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Ukraine Finally Starts To Build Defense Lines
After wasting ten-thousands of men in hopeless battles the Ukrainian comedian has finally acknowledged that his army's performative 'counter-attacks' and hold-to-the-last-man defenses have made no sense.
Politco's Dreamer of the year finally calls for building defensive lines:
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called for a faster buildup of major defensive lines amid Kyiv’s stalled counteroffensive and concerns that Russia could attempt to take more territory.
Zelenskiy urged greater speed and efficiency in building defenses in a video statement on Telegram after a meeting with key military and security officials Tuesday evening. He encouraged local communities to pitch in and pledged to make money available for the effort.
“Our country will definitely have enough mines and concrete,” he said. He didn’t provide details on where the fortifications would be built or how extensive they might be.
It took the Russian army several months and lots of money to build its extensive defense lines in the southeast of Ukraine.
Zelenski has neither the time nor the money to build solid lines but he wants many of them (machine translation):
According to Zelensky, he held a meeting on fortification in all major directions – first of all on Avdiivka and Maryinsky, as well as on Kupyansk and on the Kupyansk – Liman line, in Zaporozhye and Kherson regions.
In addition, fortifications will be built along the entire border with Russia and Belarus.
"We will work with our partners to strengthen our defensive lines," the president added.
Earlier, Zelensky already spoke about a "special" meeting of the Stavka, where they discussed strengthening the fortification.
Comments Strana (machine translation):
This is quite a landmark statement. It sounds like an announcement of the construction of large-scale defensive lines-similar to the one that Russia has built in the south.
And more broadly, this can be interpreted as a transition to a defensive strategy, which began to be talked about more and more often after the counteroffensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine actually stopped, and the Russians themselves switched to large-scale attacks.
But officially, the authorities do not talk about the transition to defense, and the main thesis remains that the APU is preparing to attack, and there is no deadlock (which even the commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny wrote about) at the front.
Zelenski called for private companies to build the new fortifications. In the context of Ukraine that means more corruption – lots of it – as government officials will ask for kick backs for any contract they may sign. Previous attempts of privately build defense lines had ditches that were too shallow and of little utility. Some concrete was poured but in the wrong places and shapes.
There were reasons why Ukraine failed last summer to overcome the Russian defense lines. It lacked the artillery support, air-superiority and sheer mass that is required to achieve that. But Russia has all of that – an enormous amount of heavy siege artillery (200 mm and beyond), a ridiculous superiority in the number of unmanned drones and manned fighter planes and lots of new contract soldiers. Any lines the Ukrainians can build will be overcome by superior Russian forces.
Yes, passing Ukrainian minefields will be difficult. But there are ways and means to do such.
Thanks to its previous lunatic attempts the Ukrainian army has lost too many men to hold each and every line. And while the Ukrainian army will have to defend everywhere, the Russia one can choose the one or two local fronts where it wants to breach the defense lines to pass through them.
What is planned now is too little too late to save Ukraine.
“Studying the map of the conduct of the SMO, people periodically ask a rhetorical question: why not strike at the flank and rear of the APU, again crossing the border in the Kharkiv, Sumy, Chernihiv regions and entering from the territory of Belarus. After all, we are surrounded by a certain territorial framework (“war zone”) doesn’t limit it.
The Ukrainian Armed Forces are constantly shelling the adjacent territories of Russia, their DRGs are trying to carry out raids deep into Russian territory (not far, but still), and through Belarus Russian troops have already entered Ukrainian territory in the spring of 2022. Since then, the Kiev regime’s relations with Minsk have only worsened, so there are no serious obstacles to a repeat.
There were Polish statements regarding Poland’s readiness to defend Ukraine if the Belarusian Armed Forces take part in military operations on Ukrainian territory. But, firstly, we are not talking about the use of the Belarusian army (only passing through the territory), and secondly, Poland is not against fighting with Russia (at least in Galicia) and will definitely send the Polish Army to the front if it has the slightest hope of at least bringing the confrontation to a draw, avoiding complete defeat. defeats.
At this stage, Poland has not yet completed the reform and rearmament of its army, so a full-scale conflict with Russia, without the active complicity of its senior NATO comrades, is clearly not up to it. Warsaw itself will not survive for long, and the United States and Poland’s Western European allies do not want to fight Russia personally.
So why, if there are no significant contraindications, half of the potential front remains unused? Because it is not profitable for Russia. The enemy is trying to stretch our forces on the widest possible front, while we are trying to concentrate them on the narrowest possible area, on the main directions.
At the first stage of the SVO, Russia tried to conduct a maneuver war on a broad front, based on the fact that Ukraine in any case (with the most massive mobilization) will not have enough troops to provide the necessary density, along a huge arc, from Odessa to Zhytomyr, and a better prepared and equipped Russian army, due to effective maneuver it will gain a significant advantage.
Actually, this was a modern development of the theory of deep operation, developed in the early 30s of the Red Army, but better known in its vulgar form, under the German name Blitzkrieg. The wars of the 1990s and noughties, as well as the experience of limited conflicts, such as the Syrian one, confirmed the relevance of this theory. They showed that the modern high-tech army has an overwhelming advantage over the enemy, armed and trained in the style of the late 80s-early 90s of the last century, not only being in numerical equality, but also significantly inferior to it. It was assumed that Russia would easily realize its technological superiority.
However, the pause in negotiations made in March and April allowed Kiev not only to mobilize manpower, but also to receive modern means of combat from the West in the form of counter-battery radars, as well as to deploy its air defense/missile defense systems. Russia was not afraid of the relative abundance of the latter, but their ability to work in conjunction with Western intelligence complexes was an unpleasant surprise, which sharply and permanently reduced the effectiveness of combat aviation. By the beginning of the summer, Ukraine received Western artillery systems, which, together with reconnaissance UAVs, posed a serious threat to the nearest army rear.
All this combined made it impossible for powerful marching columns to move quickly, which was the hallmark of any Blitzkrieg. A deep operation means as few deployments for combat as possible, as much movement as possible in marching columns. Rapid movement solves the problem of cutting off the still resisting front from the rear, blocking the delivery of replenishment of manpower, weapons, ammunition, fuel and lubricants to the front, as well as destroying suitable reserves in parts, depriving the enemy of the opportunity to create a strike group to deblockade the cut-off parts or at least to create a new front line in the depth of defense.
Deep operation – a fine-tuning system. All its components should work in full and effective interaction with each other. If one of the elements of the system cannot be implemented, then the Blitzkrieg cannot be implemented either.
I have already written that the Russian military-political leadership has the main advantage and talent necessary for a military leader (since the beginning of the world wars, the leadership of the troops has been carried out by a collective military-political intelligence in the form of the Supreme Command Headquarters, a similar structure, or simply effectively established interaction between military and political leaders within traditional constitutional structures – – having discovered the problem it doesn’t try to overcome it through stubbornness or fill it with a superior resource, but looks for and quickly finds an alternative option that leads to victory, maybe slower, but no less true.
If superiority cannot be implemented in the Blitzkrieg format, it must be implemented in a different format. Clausewitz also divided wars by type: lightning wars and wars of attrition. In the 20s of the twentieth century, this division was thoroughly worked out by the Russian and Soviet military commander and military theorist Alexander Andreevich Svechin (in the Russian Imperial Army of the General Staff, Major General, in the Red Army – Divisional Commander).
By the way, Alexander Andreevich, unlike many contemporaries, was a supporter of preparing the country for a long war of attrition, rightly noting that the vast Russian expanses and mobilization capabilities do not allow the Blitzkrieg theory to be fully implemented against it. In addition, the experience of the First World War showed that the opposing blocs use so large resources that the breakthrough of one of the fronts and even the withdrawal of one of the allied powers from the war do not give a final victory.
The Second World War brilliantly confirmed all Svechin’s foresight (his work “Strategy” is still relevant and easy to read for such a specific literature). Despite all of Hitler’s Blitzkriegs, despite France’s withdrawal from the war, despite Germany’s seizure of all of the Balkans and control of Scandinavia, despite the initial successes of the Wehrmacht in the 1941 campaign against the USSR, the war eventually took on a protracted character and the victory was won not by a brilliant deep maneuver, but by a more powerful resource base.
It is logical that, realizing the unrealizability of a Blitzkrieg in the circumstances that opened up, the Russian military and political leadership switched to the second type of war – a war of attrition.
For those who like to point out without reason that Russia did not set itself the task of conquering Ukraine, I note that Blitzkrieg, like the war of attrition, as a rule, with rare exceptions, and do not pursue such a goal. The goal of any war is not to capture more territory, as some people think, but to achieve the desired peace conditions, in the shortest possible time and with the least loss and cost.
Therefore, all the definitions of classical military operations are quite applicable to the SVO, especially since it has gone beyond a short liberation campaign in support of local healthy forces. But even within this framework, it also pursued the classic goals of a military campaign, but the main emphasis was not on the military, but on the political component.
A war of attrition requires the creation of strong, stable fronts, which requires an excessive concentration of forces in priority areas. In order to avoid large-scale mobilization, which is not necessary from the point of view of the goals of the war of attrition, Russia has reduced the front line as much as possible, withdrawing troops from three north-eastern regions. Later, to increase the stability of the front, it was necessary to leave part of the Kharkiv region, as well as move beyond the Dnieper in its lower course.
Ukraine cannot launch a full-scale attack across the border in its Northeast. There are no targets for a sane operation of the armed forces – Russia has too much strategic depth, exceeding any ability of the Armed Forces of Ukraine to conduct an effective offensive operation.
Any breakthroughs of Ukrainian troops across the border, including by relatively large forces, would be suicidal, would be exclusively informational and political in nature, and would be aimed at putting pressure on the psyche of Russian society. However, the relatively rapid construction of fortifications along the state border and their occupation by troops, the possibility of major breakthroughs were generally reduced to zero, while periodic attempts to penetrate the Russian territory of small enemy DRGs lead only to the loss of their personnel and to similar retaliatory actions of Russia, without causing serious physical, especially information and psychological damage.
At the same time, since there is an eventual threat of a breakthrough of Russian troops across the border of the North-Eastern regions of Ukraine, the APU is forced to keep relatively large groups along the entire length of the border, from Kharkiv to Kovel and Lutsk, distracting these forces from the front. Using relatively small forces, Russia is chaining much more serious resources of the Armed Forces of Ukraine to the North-Eastern border of Ukraine.
At the same time, on the front line from Kherson to Kupyansk, the issue of grinding the forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is being successfully solved by creating and constantly increasing the advantage of the Russian Armed Forces in armored vehicles, artillery, aviation, UAVs, rocket weapons, as well as in the ability to release many times more ammunition per unit of time at enemy positions. No matter how hard Kiev tries, no matter how many total and super-total mobilizations it announces, and its reserves are being depleted, the density of troops occupying the front is decreasing, the quality of these troops is falling, and the general front catastrophe is getting closer.
This is already evident from the fact that from the beginning of summer to the end of autumn, the Russian Armed Forces first switched from defense to counter-battles, then forced the APU to go on the defensive almost along the entire front line. Finally, by constantly increasing the pressure and forcing the Ukrainian General Staff to move the same units from the South to the North and to the Center to plug the constantly forming gaps in the battle formations, the Russian army began to slowly but surely push the enemy back.
The rate of retreat of the APU, the frequency and depth of breakthroughs of the Russian Armed Forces will only increase. In the near future, the Ukrainian General Staff will face a choice-to quickly retreat to unprepared positions beyond the Dnieper, risking a total collapse of the front, or to transfer brigades covering the North-Eastern border of Ukraine for another temporary stabilization of the front. If Kiev chooses the latter option, the repetition of the offensive of the Russian Armed Forces of the February-March 2022 model (taking into account and correcting the mistakes made then) on the Belarusian-Kharkiv section will again become relevant.
The fundamental difference between the war of attrition and Blitzkrieg is that the latter involves the destruction of the enemy army in the course of a deep breakthrough. If the breakthrough failed, or the destruction of the enemy for some reason did not happen, this kind of unsuccessful Blitzkrieg most often creates a crisis for the side that used it.
A war of attrition has its negative aspects (in particular, it can cause problems in the economy and fatigue of society, and it is also more expensive than a successful Blitzkrieg), but its purely military solution is less risky (if the balance of forces, one’s own and the enemy, is evaluated correctly).
In a War of attrition, a deep breakthrough occurs after the enemy’s army has suffered sufficient human and material losses, as well as sufficiently exhausted physically and morally, to lose the ability to resist the next offensive. Then the standard pressure on the enemy’s positions itself turns into a deep breakthrough, which the enemy can no longer close, not because it does not have time to transfer reserves, but because these reserves simply do not exist – they were burned during the war of attrition.
In fact, the enemy has already lost the war of attrition. Ukraine simply did not have the appropriate resources, and the West has exhausted its own, as it bitterly admits. However, the enemy is not ready to capitulate and accept Russian peace terms. If this stubborn position does not change (and we have no reason to believe that anything can change), then we will still have the opportunity to see both the catastrophe of the Ukrainian front and the rapid advance of the marching columns of the Russian army, which the enemy simply has nothing to stop. But to do this, it is necessary to finally break it morally and financially in the existing positions.”
https://cont.ws/@ishchenko/2686079
Posted by: rpst | Dec 2 2023 15:50 utc | 212
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