2022-2024 Russo-Ukrainian War

[Monash]

. .....Again, this is 6 examples. Not a single one made it to a BTG CP?

The only thing I can think of is that the Ukrainians were blocked by strong forces, not that the Ukrainians were unwilling to go all the way to a CAA HQ.

As far as the first statement goes how certain are we that this is in correct? I'm not saying it isn't BTW just that I haven't seen any reports confirming the situation one way or the other.

On the second point? Exactly how 'strong' would any Russian blocking force have to be given the terrain and the fact the Ukrainians were themselves able to mount successful blocking ops largely just using infantry (most of whom were reservists if reports are to believed).

On top of that if the Ukrainians knew the Russians were in the process of withdrawing back from Kiev and again given the terrain where is the immediate/pressing need to do as you suggest? I ask this given an underunderstandable reluctance on the part of Ukrainian commanders to take heavy casualties until such time as the local strategic situation justified it.

Would they necessarily push as hard as your suggesting given he Russians are moving in the direction you want them to and the bulk of your professional army and heavy equipment is located on other fronts? At least before signs emerged that the Russians had ceased their withdrawal and were attempting to consolidate new defensive positions inside Ukraine's Borders.

After all as long as the herd is stampeding in the direction you want where's the pressing need to crack the whip, leastways before they start slowing down. I mean for political reasons alone its not like Ukraine can could afford to 'invade" Belarus, (even if most Belarusians wanted them to).

[Officer of Engineers]

As far as the first statement goes how certain are we that this is in correct? I'm not saying it isn't BTW just that I haven't seen any reports confirming the situation one way or the other.

Considering the Ukrainians have been blaberring everytime they shot a Russian General and everytime a guns strike hit a HQ, I say very certain.

On the second point? Firstly exactly how 'strong' would any Russian blocking force have to be given the terrain and the fact the Ukrainians were themselves able to mount successful blocking ops largely just using infantry (most of whom were reservists if reports are to believed).

Coy size.

On top of that if the Ukrainians knew the Russians were in the process of withdrawing back from Kiev and gain given the terrain where is the immediate/pressing need to do as you suggest? I ask this given an under understandable reluctance of the Ukrainian commanders take heavy casualties until the local strategic situation justified it.

This is not a CP nor HQ level decision. This is the engaging Coy OC tactical decisison. Never break contact with a retreating enemy. Keep pressuring him until you can't. Otherwise, you're allowing him to fix you in place and the next time, add in a bit of artillery. The Iraqis learn this the hard way. They beat off an American attack but allowed the Americans to break contact. The next thing they knew a bunch of F-16s were killing them.

There are points where you have to break contact. You're bingo men and/or ammo. You're getting lost. You're over-extended (reserves can't reach you) but if the Russian reserves can reach you, your reserves should be able to reach them, ie their CP.

[astralis]

There are points where you have to break contact. You're bingo men and/or ammo. You're getting lost. You're over-extended (reserves can't reach you) but if the Russian reserves can reach you, your reserves should be able to reach them, ie their CP.

that's probably your answer right there. Russians are getting attrited...but so are the Ukrainians. both sides are using artillery to slam reserves.

[Albany Rifles]

The latest from Austraylia's MG(Ret) Mick Ryan.

Interesting analysis...


A thread by Mick Ryan, AM


Back in May, I examined Ukraine’s military strategy in a thread that I informally called ‘The Ukrainians are Masters of 21st Century War”. Today, an update on the Ukrainian approach - the "strategy of corrosion". 1/25



It is important we study the Ukrainian military #strategy and how they fight. It offers important insights for the modernisation of western military forces, many of whom remain mired in an intellectual quicksand of Cold War and COIN doctrines. During their invasion, Russia’s military has been forced by the Ukrainians to continually re-assess its strategic objectives. Russia has downgraded their political goals for #Ukraine, and the strategy for achieving them. The Ukrainians have fought & subverted Russian strategy. While political objectives shape how war is conducted and what battles are fought, so too do battles reshape political objectives. It has been the Ukrainian military strategy, implemented with courage and discipline, that has driven this. The Ukrainians have achieved this through the adoption of a simple military strategy: corrosion. The Ukrainian approach has embraced the corrosion of the Russian physical, moral, and intellectual capacity to fight in #Ukraine - and in the global information environment. This strategy of corrosion sees #Ukraine attacking the Russians where they are weak, while also using some of their combat power to delay and frustrate Russian combat forces. It extends beyond tactics & operations - as I noted before, it also attacks Russian military strategy. British military historian and theorist, Basil Liddell Hart described this as the indirect approach. He wrote writes how “effective results in war have rarely been attained unless the approach has had such indirectness as to ensure the opponents unreadiness to meet it.”

The Ukrainians have taken this advice to heart. They have attacked the weakest physical support systems of an army in the field – communications networks, logistic supply routes, rear areas, artillery and senior commanders in their command posts. In the Battles for #Kyiv and #Kharkiv, the Ukrainians were able to fight the Russians to a standstill because they were able to penetrate Russian rear areas and destroy parts of their logistic support. And in doing so, they had a significant impact on Russian morale. The Ukrainians therefor corroded the northern Russian expedition physical and morally from within, and forced its ejection from Ukraine. The Ukrainians had less success with this approach in the Donbas however. Due to the alignment of the front line, and the concentration of most Russian offensive capacity, the Ukrainians were drawn into an attrition fight there for many weeks.



This is a way of war that Russians embrace and one which the Ukrainians would have preferred to avoid. It was a crunching and destructive fight, with many lives spent on both sides for minor tactical gains by the Russians. The introduction of #HIMARS changed this dynamic. It allowed the Ukrainians to realign their defensive operations in the east and adapt to attack the Russian strength (artillery) by targeting its ammunition supply depots.



The Ukrainians are re-adopting the asymmetric conventional tactics they used so successfully early in the war. This is the Ukrainian ‘deep battle’, an integral part of their strategy of corrosion. Another key target is command and control nodes, or in other words, command posts with senior Russian commanders. The ability to rapidly target these & use #HIMARS to inflict maximum destruction is vital. Because beyond the physical, there is a psychological impact. Removing headquarters also removes important coordination nodes, breaking down force unity of effort. Targeting soldiers and units degrades (further) their morale and cohesion. Russian morale is being corroded because of its battlefield defeats in the south, declining availability of artillery and destruction (seen on social media) of supply depots. And clever Ukrainians innovations like this are also having an impact.



The use of social media, showing off Russian deficiencies, has magnified this moral corrosion. The corrosion in morale has resulted in declining battlefield discipline, with Russian desertions, battlefield refusals and – horribly – frequent war crimes.



The Ukrainians have also forced on the Russians a deeper form of intellectual corrosion. Under pressure to achieve some form of victory due to previous setbacks, the Russians are taking greater tactical and operational risks with their military operations. More broadly, the Russians are having to form volunteer battalions which will not be as well-equipped, led or trained as the Russian forces that entered Ukraine in February. This is corroding the Russian military and its capacity to sustain operations in the long term. The Ukrainian consistency in implementing their strategy of corrosion now sees the Russian Army under pressure, with insufficient reinforcements to replace an increasingly exhausted force that is under attack physically and psychologically. Strategically, the Ukrainians are corroding Russia’s international standing with their global influence operations. And they have secured strategic commitments from the EU and NATO.



In corroding the Russian military physically, morally, and intellectually, the Ukrainians have evolved the military art. This is what 21st century war looks like. The Ukrainians have proved to be masters of it. Ukraine, largely, has refused to fight how Russia wants to fight. It has developed & implemented its own military strategy with great discipline. What might other nations learn from the Ukrainian Armed Forces? In short – a lot. That is the topic of my next thread. End



Thanks to @IAPonomarenko @thestudyofwar @UAweapons @MilitaryLandNet @Archer83Able @defenceHQ @RALee85 @PhillipsPOBrien @Blue_Sauron, whose images I used in this thread.

[Officer of Engineers]

that's probably your answer right there. Russians are getting attrited...but so are the Ukrainians. both sides are using artillery to slam reserves.

But you need a blocking force to stop the opposing side long enough for guns to zero in on.

[Ironduke]

That said I still tend to side with the 10,000 -15,000 (max) KIA figure. It has been 6 months after all since the war started. Granted Russian casualty figures would trail off during the current 'grind' phase. But during the earlier, more chaotic phases before Russia started getting its act together? Easy to see them losing 2000 plus KIA in the first 3 months of the war.

I would say significantly higher than 10,000 KIA. BBC alone has been able to confirm the deaths of 5185 individually named Russian troops between Feb 24 through Jul 28. The DPR has claimed to have lost 2447 KIA as of July 28th. That's 7662 confirmed killed from BBC individual verfication and DPR self-reporting alone.

I seriously doubt BBC has been able to yet verify half of Russia's actual KIA by name yet. But they have managed to prove 5185 KIA.

Factor in missing Russian troops who are either unable to be confirmed KIA, Russian troops whose names are unknown, not able to be individually verified, and/or not yet reported, LPR losses, Wagner/mercenary losses. I think we're easily looking at northward of 15000 KIA.

The pro-Kremlin Komsomolskaya Pravda paper published on Mar 22 a figure citing 9861 KIA from the Russian MoD, before removing the article and blaming it on a "hack".

[astralis]

if the Ukrainians have been suffering roughly equal or only have a slight advantage in attrition on the defense, then going on the offense there is probably a bad idea. especially considering that they need TDF to fill out their numbers.

looking at Kherson, though, that's where Ukraine has the numbers to advance/outmaneuver the Russians despite Russian fortifications and artillery...

[Monash]

Mick Ryan might be overselling Ukraine's success (a little bit). For example two other possible reasons for the sharp decease in Russian artillery attacks the past fortnight are firstly, rest and reorientation as they prepare for another offensive in the Donesk sector. Secondly (and I haven't seen any evidence of this yet) long columns of artillery are being hastily shipped to the Kherson sector. Not that I want him to be wrong mind you, I just don't see any sign that the military and political realities of the war are being acknowledged in Moscow.

[Albany Rifles]

Mick Ryan might be overselling Ukraine's success (a little bit). For example two other possible reasons for the sharp decease in Russian artillery attacks the past fortnight are firstly, rest and reorientation as they prepare for another offensive in the Donesk sector. Secondly (and I haven't seen any evidence of this yet) long columns of artillery are being hastily shipped to the Kherson sector. Not that I want him to be wrong mind you, I just don't see any sign that the military and political realities of the war are being acknowledged in Moscow.

I would agree with this statement if artillery is never placed into reserve. The maxim in artillery operations are the artillery reserve's are it's ammunition. Soviet and Western artillery doctrine is non-organic artillery stays in the fight. I could buy 18 - 24 hour stand downs...maybe as long as 36. But as you say, time will tell.

But I deeply respect General Ryan...he is one the keenest defense intellects in the world today.

[TopHatter]

Ukraine needs more than just weapons to beat Russia. It needs a strategy
Mortars and missiles alone won't cut it, according to former JTAC.



Ukrainian soldiers ride on an armored personnel carrier (APC) on a road of the eastern Luhansk region on June 23, 2022, amid Russia's military invasion launched on Ukraine. (Photo by Anatolii Stepanov / AFP)

The continuing shipments of Western aid to Ukraine highlight a cold reality – that nations remain slow to adjust their war-fighting methods from previous conflicts, and there remains a lack of strategy as this crisis transitions from Ukrainian survival to a battle of attrition between Ukraine and Russia. The West’s attempt to build a modernized Ukrainian army on the fly, without thought to long-term viability, will be hampered by Kyiv’s ability to sustain such a military force in an era of the re-emergent Russian threat.

The impetus has been to throw everything at Kyiv since the initial invasion to stop Moscow, whose reputation as a villain has never been so clearly rendered. These efforts worked with low-tech systems as a tourniquet to staunch the bleeding early on, but now that this war has settled into a long-term attritional contest, it remains unclear what Kyiv, NATO, the E.U., or the United States. intend the outcome to be. Absent a political solution to the conflict, there seems to be no functional grand military strategy.

Further, if the West truly wants to anticipate any future wars and prepare accordingly, it has thus far failed to exploit the terrible opportunity that Ukraine’s plight presents; specifically how forward-thinking may be employed against adversaries who have yet to adapt to the new mode of warfare. The short-sightedness of shipping traditional weapons, technologies, and capabilities to the Ukrainians, with only the bare minimum training necessary to field these systems, let alone maintain them, is hindered by the lack of a grand military strategy – a unifying doctrine that gets Ukraine beyond ‘survival mode’ and refocuses its military efforts towards seizing the initiative. Furthermore, lacking a doctrinal organization of the Ukrainian military to better coordinate its efforts, i.e., enabling their units to function as a joint force, and instead engaging in a reckless distribution of weapons, weakens the long-term potential for the future of Ukrainian forces.


A man looks at a Russian T-72 tank that was destroyed during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. (Maxym Marusenko/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Granted, the use of open-source intelligence, commercial technologies, and other non-traditional mechanisms of national resources have been employed in the conflict. But this remains, in no uncertain terms, a war between two powerful and functional states, requiring the appropriate tools of warfighting, and a grand strategy – a Ukraine-holistic grand strategy – that simply arming, and rearming will not produce.

In small doses, new tools of combat have been placed in Ukrainian hands which offer some measure of innovation and are appropriately suited to the sustainment capabilities of the non-NATO defenders; components like Loitering munitions, Electronic Attack, and space integration, tools heretofore not used together in a modern war. But the great limitation, as is often the case, is the short-sightedness of how the West prepares itself for future conflict, where it has instead chosen to substitute military aid for coherent foreign policy.

In Ukraine, the international support via weapons technology and aid packages is attempting to build a modern national military – Ukraine’s – on the fly, and force it into a NATO mold. Prior to Russia’s invasion, there were marginal efforts to bolster Kyiv’s military capacity like the U.K.’s “Operation Orbital”, where British military personnel provided hands-on training and tactical guidance to Ukrainian forces. U.S. military and financial aid pre-date the February 24^th invasion, appropriated in NDAA allocations which included equipment, weapons, and other military resources. Cyber and electronic warfare capabilities have been key battlegrounds in Ukraine since well before the invasion, prompting EU and NATO assistance along those fronts as well.

But then the invasion happened, and the collective response from Western benefactors has seen fit to consolidate all aid for Ukraine into traditional westernized molds. Most notably, artillery has served as the vehicle for this warfighting thesis, with such weapons that are only marginally more advanced than those which razed European battlegrounds in the First World War. Ukraine cannot hope to out-gun its adversary; indeed by many estimates, Russian artillery out-numbers that of Ukraine by as much as twenty-to-one.

Ukraine’s best hope is not to suddenly morph into something from a NATO doctrine manual, but by determining how it wants to win this war, so that it can be enabled to do so. Joshua Huminski, a Russian strategy expert and Director for the Mike Rogers Center for Intelligence and Global Affairs, told me in a recent interview “provision of increasingly high-tech systems without a determination as to what the political objective is, and in the absence of that objective, it’s unclear whether these are the right tools for the job. We’re giving Ukraine a scalpel that they are using to scrape gum from underneath the table.”

Ukraine has borne up under the unrealistic expectation that they can simply rise to the technical proficiency of a standing NATO member, and because their survival has demanded that they find a way to do so, the West continues to send more refined systems that might not even be useful in the long-term. More weapons without professionalization and coordination of those forces is not the answer.


A view of a destroyed armored vehicle during ongoing conflicts in the city of Mariupol under the control of the Russian military and pro-Russian separatists, on April 9, 2022. (Leon Klein/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

The present battlefield is suffering from egregious levels of collateral damage and casualties on both sides, owing to traditional weapons being employed across vast distances without thought to strategic payoff or how those attacks play into a long-term strategy. It is not some new, revolutionary theory to say that Ukrainians need to be more effective at target engagement to force a Russian military defeat, but continuing to employ tools like artillery – with limited stockpiles and slow reconstitution – will inevitably create an injunction point that favors Russia.

Traditional weapons, even precision-guided artillery, cannot claim accuracy to the same degree as other modern guided munitions, nor does it replace a unifying strategy for Ukraine or a clear-eyed end state from the West. If this conflict is accepted as a war of attrition, that paradigm also favors Russia. Perhaps German military leader Helmut von Moltke said it best, “the greatest good deed in war is the speedy ending of the war, and every means to that end so long as it is not reprehensible, must remain open.” Continued reliance on arms shipments absent a grand strategy, which is presently costing civilian lives, causing damage to critical infrastructure, and the battlelines going back and forth, doesn’t hasten a Ukrainian victory, nor does it compel a Russian capitulation or a diplomatic resolution.

War remains abhorrent, but the need to bring this conflict to a speedy conclusion justifies hard, candid questions and implementations of warfighting strategy beyond more weapons and tools. It begs further questions about how the West is failing to enable Ukraine to become a legitimate and credible deterrent.
__________

[Monash]

I would agree with this statement if artillery is never placed into reserve. The maxim in artillery operations are the artillery reserve's are it's ammunition. Soviet and Western artillery doctrine is non-organic artillery stays in the fight. I could buy 18 - 24 hour stand downs...maybe as long as 36. But as you say, time will tell.

Normally, yes but the Russian campaign in Donesk hasn't exactly followed modern military doctrine. Russian strategy seems to have been based on using massive (dumb) artillery barrages to effect very limited territorial gains by small infantry formations. No breakthroughs and exploitation, just grind. Their tubes are literally doing all the heavy lifting and based on all reports are in battery and executing fire missions for days if not weeks at a time. Plus the Uki's have been using HIMARs to take out their munition dumps. Combine all that together and you have ammunition shortages, lots of worn out barrels and exhausted gunners. So a longer down time than you'd expect from NATO class armies (or for that matter the 'old' Russian army everyone thought they knew) might well be the result. And as we all know the Ukrainians have pretty much been signalling their intentions on the Kherson front for weeks if not months now. Russia has to have responded somehow.

But I deeply respect General Ryan...he is one the keenest defense intellects in the world today.

No doubt about it.

[Officer of Engineers]

Ukraine needs more than just weapons to beat Russia. It needs a strategy
Mortars and missiles alone won't cut it, according to former JTAC.

The UKR needs more than that. She needs a General Staff with vision on how to fight this war. I don't know how many times I see perfectly good oppertunities goto waste simply because they had not planned on good fortune. Ok, never mind marching all the way to a CAA HQ early on in the war. Why isn't there a general push right now with the forces in place now that guns fire had died down. Hug the shit out of the Russians (danger close) before they could bring their guns back to bear.

[Officer of Engineers]

And as we all know the Ukrainians have pretty much been signalling their intentions on the Kherson front for weeks if not months now. Russia has to have responded somehow.

I'm very leery of a Russian trap.

[Monash]

I'm very leery of a Russian trap.

Given the open terrain in that sector and constant US/NATO over watch that's would be kind of hard to pull off. For that matter its not like the Ukrainians will be able to hide their own build up & preparations from the Russians either, even if specific details are still kept hidden.

[Monash]

The UKR needs more than that. She needs a General Staff with vision on how to fight this war. I don't know how many times I see perfectly good oppertunities goto waste simply because they had not planned on good fortune. Ok, never mind marching all the way to a CAA HQ early on in the war. Why isn't there a general push right now with the forces in place now that guns fire had died down. Hug the shit out of the Russians (danger close) before they could bring their guns back to bear.

I have to wonder what assistance NATO is giving the Ukrainians at that kind of level. For example I find it hard to believe there isn't a 'war room' set up somewhere in Western Europe shadowing Ukrainian and Russia deployments in real time and funneling advice and recommendations strategies to the Ukrainians military in Kiev. For that matter there has to be very high level liaison in Kiev itself.