How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Kinophile]

9 hours ago, The_Capt said:

I think you are mixing a lot of themes here to the detriment of objective analysis.  The Soviet system was designed to create as much mass as possible and project it at an opponent.  It may appear "cruel and uncaring" but in reality it was built on the brutal lessons of the Eastern Front and how a quick violent short war was far better than a drawn out one.

We vie for the same aspiration of short wars, we simply lean on technology instead of human capital.  And frankly we have no real proof either system is truly superior.

The Soviet system is a poorer fit for modern democracies; however, before we sit too high on that horse, lets not forget democracies fought in WW1 too, and were very able to throw human capital at a problem at great loss.

The reality is that there is nothing inherently "wrong" or "evil" about the Soviet military system - talking political ideology out of the equation - so long as one asks that system to do what it was designed to do.  The exact same thing goes for the Western military system.  In this war, both sides have tried the western approach...and it did not work.  Now they are in a grinding war of attrition for which the western systems is also a very bad fit.

Nor is there proof that democracies can't do attrition either.  We have proven that we are very capable at spending a lot of lives to win.  What I oppose is this reoccurring narrative that somehow all the problems all sides are having are "Soviet legacy" and any successes are somehow western modernization; this is simply not proven by what we have seen.

Russia has fallen back onto a more Soviet-like approach to force generation and employment...and clearly it is working for them.  They are able to hold ground and even conduct tactical advances even with appalling losses.  The UA is moving much farther to the western doctrine, and frankly some of it is working for them too.  They are able to hold, strike deep and have very high precision.  

The weaknesses of either system are also on display for all to see as well.  For the Soviet system it is rigidity and logistical weight, which is untenable on the modern battlefield.  For the Western system it is the serious lack of depth and capacity.

I suspect that each side is evolving to some sort of hybrid, or at least trying to.  Either way, it does us little good to point at every problem and go "difficulty upscaling due to Soviet legacy"  which frankly does not even make sense based on what Soviet legacy really was.

As to that last part I highlighted - well yes and no.  The Mongols created smart fast mass and took over half the planet, so not entire a new idea.  The Soviet system could generate modern mech and armor forces like no one else.  Their operational art was very advanced on how to employ that mass.  In many ways they really are a defining school of modern warfare, the counter-point to the western schools.  We have no actual war to try and decide which system was better to worse to be honest.  The Gulf War was the closest but it really was a poor analogue.  This war has shadows of the Soviet system but overlapped with other schools.

To clarify, we are in agreement to some degree, where I'm not saying Western is superior, militarily (or technically even that Democracy is) but that the combination of a military system built on fundamentally different principles of construction and sustainment by an autocracy is a bad match to a democratic government.  I certainly agree that democracies can do long term, large scale attrition (hello, WW1+).

I'm not convinced here:

Quote

That the soviets built the large scale mass system for a 'quick violent short war'.

Is it not simpler to argue they built such a large, intense and in-depth military system because Russia is geographically huge, the Soviets had a lot of enemies and modern war is highly destructive? These points would also apply to NATO, but with democracies as the source political systems and cultures the patterns of their militaries angled in a different direction from the Soviets. 

To further expand:

With Ukraine firmly in the democracy camp retaining a legacy Soviet military system can only grate and grind against the political and civil structures. We've seen that friction occur many times on the Ukrainian side; sometime sthe modern mindset wins out, sometimes the Soviet. Where reform/reformatting has not happened the Ukrainian military appears weakest. By contrast where the Soviet system is weakest is where Ukraine has its greatest successes.

This isn't simply Bashing the Soviet Legacy, its highlighting that when the Ukrainian military is allowed to operate in ways compatible with its current social construct is when its at it's most effective. Where it is hidebound by Soviet influence it fails far more often than succeeds. 

As I've said before, the greatest favour  RUS did to Ukraine was destroying its Navy. Here we see the Soviet naval legacy literally wiped away, an almost clean slate, and what does Ukraine proceed to do? Retake Snake Island, sink the Moskva +15% of the BSF, destroy the BSF command HQ, re-open the grain corridor, etc. 

Almost all through Western weapons and methodologies combined with Ukrainian initiative, technical ability and without the dead hand of Soviet material. It had to rethink its naval war from the waves up.

By contrast, the Ukrainian Army is very much built from and composed of Soviet machines and methods. Where they get Western tech and training to the right degree they succeed far more than when they have plenty of Soviet gear. I;m not saying Soviet gear/tech fails (it patently doesn't) but that Western gear/tech/mindset provides far more opportunities and avenues for Ukraine to succeed.

Quote

In this war, both sides have tried the western approach...and it did not work.  

I'm not clear how you come to this conclusion.

Its well documented and also noted many times here that the UA has not been given the sufficient time and gear to fully transition into a Ukrainian/Western hybrid. Its currently a Ukrainian/Western/Soviet Frankenstein's monster. When its tried the 'true' Western approach in offensives it has not had enough training and not enough gear. When its combined the Western/Soviet its had decent success and when its gone the trad Soviet approach its had nothing but failures (almost all tactical). 

When the UA is fully supplied with modern Western gear and training it has a compounding effect with Ukrainian innovation and determination. The Soviet systems of doing things get in the way of the UA being all it could be. The UA is constantly testing and adapting the Western approach, but tailored to the realities of the front.

The Western approach works, just not in the classic, expected way of the West. If it didn't work the UA would rapidly abandon it. The Soviet way does not work for Ukraine, now, and especially not with the democratic society it is currently nailed onto.

My contention is we will see this removal of the Soviet legacy accelerate under both Syrskyi's leadership intentions, the attrition of the war itself and the modern expectations/demands of the civilian populace. I don't view the Soviet legacy as blameable for everything, more that it hass held back Ukraine from achieving even more than it has.

It certainly had its uses and can still deliver tangible effects, but those are no longer good enough, at large enough scale or as replicable as they need to be. They are certainly not as inventive and original as this war demands and by now are in deep & growing conflict with Ukrainian civil society's values and expectations.

Edited March 15 by Kinophile

[cesmonkey]

Oleksandr Syrskyi today:
https://t.me/osirskiy/625

Quote

He worked in the Avdiyiv direction, where the enemy concentrated his main efforts and for several days in a row has been trying to break through the defense of our troops in the bands of three brigades, daily throwing assault units on equipment and on foot into battle.

The offensive actions of the enemy are supported by intense artillery fire and the active use of FPV drones and drones with drops. Enemy aviation periodically strikes with anti-aircraft missiles from a distance of 40-50 km, artillery positions and the main elements of the battle order are covered by EW.
In these conditions, the most effective way to conduct defense is to destroy the enemy's armored vehicles and infantry assault groups by artillery fire, the actions of armored groups, the complex use of strike unmanned systems of various types, the protection of one's units from enemy drones by means of EW in combination with the destruction of enemy UAV control points by missile strikes and artillery fire.

My work was dedicated to the organization and provision of these issues. Together with the commanders, we considered the optimal options for actions of our troops, reserve maneuvers, provision of ammunition and other material means.
All necessary measures were taken to strengthen the defense and organize constant interaction between all elements of the operational construction in this direction.
We continue our work.
Glory to Ukraine!

 

[chrisl]

On 3/11/2024 at 6:33 AM, cesmonkey said:

 

 

On 3/1/2024 at 1:30 PM, Kinophile said:

 

I've been trying to keep up with the thread the past couple weeks and haven't really had time to respond to things, but a few things went by without generating very many additional comments:

The first is the number of FPV drones that Ukraine is producing: 100K/month.  The second is the number of drones it takes to get a hit.  I've seen various numbers in the past 30 pages and also in some searching, and they're all consistently less than 10 drones per hit, 1/3, 1/5, and 1/7 all showing up.  That's a major step towards massed precision.

If you multiply it out and take the conservative 1/7, that's about 475 hits/day of something, and over 14,000 hits/month.  Those are all either damaged/destroyed vehicles of casualties, or some combination.  If each hit on average damages two people/things (not a big stretch, since most successful FPV attacks we see are on a vehicle or small group), that's 28K casualties or vehicles/month that have to be replaced, and 170K/year.  Just to break even.  And it doesn't depend on tubes that wear out or a heavy logistics tail moving a bunch of 152/155 HE around.

The third is the 350K artillery shells per month that RU is producing/procuring/refurbing.  If we assume that RU has fired 10K shells/day through the war to get 31,000 Ukrainian KIAs, and assume 3 WIA/KIA, those shells are producing about 170 Ukrainian casualties/day and it's taking ~275 shells to produce a single casualty. 

These are all approximate, and I'm not really comparing apples to apples (the drones are counting hits that can include both vehicles and troops, or one or the other, and I'm only counting troop casualties for impact of RU arty on Ukraine), but it's showing a picture of a transition - Ukraine is substituting drones for artillery and doing so very effectively.  And steadily improving. Russian artillery effectiveness is roughly constant, if not decreasing as quality of tubes and shells decreases, and not all that different from WWII era artillery effectiveness numbers I've seen.  If the Ukrainian FPV effectiveness is closer to 1/5 or 1/3, that starts to get into the "1 munition per opposing troop" kind of massed precision.  And many of the FPV drones don't cost much more than a single artillery shell.

The effectiveness could also drop as they have to have more troops with less training flying the FPVs, but it will also come back up as those "pilots" get practice.  And using FPVs instead of "meat in the seat" pilots means that the pilots just continue to gain experience, even if their missions fail, because they're not put directly into harms way during their sorties.

One of the biggest limitations of drones vs. artillery is range - drones are still mostly 10 km or less, and often limited to aerial LOS. They need bigger batteries or an artillery boost to get to longer range, and a relay drone (or multiple relays) to be controllable  farther out.

The other thing that's not making a lot of sense are the various claims that Russia can make or buy even more FPV drones than Ukraine.  We're not seeing the same kind of effectiveness - if they were just as numerous and effective as Ukr drones we'd be seeing 4 or 5x higher Ukr casualties than we are.  And I don't think we have reason to think that they are that effective and it's just good Ukr OpSec keeping us from hearing about it.

 

[JonS]

3 hours ago, Kinophile said:

With Ukraine firmly in the democracy camp retaining a legacy Soviet military system can only grate and grind against the political and civil structures.

Interesting analysis (the whole post, not just this snippet). Seriously.

If I may paraphrase you: militaries work best when they reflect the civil culture from which they spring and which sustains them. The more there is a mismatch, the less well that military will function.

Is that about right?

Hence, trying to graft a western-style military onto the Afghan government failed spectacularly. There are loads of other examples, positive and negative (Israel in the 1960s and 70s, Iraq last decade, Saudi Arabia, ...)

Edited March 15 by JonS

[The_Capt]

7 hours ago, Kinophile said:

Is it not simpler to argue they built such a large, intense and in-depth military system because Russia is geographically huge, the Soviets had a lot of enemies and modern war is highly destructive? These points would also apply to NATO, but with democracies as the source political systems and cultures the patterns of their militaries angled in a different direction from the Soviets. 

There is some truth to the idea that militaries are an extension of the people who make them, however, one cannot become too focused on political ideology as the sole source of an overall school of doctrine.  History, resources, infrastructure, culture, environment and even things as simple as education and literacy all play important roles in how a military is generated and employed.  We can see vast differences in communist military approaches, for example.  North Vietnam had a very different approach than the Soviets, as did China and other non-Soviet communist states.  Western militaries also differed, not only internally but over time.  There is a vast difference in US military doctrine as it went from conscription to an all volunteer force.  Its conscription based force actually favoured mass until the 70s as did many other western nations.

7 hours ago, Kinophile said:

With Ukraine firmly in the democracy camp retaining a legacy Soviet military system can only grate and grind against the political and civil structures. We've seen that friction occur many times on the Ukrainian side; sometime sthe modern mindset wins out, sometimes the Soviet. Where reform/reformatting has not happened the Ukrainian military appears weakest. By contrast where the Soviet system is weakest is where Ukraine has its greatest successes.

This isn't simply Bashing the Soviet Legacy, its highlighting that when the Ukrainian military is allowed to operate in ways compatible with its current social construct is when its at it's most effective. Where it is hidebound by Soviet influence it fails far more often than succeeds. 

I think this risks dangerous oversimplification of the issue.  Ukraine is on a democracy spectrum, not a full fledge liberal democratic state yet.  Russia is also technically a democracy, but far more in the “locked in” autocratic/oligarch end.  Neither Ukraine or Russia are communist states (see their economic systems).  So boiling this all down to Russia = dictatorship = communism = Soviet system: Ukraine = democracy = western system, is a serious oversimplified lens through which to view the situation on just about every point of the algorithm.  

7 hours ago, Kinophile said:

I'm not clear how you come to this conclusion.

Its well documented and also noted many times here that the UA has not been given the sufficient time and gear to fully transition into a Ukrainian/Western hybrid. Its currently a Ukrainian/Western/Soviet Frankenstein's monster. When its tried the 'true' Western approach in offensives it has not had enough training and not enough gear. When its combined the Western/Soviet its had decent success and when its gone the trad Soviet approach its had nothing but failures (almost all tactical). 

The initial Russian invasion was constructed pretty much as we expected - BTGs under Brigade formations.  The nature of the assault was multi-axis manoeuvre designed to overwhelm an opponent.  The RA did not employ a Soviet style military approach here, they were much closer to western military philosophy and doctrine - fast moving warfare based on strategies of rapid annihilation through manoeuvre.  We did not see MRDs in an echeloned system designed to attack in multiple waves or the massive fires complex that are hallmarks of the Soviet system - in fact if Russia had gone with a Soviet style attack, with the numbers behind it, they may very well have won.  No the RA tried to employ what was basically a western style opening attack but it failed, nearly completely.  Now why it failed is interesting and two camps have sprung up.  The main one is that “Russia Sux” and cannot do western doctrine, despite trying to look like us, for various reasons - a BTG is nothing more than a type of Battle Group.  The other camp is of the mind the RA failed because conditions on the modern battlefield have changed.  The first camp has been the loudest but the evidence in support of the second is growing.

The western school is far more than training and kit - it is a deeper military philosophy that generates strategy, which in turn generates campaigns…pretty much like the Soviet school but taking very different routes to get to a similar end-state.  Now as the war has progressed the RA quickly saw that their was little hope for them by holding onto the western doctrinal school, they appear have to fallen back on mass but even here in small bite sized chunks…why?  This is the Soviet style but descaled.  The immediate answer to this descaling was “Russia Sux..LOLZ” but this does not make sense.  Russia managed a 5-6 axis, high speed operation at the beginning of the war but cannot figure out a Battalion level attack two-years in?  The good news is that it appears the Soviet approach is also under constraints based on the environment as well.  High concentration is too dangerous so they too have to de-aggregate.

As to the UA the idea you appear to be proposing is the “one more XYZ and they can win” idea.  It is that if we can only make the UA more like us, enough, that victory will somehow happen.  This does not match observations either.  Ukraine started this war fighting hybrid.  Mixes of conventional and unconventional defence along the entire length of the RAs overstretched operational system.  That was not western doctrine nor Soviet, it was something we have seen in COIN but upscaled and empowered.  The core C2 component of the Soviet style system is centralized control and task-command.  We saw neither of these from Ukraine in the opening days of the war.  They were far more western in that resistance in that regard.

Last summer was a testament and watershed moment.  It is well documented that the UA had a lot of western equipment and tens of thousands of western trained troops. The UA tried Bn level mechanized breaches in the centre south that are straight out of the western manuals.  They clearly trained for them in Europe and operationalized them.  They also failed…dramatically.  So either the Ukrainians can’t do western (another narrative that sprung up) or there are weaknesses in the western technology based approach on these battlefields.  I argue the latter.  The single largest one is the over-dependence of the western system on air superiority.  Without that the entire western school starts to fail.  And in the modern UAS environment air superiority is impossible.  So it won’t matter how much western equipment and training we provide, our current doctrine looks like it will not work on this battlefield.  So what?  We need a new doctrine.

7 hours ago, Kinophile said:

The Western approach works, just not in the classic, expected way of the West. If it didn't work the UA would rapidly abandon it. The Soviet way does not work for Ukraine, now, and especially not with the democratic society it is currently nailed onto.

My contention is we will see this removal of the Soviet legacy accelerate under both Syrskyi's leadership intentions, the attrition of the war itself and the modern expectations/demands of the civilian populace. I don't view the Soviet legacy as blameable for everything, more that it hass held back Ukraine from achieving even more than it has

It really doesn’t, in Ukraine and both sides have pulled back from the western style approach as they have been pulled into an attrition war. The western school vs Soviet school is less about politics and more about military strategies. Both were built for Annihilation strategies but the Soviet school has a far higher tolerance for attrition warfare.  Ukraine has kept the high technology approach but western style manoeuvre is simply undoable in this environment at any scale.  Or it may take a scale so high that it looks more Soviet than anything else.

Your position sounds an awful lot like the militaries of WW1 - one more push and we are through. But now they just need more F16s.  The Russians have taken the same philosophy but are basing it on human capital and not kit.  I suspect both camps are incorrect.  The western school of rapid overwhelming manoeuvres may be dead due to nearly complete battlefield illumination and modern friction.  Dumb mass is definitely dead for essentially the same reasons.

Neither side will adopt either the Western or Soviet approach in full because both of these schools are 80 years old and designed for a different time.  The Western school cannot deal with a modern attrition based war and the Soviet one cannot deal with the technological realities.  Neither schools can address the realities of denial and friction we are seeing.  So we are going to see the evolution of something else.  And our job over here in the safe sidelines is to try and stay out of Ukraine’s way while they figure it out…and take notes.

In summary, both militaries started this war more western than Soviet.  It worked for the Ukrainians on defence but has failed them on offence.  The Russians started with a more western-style approach on offence but once it failed ran back into the loving arms of Soviet doctrine on defence.

The Russian have tried a much smaller scaled down version of Soviet style on offence and it has provided limited gains at horrendous costs.  Ukraine has tried western style offensives, also at smaller scales, which have essentially done as well as the Soviet system, but with much lower casualties.  So here we are, neither school is really working on offence but can do defence.  Hence the growing belief that we are into something larger than either school - defensive primacy.

So, solutions.  Well doubling down on either school is likely a dead end. We probably need a new school entirely.  One we have not seen yet.  This war, and the next one will be a race of adaptations.  We have yet to see where it will end.

My position is that neither the Western or Soviet schools are working in this war, even though they have been attempted.  We should not even try to make the UA more like the US Army at this point.  Nor will expunging “Soviet legacy” fix the situation for Ukraine.  I suspect we have yet to see a new school of military art and thought emerge.  It is largely built on a foundation of artificial intelligence/forward processing that can create massed precision fires.  Both sides appear to be trying to figure out this problem, my money is that Ukraine is ahead in the game but not unassailable.

Edited March 15 by The_Capt

[The_Capt]

2 hours ago, JonS said:

Interesting analysis (the whole post, not just this snippet). Seriously.

If I may paraphrase you: militaries work best when they reflect the civil culture from which they spring and which sustains them. The more there is a mismatch, the less well that military will function.

Is that about right?

Hence, trying to graft a western-style military onto the Afghan government failed spectacularly. There are loads of other examples, positive and negative (Israel in the 1960s and 70s, Iraq last decade, Saudi Arabia, ...)

Danger young “S”.  This is not the first time this distillation has been attempted.  As I allude to in my post, the link between military schools of thought and the societies behind them is not 1) unidirectional, nor 2) in glorious isolation.  There is truth to the above argument but only partial truths.  For example, in war societies themselves shift and change (see Japanese internment camps) so the evolution of their military will also shift and change.  

In the examples you cite, these are less failures in military transposition but in a larger political ideology.  More bluntly we cannot reproduce western democracies in many of these nations.  The failure of western military school in these same nations is a symptom of a large issue.  At the same time history is full of “westernized” indigenous troops who were successfully integrated and operationalized out of line with their home cultures - Sikh Regiments anyone?

A military must be a recognizable extension of its society but that is far slipperier and squishier concept than the picture on the cereal box.

[chuckdyke]

No plan survives first contact. Except for the propagandists in Moscow.

[photon]

So, reading the last couple of pages, here's how I'm reading the argument about western and soviet legacies. To succeed tactically on the modern battlefield, an army needs to establish fires superiority and ISR superiority (which involves denying both to the enemy and securing both for friendly operations). The legacy Soviet and legacy Western took different paths to achieving those two superiorities, albeit with some overlap. Neither seems workable on the modern battlefield.

The legacy western system relied on ranged precision systems to deliver fires. So, Excalibur, Javelin, HIMARS, Tomahawk, HARM, and the like. The legacy western system relied on dismantling the enemy's fires complex. This is a sort of pre-emptive counter battery, where we identified fires systems and targeted them as a precursor to tactical engagement.

"Air Superiority" is a misnomer. It's really ISR and fires superiority delivered by primarily airborne systems. One thing on the table now is whether the western fires superiority system can dismantle an opposing fires complex. We built our fires complex to targeting large, hot, heavy systems, not now a fires complex is much more distributed and made of much less energetic bits. Targeting a Pantsir? Doable. Targeting two guys with a backpack full of drones? Harder.

The legacy soviet system relied on mass to deliver fires. TOS-1, Grad, the abundance of tube artillery. The legacy soviet system relied on overwhelming the enemy's counterbattery complex to secure fires in a competitive environment. 

The legacy western system relied on airborne ISR to establish superiority, and on airspace denial to inhibit enemy airborne ISR. The legacy soviet system relied on recon in force (?) to establish ISR superiority, and on airspace denial to inhibit enemy ISR. These have both been blown up by high speed battlefield networking (!) and plentiful drones. Nobody has any idea how to deny dronespace. Also, the Russians appear to be using waves of expendable soldiers as a form of reconnaissance, which is horrifying, but appears to be sort of effective?

More to ponder here, and whatever system ends up able to deliver fires and ISR won't look like either the legacy western or legacy Soviet system, because the physics and geometry of a modern battlefield are so different.

[The_Capt]

1 hour ago, photon said:

So, reading the last couple of pages, here's how I'm reading the argument about western and soviet legacies. To succeed tactically on the modern battlefield, an army needs to establish fires superiority and ISR superiority (which involves denying both to the enemy and securing both for friendly operations). The legacy Soviet and legacy Western took different paths to achieving those two superiorities, albeit with some overlap. Neither seems workable on the modern battlefield.

The legacy western system relied on ranged precision systems to deliver fires. So, Excalibur, Javelin, HIMARS, Tomahawk, HARM, and the like. The legacy western system relied on dismantling the enemy's fires complex. This is a sort of pre-emptive counter battery, where we identified fires systems and targeted them as a precursor to tactical engagement.

"Air Superiority" is a misnomer. It's really ISR and fires superiority delivered by primarily airborne systems. One thing on the table now is whether the western fires superiority system can dismantle an opposing fires complex. We built our fires complex to targeting large, hot, heavy systems, not now a fires complex is much more distributed and made of much less energetic bits. Targeting a Pantsir? Doable. Targeting two guys with a backpack full of drones? Harder.

The legacy soviet system relied on mass to deliver fires. TOS-1, Grad, the abundance of tube artillery. The legacy soviet system relied on overwhelming the enemy's counterbattery complex to secure fires in a competitive environment. 

The legacy western system relied on airborne ISR to establish superiority, and on airspace denial to inhibit enemy airborne ISR. The legacy soviet system relied on recon in force (?) to establish ISR superiority, and on airspace denial to inhibit enemy ISR. These have both been blown up by high speed battlefield networking (!) and plentiful drones. Nobody has any idea how to deny dronespace. Also, the Russians appear to be using waves of expendable soldiers as a form of reconnaissance, which is horrifying, but appears to be sort of effective?

More to ponder here, and whatever system ends up able to deliver fires and ISR won't look like either the legacy western or legacy Soviet system, because the physics and geometry of a modern battlefield are so different.

Outstanding summary…much better than mine.  I would add that “Air Superiority” is also about “range, reach and persistence”.  We relied on air power dominance for deep battle, which is critical to the western way of warfare.  If that is denied we run into serious trouble.  The Soviet system relies of air power more for, as you note, denial and strategic shaping.  The Soviets really did not have a CAS or operational air power complex like we developed in the west.  Even Tac Avn was seen as a firepower projection element and not an integral part of manoeuvre.

Beyond Air, the west relies heavily on multi-domain superiority.  We not only need to own the air, but also the maritime, space and cyber for our system to really work.  The major problem is, and will continue to be that potential adversaries are not stupid.  They know that if they cannot dominate a domain, they only need to deny it in order to create cracks in the western military system.  They have, and will continue to invest heavily into these denial capabilities.  The problem is that denial has become increasingly easy to achieve.  This has been due to several driving factors but miniaturization of processing power has been central.  By being able to load more complex processing power, and sensors to inform that processing…all cheaper and lighter.  It means weapons for denial have become not only smaller - allowing for greater range - but more autonomous and precise.

This is potentially enormous.  It redraws the fabric of warfare at some pretty fundamental levels.  In the past it was some very small things.  The ability to create overwhelming firepower in the form of things like machine guns and fast fire artillery had a massive impact on warfare.  But in reality the largest impacts on warfare were a rail line, signals wire and tin can.  Rail lines allowed for massive quick force projection on scales and timelines we never saw before.  Signals wire linked all that firepower volume together.  And tin cans meant we could keep troops in the field for 365 days a year.  Those three relatively disconnected technologies changed warfare forever.

What we are seeing on the modern battlefield is even more profound.  We are talking about artificial thinking and decision making.  We are seeing everything in real time and feeding it back to these systems.  To try and pin this on a Western or Soviet military school of thought is really not useful in my opinion as what we could potentially be seeing is so much larger.

[Beleg85]

Regarding recent Russian strike on Ukrainian AA column, Butusov channel confirmed it was Patriot launcher.

-2 launchers were destroyed (no mention of radar, but another vehicle was destroyed too) by overal 3 Iskanders.

- This battery was used very extensively in recent weeks, likely it was reason so many Russian planes started to fall down. This allowed muscovites to broadly locate the place of the radar; likely rest was done by visual confirmation by drones.

- Ukrainians knew in last moment that rockets zeroed on them, and according to journalist they did cardinal mistake here: instead of scrambling, they formed compact column that was to leave the place. It didn't manage on time. 9 crew members sadly died.

[Kinophile]

2 hours ago, The_Capt said:

There is some truth to the idea that militaries are an extension of the people who make them, however, one cannot become too focused on political ideology as the sole source of an overall school of doctrine.  History, resources, infrastructure, culture, environment and even things as simple as education and literacy all play important roles in how a military is generated and employed.  We can see vast differences in communist military approaches, for example.  North Vietnam had a very different approach than the Soviets, as did China and other non-Soviet communist states.  Western militaries also differed, not only internally but over time.  There is a vast difference in US military doctrine as it went from conscription to an all volunteer force.  Its conscription based force actually favoured mass until the 70s as did many other western nations.

I think this risks dangerous oversimplification of the issue.  Ukraine is on a democracy spectrum, not a full fledge liberal democratic state yet.  Russia is also technically a democracy, but far more in the “locked in” autocratic/oligarch end.  Neither Ukraine or Russia are communist states (see their economic systems).  So boiling this all down to Russia = dictatorship = communism = Soviet system: Ukraine = democracy = western system, is a serious oversimplified lens through which to view the situation on just about every point of the algorithm.  

The initial Russian invasion was constructed pretty much as we expected - BTGs under Brigade formations.  The nature of the assault was multi-axis manoeuvre designed to overwhelm an opponent.  The RA did not employ a Soviet style military approach here, they were much closer to western military philosophy and doctrine - fast moving warfare based on strategies of rapid annihilation through manoeuvre.  We did not see MRDs in an echeloned system designed to attack in multiple waves or the massive fires complex that are hallmarks of the Soviet system - in fact if Russia had gone with a Soviet style attack, with the numbers behind it, they may very well have won.  No the RA tried to employ what was basically a western style opening attack but it failed, nearly completely.  Now why it failed is interesting and two camps have sprung up.  The main one is that “Russia Sux” and cannot do western doctrine, despite trying to look like us, for various reasons - a BTG is nothing more than a type of Battle Group.  The other camp is of the mind the RA failed because conditions on the modern battlefield have changed.  The first camp has been the loudest but the evidence in support of the second is growing.

The western school is far more than training and kit - it is a deeper military philosophy that generates strategy, which in turn generates campaigns…pretty much like the Soviet school but taking very different routes to get to a similar end-state.  Now as the war has progressed the RA quickly saw that their was little hope for them by holding onto the western doctrinal school, they appear have to fallen back on mass but even here in small bite sized chunks…why?  This is the Soviet style but descaled.  The immediate answer to this descaling was “Russia Sux..LOLZ” but this does not make sense.  Russia managed a 5-6 axis, high speed operation at the beginning of the war but cannot figure out a Battalion level attack two-years in?  The good news is that it appears the Soviet approach is also under constraints based on the environment as well.  High concentration is too dangerous so they too have to de-aggregate.

As to the UA the idea you appear to be proposing is the “one more XYZ and they can win” idea.  It is that if we can only make the UA more like us, enough, that victory will somehow happen.  This does not match observations either.  Ukraine started this war fighting hybrid.  Mixes of conventional and unconventional defence along the entire length of the RAs overstretched operational system.  That was not western doctrine nor Soviet, it was something we have seen in COIN but upscaled and empowered.  The core C2 component of the Soviet style system is centralized control and task-command.  We saw neither of these from Ukraine in the opening days of the war.  They were far more western in that resistance in that regard.

Last summer was a testament and watershed moment.  It is well documented that the UA had a lot of western equipment and tens of thousands of western trained troops. The UA tried Bn level mechanized breaches in the centre south that are straight out of the western manuals.  They clearly trained for them in Europe and operationalized them.  They also failed…dramatically.  So either the Ukrainians can’t do western (another narrative that sprung up) or there are weaknesses in the western technology based approach on these battlefields.  I argue the latter.  The single largest one is the over-dependence of the western system on air superiority.  Without that the entire western school starts to fail.  And in the modern UAS environment air superiority is impossible.  So it won’t matter how much western equipment and training we provide, our current doctrine looks like it will not work on this battlefield.  So what?  We need a new doctrine.

It really doesn’t, in Ukraine and both sides have pulled back from the western style approach as they have been pulled into an attrition war. The western school vs Soviet school is less about politics and more about military strategies. Both were built for Annihilation strategies but the Soviet school has a far higher tolerance for attrition warfare.  Ukraine has kept the high technology approach but western style manoeuvre is simply undoable in this environment at any scale.  Or it may take a scale so high that it looks more Soviet than anything else.

Your position sounds an awful lot like the militaries of WW1 - one more push and we are through. But now they just need more F16s.  The Russians have taken the same philosophy but are basing it on human capital and not kit.  I suspect both camps are incorrect.  The western school of rapid overwhelming manoeuvres may be dead due to nearly complete battlefield illumination and modern friction.  Dumb mass is definitely dead for essentially the same reasons.

Neither side will adopt either the Western or Soviet approach in full because both of these schools are 80 years old and designed for a different time.  The Western school cannot deal with a modern attrition based war and the Soviet one cannot deal with the technological realities.  Neither schools can address the realities of denial and friction we are seeing.  So we are going to see the evolution of something else.  And our job over here in the safe sidelines is to try and stay out of Ukraine’s way while they figure it out…and take notes.

In summary, both militaries started this war more western than Soviet.  It worked for the Ukrainians on defence but has failed them on offence.  The Russians started with a more western-style approach on offence but once it failed ran back into the loving arms of Soviet doctrine on defence.

The Russian have tried a much smaller scaled down version of Soviet style on offence and it has provided limited gains at horrendous costs.  Ukraine has tried western style offensives, also at smaller scales, which have essentially done as well as the Soviet system, but with much lower casualties.  So here we are, neither school is really working on offence but can do defence.  Hence the growing belief that we are into something larger than either school - defensive primacy.

So, solutions.  Well doubling down on either school is likely a dead end. We probably need a new school entirely.  One we have not seen yet.  This war, and the next one will be a race of adaptations.  We have yet to see where it will end.

My position is that neither the Western or Soviet schools are working in this war, even though they have been attempted.  We should not even try to make the UA more like the US Army at this point.  Nor will expunging “Soviet legacy” fix the situation for Ukraine.  I suspect we have yet to see a new school of military art and thought emerge.  It is largely built on a foundation of artificial intelligence/forward processing that can create massed precision fires.  Both sides appear to be trying to figure out this problem, my money is that Ukraine is ahead in the game but not unassailable.

Thank you for taking the time to answer. 

I feel I need to solidify my thoughts a bit more before discussing further, as several of the positions you ascribe to what I'm thinking are actually not my positions.

This is a failure of clarity on my side but there's also a easiness to lumping people into boxes of thought - but it's made easier by foggy articulation. 

I shall ponder... 

 

 

 

Edited March 15 by Kinophile

[Kinophile]

 

 

[Kinophile]

 

 

[The_Capt]

31 minutes ago, Kinophile said:

Thank you for taking the time to answer. 

I feel I need to solidify my thoughts a bit more before discussing further, as several of the positions you ascribe to what I'm thinking are actually not my positions.

This is a failure of clarity on my side but there's also a easiness to lumping people into boxes of thought - but it's made easier by foggy articulation. 

I shall ponder... 

 

 

 

Well kudos for trying to wrestle with it.  There is a lot in the wind with respect to warfare right now. All of my theories could easily collapse tomorrow.  I spent the first year of this war, mouth agape, trying to figure out what was going on.  The second year, things started to form, but they are nothing more than shadows we can see from the outside.

Now into the third year, I am convinced of some things, which if wargaming has taught me anything, is about the time Bil H drops the bomb and blows up my entire plan.

[FancyCat]

Sad news about the Patriot launchers. Russia can't afford to replace their AA assets, we can. By God we are not shaping up on the industrial side. More everything to Ukraine. If we want to make peace, it's obvious that we need to give Ukraine a stronger hand. More to Ukraine.

[dan/california]

2 hours ago, The_Capt said:

is about the time Bil H drops the bomb and blows up my entire plan.

If Bil H was a general on the Russian side they would be in Lviv...

 

5 hours ago, The_Capt said:

There is some truth to the idea that militaries are an extension of the people who make them, however, one cannot become too focused on political ideology as the sole source of an overall school of doctrine.  History, resources, infrastructure, culture, environment and even things as simple as education and literacy all play important roles in how a military is generated and employed.  We can see vast differences in communist military approaches, for example.  North Vietnam had a very different approach than the Soviets, as did China and other non-Soviet communist states.  Western militaries also differed, not only internally but over time.  There is a vast difference in US military doctrine as it went from conscription to an all volunteer force.  Its conscription based force actually favoured mass until the 70s as did many other western nations.

I think this risks dangerous oversimplification of the issue.  Ukraine is on a democracy spectrum, not a full fledge liberal democratic state yet.  Russia is also technically a democracy, but far more in the “locked in” autocratic/oligarch end.  Neither Ukraine or Russia are communist states (see their economic systems).  So boiling this all down to Russia = dictatorship = communism = Soviet system: Ukraine = democracy = western system, is a serious oversimplified lens through which to view the situation on just about every point of the algorithm.  

The initial Russian invasion was constructed pretty much as we expected - BTGs under Brigade formations.  The nature of the assault was multi-axis manoeuvre designed to overwhelm an opponent.  The RA did not employ a Soviet style military approach here, they were much closer to western military philosophy and doctrine - fast moving warfare based on strategies of rapid annihilation through manoeuvre.  We did not see MRDs in an echeloned system designed to attack in multiple waves or the massive fires complex that are hallmarks of the Soviet system - in fact if Russia had gone with a Soviet style attack, with the numbers behind it, they may very well have won.  No the RA tried to employ what was basically a western style opening attack but it failed, nearly completely.  Now why it failed is interesting and two camps have sprung up.  The main one is that “Russia Sux” and cannot do western doctrine, despite trying to look like us, for various reasons - a BTG is nothing more than a type of Battle Group.  The other camp is of the mind the RA failed because conditions on the modern battlefield have changed.  The first camp has been the loudest but the evidence in support of the second is growing.

The western school is far more than training and kit - it is a deeper military philosophy that generates strategy, which in turn generates campaigns…pretty much like the Soviet school but taking very different routes to get to a similar end-state.  Now as the war has progressed the RA quickly saw that their was little hope for them by holding onto the western doctrinal school, they appear have to fallen back on mass but even here in small bite sized chunks…why?  This is the Soviet style but descaled.  The immediate answer to this descaling was “Russia Sux..LOLZ” but this does not make sense.  Russia managed a 5-6 axis, high speed operation at the beginning of the war but cannot figure out a Battalion level attack two-years in?  The good news is that it appears the Soviet approach is also under constraints based on the environment as well.  High concentration is too dangerous so they too have to de-aggregate.

As to the UA the idea you appear to be proposing is the “one more XYZ and they can win” idea.  It is that if we can only make the UA more like us, enough, that victory will somehow happen.  This does not match observations either.  Ukraine started this war fighting hybrid.  Mixes of conventional and unconventional defence along the entire length of the RAs overstretched operational system.  That was not western doctrine nor Soviet, it was something we have seen in COIN but upscaled and empowered.  The core C2 component of the Soviet style system is centralized control and task-command.  We saw neither of these from Ukraine in the opening days of the war.  They were far more western in that resistance in that regard.

Last summer was a testament and watershed moment.  It is well documented that the UA had a lot of western equipment and tens of thousands of western trained troops. The UA tried Bn level mechanized breaches in the centre south that are straight out of the western manuals.  They clearly trained for them in Europe and operationalized them.  They also failed…dramatically.  So either the Ukrainians can’t do western (another narrative that sprung up) or there are weaknesses in the western technology based approach on these battlefields.  I argue the latter.  The single largest one is the over-dependence of the western system on air superiority.  Without that the entire western school starts to fail.  And in the modern UAS environment air superiority is impossible.  So it won’t matter how much western equipment and training we provide, our current doctrine looks like it will not work on this battlefield.  So what?  We need a new doctrine.

It really doesn’t, in Ukraine and both sides have pulled back from the western style approach as they have been pulled into an attrition war. The western school vs Soviet school is less about politics and more about military strategies. Both were built for Annihilation strategies but the Soviet school has a far higher tolerance for attrition warfare.  Ukraine has kept the high technology approach but western style manoeuvre is simply undoable in this environment at any scale.  Or it may take a scale so high that it looks more Soviet than anything else.

Your position sounds an awful lot like the militaries of WW1 - one more push and we are through. But now they just need more F16s.  The Russians have taken the same philosophy but are basing it on human capital and not kit.  I suspect both camps are incorrect.  The western school of rapid overwhelming manoeuvres may be dead due to nearly complete battlefield illumination and modern friction.  Dumb mass is definitely dead for essentially the same reasons.

Neither side will adopt either the Western or Soviet approach in full because both of these schools are 80 years old and designed for a different time.  The Western school cannot deal with a modern attrition based war and the Soviet one cannot deal with the technological realities.  Neither schools can address the realities of denial and friction we are seeing.  So we are going to see the evolution of something else.  And our job over here in the safe sidelines is to try and stay out of Ukraine’s way while they figure it out…and take notes.

In summary, both militaries started this war more western than Soviet.  It worked for the Ukrainians on defence but has failed them on offence.  The Russians started with a more western-style approach on offence but once it failed ran back into the loving arms of Soviet doctrine on defence.

The Russian have tried a much smaller scaled down version of Soviet style on offence and it has provided limited gains at horrendous costs.  Ukraine has tried western style offensives, also at smaller scales, which have essentially done as well as the Soviet system, but with much lower casualties.  So here we are, neither school is really working on offence but can do defence.  Hence the growing belief that we are into something larger than either school - defensive primacy.

So, solutions.  Well doubling down on either school is likely a dead end. We probably need a new school entirely.  One we have not seen yet.  This war, and the next one will be a race of adaptations.  We have yet to see where it will end.

My position is that neither the Western or Soviet schools are working in this war, even though they have been attempted.  We should not even try to make the UA more like the US Army at this point.  Nor will expunging “Soviet legacy” fix the situation for Ukraine.  I suspect we have yet to see a new school of military art and thought emerge.  It is largely built on a foundation of artificial intelligence/forward processing that can create massed precision fires.  Both sides appear to be trying to figure out this problem, my money is that Ukraine is ahead in the game but not unassailable.

 

5 hours ago, The_Capt said:

Danger young “S”.  This is not the first time this distillation has been attempted.  As I allude to in my post, the link between military schools of thought and the societies behind them is not 1) unidirectional, nor 2) in glorious isolation.  There is truth to the above argument but only partial truths.  For example, in war societies themselves shift and change (see Japanese internment camps) so the evolution of their military will also shift and change.  

In the examples you cite, these are less failures in military transposition but in a larger political ideology.  More bluntly we cannot reproduce western democracies in many of these nations.  The failure of western military school in these same nations is a symptom of a large issue.  At the same time history is full of “westernized” indigenous troops who were successfully integrated and operationalized out of line with their home cultures - Sikh Regiments anyone?

A military must be a recognizable extension of its society but that is far slipperier and squishier concept than the picture on the cereal box.

We deeply appreciate the opportunity to audit staff college for free!

2 hours ago, Kinophile said:

 

 

I suspect the thing that is not being talked up is some level of support from some portion of the Chinese military industrial complex. But this is also more proof of the basic fact that cell phone tech makes drones so easy ANYBODY can do it. As The_Capt keeps saying, that is simply world changing.

I also think it implies the Burmese Junta is bleeped...

[Kinophile]

We'll see. 

[Kinophile]

 

[Kinophile]

 

 

[Carolus]

Quite a historic move for the purely economic union. 

 As I thought in the past, the EU should not be completely underestimated, although it is an entity without an army. 

It's a financial juggernaut and some EU parliamentarians are idealistic people (in a good way), motivated by the idea of a transnational effort.

 

 

[The_MonkeyKing]

40 minutes ago, Carolus said:

Quite a historic move for the purely economic union. 

 As I thought in the past, the EU should not be completely underestimated, although it is an entity without an army. 

It's a financial juggernaut and some EU parliamentarians are idealistic people (in a good way), motivated by the idea of a transnational effort.

 

 

The sum was 500 million euros...

Finland made the same investment last year to our own plants alone

[poesel]

16 minutes ago, The_MonkeyKing said:

The sum was 500 million euros...

Finland made the same investment last year to our own plants alone

That's 500 mil just for ammo production, out of a total of 2 bil for defense spending.

But more important than the actual numbers is the fact, that the EU as an entity is spending money on defense. AFAIK, that is unprecedented.

[Carolus]

41 minutes ago, The_MonkeyKing said:

The sum was 500 million euros...

Finland made the same investment last year to our own plants alone

And see it that way: some of that EU money might be added to that. It's a pure bonus.

The most importnt part is of course that this represents a legal precedent.

The EU has been producing legal precedents with mind-boggling speed since Feb 2022, actually, compared to how sluggish the EU is designed to be (to facilitate common ground between diverse member nations).

This sleepy giant started to run, and he has deep coffers.

Edited March 15 by Carolus

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, Carolus said:

This sleepy giant started to run, and he has deep coffers.

The sleepy giant isn't running yet, but it is awake and it's definitely making some coffee.

Steve

[Carolus]

21 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

The sleepy giant isn't running yet, but it is awake and it's definitely making some coffee.

Steve

Well, that's true. He doesn't have the running shoes on yet, but he is thinking really hard about the socks.