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The War In Ukraine Is Done
The Washington Post has produced a long, two part piece, about the failed 'counter-offensive' in Ukraine. It dispenses equal blame on the U.S. and British planning of the whole mess and the Ukrainian execution of it.
The bullet points from the first part:
Miscalculations, divisions marked offensive planning by U.S., Ukraine (archived)
Key elements that shaped the counteroffensive and the initial outcome include:
- Ukrainian, U.S. and British military officers held eight major tabletop war games to build a campaign plan. But Washington miscalculated the extent to which Ukraine’s forces could be transformed into a Western-style fighting force in a short period — especially without giving Kyiv air power integral to modern militaries.
- U.S. and Ukrainian officials sharply disagreed at times over strategy, tactics and timing. The Pentagon wanted the assault to begin in mid-April to prevent Russia from continuing to strengthen its lines. The Ukrainians hesitated, insisting they weren’t ready without additional weapons and training.
- U.S. military officials were confident that a mechanized frontal attack on Russian lines was feasible with the troops and weapons that Ukraine had. The simulations concluded that Kyiv’s forces, in the best case, could reach the Sea of Azov and cut off Russian troops in the south in 60 to 90 days.
- The United States advocated a focused assault along that southern axis, but Ukraine’s leadership believed its forces had to attack at three distinct points along the 600-mile front, southward toward both Melitopol and Berdyansk on the Sea of Azov and east toward the embattled city of Bakhmut.
- The U.S. intelligence community had a more downbeat view than the U.S. military, assessing that the offensive had only a 50-50 chance of success given the stout, multilayered defenses Russia had built up over the winter and spring.
- Many in Ukraine and the West underestimated Russia’s ability to rebound from battlefield disasters and exploit its perennial strengths: manpower, mines and a willingness to sacrifice lives on a scale that few other countries can countenance.
- As the expected launch of the offensive approached, Ukrainian military officials feared they would suffer catastrophic losses — while American officials believed the toll would ultimately be higher without a decisive assault.
And from the second part:
In Ukraine, a war of incremental gains as counteroffensive stalls (archived)
Key findings from reporting on the campaign include:
- Seventy percent of troops in one of the brigades leading the counteroffensive, and equipped with the newest Western weapons, entered battle with no combat experience.
- Ukraine’s setbacks on the battlefield led to rifts with the United States over how best to cut through deep Russian defenses.
- The commander of U.S. forces in Europe couldn’t get in touch with Ukraine’s top commander for weeks in the early part of the campaign amid tension over the American’s second-guessing of battlefield decisions.
- Each side blamed the other for mistakes or miscalculations. U.S. military officials concluded that Ukraine had fallen short in basic military tactics, including the use of ground reconnaissance to understand the density of minefields. Ukrainian officials said the Americans didn’t seem to comprehend how attack drones and other technology had transformed the battlefield.
- In all, Ukraine has retaken only about 200 square miles of territory, at a cost of thousands of dead and wounded and billions in Western military aid in 2023 alone.
All those points played a role.
My personal ones:
- Both, the Ukraine and its supporters, systematically underestimated Russian capabilities. (And still do.)
- Satellite reconnaissance showed Russian defense preparations on the level of the Battle of Kursk. There the German Wehrmacht, after way too long preparations, failed to break the Russian lines. The unlearned lesson from 1943: When you see defense lines like these, try something else.
- Battle simulations and table top war games have a 'moral factor' input for each side. Setting your sides' factor to 10 and the enemy's factor to 0, as the U.S. and UK obviously did, will let you win every time – but has no relation to reality.
- Air support would not have helped. Russian air defenses are too strong to counter it.
- The decision to use barely trained, 'green' brigades without any fighting experience was a serious error.
- Not to use smoke grenades and, in general, means of deception, was not reasonable at all.
- To have half of the new troops, the more experienced part, fight Zelenski's already lost battle for Bakhmut, was a major political mistake.
All together made sure that the so called 'counter-offensive' never had a chance to take off. The bickering now is just an attempt to put the blame for the failure onto the other side of the table.
The Ukrainian General Zaluzny has learned from the battle. He now puts up somewhat realistic numbers to let the U.S. understand how small its chances to win really are:
Commander-in-Chief Zaluzhnyi asked Pentagon chief for 17 million rounds of ammunition
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was informed during a visit to Kyiv that Ukraine needed 17 million rounds of ammunition and that US$ 350-400 billion worth of assets and personnel would be required to liberate the country.
…
Quote from a senior Defence Forces official: "Austin was told 17 million rounds of ammunition were needed. He was stunned, to put it mildly, because you wouldn’t be able to collect that many rounds in the whole world."
The Ukrainian army does not have the ten thousands of barrels required to fire 17 million rounds. Nor has it the men to feed those imaginary guns.
Zaluzny obviously thinks that the war is lost and done with. And that it is time for politics that pursue peace:
In addition, according to a source, Austin also said Zaluzhnyi had complained privately to American generals about interference from the President’s Office [..]: "Austin told us privately that Zaluzhnyi was always complaining to his generals about the President’s Office and how it obstructed him. Well, obviously the president learned about those conversations too. And that isn’t conducive to trust."
However, the President’s Office is inclined to believe that Zaluzhnyi’s dismissal would facilitate his political career.
It is high time for the Biden administration to wrap this whole thing up. Do the usual thing: declare victory, leave and forget-about-it.
Gilbert Doctorow muse about ways to do that:
Seymour Hersh, Anatol Lieven and the desperate DC gambit to end hostilities in Ukraine while claiming ‘victory’
Whatever happens thereafter will be left for the footnotes.
From the the previous thread:
Russia is iterating munitions development so fast. One might expect that we’d be seeing a mini arms race but there seems to be no such iterating and testing on the western side. The switchblade was gonna be a thing, flopped and then we haven’t seen or heard about an improvement or any analogues to drones like the Geran and Lancet. And I don’t buy that they’re being kept under wraps, the value is getting them to see real use.
Posted by: Lex | Dec 5 2023 1:48 utc | 148
It doesn’t work that way in a system where R&D is in the private sector.
How does it normally happen in peace time?
Officially the Pentagon puts out some specs and then the defense contractors compete for the contract with alternative products that meet those specs, then the Pentagon decides who to give the contract too. Then it gets produced in whatever quantities were planned, subject to Congress changing its mind about the whole thing and slashing the procurement budget for it.
The reality if, of course, a bit different — the specs are defined together with the defense contractor lobbyists, there is no real competition for the contract, and production is widely distributed across many subcontractors in many different places for political reasons, all of them in the private sector.
There is also some R&D done in-house by the government, but it is not the dominant component, aside from nukes (and not even for many aspects of the nuclear program).
Now a war comes and you need fast iteration with real-time feedback from the battlefield. Does such a system work? Not at all — information from the battlefield has to be processed by the clumsy bureaucratic machine at the Pentagon, specs have to be defined, the MIC has to do the R&D and testing, but it will only make that investment if there is certainty about profits, and it all takes forever and at an exorbitant cost, if it ever happens. And because missiles and drones are not launched against DC, NYC, and ATL daily and nobody is dying, profit is the only driving force in the process.
Meanwhile in Russia the MIC is almost entirely state-owned and directly integrated with the military, and the private companies operate in such close cooperation too, and right now nobody is too obsessed with contracts and profits, because people are dying and this is an existential war. So what is happening on the front lines makes its way as demands for improvements to the design and constructions bureaus in real time, and you have that fast iteration.
But still, there are baffling cases, i.e. this:
This is particularly true for something like a Geran analogue. That could be produced almost anywhere, relatively quickly and in pretty large numbers cheaply. The brightest minds of the giant western economies can’t (?) make a cheap and effective solution anymore. Can’t even just copy one. That should be something Ukrainians can do domestically with just parts and maybe some initial manufacturing work in Europe or the US. Still no.
Posted by: Lex | Dec 5 2023 1:48 utc | 148
I also expected them to be in a position to send large drone swarms towards central Russia daily by now. This is a well defined objective with an already worked out technical solution. Hasn’t really happened.
Some possible explanations:
1) They tried to set it up, but you actually can’t produce these efficiently distributed in various garages, you need larger facilities, and those got immediately destroyed by missiles strikes
2) They couldn’t set it up outside Ukraine because it was communicated through the back channels that this will not be tolerated and those facilities will be bombed (notice that Germany still hasn’t sent Taurus after such threats were made publicly)
3) Russian air defense adjusted quite well after it was initially penetrated fairly deeply a few months ago and now nothing makes it very far beyond Bryansk, Kursk and Belgorod, and certainly not to target.
Posted by: shаdοwbanned | Dec 5 2023 15:46 utc | 73
Dances with Bears today takes up this very topic. https://johnhelmer.net/
Helmer identifies Kremlin and Shoigu advisor Andrei Ilnitski as the theorist behind Russia’s current moves.
He says Russia wants NATO rolled back to its 1997 borders- shown on the map. And that the current “peace talk’ to the effect that it will settle for less- the torpedoed Ankara agreement for example or a Minsk III- is just CIA wishful thinking.
As b says Ukraine has been defeated and so has NATO which means that the struggle has only just begun.
But it has begun.
It is the same struggle as the one which began in 1918- the war against imperialism.
The war that ended in 1918 was the war for the Empire between the contenders for Hegemony within it, and thus over the world. It was a struggle taken up again in 1939, when it emerged that ending the struggle, and establishing the victory of the US UK Empire was only possible by enrolling the anti-imperialist armies- from the struggle that had begun in 1917/8
It was those armies ( the Red Army, the Peoples Liberation Army of China, and the world wide uprising of anti-fascist partisans, from Vietnam to Italy, from Yugoslavia and France to Malaya and far beyond) from the struggle, which begins with the Russian revolution, against imperialism (the very definition of an existential struggle) which tipped the scale, defeated European and Japanese fascism, and led to the situation after 1945.
Which is often misunderstood.
As the UN’s founding documents suggest and the rhetoric of the New Dealers- famously resented by Churchill- shows, by 1945 the United States was theoretically committed to the cause of anti-imperialism. Hence the wave of colonial divestments by the UK, beginning in India (Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangla Desh and Burma) and engulfing the Asian empires of France and The Netherlands, then the African colonies in a long period of decolonising which only reached a conclusion with the end of the Rhodesian and South African regimes .
The US role was duplicitous to the point of being shizoid- it was all in favour of ending imperialism so long as the imperialists remained in control. The model was Latin America where post imperial rule was generally worse than anything the Spanish or Portuguese had been doing.
The same pattern emerged in Korea, where Kim Il Sung’s national liberation armies were stopped by the forces of the Japanese occupiers re-organised by the US in the south. The case in Vietnam was similar. And that in Malaya not completely different. Ditto The Philippines. Indonesia was different: it took twenty years before Sukarno and the forces that he represented and protected were swept out of power on a tidal wave of innocent blood.
Throughout that post 1945 wave of decolonisation the real struggle between what was the Soviet Union, China and the forces of national liberation, on the one side and the old Empire, desperately trying to retain its grip on a world changing its form and shape, new born and wet from the womb, protesting, with increasing hollowness, that it was not what it seemed to be- the old genocidal, racist, plundering pirate Empire of old but a totally reformed successor, exemplified in the rule of the working class in Britain (Labour) and the freedom loving, gum chewing, egalitarian good fellow of the US “middle class’ which had progressed beyond the crude divisiveness of Marxism into a new world where capitalist and proletarian played golf together, lived the same sort of lives, went to school together, married each others cousins-were each others cousins. All According to the Saturday Evening Post.
Unless of course, like most of the colonials, they had skins of a darker hue.
(Which was so embarassing that the CIA and State Department found themselves on the side of the Civil Rights movement, provided it was moderate enough not to do more than whine quietly. ..to which we can trace back the entire current phenomenon of wokeness in the ruling class, constantly striving for dramatic changes which change nothing of any importance.)
In the real world- as Stalin understood- the Russian Revolution did not last long before it had become nothing more (or less) than a national liberation movement for Russia and the Toilers of the East. (MN Roy is a forgotten giant in modern history.)
The end of the Soviet Union, messy and disgusting as it was and a real tragedy actually changed very little geo-politically except to throw people,obsessed with labels, off balance. Thirty years after it happened the same struggle, between the Euro-imperialists and their past and putative victims, under the leadership of the wariest population that Capitalism ever ran across- the Russian peasant people- goes on.
And go on it will until there is nothing left of the NATO/Israel world axis except sensible people seeking what we always have and always will, happy, communally rich lives among our families and everyone else’s families restoring the earth to the awful beauty that we know instinctively from a hundred million years of breathing its air and drinking its waters.
It may take a while, but there are grown ups with teenage kids today who will see the new world and build it. In the meantime-willy nilly and surrounded by predatory oligarchs and Pobedonostsev’s posthumous fan club- the ghost of the Red Army is doing God’s work. Israel has reason to be nervous.
Posted by: bevin | Dec 5 2023 17:10 utc | 95
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