Hey gang. Wanted your help working through something I keep thinking about.
The common refrain from (mostly) R's is "the Biden Administration isn't doing enough" to help Ukraine. Now, maybe it's all the Churchill comparisons flying around, but I keep having the same thought about the current moment:
This looks a lot like Lend-Lease.
I know. WW2 comparisons are dumb. But isn't there a little bit of similarity to American policy during the Blitz? A European ally getting bombarded, thousands of dead civilians, a president hamstrung by isolationists at home, but providing a blank check of material support.
Am I crazy, or is Biden's current Ukraine policy kinda like Lend-Lease? Is that good or bad? Will it take a Pearl Harbor type event to escalate American involvement? Help me out here.
Yeah. People tend to remember the heroism of the Berlin Airlift and forget how dangerous it was, strategically and politically, even just logistically. That many planes in that little time would have been hazardous even in a perfectly peaceful environment.
Also, Spades is the unofficial card game of the Marine Corps. I learned how to play it in juvi as a teen and it came in handy in country. Ran x3 Bostons my last tour. Very underrated game.
Another big tell in the casualty counts are the Russian KIA:WIA ratios, which appear to be around 1:2 right now. By comparison, US casualty rates throughout GWOT were around 1:7-8. This is because we strapped insane amounts of personal body armor to every guy/gal outside the wire (x4 E-SAPI plates) and then kept our combat units dismounted for the most part save for insert/exfils in some cases (logistical convoys are the exception, but they're not combat units).
The point is: BMPs and T-72s are ATGM/IED-magnets, and if the Russian military spends most of its time relying on motorized armor for force protection, they will continue to see their guys get burnt alive inside of scrap vehicles at a rate of 2-8 guys per ATGM. That's where the rate of change comes from: multiple personnel kills per effective ATGM deployed. When you dismount your infantry they can't be effectively targeted by ATGMs, or certainly not as easily when they're all sitting inside of an APC. The enemy has to rely on using small arms fire to take out dispersed ground patrols, which gets a lot more dicey than firing off an ATGM and then dipping out. Bullets go both ways and artillery fire can be called in if within range. The biggest tactical error Russia is making right now is keeping a lot of their guys inside of armored vehicles that are more vulnerable than had the conscripts simply gotten out and patrolled instead of sitting inside of a BMP-2 or Tigr. You can survive bullet wounds taken on patrol. You *cannot* survive a catastrophic ATGM hit on an armored troop transport or an Mi-24 shootdown using MANPADs.
There is a false sense of security when you are sitting in a bulletproof box, especially in the era of man portable ATM systems that are reasonably effective--especially against something like a BMP.
For those of you interested in Travis' comment (really sounds like he has a lot of expertise!) but who, like me, don't have his military knowledge of acronyms, I looked some of them up: WIA: Wounded in Action (I knew that KIA is Killed in Action), GWOT: Global War on Terrorism, BMP is a Russian Infantry fighting vehicle; I think a tank, ATGM: Anti-Tank Guided Missile, and APC: Armored Personnel Carrier.
I sympathize, Travis. My career was in special education, and talk about acronyms!! I appreciate your knowledge and experience, and fortunately, "Dr. Google", as I say to my grandkids, can answer a lot of questions.
Everybody does it, my late wife was a proposal manager for a large engineering company, one of her jobs was to get everybody to define their acronyms so she could put it in the proposal. She was explaining why to a group of engineers of various disiplines, she used EOP and gave a couple of examples, one was something to do with environmental studies and I don't remember the other one. An architect came up with End of Pipe and the road guy, said no it is end of pavement. proving why she wasn't just asking dumb questions.
The Navy has its own particular language for a lot of things--plus the usual load of acronyms that any large institution generates. Sometimes when writing or talking about my experiences there I forget to translate myself ;)
I read a quote from a DOD briefer yesterday that most of these deaths are concentrated in Russia's combat-ready forces, not in combat support forces, so the deaths are particularly devastating to Russia's ability to initiate offensive action in the future.
Already, combat support troops are being placed in to combat roles they aren't trained for. That will probably make it even easier for Ukrainian troops to kill them.
Before the invasion happened, I made the comment to my wife that Putin's grievance isn't with the West, it's with objective reality in the 21st Century. The Russian leadership's unwillingness to accept inconvenient facts is destroying their stature in the world, perhaps permanently.
Let us hope Ukrainian civilian casualties never approach those numbers in Iraq.
No one knows with certainty how many people have been killed and wounded in Iraq since the 2003 United States invasion. However, we know that between 184,382 and 207,156 civilians have died from direct war related violence caused by the U.S., its allies, the Iraqi military and police, and opposition forces from the time of the invasion through October 2019. The violent deaths of Iraqi civilians have occurred through aerial bombing, shelling, gunshots, suicide attacks, and fires started by bombing. Many civilians have also been injured.
Everyone focuses on the drone strikes killing civilians, but honestly, during the three tours I put in there, most common way I saw civvies buy it was through "escalation of force" scenarios. Basically, we treated anyone who got too close to our convoys or checkpoints without stopping as a suicide bomber and lit their vehicle up with MG fire. I seen *a lot* of Iraqi civvies go out this way. A lot of folks don't know about things like the Haditha Massacre either, which is unfortunate, because that was basically a squad of Marines executing 24 civilians with close-range sternum and headshots--some victims as young as 8. The only Marine successfully charged for that war crime was a squad leader who was reduced to the rank of private. That's what happens when you take a Fallujah '04 spearhead infantry unit and recycle them to a different city with only about 6 months stateside in between. ALL the veterans in 3/1 had hardcore PTSD. That came out during our tour in the Haditha Triad following Rep Ruben Gallego's (D-AZ) unit getting pretty fucked up out there the month prior.
Advertising my lack of military knowledge in advance, I have a question concerning Russia's desire to conquer certain cities. In the past, when we fought with more primitive weapons, most building structures would be left intact, even if all the inhabitants were killed. Additionally, the control of significant cities meant controlling supply lines, transportation hubs, manufacturing facilities, and centralized communication centers. Most of these factors are no longer valid. In addition, with modern high explosive munitinitins, there is little left of the city after it has been conquered. When I see pictures (which I guess are accurate) of cities pounded into piles of rubble, I wonder the point of trying to capture this city that no longer exists. Other than the psychological benefit of attempting to demoralize the enemy, all I see is the firming of Ukrainian resolve to resist Russian advances. Also, the Ukrainians know the consequences of being taken prisoner by the Russians, which is another reason for fierce resistance. From a military perspective, wouldn't it make more sense to go around a city, blockade it, destroy any airfields, and offer good terms to anyone who surrenders? I see the Ukrainians doing something similar to what the Russians did to Germany in WWII. Retreat, leave a wasteland behind, and stretch the enemy's supply lines to the breaking point. Not exactly the same, but similarities are enough to make wonder what is passing for military strategy in the minds of the Russian high command?
Not 100% sure about this, but I've seen suggestions that any real Russian advance would require the ability to use the Ukrainian rail system for logistical support, since they can't keep up the truck supply. Rail lines go through big cities, so to use them, you need to hold at least part of the city.
The Russian military isn't really set up to conduct the same type of war that the US military is. Part of the reason for that is that it is set up along the lines of the Soviet military--which was intended for two uses:
1) A war against NATO forces;
2) Suppression of revolt inside the Soviet empire (including their Warsaw Pact "allies.").
Condition #1 sort of dictated both the TO&E (table of organization and equipment) of the units and the force structure. One of the primary factors in this appears to be the general assumption on the part of the Soviets (later Russians) that they would not have air superiority (in fact the reverse).
This accounts for the large number of AAD systems in the Soviet army that had no American equivalents (like the ZSU23-4). No really effective equivalents of AWACs or Joint Stars (or whatever they are calling it these days)...and LOTS of artillery.
The Russians apparently also suck at SEAD (suppression of enemy air defenses), which has been developed into a fine art by the American Air Forces (one of the reasons for the American early adoption of stealth and why we basically lead the world in it).
Air/ground interoperations also seem poor... something else that has been hugely refined by the Americans.
Given their force composition, the only real option for the Russians WRT urban combat is the old shell the place into oblivion approach--which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.
Destroying a city actually makes it more defendable.
If you have a decent logistics train (oops, sorry Russia) it isn't really necessary to take a city--as pointed out, you generally had to wreck the place to take it and you had to expend a lot of logistics and manpower to do that.
Taking a city is more of a political objective than a military objective... which is why there is a certain fixation about it on the part of the leadership.
Getting bogged down in urban warfare is a big no-no (from a military perspective)--especially if you are armor-heavy (because armor is kind of useless in that type of warfare).
Russian military strategy appears to be primarily driven by the political objectives of Putin. While the overall political strategy should be guiding operations , there is a difference between political and military objectives that causes some apparent stupidity to appear. What this generally means is that the political leadership is micromanaging.
Given modern technologies, the capability of modern logistics (at least on the American side), and the nature of contemporary high intensity warfare as being mostly about fighting with what you already have on hand (because there isn't time to build stuff or train new people), most of the historical rationales for taking cities have essentially disappeared, other than the political rationales.
We regularly fight wars on the other side of the globe. The last time the Russians did that was essentially WW2--in the Soviet Far East versus Japan. They had MASSIVE American logistical support for that.
Thank you for the explanation. I don't believe the Ukrainians can accept any peace agreement that allows Russia to keep any territory it has taken. Whatever Putin agrees to today, he will find an excuse to break tomorrow. Today either we, the West, drive him back to Russia, or we will pay the price tomorrow. If he gets to keep any territory, he will use it as a victory in his propaganda war. He has supporters in America as well as in Europe. We are looking at Europe in 1936 when Churchill was warning everyone about Nazi Germany. I realize the comparison is not a one-to-one, but there are enough similarities that should make us very wary of the immediate future.
The point of leveling cities is casualty-aversion. Russian losses are already sky-high because they tried to Blitzkreig Kyiv on day one, which is a significant departure from their traditional tactics. When it failed measurably, they went back to their traditional model of barraging cities with artillery instead of sending motorized infantry into the urban combat environment to get slaughtered. The Russian military is passing the buck on casualties from their ranks to the Ukrainian civilians. Remember when they evacuated Russian-speaking Ukrainians prior to the invasion? This is why. It's so that they can turn the populous of any city that mounts resistance into refugees while turning their old homes into rubble. If the defenders don't end resistance, the Russians turn their families into refugees. Suddenly, defenders are making the choice between looking after their families or staying in the fight. It's disgusting shit, but it has worked in Russia's favor every time it has been employed in the past. It turns defenders into refugees and leaves nothing behind to defend.
There will be no trusting between what a Russian soldier says and what a Ukrainian hears. Not after 02/24.
Holding the area that the city controls hands that control over to your side, so long as you can keep it. Putin (not "Russia", but Putin) wants the country. So long as he can keep soldiers in those areas and nominally hold them, those cities can be standing or they can be glassed.
That's a further problem for his military: Can they hold what they claim?
Amen to drones & intel. If the Ukrainians can take out the howitzers and MLRS launchers that are devastating the civilian population then Putin loses much of his ability to inflict terror.
For once I think I can agree with JVL, about the use of Drones. All the chatter about getting cold war age MIGS in the air for Ukraine would solve the problem is a crock. There is NO way a 40 year old plane would be any match for today's technology. The drones and an improved anti aircraft missle systems would serve Ukraine much better.
In any war, there are mistakes made by either side at the outset that either get corrected over time or lead to a protracted front where casualty-aversion is the name of the game. This is the nature of how both sides grow their "veteranship" over time as they learn what tactics work and which ones will get your whole unit murdered. Mariupol will be a big turning point because once it is taken it will do some big things for Russian field commanders:
It will demonstrate the effectiveness of the "use artillery barrages to inflict casualties while minimizing friendly losses" model that will no doubt be adopted in other urban sieges around the country once it has proven its effectiveness in the south. This is how commanders learn and adapt from the successes of their counterparts.
The other big thing it will do for Russian commanders is open up more logistical resources. With Mariupol leveled and leftover resistance there slim, Chechens and other veteran units that Russia has in Mariupol can be recommitted to taking Odessa or consolidating the eastern Oblasts.
Finally, we need to look at who the Russians can loop in. They're already tapping Syrian and now Libyan troops (Run Marty!), but word on the block is that there is a real chance of Belarus getting pulled into a conflict it is already ankle-deep in. If Belarus commits its military to the Russian cause, that's like several new northern fronts opening up just north of Kyiv. If this occurs, the map looks a lot different. Same thing if the Russians continue to employ the "more artillery, fewer casualties" model across the north. The Russian military is already offering Mariupol the same thing it had previously offered cities like Idlib & Grozny: "Capitulate and cease all resistance now or see the city you are defending reduced to ruble."
The Ukrainians can resist these tactics, but absent intervention by US/UK/France (NATO won't do it), expect to see that Russian casualty rate to go down while the civilian casualty rates goes way up.
"reduced to ruble" is a pretty great typo, that's a great one.
Artillery before all else has basically been the Russian strategy for the last century, no? I've been expecting this protraction more or less the whole time.
Omg LOL, great typo I missed, but being that the ruble is now rubble it kind of fits somehow? Artillery before all else is what they resort to once their initial ideas fail--see the Hostomel Turkey Shoot. These guys tried to do a blitzkreig and jacked it up HARD, so now they're going back to the default tactics, which worked in their favor in places like Chechnya, Dagestan, Syria, and now Mariupol.
The Bosporus is closed to commercial traffic, not military. If they're loaded onto mil transports or even civilian transports with mil escorts, they will get to Sevastopol--or maybe even directly to Mariupol by then. Frustrated forces in unfamiliar terrain tend to resort to war crimes to fight back, which blends with the overall "Mariupol Model" of war-criming until the enemy capitulates. Russia also has the Vagner mercs. I'm not sure about what the odds of a Belarusian mutiny would be, but I wouldn't be comfortable banking on that personally. I don't have as much insight into that part of the geopolitics other than Belarus has been Russia's footstool for even longer than Ukraine was pre-Maidan Rev.
None of this addresses what happens if the Mariupol Model spreads across the other urban centers of interest like Kharkiv, Chernihiv, and Mykolaiv. How does the Ukrainian military fight artillery barrages when the Russians start trading their casualty rates for civilian ones elsewhere? How do they combat the Grozny/Idlib/Mariupol tactics that have worked time and again? If there's one thing that the Russians *have* kept in good supply logistically it appears to be artillery shells.
If cities are reduced to rubble and most of the defenders are now refugees, then there's a lot less resistance to be faced once you take what's left of the city. The Russians may only need to employ DNR/LNR militias at that point. We'll find out soon enough in the case of Mariupol that's for sure.
Double-checked this and you're right, point acknowledged. But do you think Turkey will enforce that as a NATO member if Russian warships approach the straight? Even if the straits aren't an option, flying works just fine. We flew all of our people into Iraq/Afghanistan post-invasion. You don't need ships.
I appreciate the back and forth between Travis and TCinLA, both of whose comments I have read and both of whom seem to have background military knowledge. I feel like I am getting additional information to add to the very thorough treatment of topics from JVL (thanks to you, JVL.)
JVL, the drone news is even better than you indicate, as it turns out that the 100 Switchblade systems being provided is actually 1000 drones, as each system comes with 10 munitions. 1000 drones is a good start, but hopefully the US continues supplying them. These could be a game changer. https://twitter.com/michaeldweiss/status/1504399671632048128
We hear a lot about the RU generals who are killed. How much does the number of officers killed in that KIA number play a role?
Also, is there any suggestion that Ukrainian forces are actually targeting those officers rather that the officers just being too close?
Hey gang. Wanted your help working through something I keep thinking about.
The common refrain from (mostly) R's is "the Biden Administration isn't doing enough" to help Ukraine. Now, maybe it's all the Churchill comparisons flying around, but I keep having the same thought about the current moment:
This looks a lot like Lend-Lease.
I know. WW2 comparisons are dumb. But isn't there a little bit of similarity to American policy during the Blitz? A European ally getting bombarded, thousands of dead civilians, a president hamstrung by isolationists at home, but providing a blank check of material support.
Am I crazy, or is Biden's current Ukraine policy kinda like Lend-Lease? Is that good or bad? Will it take a Pearl Harbor type event to escalate American involvement? Help me out here.
Lend lease combined with a "Berlin airlift" like operation, and another tactic yet to be imagined.
Yeah. People tend to remember the heroism of the Berlin Airlift and forget how dangerous it was, strategically and politically, even just logistically. That many planes in that little time would have been hazardous even in a perfectly peaceful environment.
Lend Lease is a good analogy the key is to not expect anything back
Also, Spades is the unofficial card game of the Marine Corps. I learned how to play it in juvi as a teen and it came in handy in country. Ran x3 Bostons my last tour. Very underrated game.
In the USN it was Cribbage, at home when I worked in the mill, it was Euchre.
Cribbage is for the submariners. Most topside bubbas play hold em or spades. At least that was my experience in the Navy '13-'18.
Hmm, could be true--I was a bubblehead in the 80s--fast boats.
Fast boats are the way to go. Best missions, incredible platforms.
Another big tell in the casualty counts are the Russian KIA:WIA ratios, which appear to be around 1:2 right now. By comparison, US casualty rates throughout GWOT were around 1:7-8. This is because we strapped insane amounts of personal body armor to every guy/gal outside the wire (x4 E-SAPI plates) and then kept our combat units dismounted for the most part save for insert/exfils in some cases (logistical convoys are the exception, but they're not combat units).
The point is: BMPs and T-72s are ATGM/IED-magnets, and if the Russian military spends most of its time relying on motorized armor for force protection, they will continue to see their guys get burnt alive inside of scrap vehicles at a rate of 2-8 guys per ATGM. That's where the rate of change comes from: multiple personnel kills per effective ATGM deployed. When you dismount your infantry they can't be effectively targeted by ATGMs, or certainly not as easily when they're all sitting inside of an APC. The enemy has to rely on using small arms fire to take out dispersed ground patrols, which gets a lot more dicey than firing off an ATGM and then dipping out. Bullets go both ways and artillery fire can be called in if within range. The biggest tactical error Russia is making right now is keeping a lot of their guys inside of armored vehicles that are more vulnerable than had the conscripts simply gotten out and patrolled instead of sitting inside of a BMP-2 or Tigr. You can survive bullet wounds taken on patrol. You *cannot* survive a catastrophic ATGM hit on an armored troop transport or an Mi-24 shootdown using MANPADs.
There is a false sense of security when you are sitting in a bulletproof box, especially in the era of man portable ATM systems that are reasonably effective--especially against something like a BMP.
For those of you interested in Travis' comment (really sounds like he has a lot of expertise!) but who, like me, don't have his military knowledge of acronyms, I looked some of them up: WIA: Wounded in Action (I knew that KIA is Killed in Action), GWOT: Global War on Terrorism, BMP is a Russian Infantry fighting vehicle; I think a tank, ATGM: Anti-Tank Guided Missile, and APC: Armored Personnel Carrier.
I need to work on cleaning up the old jargon, thanks for the translation :-)
I sympathize, Travis. My career was in special education, and talk about acronyms!! I appreciate your knowledge and experience, and fortunately, "Dr. Google", as I say to my grandkids, can answer a lot of questions.
Everybody does it, my late wife was a proposal manager for a large engineering company, one of her jobs was to get everybody to define their acronyms so she could put it in the proposal. She was explaining why to a group of engineers of various disiplines, she used EOP and gave a couple of examples, one was something to do with environmental studies and I don't remember the other one. An architect came up with End of Pipe and the road guy, said no it is end of pavement. proving why she wasn't just asking dumb questions.
The Navy has its own particular language for a lot of things--plus the usual load of acronyms that any large institution generates. Sometimes when writing or talking about my experiences there I forget to translate myself ;)
Thanks Mary! (And thank you Travis for your expert commentary.)
RE: Russian soldier deaths . . .
I read a quote from a DOD briefer yesterday that most of these deaths are concentrated in Russia's combat-ready forces, not in combat support forces, so the deaths are particularly devastating to Russia's ability to initiate offensive action in the future.
Already, combat support troops are being placed in to combat roles they aren't trained for. That will probably make it even easier for Ukrainian troops to kill them.
Before the invasion happened, I made the comment to my wife that Putin's grievance isn't with the West, it's with objective reality in the 21st Century. The Russian leadership's unwillingness to accept inconvenient facts is destroying their stature in the world, perhaps permanently.
Let us hope Ukrainian civilian casualties never approach those numbers in Iraq.
No one knows with certainty how many people have been killed and wounded in Iraq since the 2003 United States invasion. However, we know that between 184,382 and 207,156 civilians have died from direct war related violence caused by the U.S., its allies, the Iraqi military and police, and opposition forces from the time of the invasion through October 2019. The violent deaths of Iraqi civilians have occurred through aerial bombing, shelling, gunshots, suicide attacks, and fires started by bombing. Many civilians have also been injured.
And Syria--- and Yemen.
Everyone focuses on the drone strikes killing civilians, but honestly, during the three tours I put in there, most common way I saw civvies buy it was through "escalation of force" scenarios. Basically, we treated anyone who got too close to our convoys or checkpoints without stopping as a suicide bomber and lit their vehicle up with MG fire. I seen *a lot* of Iraqi civvies go out this way. A lot of folks don't know about things like the Haditha Massacre either, which is unfortunate, because that was basically a squad of Marines executing 24 civilians with close-range sternum and headshots--some victims as young as 8. The only Marine successfully charged for that war crime was a squad leader who was reduced to the rank of private. That's what happens when you take a Fallujah '04 spearhead infantry unit and recycle them to a different city with only about 6 months stateside in between. ALL the veterans in 3/1 had hardcore PTSD. That came out during our tour in the Haditha Triad following Rep Ruben Gallego's (D-AZ) unit getting pretty fucked up out there the month prior.
FYI. Each switchblade unit contains 10 drones. That’s effectively 1000 guided missiles. (Sorry. Missed the earlier comment)
Advertising my lack of military knowledge in advance, I have a question concerning Russia's desire to conquer certain cities. In the past, when we fought with more primitive weapons, most building structures would be left intact, even if all the inhabitants were killed. Additionally, the control of significant cities meant controlling supply lines, transportation hubs, manufacturing facilities, and centralized communication centers. Most of these factors are no longer valid. In addition, with modern high explosive munitinitins, there is little left of the city after it has been conquered. When I see pictures (which I guess are accurate) of cities pounded into piles of rubble, I wonder the point of trying to capture this city that no longer exists. Other than the psychological benefit of attempting to demoralize the enemy, all I see is the firming of Ukrainian resolve to resist Russian advances. Also, the Ukrainians know the consequences of being taken prisoner by the Russians, which is another reason for fierce resistance. From a military perspective, wouldn't it make more sense to go around a city, blockade it, destroy any airfields, and offer good terms to anyone who surrenders? I see the Ukrainians doing something similar to what the Russians did to Germany in WWII. Retreat, leave a wasteland behind, and stretch the enemy's supply lines to the breaking point. Not exactly the same, but similarities are enough to make wonder what is passing for military strategy in the minds of the Russian high command?
Not 100% sure about this, but I've seen suggestions that any real Russian advance would require the ability to use the Ukrainian rail system for logistical support, since they can't keep up the truck supply. Rail lines go through big cities, so to use them, you need to hold at least part of the city.
Assuming that it won't take you a couple of weeks to get the rail system that you just obliterated working again.
The Russian military isn't really set up to conduct the same type of war that the US military is. Part of the reason for that is that it is set up along the lines of the Soviet military--which was intended for two uses:
1) A war against NATO forces;
2) Suppression of revolt inside the Soviet empire (including their Warsaw Pact "allies.").
Condition #1 sort of dictated both the TO&E (table of organization and equipment) of the units and the force structure. One of the primary factors in this appears to be the general assumption on the part of the Soviets (later Russians) that they would not have air superiority (in fact the reverse).
This accounts for the large number of AAD systems in the Soviet army that had no American equivalents (like the ZSU23-4). No really effective equivalents of AWACs or Joint Stars (or whatever they are calling it these days)...and LOTS of artillery.
The Russians apparently also suck at SEAD (suppression of enemy air defenses), which has been developed into a fine art by the American Air Forces (one of the reasons for the American early adoption of stealth and why we basically lead the world in it).
Air/ground interoperations also seem poor... something else that has been hugely refined by the Americans.
Given their force composition, the only real option for the Russians WRT urban combat is the old shell the place into oblivion approach--which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.
Destroying a city actually makes it more defendable.
If you have a decent logistics train (oops, sorry Russia) it isn't really necessary to take a city--as pointed out, you generally had to wreck the place to take it and you had to expend a lot of logistics and manpower to do that.
Taking a city is more of a political objective than a military objective... which is why there is a certain fixation about it on the part of the leadership.
Getting bogged down in urban warfare is a big no-no (from a military perspective)--especially if you are armor-heavy (because armor is kind of useless in that type of warfare).
Russian military strategy appears to be primarily driven by the political objectives of Putin. While the overall political strategy should be guiding operations , there is a difference between political and military objectives that causes some apparent stupidity to appear. What this generally means is that the political leadership is micromanaging.
Given modern technologies, the capability of modern logistics (at least on the American side), and the nature of contemporary high intensity warfare as being mostly about fighting with what you already have on hand (because there isn't time to build stuff or train new people), most of the historical rationales for taking cities have essentially disappeared, other than the political rationales.
We regularly fight wars on the other side of the globe. The last time the Russians did that was essentially WW2--in the Soviet Far East versus Japan. They had MASSIVE American logistical support for that.
Thank you for the explanation. I don't believe the Ukrainians can accept any peace agreement that allows Russia to keep any territory it has taken. Whatever Putin agrees to today, he will find an excuse to break tomorrow. Today either we, the West, drive him back to Russia, or we will pay the price tomorrow. If he gets to keep any territory, he will use it as a victory in his propaganda war. He has supporters in America as well as in Europe. We are looking at Europe in 1936 when Churchill was warning everyone about Nazi Germany. I realize the comparison is not a one-to-one, but there are enough similarities that should make us very wary of the immediate future.
The point of leveling cities is casualty-aversion. Russian losses are already sky-high because they tried to Blitzkreig Kyiv on day one, which is a significant departure from their traditional tactics. When it failed measurably, they went back to their traditional model of barraging cities with artillery instead of sending motorized infantry into the urban combat environment to get slaughtered. The Russian military is passing the buck on casualties from their ranks to the Ukrainian civilians. Remember when they evacuated Russian-speaking Ukrainians prior to the invasion? This is why. It's so that they can turn the populous of any city that mounts resistance into refugees while turning their old homes into rubble. If the defenders don't end resistance, the Russians turn their families into refugees. Suddenly, defenders are making the choice between looking after their families or staying in the fight. It's disgusting shit, but it has worked in Russia's favor every time it has been employed in the past. It turns defenders into refugees and leaves nothing behind to defend.
There will be no trusting between what a Russian soldier says and what a Ukrainian hears. Not after 02/24.
Holding the area that the city controls hands that control over to your side, so long as you can keep it. Putin (not "Russia", but Putin) wants the country. So long as he can keep soldiers in those areas and nominally hold them, those cities can be standing or they can be glassed.
That's a further problem for his military: Can they hold what they claim?
Dude. This Spades article rules.
Amen to drones & intel. If the Ukrainians can take out the howitzers and MLRS launchers that are devastating the civilian population then Putin loses much of his ability to inflict terror.
The Spades piece is amazing - don't miss it. (Thanks, as always, for pointing us to all kinds of interesting writing out there in the world, JVL!)
For once I think I can agree with JVL, about the use of Drones. All the chatter about getting cold war age MIGS in the air for Ukraine would solve the problem is a crock. There is NO way a 40 year old plane would be any match for today's technology. The drones and an improved anti aircraft missle systems would serve Ukraine much better.
The flip side to the Russian loss equation:
In any war, there are mistakes made by either side at the outset that either get corrected over time or lead to a protracted front where casualty-aversion is the name of the game. This is the nature of how both sides grow their "veteranship" over time as they learn what tactics work and which ones will get your whole unit murdered. Mariupol will be a big turning point because once it is taken it will do some big things for Russian field commanders:
It will demonstrate the effectiveness of the "use artillery barrages to inflict casualties while minimizing friendly losses" model that will no doubt be adopted in other urban sieges around the country once it has proven its effectiveness in the south. This is how commanders learn and adapt from the successes of their counterparts.
The other big thing it will do for Russian commanders is open up more logistical resources. With Mariupol leveled and leftover resistance there slim, Chechens and other veteran units that Russia has in Mariupol can be recommitted to taking Odessa or consolidating the eastern Oblasts.
Finally, we need to look at who the Russians can loop in. They're already tapping Syrian and now Libyan troops (Run Marty!), but word on the block is that there is a real chance of Belarus getting pulled into a conflict it is already ankle-deep in. If Belarus commits its military to the Russian cause, that's like several new northern fronts opening up just north of Kyiv. If this occurs, the map looks a lot different. Same thing if the Russians continue to employ the "more artillery, fewer casualties" model across the north. The Russian military is already offering Mariupol the same thing it had previously offered cities like Idlib & Grozny: "Capitulate and cease all resistance now or see the city you are defending reduced to ruble."
The Ukrainians can resist these tactics, but absent intervention by US/UK/France (NATO won't do it), expect to see that Russian casualty rate to go down while the civilian casualty rates goes way up.
I'm just sad that nobody got the Back to the Future reference :-(
Took me a while to get that one as it has been quite some time since I saw the movie, lol.
Good one!
"reduced to ruble" is a pretty great typo, that's a great one.
Artillery before all else has basically been the Russian strategy for the last century, no? I've been expecting this protraction more or less the whole time.
Omg LOL, great typo I missed, but being that the ruble is now rubble it kind of fits somehow? Artillery before all else is what they resort to once their initial ideas fail--see the Hostomel Turkey Shoot. These guys tried to do a blitzkreig and jacked it up HARD, so now they're going back to the default tactics, which worked in their favor in places like Chechnya, Dagestan, Syria, and now Mariupol.
The Bosporus is closed to commercial traffic, not military. If they're loaded onto mil transports or even civilian transports with mil escorts, they will get to Sevastopol--or maybe even directly to Mariupol by then. Frustrated forces in unfamiliar terrain tend to resort to war crimes to fight back, which blends with the overall "Mariupol Model" of war-criming until the enemy capitulates. Russia also has the Vagner mercs. I'm not sure about what the odds of a Belarusian mutiny would be, but I wouldn't be comfortable banking on that personally. I don't have as much insight into that part of the geopolitics other than Belarus has been Russia's footstool for even longer than Ukraine was pre-Maidan Rev.
None of this addresses what happens if the Mariupol Model spreads across the other urban centers of interest like Kharkiv, Chernihiv, and Mykolaiv. How does the Ukrainian military fight artillery barrages when the Russians start trading their casualty rates for civilian ones elsewhere? How do they combat the Grozny/Idlib/Mariupol tactics that have worked time and again? If there's one thing that the Russians *have* kept in good supply logistically it appears to be artillery shells.
If cities are reduced to rubble and most of the defenders are now refugees, then there's a lot less resistance to be faced once you take what's left of the city. The Russians may only need to employ DNR/LNR militias at that point. We'll find out soon enough in the case of Mariupol that's for sure.
Double-checked this and you're right, point acknowledged. But do you think Turkey will enforce that as a NATO member if Russian warships approach the straight? Even if the straits aren't an option, flying works just fine. We flew all of our people into Iraq/Afghanistan post-invasion. You don't need ships.
I appreciate the back and forth between Travis and TCinLA, both of whose comments I have read and both of whom seem to have background military knowledge. I feel like I am getting additional information to add to the very thorough treatment of topics from JVL (thanks to you, JVL.)
What is Russia’s airlift capability? Is it comparable to the U.S.?
Doesn't need to be that much when round trips are an option.
JVL, the drone news is even better than you indicate, as it turns out that the 100 Switchblade systems being provided is actually 1000 drones, as each system comes with 10 munitions. 1000 drones is a good start, but hopefully the US continues supplying them. These could be a game changer. https://twitter.com/michaeldweiss/status/1504399671632048128
I want to give you a "hearty" like, but Bulwark keeps rejecting my attempts. So try this one:❤