How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[kevinkin]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

 In fact in many ways fighting this war employing NATO doctrine would be worse and likely lead to operational cul de sacs.  I am not sure mission command is always appropriate or effective in this sort of environment. 

Yes, without airpower developing cracks into which mission command can operate and then out Boyd cycle Russian leadership, troops might not find many opportunities on the ground to economically exploit. The UA would be sort guessing where to probe based on overhead intel. Better than in WW2. But they can't afford to bumble into the cul de sacs that could turn into kill zones. Of course this makes one think why upgrade UA armored formations if the air component is left on the ground? Well, they made do under less than ideal conditions before. And they are better off with the upgrades even if only for defensive measures right now. 

Edited February 22, 2023 by kevinkin

[The_Capt]

34 minutes ago, kevinkin said:

Yes, without airpower developing cracks into which mission command can operate and then out Boyd cycle Russian leadership, troops might not find many opportunities on the ground to economically exploit. The UA would be sort guessing where to probe based on overhead intel. Better than in WW2. But they can't afford to bumble into the cul de sacs that could turn into kill zones. Of course this makes one think why upgrade UA armored formations if the air component is left on the ground? Well, they made do under less than ideal conditions before. And they are better off with the upgrades even if only for defensive measures right now. 

Exactly.  Let's be brutally honest with ourselves here.  Western warfare theory and doctrine is highly elegant and has demonstrated superiority in some contexts.  However, it is also very fragile.  Books have been written about why this is and how we got here - to be honest I am leaning towards the "let's sell war as political 'fast-food' - cheap, fast and goes down easy" linked to a bloated military industrial complex (War Incorporated) as the primary reason.  Regardless our entire military doctrine is based on a highly interlinked and dependent system that we have labelled many things over the years - combined, joint, JIMP, multi-domain, all domain. 

It is a brilliant theory but it is not robust.  You pull out one critical component and the whole thing falls apart.  And of course being us, we have highly incentivized finding ways to pull out critical components for our adversaries.  Saddam H was a monument on "How not to fight the western world" and everyone who might be "agin us" took a lot of notes - and modern asymmetric warfare doctrines were born.  A2AD, grey zone, subversive, hybrid, NavWar, swarms, cyber and a bunch of stuff which we probably have not even thought of yet all got a lot of heat and light because they could be weaponized to help the western way of war fall apart. 

Say what you will about the Russian way of war but it is damned robust.  What is happening is a final exam on whether dumb resilience can still stand up in the modern era - my guess is "no".  However, our system is very vulnerable.  Take away air power and AirLand Battle falls apart.  Take away armor and combined arms falls apart.  Take away C4ISR and the whole damned thing falls apart.  The best generals right now train by taking things away because that is what our opponents are going to do.

So to clarify my point.  Given the same forces that the UA has, I do not think western commanders would have done better and in fact may have very well done worse.  Manoeuvre warfare clearly needs some rethinking in this environment and we already saw what happens when it is blindly applied, by the RA.  The RA are the ones who started this war fighting in a manner very similar to our own, not the UA - they did something else entirely.  Now at some point, good old fashion western manoeuvre (aka dirty tank-love) is going to work, but likely after a long campaign of corrosive warfare.  And right now the experts at managing that corrosive warfare campaign are in the UA, not back in NATO.

 

Edited February 22, 2023 by The_Capt

[cyrano01]

2 hours ago, Kinophile said:

This is what I've also read,and has been noted by Haiduk et al. 

Notably:

16/17 In the areas where these mistakes were avoided, units performed greatly. While the Ukrainian army improved a lot, it's not always possible to turn a colonel or a general with 30 years of soviet-style experience into a NATO-like commander by performing a 3-month course.

This might be explain why when I look at videos of UKR officers in Western training I see relatively few over 30s. They seem to be sending the newer, "fresher" minds to NATO for early and clean training in Western approaches, the older guys are already engaged at the front and why try to train an old dog in new tricks? 

 

And there is a general tendency for the ages of commanders to fall during wartime as death, stress, exhaustion and weeding out of the inept all take their toll.  I seem to recall that, for the British Army (BEF) in France during WW1 the average age of battalion commanders was down to 34 by 1918, in 1914 it had been 47.

[cyrano01]

24 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Exactly.  Let's be brutally honest with ourselves here.  Western warfare theory and doctrine is highly elegant and has demonstrated superiority in some contexts.  However, it is also very fragile.  Books have been written about why this is and how we got here - to be honest I am leaning towards the "let's sell war as political 'fast-food' - cheap, fast and goes down easy" linked to a bloated military industrial complex (War Incorporated) as the primary reason.  Regardless our entire military doctrine is based on a highly interlinked and dependent system that we have labelled many things over the years - combined, joint, JIMP, multi-domain, all domain. 

It is a brilliant theory but it is not robust.  You pull out one critical component and the whole thing falls apart.  And of course being us, we have highly incentivized finding ways to pull out critical components for our adversaries.  Saddam H was a monument on "How not to fight the western world" and everyone who might be "agin us" took a lot of notes - and modern asymmetric warfare doctrines were born.  A2AD, grey zone, subversive, hybrid, NavWar, swarms, cyber and a bunch of stuff which we probably have not even thought of yet all got a lot of heat and light because they could be weaponized to help the western way of war fall apart. 

Say what you will about the Russian way of war but it is damned robust.  What is happening is a final exam on whether dumb resilience can still stand up in the modern era - my guess is "no".  However, our system is very vulnerable.  Take away air power and AirLand Battle falls apart.  Take away armor and combined arms falls apart.  Take away C4ISR and the whole damned thing falls apart.  The best generals right now train by taking things away because that is what our opponents are going to do.

So to clarify my point.  Given the same forces that the UA has, I do not think western commanders would have done better and in fact may have very well done worse.  Manoeuvre warfare clearly needs some rethinking in this environment and we already saw what happens when it is blindly applied, by the RA.  The RA are the ones who started this war fighting in a manner very similar to our own, not the UA - they did something else entirely.  Now at some point, good old fashion western manoeuvre (aka dirty tank-love) is going to work, but likely after a long campaign of corrosive warfare.  And right now the experts at managing that corrosive warfare campaign are in the UA, not back in NATO.

 

Absolutely. Come to think of it I am not even sure that Western style manoeuvre warfare really has that great a track record against competent peer opponents.

[sburke]

'It's hard, but they're holding on': On the ground in Ukraine, the war depends on U.S. weapons (yahoo.com)

[Billy Ringo]

6 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

  And right now the experts at managing that corrosive warfare campaign are in the UA, not back in NATO.

 

I should know better than to challenge an expert, but--that's never stopped me before so here goes:

From a public perception standpoint it's obviously advantageous to claim the UA is calling the shots, developing the strategies, the timing and driving their own campaign bus.  But....(and this is where I usually get in trouble),  are they really independently developing their own strategies without significant input from a select few career and trusted professionals from the US and/or NATO?    Those that know the real capabilities of their own weapons?  Those that have visibility to the battlefield?  Those that have access to more human intel?  Those that have access to more advanced battlefield analysis scenarios to test different strategies and possible outcomes?

I understand that the Ukrainians make the final call as to what happens and when, but, who is actually developing and analytically testing different scenarios and possible strategies to use on the battlefield and then recommending those to the Ukrainians?  Thus---maybe it's just not the Ukrainians managing corrosive warfare--but also others who are crafting different scenarios.

I'll run back to my trench and wait for incoming...

[FancyCat]

Head of Meduza, a Russian opposition newspaper, shared this perspective. Whether or not you disagree with this coming true or even be possible, it is a interesting look at how might domestic opinions inside Russia are perceiving Putin's rhetoric. Obviously lots of differences between Israel and Palestine and etc but again, a interesting domestic viewpoint of Russia. Whether true or not, I think all pro-Ukrainians recognize that a scenario along Israeli-Palestinian lines is a clear loss for Ukraine and success for Russia.

(For the last time, what one thinks vs the reality is never matching, before I get piled on)

Reality of course being such a scenario is not really possible in my opinion, the fact that Putin may be trying to accomplish it, well, the West needs to up it's game. (Whether it is, I am leaning towards yes)

 

[Elmar Bijlsma]

I am very much enjoying Prigozhin whining about ammo shortages.

Last few months he was dunking on the Russian armed forces harder than most people in this thread. But the Prig forgot that the people in this thread aren't drawing their ammunition directly from Russian army stocks. Whoops!

 

[FancyCat]

8 minutes ago, Billy Ringo said:

I'll run back to my trench and wait for incoming...

Nah I think you didn't say anything controversial.

With the excuse that it took years and dozens of years for lots of classified and secret measures to be revealed from WWII, I will say I've seen reporting that Ukrainian General Staff did their best to be tight lipped about such things like the plans for the defense of Kiev to prevent it from leaking to Russia.

Quote

Those that have visibility to the battlefield?  Those that have access to more human intel? 

You know, while I'm sure U.S and NATO ISR is great....I doubt Ukraine wouldn't have better insight into their own country, their own HUMINT sources than the West.

[The_Capt]

4 minutes ago, Billy Ringo said:

I should know better than to challenge an expert, but--that's never stopped me before so here goes:

From a public perception standpoint it's obviously advantageous to claim the UA is calling the shots, developing the strategies, the timing and driving their own campaign bus.  But....(and this is where I usually get in trouble),  are they really independently developing their own strategies without significant input from a select few career and trusted professionals from the US and/or NATO?    Those that know the real capabilities of their own weapons?  Those that have visibility to the battlefield?  Those that have access to more human intel?  Those that have access to more advanced battlefield analysis scenarios to test different strategies and possible outcomes?

I understand that the Ukrainians make the final call as to what happens and when, but, who is actually developing and analytically testing different scenarios and possible strategies to use on the battlefield and then recommending those to the Ukrainians?  Thus---maybe it's just not the Ukrainians managing corrosive warfare--but also others who are crafting different scenarios.

I'll run back to my trench and wait for incoming...

No need, I have no doubt there are significant supporting relationships happening here.  We already know the west (US specifically) is directly involved in ISR and targeting.  We are definitely lending our expertise in terms of western equipment and force generation.  

But the west is not managing the application of this war.  The risks are way too high for both us and the Ukrainians to go down that road.  I think we are tightly linked and may even have a veto authority on some weapons systems/targeting; however I also strongly suspect that the Ukrainian military has complete unity of command up through to the political level.  If there are any management pressures being applied, the political level is the place to do it - trying to micro-manage a proxy war just doesn't work and is in fact a pretty key metric of being in a "bad proxy war" position (see. Vietnam).

And then the Ukrainians own the "ping space".  The returns from the environment are coming from them as they are the ones in contact.  We may be able to see a lot but they are feeling it. This means that they are in a better position to really build the instinctive understanding of the environment, not us - to really learn about a war you need to be all in it.  I have no doubt we are in deep on supporting roles in this, but they do not subsume supported roles - tails wagging dogs is another terrible way to wage a war.

Based on what we have seen there is just too much positive evidence that this is that way things are being run.  As such the UA is really out in front (and should be) on all this.  We are likely already lining up their leadership for book deals and doctrine positions - we need to learn very quickly from this war, faster than our opponents.  

[kevinkin]

20 minutes ago, Billy Ringo said:

who is actually developing and analytically testing different scenarios and possible strategies to use on the battlefield and then recommending those to the Ukrainians?

Or maybe it is the UA recommending possible strategies to NATO since they know the ground so intimately. NATO processes scenarios in light of intel and grand strategic political factors. Then I guess some agreement is made. In some ways this is not a proxy war since the proxy has so much influence on how the war is conducted. It's more of a partnership in the defeat of Russia. In biology; a symbiotic relationship. 

[womble]

There's more to "being more like NATO than like the USSR" than "AirLandBattle" when it comes to armed forces. Basic principles like empowerment of the guy at the pointy end, treating your troops like you give a damn, not diverting their rations/pay/NVG into your own and your superiors' pockets, accepting that adaptation of plans may be necessary and failure isn't a capital crime. Basic stuff, of which there's more, doubtless, but stuff UKR will continue to benefit from learning to do more of and which RUS won't because their underlying society/principles simply can't. 

[cesmonkey]

A 30 minute interview with AEI and ISW's General Jack Keane. Interview starts about 5:15.

He's rather critical of the Biden Administration's go-slow approach to support for Ukraine.

WTH Is Going on with Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine? Gen. Jack Keane on Biden’s Response and the Ramifications for US National Security

https://tunein.com/podcasts/News--Politics-Podcasts/What-the-Hell-is-Going-On-p1330068/?topicId=257854942

 

 

 

[The_Capt]

5 minutes ago, womble said:

There's more to "being more like NATO than like the USSR" than "AirLandBattle" when it comes to armed forces. Basic principles like empowerment of the guy at the pointy end, treating your troops like you give a damn, not diverting their rations/pay/NVG into your own and your superiors' pockets, accepting that adaptation of plans may be necessary and failure isn't a capital crime. Basic stuff, of which there's more, doubtless, but stuff UKR will continue to benefit from learning to do more of and which RUS won't because their underlying society/principles simply can't. 

Sure, a lot of this is force management and leadership/culture.  But let’s also not get too high on ourselves here either.  Plenty of militaries have won wars not employing either our culture, C2 philosophy or force management methods. Taliban just handed the west and its proxies their bums and they definitely do not follow our systems, as an example.

The whole “the UA is winning because they fight like us” has a lot of flaws and holes that sound nice and make us feel good.  But they  also just reinforce the belief that “we are just great as we are”, which is really dangerous given that some fundamentals are currently up for grabs.  We can say that the UA has sustained troop quality far better than the RA, which is definitely something.

[TheVulture]

2 hours ago, keas66 said:

Off topic I guess - but I'm kind of curious as to folks opinions  about the actual abilities of the Chinese Armed Forces  if they really decided to  start something . Their last major engagement was with Vietnam  in the late 1970's and that didn't go so well for them as I recall  . How are they going to go when they kick off something major in the  here and now ?

Without wanting to stray off topic in this thread, the US Department of Defence makes an annual report to Congress (publicly available) on Chinese military capabilites and intentions. The most recent one (September 2022) is currently available at https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23321290/2022-military-and-security-developments-involving-the-peoples-republic-of-china.pdf It weight in at just under 200 pages, so it's not short.

This comes with the caveat that it obviously isn't going to include everything the US knows about Chinese military, since a lot of that information is going to be classified. And there are going to be limits to how accurate the underlying intelligence is (what's the Chinese for maskirovka?). And there may be deliberate biases if the DoD wants to influence Congress' policy and funding decisions in particular directions.

But it's also about as good as you're going to get for a comprehensive open source review.

[billbindc]

1 hour ago, FancyCat said:

Head of Meduza, a Russian opposition newspaper, shared this perspective. Whether or not you disagree with this coming true or even be possible, it is a interesting look at how might domestic opinions inside Russia are perceiving Putin's rhetoric. Obviously lots of differences between Israel and Palestine and etc but again, a interesting domestic viewpoint of Russia. Whether true or not, I think all pro-Ukrainians recognize that a scenario along Israeli-Palestinian lines is a clear loss for Ukraine and success for Russia.

(For the last time, what one thinks vs the reality is never matching, before I get piled on)

Reality of course being such a scenario is not really possible in my opinion, the fact that Putin may be trying to accomplish it, well, the West needs to up it's game. (Whether it is, I am leaning towards yes)

 

Meh.

"Gazafication" where it already exists depends on the utter conventional dominance of the IDF and the complete penetration of the client adversary by Shin Bet, et al. And that is all underpinned by the enormous economic mismatch between the two. Russia possesses nothing close to those advantages and as time has passed the balance has gone further against it. If you are looking for a model, something between India/Pakistan and RKO/DPRK is a likelier outcome.

[JonS]

1 hour ago, Billy Ringo said:

But.... are they really independently developing their own strategies without significant input from a select few career and trusted professionals from the US and/or NATO?  

This is kind of unanswerable, and a bit chauvinistic.

Unanswerable in that no one involved is going to say. Like the Capt I have little doubt there is a lot of integration in certain areas. ISR and targeting is an obvious one: I doubt NATO are just piping raw intel into an HQ somewhere in Kyiv, or emailing random target packs to intel@mil.gov.ukr   I *assume* there is some back and forth dialog along the lines of "is anything going on south east of Bakhmut?" "Well, this is what we found, and this is what we think they're up to. We assess their critical vulnerabilities as this and that, located here and there. You could hit them with these things at this time." "Thanks. We'll get back to you."

Similarly, I don't think NATO are just leaving random 40' containers just on the Polish border, with a consignment note and instruction manuals taped to the doors. I assume the loggies are talking to each other in great detail about what is where, when things are arriving, and collaboratively managing the sustained flow of materiel. NATO - and the US especially - really are really good at logistics.

But i believe the strategy and strategic decisions are all with UKR.

Chauvanistic in that it kinda comes across as "silly Ukes. What you're doing is cute, but get out of the way now, and let us show you how it's really done."

Edited February 22, 2023 by JonS

[Haiduk]

How thermobaric grenade works insinde light armor

 

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

It is a brilliant theory but it is not robust.  You pull out one critical component and the whole thing falls apart. 

I agree with your characterization of NATO's war as being "brittle" as that's the tradeoff for complexity.  I also agree with you that sometimes the more straight forward ("resilient") method can win out because it is less able to be thrown off track when something goes wrong.

However

As you yourself pointed out, Russia's traditional brute force way of waging war got it through last year because of its resilience, but does it really matter if it winds up failing this year because it wasn't flexible enough to deal with corrosion of an otherwise stable model?  You say that you're unsure and leaning towards "no, it doesn't matter".

I'm putting my thoughts this way because I think the same is true for NATO.  Although its system is more prone to failure, it has flexibility and adaptability built into its core philosophies (strategic, operational, tactical).  I'm not convinced things would "fall part" as you put it if something didn't work as intended.  Two examples:

1.  Afghanistan and Iraq showed the limitations of the NATO way of fighting.  It had to adapt to such an extent that entirely new doctrine had to be developed and employed with entirely new types of equipment (MRAP for example) which didn't even exist when the conflict started.  This all happened while fighting was going on.

2.  Because NATO inspires cleverness and innovation, solutions to practical shortcomings can come about quickly and effectively.  A tiny example of this is the lack of proper cooling inside the brand new Stryker vehicles caused the FBCB2 (blue force tracker) system overheated.  This could have fooked a central part of US warfighting capabilities, but the clever crews got some coolers, put in a bunch of ice, and stuck the FBCB2 into it to keep it cool.  Not pretty, but it worked until the AC units were developed, built, and installed.

 

My point here is if some major NATO capability fails, and an opponent isn't able to exploit it to the extent it poses a strategic defeat upon NATO, then it won't likely matter.

If we look at this war I do wonder what would happen to a US force fighting in Ukraine if it had no air cover?  I think, by and large, the Russians would be slaughtered because the NATO fundamentals without airpower are still vastly superior to Russia's fundamentals.  Now, take away NATO air cover and give Russia NATO like CAS... well then, I think the picture would change dramatically.  Fortunately, Russia doesn't have CAS at all so no worries there

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

18 minutes ago, JonS said:

This is kind of unanswerable and chauvinistic.

Unanswerable in that no one involved is going to say. Like the Capt I have little doubt there is a lot of integration in certain areas. ISR and targeting is an obvious one: I doubt NATO are just piping raw intel into an HQ somewhere in Kyiv, or emailing random target packs to intel@mil.gov.ukr   I *assume* there is some back and forth dialog along the lines of "is anything going on south east of Bakhmut?" "Well, this is what we found, and this is what we think they're up to. We assess their critical vulnerabilities as this and that, located here and there. You could hit them with these things at this time." "Thanks. We'll get back to you."

Similarly, I don't think NATO are just leaving random 40' containers just on the Polish border, with a consignment note and instruction manuals taped to the doors. I assume the loggies are talking to each other in great detail about what is where, when things are arriving, and collaboratively managing the sustained flow of materiel. NATO - and the US especially - really are really good at logistics.

But i believe the strategy and strategic decisions are all with UKR.

Chauvanistic in that it kinda comes across as "silly Ukes. What you're doing is cute, but get out of the way now, and let us show you how it's really done."

I agree with all this, however what we don't know is how much Ukraine's decision making is based on NATO advice.  Because like the nuts and bolts stuff, I have no doubt that NATO is providing both solicited and unsolicited advice.  Therefore, Ukraine's final decisions might be their own to make, but that doesn't mean they came up with all the good ideas on their own.

It's going to be a very long time before we have a handle on any of this.  Which is good because it isn't the sort of thing we should be able to know while the war is going.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

14 minutes ago, Haiduk said:

How thermobaric grenade works insinde light armor

 

Whenever I see a vid of Ukraine blowing up something that is obviously abandoned I think "what a waste!" as now Ukrainian farmers have less videos of their own to make

These sorts of bombing runs likely involve Ukraine's side weighing the chances Russia will recover the vehicle before Ukraine and deciding not to take a chance.  The only thing worse than destroying a vehicle you might be able to use later is letting the enemy recover the vehicle because the chance to destroy it wasn't taken.

Steve

 

[Aragorn2002]

Ukraine war: What support is China giving Russia?

https://www.bbc.com/news/60571253

Edited February 22, 2023 by Aragorn2002

[dan/california]

26 minutes ago, JonS said:

Chauvanistic in that it kinda comes across as "silly Ukes. What you're doing is cute, but get out of the way now, and let us show you how it's really done."

I am quite sure they would be happy take a step back the second the U.S. Air Force agreed to show up.

4 hours ago, billbindc said:

A month ago I was saying this but it's clear now that there are very strong forces in Chinese government that are set on confrontation. Whether they made the balloon incident occur or if they simply took advantage of it, their approach is clearly ascendant. We should keep our power dry.

And build munition plants. Is there any opinion about why the hawkish Chinese faction is suddenly in a hurry? Have they decided the military balance now is probably the best it is ever going to be? Or is there some internal pressure driving them?

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

No need, I have no doubt there are significant supporting relationships happening here.  We already know the west (US specifically) is directly involved in ISR and targeting.  We are definitely lending our expertise in terms of western equipment and force generation.  

But the west is not managing the application of this war.  The risks are way too high for both us and the Ukrainians to go down that road.  I think we are tightly linked and may even have a veto authority on some weapons systems/targeting; however I also strongly suspect that the Ukrainian military has complete unity of command up through to the political level.  If there are any management pressures being applied, the political level is the place to do it - trying to micro-manage a proxy war just doesn't work and is in fact a pretty key metric of being in a "bad proxy war" position (see. Vietnam).

And then the Ukrainians own the "ping space".  The returns from the environment are coming from them as they are the ones in contact.  We may be able to see a lot but they are feeling it. This means that they are in a better position to really build the instinctive understanding of the environment, not us - to really learn about a war you need to be all in it.  I have no doubt we are in deep on supporting roles in this, but they do not subsume supported roles - tails wagging dogs is another terrible way to wage a war.

Based on what we have seen there is just too much positive evidence that this is that way things are being run.  As such the UA is really out in front (and should be) on all this.  We are likely already lining up their leadership for book deals and doctrine positions - we need to learn very quickly from this war, faster than our opponents.  

AFU officers are going to suffer death by lecture. Hopefully they will put out a really nice lessons learned presentation with good production values that can incorporated by every staff college in the western world. Interesting question is should that be made public? I mean as we a have watched this war play out you can make a coherent argument that CMBS is so useful its distribution ought to be restricted. I assuming that is not the least of the reasons we have not seen an updated version just yet.

[sburke]

1 minute ago, dan/california said:

AFU officers are going to suffer death by lecture. Hopefully they will put out a really nice lessons learned presentation with good production values that can incorporated by every staff college in the western world.

clearly, they don't have enough PowerPoint presentations.

[The_Capt]

5 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

I'm putting my thoughts this way because I think the same is true for NATO.  Although its system is more prone to failure, it has flexibility and adaptability built into its core philosophies (strategic, operational, tactical).  I'm not convinced things would "fall part" as you put it if something didn't work as intended.  Two examples:

1.  Afghanistan and Iraq showed the limitations of the NATO way of fighting.  It had to adapt to such an extent that entirely new doctrine had to be developed and employed with entirely new types of equipment (MRAP for example) which didn't even exist when the conflict started.  This all happened while fighting was going on.

2.  Because NATO inspires cleverness and innovation, solutions to practical shortcomings can come about quickly and effectively.  A tiny example of this is the lack of proper cooling inside the brand new Stryker vehicles caused the FBCB2 (blue force tracker) system overheated.  This could have fooked a central part of US warfighting capabilities, but the clever crews got some coolers, put in a bunch of ice, and stuck the FBCB2 into it to keep it cool.  Not pretty, but it worked until the AC units were developed, built, and installed.

I have heard this inspirational "innovative verve" argument before and I am not entirely sold to be honest.  At strategic and operational levels we did not adapt in Afghanistan or at least nowhere near enough.  We became hammers looking for nails and never prioritized the non-kinetic over the kinetic.  In Iraq we also failed to win a peace by setting in motion sectarian alienation.  Place it still a mess.  Now in some ways these wars were (are) unwinnable as the adaption we would need to make to win them are off our maps.

Tactical innovation does stand out but troops everywhere have been doing this for centuries.  Largely due to Darwinian pressure on the battlefield - those who cannot improvise, die.  I am not sure we can definitively say we are better or worse than other forces to be honest.

So the evidence that at the scope and scale of this conflict that we would really do any better going off-doctrine than the UA already has, is pretty limited.  We are pretty dogmatic about how we fight, for example to suggest that we should start thinking about Detailed Command, and the utility of Mission Command could be limiting is outright heresy in western military circles.  And although you won't be taken out and shot for speaking heresy in the west, you will still be sidelined and isolated. Military cultures are extremely conservative - look at our track record in the people space, we have always lagged the rest of society on social change (don't ask, don't tell, integration of women etc)

I think the only real advantage we may have is in learning because the west is built on liberal education.  That does allow for a lot faster and more agile collective learning potential, but again we counter it with culture in a lot of ways. 

In the end I am not sure what we would do if airpower was removed.  I think we would likely initially try to do what we have always done with airpower and suffered setbacks. We then likely would have also adopted more cautious and deliberate strategies much in the same way the Ukrainians have. I like to think we would done better than the RA because they are extremely wasteful in chasing attrition, and have demonstrated an extreme aversion to actually learning.  However, we may have also stuck too close to manoeuvre and decisive battle as opposed to the far more distributed defence we saw from the UA in Phase I, which could have gotten us into serious trouble given the battlefield realities we saw emerge.

I never assume advantage or overmatch until I am damn sure we actually have it.  Understanding ones weaknesses is almost as important as understanding theirs, same goes for strengths.