaps they are mutually supporting in reality.  Precision really means very high efficiency combined with effectiveness.  So one does not need massive amounts of dumb war stocks, but one may need massive amounts of smart-war stocks because they are now on the critical path.  I do not think either side in this war has fully expressed what mass-precision looks like but the UA is coming damned close.

The_Capt's axiom update:

Mass beats isolation, connected precision beat mass, integrated massed precision beats everything.

Re-thinking War

I am coming to a growing sense that warfare is in need of a serious rethink.  We have principles and foundations that remain unchanged - e.g. selection and maint of the aim, morale, attrition.  But we have others that are looking more and more as though they are in the wind - surprise, manoeuvre, concentration of mass.  I think we need to start looking through different lens's and frameworks, as many of our old ones are challenged.  Our planning processes and how we make assumptions, how we define "decision" and "victory".  How we think about the translation of military power - to capability - to effect - to decisions and outcomes.  How we think about capability itself.  To my mind this is a good thing, if we do it ahead of evolution.  Whether or not we are in a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) is an entirely different question.  Many thought we were in the 90s and early 00's but it kind of petered out.  I suspect RMAs take longer than a couple decades to culminate so we could very well be in the middle of one; however, it is very hard to say without more evidence. 

I can only say the best course is to keep watching carefully, critically and continuously as you can.  For me the progress of this war has been both terrible, wasteful and simply tragic.  It has also been professionally mesmerizing - the entire point of mastery of warfare is so you do not have to fight one, or if you do it is short and sharp as possible.  The lessons from this war all point to reinforcing the primacy of this idea. 

   

  

[billbindc]

44 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Definitely wanted to weigh in on this one.  So there was an earlier draft out of RUSI but this is likely one of the most comprehensive analysis/assessments of the first 6 months of the war - outside of our little forum here, of course.  There is nothing in the summaries and conclusions that does not match a lot of what we have been seeing and saying on this forum - at least in the main.  So if you are following this war with us here at BFC, I highly recommend downloading the document and giving it a good going over, you will walk away smarter and with what appears to my eyes a very objective and balanced narrative of the first two phases: Russian invasion & Battle for the Donbas, or perhaps it was really a single strategic phase - the Russian Offensive.

However, I would caution that this is a "Preliminary" analysis, it is in the title.  It is incomplete, and in at least one or two spots that incompleteness is leading to what I think are incomplete conclusions.  Even being likely the best professional analysis we have seen what struck me most about this document is "what it did not say" - there are a lot of gaps here in both scope and scale.  I do not think they are deliberate or a result of laziness at all.  The authors state up front in the introduction "This report is methodologically problematic" because they could only employ data that was provided to them by the UA General staff.  That is not small but that data was filtered - they note this as well - for OPSEC and political sensitivity reasons.  Further there is massive amounts of data missing that will be required for a more accurate picture.  Data from the other two parties in this war - Russia and The West.  A lot of deductions on Russian intent, capability and performance are made here without a lot from those other two data streams, so I am very cautious in accepting gospel at this point.  So that said up front I will dig into this with some initial takeaways/observations for any who are interested:

Pre-Invasion

So this pretty much confirms what we suspected from very early on - Russian had only planned for a 10 day "war".  Russia, like many in the west, way over-estimated the relative symmetry and competitive advantage at the outset of this war.  Russia, like many western analysts, were using outdated concepts and metrics with respect to mass while at the same time were way over-estimating their own capabilities and readiness.  Russian planners were experiencing what has been referred to a progressive unreality, which is a fancy way of saying they built a house of cards on a foundation of shifting sand.

Russian "shock and awe" through operational surprise was a flawed concept in the 21st century.  It appears the UA was initially somewhat dislocated, the authors even go so far to say that Russian operational surprise was achieved by convincing the UA that the main effort would be the Donbas:

"As it became apparent that the Gomel axis was the enemy’s main effort and that another group of forces would
strike through Chernihiv, a redeployment of Ukrainian forces was ordered approximately seven hours prior to the invasion. This took considerable time. The result was that many Ukrainian units were not at their assigned defensive positions when the invasion began and, especially on the northern axes, were not in prepared positions."

So this highlights a really important missing peice from this whole analysis - the role of western ISR.  I have no doubt the authors and UA General Staff scrubbed any mention of this from the data used for many very good reasons.  But given the massive pre-war ISR effort by the west and the open-door policy with respect to intel from the US - how on earth did the UA miss the indicators on the Gomel axis?  This one sounds very weird to my ears and there is definitely a story here that is going to need unpacking.  Was there a failure in western ISR?  Was there a breakdown in communications?  Did UA planners fall for progressive unreality of their own?

It appears that Russia bet the entire farm on "the mighty Russian bear" in a series of increasingly unrealistic assumptions, built upon unrealistic assumptions.  Here we hit the other missing peice - what was the actual Russian thinking?  We cannot know this from data given - although authors lean in pretty hard, and I am not sure we will ever get a full Russian internal picture.  

Initial Invasion

The big takeaway for me here was the serious disparity in RA C4ISR and catastrophic misalignment in the levels of warfare.  There were a lot of systemic targeting problems and the failure to establish operational pre-conditions in favor of operational surprise - destruction of transportation and communications infrastructure.  However the indicators of lack of targeting enterprise integration are pretty bold:

"A critical weakness of the Russian strike campaign was battle damage assessment. First, the Russian military appears to have presumed that if an action had been ordered and carried out then it had succeeded, unless there was direct evidence to the contrary."

This speaks to a fundamentally flawed Russian joint targeting enterprise.  Further confirmation bias is pure poison in warfighting.  It causes can be so deep that there are examples worse than what we saw in the first days of the war.  In Russia's case they seem to be a combination of deep cultural biases combined with a rigid military-political hierarchy where "push back" or critical thinking is simply not a thing.  There is a fear in every military that the worst thing that can happen is "the death of formation" - the military organization collapsing into an armed mob.  Russia demonstrated in the initial invasion of Ukraine that the only thing worse than taking a military mob to war is taking a military cult.  

Based on what I can see the failure in the first three days was a combination of very poor planning and preparation, failure to establish operational pre-conditions and way under-estimating the complexity of the operation while at the same time way over-estimating the RA's capabilities.  In much more blunt terms, from a military operational point of view it was amateur hour.  Russia had not undertaken an offensive operation of this scope, size and scale since the Second World War, and they figured it would be "2014+ a little bit".  When the reality is that complexity and friction do not scale linearly - they do so exponentially; Ukraine 2022 was not 2x harder than 2014, it was 2 orders of magnitude (100x) more difficult and clearly the RA was not prepared for it.

Battle for Kyiv

To my mind this is the biggest blank spot in the document.  Even given the RA poor performance in the first 72 hours, they were able to achieve "12:1" force ratios on the Gomel axis towards Kyiv.  The authors appear to lay the majority blame for the RA stalling and eventual collapse largely on tactical "confusion".  They point out the BTG as a flawed concept - which frankly does not track as it mirrors western Battlegroup and TF constructs very closely.  Very few militaries have permanent combined arms units - they are largely modular by design.  So when the authors highlight:

"In addition to BTGs being units that had not trained together and lacking staff who knew one another, they were also non-uniform in their composition. These deviations did not appear to derive from the tasks they were assigned but instead arose from the equipment available from the units that generated them. Yet, to commanders at higher echelons, the Russian battle management appeared to treat all BTGs as comparable units of action with no tailoring of tasks to their respective capabilities. When military advances are used as a mere demonstration of force this would not have been critical. But once the force tried to transition to fighting, units were now assigned tasks for which they were poorly equipped.

As an example, consider the composition of two BTGs, which operated in almost the same area in the east of Ukraine at the end of April 2022. One of them was from the 228th Motor Rifle Regiment of the 90th Armoured Division of the Central Military District (Svatove district): 23 APCs; six tanks; a 122-mm selfpropelled artillery battery; three MLRS BM-21 ‘Grad’; up to 40 vehicles; and about 400 personnel. Another was from the composition of the 57th Motor Rifle Brigade of the 5th Army of the Eastern Military District (Rubizhne district): more than 30 infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs); 14 tanks; a 122-mm self-propelled artillery battery; a 152-mm self-propelled artillery battery; a MLRS BM-21 ‘Grad’ battery; up to 60 vehicles; and about 800 personnel."

So I find this confusing and lacking.  So how were the 228th MRR and 57th MRB BTG mis-employed?  It alludes to higher level RA commanders treating all BTGs as uniform and failure to "task tailor" and I really want to see the evidence of this.  The lack of uniformity is very common throughout modern militaries all over the place.  When I look at these two BTGs I see one "light" and one "heavy" - so what?  How was the 228th asked to do a job it was not capable of?

Again, what is really missing here is "what killed the RA north of Kyiv" because tactical confusion was very likely a contributing factor but the UA took on an opponent with a 12:1 force ration advantage and that opponent pulled out a month later in tatters.  A lot of themes here to unpack - zombie orders, complete lack of operational/tactical C2 integration, capability misalignment and logistical issues (only alluded to).  But while all of this definitely contributes to operational system strain - it does not blow up the amount of hardware we saw unfold on Oryx.  

From my read the UA held off a 12:1 force overmatch with a couple artillery brigades, SOF and ad hoc TD units - who "did not have enough ATGMs to really make a difference anyway?"  So the RA drove towards Kyiv - its main effort - in a confused and rambling fashion.  Sat on the roads in "tactical confusion" and lack of air superiority for a month while the UA killed them like freakin buffalo, largely with indirect fire from two formations?  Huh?

So here I think we need a lot more depth.  How many RA vehicles were killed by indirect fire and how much indirect fire?  How was that indirect fire targeted?  Where was the RA c-battery: did the RA really just sit there and let UA artillery hammer them without responsing?  How many vehicles were killed by those ATGMs?

[aside: I am pretty confused by the ATGM assessment to be honest.  The UA did not have enough ATGW to make a difference:

"The tactical employment of ATGWs by the UAF prior to the conflict was largely aimed at fixing or blunting enemy armoured manoeuvre and for use in raiding by light forces because of the speed with which units with these systems could displace. There were too few missiles, however, for these to be the primary means of attriting enemy forces."

Ok, well earlier they note that the UA had purchased close to 20,000 soviet-style and homemade ATGMs after 2014.  to which they received about 3000 Javelins and NLAWs.  So what did all that do to "attirting" enemy forces?  What was the effect of "raiding" on an already confused RA.  What was the role of integration of those light forces and indirect fires.?]

On the Battle of Kyiv I am left with far more questions than answers, and a whole lot here is still not adding up.  Again, missing is the role western ISR support played.  RA troops broad casting in "the clear" is not great but it cannot explain the level of precision lethality to effectively cold-stop a military system with the kind of over-match the RA had.  If western space-based ISR was fully engaged the fact that the RA used cellphones is not why they died - it was because they could be seen from space in real time.  While the RA clearly lacked the same.

Tanks?  Critical and the UA had lots...but mostly for indirect fire....WTF?!  There are so many weird sounds with respect to military mass coming out of all this it is starting to sound like a piano being fed into a woodchipper to me.

EW and UAS - wow.  Ok, so clearly this is what the environment looks like with UAS being very effectively countered.  This is not open skies, the RA has been knocking these things down like crazy and yet it has not really helped them as UA unmanned is still being used to great effect.  And again, EW is going to do nothing against higher altitude and space-based systems. 

Battle for the Donbas

Really no surprises here - we did see a lot of this here on the forum.  The political spin on why the UA did not simply pull out and stayed and fought was very interesting - i.e. war crimes in occupied areas effect.   The density of RA fires and essentially human wave attacks really highlight something else with respect to mass - the unbearable weight requirement.  So in order for the RA to achieve enough overmatch they had to concentrate so much that mobility was basically sacrificed.  They appear the limiting factor on the rates of advance in the Donbas because moving all those guns with their ammo could not be done quickly.  This appears to be what "dumb mass" risks on the modern battlefield.

I am stumped however, on why the RA never achieved breakthrough.  The massive sacrifices of the UA cannot be understated here but was that the thin blue and yellow line that held off all that weight?  Or was there something else going on to explain why after literally annihilating ground with HE, the RA was never able to breakthrough and manoeuvre?  What was the comparative UA density in these areas?

After this I am getting the sense that the Donbas was a modern day version of Verdun as the RA broke itself further for very little gain.  The damage to the UA and how much it was able to push-back is incomplete, so the nature of how this contest unfolded is unclear.  What we do know is that the RA lost the offensive after Donbas, and the UA picked it up. 

Conclusions

Despite leaning in hard and taking risks in some parts of this assessment - e.g the inner working of the RA.  The authors are actually pretty cautious their conclusions.  These are all sound but my take away is, again, something happened to military mass in this war.  "No Sanctuary" and "Disperse or Die" are basically the same point - the traditional use of mass is beyond challenged, it has proven fatal to the RA. I am very interested on how the UA employed dispersion throughout this war, particularly on the offensive.  "Fighting for the Right to Precision" is very interesting, and I think hints at the "cloud-based warfare" we have been tossing around: however, it also lacks the effects of western space based ISR.  I am convinced that fighting for the right of precision will extend into space and cyber (which gets mentioned exactly twice in the entire document).  Further as unmanned systems get smarter I am more convinced that "Fighting through Precision" is the emerging theme.

For example I have used the term "anti-mass" a few times.  This appears to be a combination of speed and precision combined to create a pressure wave of smart-attrition to systematically deconstruct an opponents operational system.  Further precision is becoming a key component in survivability.  The document alludes to this:

"Precision is not only vastly more efficient in the effects it delivers but also allows the force to reduce its logistics tail and thereby makes it more survivable. Precision weapons, however, are scarce and can be defeated by EW ."

I am left wondering what happens when precision weapons are no longer scarce and ISR clouds that go from sub-surface to space are created that cannot be defeated by EW?

Finally the "significant slack capacity" point is at odds with precision, or perhaps they are mutually supporting in reality.  Precision really means very high efficiency combined with effectiveness.  So one does not need massive amounts of dumb war stocks, but one may need massive amounts of smart-war stocks because they are now on the critical path.  I do not think either side in this war has fully expressed what mass-precision looks like but the UA is coming damned close.

The_Capt's axiom update:

Mass beats isolation, connected precision beat mass, integrated massed precision beats everything.

Re-thinking War

I am coming to a growing sense that warfare is in need of a serious rethink.  We have principles and foundations that remain unchanged - e.g. selection and maint of the aim, morale, attrition.  But we have others that are looking more and more as though they are in the wind - surprise, manoeuvre, concentration of mass.  I think we need to start looking through different lens's and frameworks, as many of our old ones are challenged.  Our planning processes and how we make assumptions, how we define "decision" and "victory".  How we think about the translation of military power - to capability - to effect - to decisions and outcomes.  How we think about capability itself.  To my mind this is a good thing, if we do it ahead of evolution.  Whether or not we are in a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) is an entirely different question.  Many thought we were in the 90s and early 00's but it kind of petered out.  I suspect RMAs take longer than a couple decades to culminate so we could very well be in the middle of one; however, it is very hard to say without more evidence. 

I can only say the best course is to keep watching carefully, critically and continuously as you can.  For me the progress of this war has been both terrible, wasteful and simply tragic.  It has also been professionally mesmerizing - the entire point of mastery of warfare is so you do not have to fight one, or if you do it is short and sharp as possible.  The lessons from this war all point to reinforcing the primacy of this idea. 

   

  

Everything about the RUSI assessment screams to me "We aren't hearing about something pretty important" that likely was operative in both Donbas and the Gomel axis.

[Kinophile]

@The_Capt thank you, interesting analysis of the analysis itself, preliminary as it is. 

Red Western ISR early on, and the silence in the report about it: I read in one eyewitness account, from an anti saboteur patrol during Kyiv,  how they were able to track approaching RUS teams in real time,  via satellite (Sat specifically, they mentioned drone at other times and knew the difference), From I believe the tactical HQ. 

Being able to provide orbital coverage to a battlefield security element implies that there was significant margin or bandwidth available to do so, without denying anything to the front line units and fires. 

So as you note,  Why Kyiv Win is not clearly answered -  but might come down to plentiful Western ISR, allowing the UKR decision chain being very short.  There are many accounts of decision points being devolved down the ladder to tactical level, as much as possible. 

UKR being Tactically (and operationally on that axis) ahead of the RUS in battle event awareness, able to detect quicker, decide quicker, react quicker, shift quicker,  it would add up to being constantly outside the RUS loop. 

Hell,  that's the primary difference even in CMBS, from US to RUS -  a RUS player assumes they are being watched, must plan/deceive with that in mind and fight accordingly. And that inversely applies to RUS v UKR. 

In Kyiv RUS fought the ZSU as if they thought Ukrainians had no equivalent ISR to them.  Technically they were correct, it's not like Western ISR is part of Ukrainian OOBs or doctrine. So, fine,  the Ukies do have a billion bloody eyes watching you,  what now?  Well if youre a Russian General it's Damn the Drones,  Full Speed Ahead,  RUS Bear go RAWR. 

Like in all things war,  Kyiv might have been a combo of both Friendly use of their organic advantage compounded by hostile inability to adapt along the entire command chain. 

Wanting to stay schtum about the former feels like a good reason for its absence in the prelum report. 

Edited December 1, 2022 by Kinophile

[Armorgunner]

Never mind, second on thatone!

 

 

 

Edited December 1, 2022 by Armorgunner

[The_Capt]

47 minutes ago, Kinophile said:

So as you note,  Why Kyiv Win is not clearly answered -  but might come down to plentiful Western ISR, allowing the UKR decision chain being very short.  There are many accounts of decision points being devolved down the ladder to tactical level, as much as possible. 

I definitely think this is part of it.  

For example: “raiding” is normally associated with harassment.  However precision raiding - called Direct Action in SOF terms - is something very different and normally associated with high value target strikes.  If the UA managed to create some sort of hybrid mass precision raiding because western ISR essentially illuminated the battlefield for them then the overall effect is much different.  The same goes for indirect fires - harassing fires become “kick-a$$ing” fires because 5 shells are doing what it use to take 50 to accomplish.

The math at Kyiv is not adding up.  Russian tactical confusion most definitely was a factor initially but these were the best troops the RA had.  If it took them a month of getting hammered to “unconfuse” themselves then we are talking about an historic level of incompetence- which the piece directly counters.  I can get this in the first 72, and even the first week but at some point RA tactical commanders are going to go “f#ck this sitting on a road and dying noise” and start using all that mass, even if they were sub-optimal with respect to battlefield geometry.  They were facing UA TD units (and freaking cadets), peppered with some SF and not enough critical ammo or air cover.  Talk about a “what the hell just happened?!” moment.

58 minutes ago, billbindc said:

Everything about the RUSI assessment screams to me "We aren't hearing about something pretty important" that likely was operative in both Donbas and the Gomel axis

It also does not provide a stable premise as to how the rest of the war is unfolding. Confused Russians and crappy BTG structure does not explain the Donbas, nor does it predict Kharkiv and Kherson unless we make some real “Russia sucks” leaps, which even the authors do not support.

My bet is that the missing pieces are bound up in OPSEC that likely transcends the UA itself.  My hypothesis is that Russian mass, complete with enablers such as they are, did not and are not working.  Russian mass looks a lot like western mass - likely why Gerasimov thought he had parity.  UA use of mass did work and is working.  The reason why this has happened will likely fill libraries but I think it is at the heart of the military dimension of this conflict.

 

[billbindc]

"My bet is that the missing pieces are bound up in OPSEC that likely transcends the UA itself."

 

[Huba]

The few posts above constitute no doubt the best analysis and polemic with RUSI piece I (and probably anyone) could find on the whole internet, hat off gents!
 

On a rather unrelated note, UA GS in it's daily update mentioned that Russians are evacuating people from Polohy, the key road junction at the very middle of Zaporizhya front. Quite strange development, but it is as official source as one can get, for sure this is the place worth keeping an eye on. Here's the full passage from the update, as posted on UA GS Facebook page an hour ago:

Quote

According to the available information, the russian occupation forces are withdrawing separate units and preparing for evacuation the personnel of the occupation administrations of the settlements of the temporarily occupied territory of the Zaporizhia region. Thus, units based in the local police station and one of the educational institutions left Mykhailivka settlement. In the settlements of Polohy and Inzhenerne, the occupiers leave the houses where they were quartered and take away the stolen property. In the village of Burchak, the occupation authorities are conducting a census for the so-called voluntary evacuation of the population.
It has been confirmed that units of the Defense Forces hit enemy manpower concentrations in the previous days. In the settlements of Myrne, Tokmak, Inzhenerne, Polohy, Yasne and Kinsky Rozdory of the Zaporizhzhia oblast, the enemy lost more than 230 people wounded, more than 15 units of military equipment of various types and ammunition depots were destroyed. Information on eliminated occupiers is being clarified.

 

[sross112]

2 hours ago, The_Capt said:

Re-thinking War

I am coming to a growing sense that warfare is in need of a serious rethink.  We have principles and foundations that remain unchanged - e.g. selection and maint of the aim, morale, attrition.  But we have others that are looking more and more as though they are in the wind - surprise, manoeuvre, concentration of mass.  I think we need to start looking through different lens's and frameworks, as many of our old ones are challenged.  Our planning processes and how we make assumptions, how we define "decision" and "victory".  How we think about the translation of military power - to capability - to effect - to decisions and outcomes.  How we think about capability itself.  To my mind this is a good thing, if we do it ahead of evolution.  Whether or not we are in a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) is an entirely different question.  Many thought we were in the 90s and early 00's but it kind of petered out.  I suspect RMAs take longer than a couple decades to culminate so we could very well be in the middle of one; however, it is very hard to say without more evidence. 

I can only say the best course is to keep watching carefully, critically and continuously as you can.  For me the progress of this war has been both terrible, wasteful and simply tragic.  It has also been professionally mesmerizing - the entire point of mastery of warfare is so you do not have to fight one, or if you do it is short and sharp as possible.  The lessons from this war all point to reinforcing the primacy of this idea. 

Great post as always, thanks.

I'd say that we have some good lessons learned and takeaways from this war, but I don't think I agree that mass is dead or we need to totally change the western way of war based upon the last ten months. I think the best parallel here is the Russo-Finnish War in 39. The Germans should have looked at that war and came to the same conclusions, that mass and armor don't work and a new way of war should be devised. The same thing in both of these wars. It wasn't that the mass was wrong, the armor incapable or concept of combined arms was dead. It was crappy soldiers led by crappy officers executing a crappy plan against excellent soldiers led by excellent officers fighting for their very existence. 

We are wargamers, so let's wargame. Take a NATO coalition and drop it in this war from the beginning on either side in comparable numbers to what was there on day one. If in the place of the UA we'd all be talking about the dominance of our heavy brigades as they wiped the floor with the RA and ended the war in a week with massive losses to Russia. Just imagine the 1st Cav Div fighting north of Kyiv and the highways of death that would have ensued. If in the place of the RA the UA would have been wrecked before the heavies even engaged them, the military formations would have been defeated and the country taken in a couple weeks. The insurgency would be in full swing and NATO would have wished they had never invaded, but the straight up military conflict would have been very one sided.  

The other thing that we have pointed out a lot on this board is that the size of the forces did not match the size of the operational goals. The RA was spread way too thin along a very long front. If the RA was five times bigger (and had even semi competent leadership and soldiers) would this campaign play out differently? If your answer is yes, then mass still matters. Personally I think it would have. If each axis of attack had 250,000 RA I don't think the UA would have been able to withstand it. I'm sure the UA would have fought valiantly and inflicted considerable losses, but in the end they wouldn't have been able to hold. 

So from a western perspective, what have we learned or should we learn from this war?

• C4ISR is king. You have to have it and you have to counter your enemy's. This is the deadliest thing to your surprise, maneuver and mass.
• PGMs kill. Arty, MRLS and missiles that miss their targets are a waste of time, money and effort. A very large percentage of your ordinance needs to be one shot - one kill. The old tactic of saturation used by the RA is exponentially less effective and very wasteful.
• Range. Your ISR bubble has to extend beyond that of the enemy and you need to be able to kill them at a longer range than they can kill you. If you want to shut down their long range fires, logistics and command you need to be able to hit them accurately from a long way away.
• Air Superiority. If either side could gain and maintain air superiority this would be a different war. SEAD/DEAD is very important. Manpads are great but they don't help much against JDAMs from 30,000 feet. 
• Drones. We need way more drones down to the squad level and we need to be able to counter drones effectively at all levels. This is truly a new dimension to the air superiority contest and needs to be addressed.
• Stockpiles. Ours are insufficient. This is a small war and munitions are being consumed at a rate that most western countries couldn't sustain. How would we expect to fight a big war with what we have?
• Size matters. Our militaries are too small. Sure, Chechnya doesn't stand a chance, but when we look at Ukraine and what it would take to seize and hold it even the US military is too small. Probably good enough for defense but how would we expect to fight and win against a large country?

These would be my takeaways from this war. I think both sides are missing or don't have enough when it comes to different pieces of the combined arms spectrum and neither side has enough troops for the size of the battlefield yet; however I think the UA is on its way to getting there.

 

[Kinophile]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

 western ISR essentially illuminated the battlefield for them 

Yes, Russian ISR failed in its equivalent mission, amplifying the UKR advantage. There is possibly an additional key factor, to articulate further:

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

Russian tactical confusion most definitely was a factor initially but these were the best troops the RA had.  If it took them a month of getting hammered to “unconfuse” themselves then we are talking about an historic level of incompetence- which the piece directly counters. 

They were good troops - within the doctrinal and cultural constraints of the pre-war AFRF. While the piece notes they should have done better it also notes that rigidity in hierarchal decision making was a key stumbling block. On a WW2 or CW battlefield, moving at the Machine pace, this was wasn't a critical flaw. But at Software pace, which is modern ISR, then it became fatal.

The fight around Kyiv might have comedown to which side could shift to Software pace first - or was even capable of it. A small local drone company enabling SOF slaughter of RUS logistics tails within a days of the invasion is a society shifting into Software pace at the drop of a hat (and which was culturally ready to do so). By contrast the RUS army was maybe fighting the ZSU, its own internal culture of deceit, rigidity and denial of initiative and Ukraine society's mentality as a whole. @Haiduk and others have mentioned the borderland / Kossack mindset, of self-organizing for defense without need of higher-up say-so, something utterly anathema to pre-war AFRF thinking.

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

I can get this in the first 72, and even the first week but at some point RA tactical commanders are going to go “f#ck this sitting on a road and dying noise” and start using all that mass, even if they were sub-optimal with respect to battlefield geometry.  

Maybe by then it was simply too little, too late?

Perhaps UKR had an institutional advantage (willingness to devolve command decisions and assets to squad level) that relentlessly pulled them ahead of the Russian info/orders/effects loop. As we've all felt in-game and I'm sure you've seen in RL war, once you have a decision process advantage over your enemy where you're planning your next move as he's fighting/reacting to your last move then that advantage compounds faster than credit card debt. 

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

Confused Russians and crappy BTG structure does not explain the Donbas

My personal read of the doc wasn't that the BTG had crappy structure (as you note, its fundamentally an advanced battle group concept, just like the West has shifted down from Divs) but that the higher command assumed all BTGs were essentially equal, were operating at the reported effectiveness and could fulfill the tasks assigned. But BTG #1 with its 7 tanks might actually have had only 4. BTG #2 with its 14 could easily have had only 8. Lying is endemic to any autocratic government and its institutions (and no I didnt just listen to Perun ! )These discrepancies add up to flawed data => flawed understanding => flawed orders => flawed effects + more lying to cover new failures => more flawed data, ad nauseum.

There's plenty of anecdotes of widespread Russian officer "command cowardice" - send the men alone and unaware, blame them for their failures, lie upstairs, send the men again. 

Id be interested in a post-war analysis of pre-war Rus Army officer culture vis a vis mid war (Kherson/Kharkiv).

Edited December 1, 2022 by Kinophile

[Kinophile]

2 hours ago, billbindc said:

Everything about the RUSI assessment screams to me "We aren't hearing about something pretty important" that likely was operative in both Donbas and the Gomel axis.

And still in play. You'd think Russia would have an idea what it is by now, but hey, why give the ****ers free ****. Let them figure it out and then get it wrong, all by themselves.

[The_Capt]

1 hour ago, sross112 said:

If in the place of the RA the UA would have been wrecked before the heavies even engaged them, the military formations would have been defeated and the country taken in a couple weeks.

This one right here is what I am not sure of.  So let’s take this war and transplant it to a fictional country but the Opposition are backed and supported by China.  Chinese ISR and smart weaponry, unmanned…the whole she bang.

We play our A-game and do Gulf War part deux all heavy and electrified.  So first things I like to think we would establish operational conditions but in a decade that is going to get harder and harder as counters to a lot of our systems continue to develop…because China.

But let’s just assume we do a better job of it in-country.  Well none of that solves for Chinese ISR outside the country and into space unless we really want to automatically widen the conflict - eg what would our reaction be if Russia started hitting western ISR assets outside Ukraine?

So what?  Our opponents in this proxy-Chinese country still have access to hi resolution multi-spectral ISR being fed to them in real time.  We, being the mighty west are 1) big, 2) hot and 3) hungry.  We are easily visible from space, our logistics tail is larger than the RAs in this war and we are more vulnerable to shortages because everything we have burns energy like nuts.  Our opponent may also very well start asymmetric hits outside their country that look a lot like Russian depots spontaneously exploding over the last 9 months as well.

Air power.  It is a fundamental assumption we have air supremacy in any war we will fight in the west.  To the point Canada abandoned air defence entirely as a capability.  Problem is that air superiority below 2000 feet is not a thing.  The RA is baking the air with EW and cannot keep UA UAS from seeing them and pooping HE on them.  If our opponent has cheap Chinese autonomous drone swarms with submunitions our multi-billion dollar air platforms are not going to matter.  And that is if we can even get those platforms into theatre.  SEAD is now every jerk with a MANPAD, which can hit up to 20+ thousand feet and is fed into all that Chinese ISR.

Indirect fires.  Last I checked, western hardware is allergic to MLRS as the Russians.  So if our opponent has highly dispersed but integrated deep precision strike capability they are hard to find, while we very definitely are not.  Our fuel and ammo is on trucks too and Chinese HIMARs hiding in a barn linked into persistent ISR we can’t do anything about is going to make us run out of gas…and we will do it faster do to consumption rates.

Anti-armor/vehicle.  So our opponent in this fictional war is armed with a whole bunch of Chinese Javelins and NLAWs etc.  Dispersed they can hit us at nearly 3kms, fire and forget.  They also have one-way loitering munitions…again all hooked into that ISR problem.  Our hot, heavy and concentrated heavy formations are going get hit effectively at really long ranges.  “Ah but we will have APS which will sweep those pesky ATGMs from the air”.  Ok, assuming they don’t do sub-munitions, decoys and a raft of work arounds, sure.  Next question: are we mounting APS on our entire logistics tail?  Because we are back to it getting seen and hammered.

Urban areas.  We have been extremely lucky that all our opponents (Iraq) were dumb enough to mostly meet us in the open.  An urban fight soaks up our western advantages really fast.  An opponent who has time to prepare and is set up to defend home urban areas is going to really hurt us badly…and we are also back to logistics support to that urban fight.  I have no idea what a modern or near future urban fight is going to look like with unmanned in the mix but “easier” does not spring to mind.

Now maybe we have counter UAS and drone swarms of our own.  Problem, our opponent is designed to fight dispersed…we are not.  A few unit types are set up for it, but the main are not designed to fight as light infantry.  In this little war our opponents are designed for this kind of work.  So we will have a steep learning curve and in war most learning is thru dying.

So what?  Well western superiority is challenged in this scenario, on more than one level.  Assuming we can get enough forces, and if we go the traditional route we are going to need a LOT of our forces, keeping them in the fight is going to be incredibly hard.  This will be sticking a steel gauntlet hand up to the shoulder in a beehive.  You would need to armor the entire length of the arm and you are still going to get stung badly as the bees get in behind things.

The cost is very high as casualties in this scenario are going to be a shock.  I am not sure we can even sustain let alone win urban combat.  As you note, the insurgency, if we make it that far, is going to make the last ones look adorable in comparison. The political calculus for this in the west makes my head swim.

In short, I see a side in this war that fights along the same approaches we do - and it isn’t the one that is winning.  “Ya but we will do a better job” makes me really nervous as I am not sure what “a better job” really looks like given some of these trends.  We may have stalled later.  We may have pulled it off with fewer casualties and taken ground faster but I am not sure terrain matters when there is an urban fight at the end of a rainbow and you are getting hit along the entire length of your operational system.  I like to think we could have isolated the country from its strategic support but that is not a sure thing either.  I would be willing to bet that even with the western powers in place of the RA the war would last longer and be far bloodier than anything we have seen since Korea.  To the point I am not convinced success is guaranteed if we continue to play be our current rule set.

In the west, in some circles, I am seeing echoes of the European powers as they observed the US Civil War - “interesting but of course we do things better”…which they believed right up to 1914.  If we are smart we will be op researching this thing to death and binning all our assumptions until they are confirmed or denied one way or the other.

Edited December 1, 2022 by The_Capt

[beardiebloke]

Just had a quick look at this video about defensive trenches in Kherson on one of the roads to Crimea.  I don't see how an AT trench looks any different to an infantry trench but I guess the commentary is based on where one expects these to be.

Not much to add except to say that this looks like a video introduction to a CM campaign with a series of tactical maps...

 

[cesmonkey]

There are some press stories today about a survey of Americans asking their opinion on defense related matters.

For example:
https://www.voanews.com/a/poll-majority-of-americans-support-continued-aid-for-ukraine/6858460.html
https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2022/12/just-half-americans-trust-military-survey-finds/380332/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-support-u-s-backing-ukraine-despite-risk-of-wider-war-survey-finds-11669869297?mod=politics_major_pos4

If you want to see the full details for the Ukraine-related questions, go to page 16 in the below PDF:
https://www.reaganfoundation.org/media/359964/rndf-survey-2022-topline.pdf

 

[Kinophile]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

[...]

A crux is ISR. Which pushes into orbital conflict as a possible solution - soft and hard killing LEO assets esp. Once that gets messy I'd say it gets VERY messy VERY quickly.

The inability of RUS to affect UKR's proxy space assets is possibly a major guarantor of its eventual defeat. How can you ever get ahead of the enemy loop if their data acquisition is massively more widespread, in depth and advanced than yours - and you cant degrade theirs? 

Yep, re USCW v WW1 is interesting, in that technically the Europeans did do everything better - better weapons, infantry, good mobilization, coordination, etc. But their overconfidence in Mentality over Machinery doomed millions to die in doomed attacks against symmetrical forces.

With your forward-casting, its the overconfidence in Western tech to solve anything symmetrical in tech but is fundamentally vulnerable to asymmetrical posture (even though sharing same type & level of tech). The apparent Jointness of modern GHQ thinking, supposedly offering wider freedom and latitude, possibly masks a deeper rigidity in thinking - everything out there is a nail or something like it and by golly we have the best titanium hammer, when the reality is more that the damn nail moves and can see you coming. Or sumfink...

 

[dan/california]

17 hours ago, NamEndedAllen said:

What *does* seem to be a problem is for the USA and Europe to decide whether they are in this for Ukraine to *win*, or just to bleed and freeze while tying down much of Russia’s military and gathering weapons and tactics comparisons and evaluations. I hate so much to even think this. But look at the the brutal fact of the onslaught of war crimes against the millions of Ukrainian women, children and elderly in their homes and schools - trying to freeze them to death in darkness across the entire country. What must Russia do in order tor the Allies to once and for all provide the long range weapons for Ukraine to be able to respond proportionally, as in the laws of war that the Allies honor? How high is that bar? Do we really see Russia backing down because of the weapons, training and sanctions already given - however generous those have been. Do the Allies *really* believe that if Ukraine knocks out electricity in neighboring Russian cities that Russia will send its unstoppable armies flooding into Poland, and roll across Europe to the Channel? 

Is there *anything* at all that will cause the USA for example, to declare ”Enough!”?

It is worth reiterating that 50 Gripens manned and maintained by "foreign legion volunteers" could end this in a week. It goes on because we are chicken%$#@ and allow it to go on. At the absolute bleeping least send the Ukrainians every short and medium range surface to surface missile in inventory. 

[dan/california]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

This one right here is what I am not sure of.  So let’s take this war and transplant it to a fictional country but the Opposition are backed and supported by China.  Chinese ISR and smart weaponry, unmanned…the whole she bang.

We play our A-game and do Gulf War part deux all heavy and electrified.  So first things I like to think we would establish operational conditions but in a decade that is going to get harder and harder as counters to a lot of our systems continue to develop…because China.

But let’s just assume we do a better job of it in-country.  Well none of that solves for Chinese ISR outside the country and into space unless we really want to automatically widen the conflict - eg what would our reaction be if Russia started hitting western ISR assets outside Ukraine?

So what?  Our opponents in this proxy-Chinese country still have access to hi resolution multi-spectral ISR being fed to them in real time.  We, being the mighty west are 1) big, 2) hot and 3) hungry.  We are easily visible from space, our logistics tail is larger than the RAs in this war and we are more vulnerable to shortages because everything we have burns energy like nuts.  Our opponent may also very well start asymmetric hits outside their country that look a lot like Russian depots spontaneously exploding over the last 9 months as well.

Air power.  It is a fundamental assumption we have air supremacy in any war we will fight in the west.  To the point Canada abandoned air defence entirely as a capability.  Problem is that air superiority below 2000 feet is not a thing.  The RA is baking the air with EW and cannot keep UA UAS from seeing them and pooping HE on them.  If our opponent has cheap Chinese autonomous drone swarms with submunitions our multi-billion dollar air platforms are not going to matter.  And that is if we can even get those platforms into theatre.  SEAD is now every jerk with a MANPAD, which can hit up to 20+ thousand feet and is fed into all that Chinese ISR.

Indirect fires.  Last I checked, western hardware is allergic to MLRS as the Russians.  So if our opponent has highly dispersed but integrated deep precision strike capability they are hard to find, while we very definitely are not.  Our fuel and ammo is on trucks too and Chinese HIMARs hiding in a barn linked into persistent ISR we can’t do anything about is going to make us run out of gas…and we will do it faster do to consumption rates.

Anti-armor/vehicle.  So our opponent in this fictional war is armed with a whole bunch of Chinese Javelins and NLAWs etc.  Dispersed they can hit us at nearly 3kms, fire and forget.  They also have one-way loitering munitions…again all hooked into that ISR problem.  Our hot, heavy and concentrated heavy formations are going get hit effectively at really long ranges.  “Ah but we will have APS which will sweep those pesky ATGMs from the air”.  Ok, assuming they don’t do sub-munitions, decoys and a raft of work arounds, sure.  Next question: are we mounting APS on our entire logistics tail?  Because we are back to it getting seen and hammered.

Urban areas.  We have been extremely lucky that all our opponents (Iraq) were dumb enough to mostly meet us in the open.  An urban fight soaks up our western advantages really fast.  An opponent who has time to prepare and is set up to defend home urban areas is going to really hurt us badly…and we are also back to logistics support to that urban fight.  I have no idea what a modern or near future urban fight is going to look like with unmanned in the mix but “easier” does not spring to mind.

Now maybe we have counter UAS and drone swarms of our own.  Problem, our opponent is designed to fight dispersed…we are not.  A few unit types are set up for it, but the main are not designed to fight as light infantry.  In this little war our opponents are designed for this kind of work.  So we will have a steep learning curve and in war most learning is thru dying.

So what?  Well western superiority is challenged in this scenario, on more than one level.  Assuming we can get enough forces, and if we go the traditional route we are going to need a LOT of our forces, keeping them in the fight is going to be incredibly hard.  This will be sticking a steel gauntlet hand up to the shoulder in a beehive.  You would need to armor the entire length of the arm and you are still going to get stung badly as the bees get in behind things.

The cost is very high as casualties in this scenario are going to be a shock.  I am not sure we can even sustain let alone win urban combat.  As you note, the insurgency, if we make it that far, is going to make the last ones look adorable in comparison. The political calculus for this in the west makes my head swim.

In short, I see a side in this war that fights along the same approaches we do - and it isn’t the one that is winning.  “Ya but we will do a better job” makes me really nervous as I am not sure what “a better job” really looks like given some of these trends.  We may have stalled later.  We may have pulled it off with fewer casualties and taken ground faster but I am not sure terrain matters when there is an urban fight at the end of a rainbow and you are getting hit along the entire length of your operational system.  I like to think we could have isolated the country from its strategic support but that is not a sure thing either.  I would be willing to bet that even with the western powers in place of the RA the war would last longer and be far bloodier than anything we have seen since Korea.  To the point I am not convinced success is guaranteed if we continue to play be our current rule set.

In the west, in some circles, I am seeing echoes of the European powers as they observed the US Civil War - “interesting but of course we do things better”…which they believed right up to 1914.  If we are smart we will be op researching this thing to death and binning all our assumptions until they are confirmed or denied one way or the other.

If only there was a nice simulation to help with this process. Anybody heard of any projects underway?  Company starts with a B, something,  something...

[dan/california]

Somewhat more seriously we are at the 1936, beginning of the spanish civil war stage in terms of drones, loitering munitions, and, and... As The_Capt is hinting above offensive operations against a technologically and militarily competent opponent might just not be a thing anymore, at least as theses things are currently conceived. Or maybe the Pentagon has a ray gun that isn't public yet and absolutely everything that shows it head above the horizon dies. But when the other side gets that too we are back to some version of the high tech trench warfare we see in Ukraine now. 

 

Edit: My money is still on the $100,000 ghillies suit.

 

Edited December 1, 2022 by dan/california