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The Ukrainian Military Is In Bad Shape
Erik Kramer and Paul Schneider are two former U.S. special operations soldiers who have been in Ukraine since 2022 to train Ukrainian troops.
At War on the Rocks they paint a dark picture of the state of the Ukrainian military. Their intent is to get money for more training, thus the real picture may be less dark than they describe. But even if one takes that into account it is still a sad state for an army that has been at war for more than a year. Some excerpts:
Based on our nine months of training with all services of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, to include the Ground Forces (Army), Border Guard Service, National Guard, Naval Infantry (Marines), Special Operations Forces, and Territorial Defense Forces, we have observed a series of common trends: lack of mission command, effective training, and combined arms operations; ad hoc logistics and maintenance; and improper use of special operations forces. These trends have undermined Ukraine’s resistance and could hinder the success of the ongoing offensive.
What ongoing offensive?
Under mission command, the German Auftragstaktik, the leader disseminates his intent ("to attack through the northern woods to take town x") and authority to subunits that is passed down with the mission to empower subordinates at all levels. Each subunits can make its plans to coordinate and execute the mission as best as possible. The contrast is an order command where every detail of execution is ordered from the top down. Both have advantages but to have a mixed system, as Ukraine currently has, is the worst of all places.
In our experience, across many units and staffs, the Ukrainian Armed Forces do not promote personal initiative and foster mutual trust or mission command. As Michael Kofman and Rob Lee recently discussed on the Russia Contingency podcast, elements of the Ukrainian Armed Forces have an old Soviet mentality that holds most decision-making at more senior levels. Amongst military leaders at the brigade level and below, our impression is that junior officers fear making mistakes.
But to use mission command down to the lower levels of a Platoon one needs noncommissioned officers (sergeants) to run the show. Those the Ukrainian military had are by now probably dead:
Having trained every component of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, we have continually seen a lack of an experienced noncommissioned officer corps. It is common to see field grade officers running around during training counting personnel and coordinating for meals. In the United States, it takes years to develop just a junior noncommissioned officer.
The next big lack is combined arms training and use. Tanks protect the infantry, the infantry protects the tanks, the artillery covers the battlefield to allow tanks and infantry to maneuver, command takes care that all three coordinate their actions.
The armor/infantry relationship is supposed to be symbiotic, but it is not. The result is that infantry will conduct frontal assaults or operate in urban areas without the protection and firepower of tanks. Also, artillery fires are not synchronized with maneuver. Most units do not talk directly to supporting artillery, so there is a delay in call for fire missions. We have been told that units will use runners to send fire missions to artillery batteries because of issues with communications.
Most of the military’s operations are not phased and are sequential. Fires and maneuver, for example, are planned separately from infantry units — and infantry units plan separately from supporting artillery. This mentality also carries over to adjacent unit coordination, which is either nonexistent or rare and causes high rates of fratricide. Unit commanders have concerns about collaborators and thus are hesitant to pass on critical information that can be used against them to sister units.
These issues are compounded by unreliable communications between units and with senior leadership. The Ukrainian Armed Forces have a hodgepodge of radios that are vulnerable to jamming. Further, battalion missions are mainly independent company operations that do not focus on a main effort coupled with supporting efforts. The armed forces do not combine effects, so operations are piecemeal and disjointed. The separate missions are not supporting each other, nor are the missions of lower level units “nested” under a higher level mission. Sustainment is not synchronized with operations, either.
Due to the wild mix of weapons and for lack of trained mechanics logistics and the maintenance of equipment are a mess.
This lack of coordinated maintenance and logistics also translates into medical care. Medical evacuation and care are haphazard. Experienced Ukrainian combat medics have repeatedly stated that many of the evacuees would have survived it they had reached definitive care in a timely manner. The Ukrainian Armed Forces can solve this issue with a systematic logistics process.
Ukrainian special forces are mostly used as infantry even as they should be used for more demanding missions. There also are gimmick missions:
Ukraine special forces units comprised of international volunteers shop around their services to conventional unit commanders without a mission being tied to a strategic or operational goal. One example of a mission was a conventional brigade commander who had reported to his command that he had occupied a village taken from the Russians. When he realized that the information he had was mistaken and they had stopped short, he asked the international special operations forces unit to go into the occupied village and take a picture of a Ukrainian flag placed on top of a building in the center of the village.
A suicide mission to hide the commanders false reporting …
The authors claim that most of the above problems could be fixed by more 'western' training which they are more than willing to sell. However, what has become of the last armies 'western' forces have trained in Iraq and Afghanistan? Both fell apart. An army must reflect the local society and culture. It can not be formed top down by outside forces.
Since 2015 the Ukrainian army has been build up and trained by U.S. and British forces. What the WotR authors describe is the result of that.
Business Insider suddenly finds out RF is killing it in cost of war. 1/4 of budget of NATO ukies wateva and kicking butt. none of it is borrowed money either.
Posted by: hankster | Jun 4 2023 6:58 utc | 207
Here’s the thing though — they are not “kicking butt” in any meaningful sense of the term. In the last 12 months, i.e., after Western arms started flooding the battlefield, the only territorial gains have been Soledar and Bakhmut, while huge territory was lost around Kharkov and Kherson, including a regional center of the RF.
And already after the goodwill gestures in early April 2022, the whole border region became a warzone — shelling became a daily occurrence (something that when the war started people saw as unthinkable, and yet it became completely normalized with nobody lifting a finger to stop it). But now it is a full-fledged bombing campaign to destroy Shebekino. Which is not a random small village, as are most of the settlements along the border, which were already abandoned to their fate, but a town of 40,000. Which has been burning for the last several days and is now being evacuated.
Is there a military operation coming soon to take at least the region around Vovchansk so that Shebekino is out of Grad range (they will still be able to hit it with HIMARS, but that particular taboo — HIMARS shelling of pre-war Russian territory — has so far not been broken)? No, nobody is mentioning anything of the sort. The reaction was to simply evacuate the town instead.
There is absolutely nothing to brag about in spending only a couple percent of GDP on the war. As a result of only the bare minimum investment into the war, Shebekino, Donetsk, Gorlovka, etc. are being systematically destroyed, and that is not something to be proud of. Spend 5-10% of GDP and this would be over by now, but no.
This is what traitors that are willing to trade the lives of their citizens for some numbers of a spreadsheet do. Of course, they already did it on a much larger scale during the pandemic — 1.5 million Russians died because the oligarchs couldn’t be bothered to pay higher taxes to support a Chinese-style infection control effort — so we should not be surprised.
For what they did in 2020-21, and for refusing to fight the war properly, Putin and the people around him should be publicly executed in the middle of the Red Square. Problem is that, even though they fully deserve it, doing so would destabilize the situation even more, so we are stuck with them as the least bad option…
There is the alternative hypothesis, which address this question:
My gut feeling is that RF is in no rush to “finish” the job, for two main reasons:
(a) they need to methodically and thoroughly achieve all their strategic objectives; and
(b) they want to observe, study and gather data on the performance of the NATO-supplied weapons systems.
But I also get the impression that President Putin wants to make a few cold-sweat-inducing points militarily before the NATO summit in Vilnius on 11-12 July. Still five weeks to go…
Posted by: tawharanui | Jun 4 2023 5:41 utc | 201
And which is that the Russian leadership knows that this is going nuclear and is preparing for that, in which case there is no point in paying too much attention to the war in Ukraine – It’s a side show.
The problem is that there is no evidence that they are in fact preparing for nuclear war. That would also involve dramatically increasing spending – on strategic delivery systems, and, most importantly, ABM defense, bomb shelters, and preparing the infrastructure. Unless that is indeed happening secretly in background, with a huge black budget dedicated to it, which is possible, but again, if it is happening, it is really well hidden, then I have no idea what the plan is here.
With their refusal to deal with Ukraine when they had the opportunity they have ensured that they now face the choice of either launching a nuclear war (and the importance of first-mover advantage in nuclear strategy cannot be stressed sufficiently enough) or surrendering…
Posted by: shadowbanned | Jun 4 2023 7:38 utc | 212
https://t.me/Slavyangrad/49158
Drunken men table chats
About everything and nothing
Ukraine is still standing, to the relief of some and the frustration of others. Some are calm though. We, the inpatient ones, are asking why is it still there and why it is not in ruins. Someone would say that the reasons are simple, Western help, zero care for the life of the soldiers…main reasons. And they would be partially right.
There is something more to it. You saw all those graveyards decorated with flags. They are not there for PR effect. They represent Ukraine’s defiance and will to resist. Call it pride, if you like. The consequence of that choice or sentiment is all those flags across the country which Ukrainians are very well aware of. They are fed over the years about their uniqueness (nobody will admit that his nation is subpar anyway) but on a big scale. It begins in 2014, which provided plenty of time to rebuild from scratch almost new identity (psychologists and sociologists will have to work hard to explain the phenomenon), with tremendous help and I would say, with the main tool in the personality of mass media. One factor was also important, maybe more than anything else. Ua become the center of the world. Not by its design, but because the future destiny of the world would be shaped there. Before 2014, no one cared about Ukraine. It was just some rusty old post-Soviet state, maybe worth harvesting for riches here and there. Then, all of a sudden, everything changed. They became a “protected species”, praised and tapped on the back by almost every other significant player in the world, who, before, didn’t even bother to look in their way. And Ukraine’s population felt that. From nobody in the eyes of the West to the beacon of light and defender of the free world. Yes, they felt it. They started to become proud of their country, a new identity, and their importance. Especially since their artificially created, “mortal enemy”, Russia, wound them heavily by taking Crimea. They are raised in their own eyes, and propaganda turns Russians into Orcs, wilde and filthy hordes from the east, who want to conquer, plunder, burn their cities, rape their women, and wipe out the newly created spirit they accepted and liked so much. Other countries use this opportunity and amplified the effect of Ukraine’s uniqueness. Pols, because they hate Russians organically, from many historical reasons, ex Warsaw pact countries because of being Soviet puppets (despite Soviets building pretty much everything for them), Germans, whose fear was already genetically installed since WW2, Britain, who’s a foreign policy through centuries besides colonialism, was “Containment of Russia” and the pragmatic USA, because of huge Russian nuclear arsenal. Ukraine becomes a place where Old New World Order meets New World Order in creation. We thought it would be Vietnam. We were wrong. Afghanistan twice, again wrong, Syria, no. It was Ukraine all along, the fact USA and Soviet (later Russian) strategists predicted. No one believed in that development but it happened.
So, why is Ukraine so stubborn? They don’t care about being the protector of the “free world” of “beacon of light “. That is the idiotic mantra the West is trying to sell to its people, to justify the fall of living standards and a situation that is threatening to escalate into something so serious, that world didn’t see anything like it since the disappearance of dinosaurs. Ukraine is defending itself, half willingly, half forced. But even those forced, if the situation is developing in a better way, would gladly take their part, at least some, to be a figure in the victory. They are defending their “newly” discovered identity, which Russia is trying to suppress. For better or worse. They are defending Ukraine, whatever we thought of it, like it or not. So, two nations are at war, for survival. One will end up in ruins in the end. None of them wants to allow that to happen. They will all fight until the utter defeat of the other side.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad/49159
Let’s be honest here, and open. Both sides look at this conflict as an existential one. Hundreds of thousands of killed Ukrainians will be followed by hundreds of thousands more. Nobody should have any illusion about it. “Butcher tally” will be huge. Lots of Russians will perish also. With every person killed on both sides, anger and hate and brutality will only grow. It grows already. It didn’t reach even half of what it can. This is the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario would include dozens, maybe hundreds of millions of dead across the world (mainly in Europe and the USA), because, keep in mind, the battle between World Orders is happening in that old, rusty post-Soviet state people didn’t bother to look before 2014. but now, they are waking up with news from there.
Posted by: shadowbanned | Jun 4 2023 12:23 utc | 243
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