The Ukrainian Way of War

This is an interesting video of Ukrainian tanks taking out a Russian strongpoint dubbed “Moscow.”

Takeaways:

  • They had to break off the attack and return to base for more ammunition. “A tank has 22 shells, which isn’t enough for attack.” By contrast the M1A2 holds 42 rounds. The rapid depletion of ammo in the Yom Kippur War was one reason the Israelis designed the Merkava with a rear access door to allow quick ammo resupply.
  • “They didn’t expect our tanks. They thought it would be just infantry.”
  • “We used all our ammo up in two minutes.”
  • Instead of the squadron commander participating in the attack (as per Soviet doctrine), “he used quadracopter drones and could see the combat scenes and command the tanks in real time.”
  • “Our personnel worked with infantry and special forces. We cleared the way through the forest for them.” That involved clearing lots of mines and booby traps.
  • They said they cleared the way from Husarivka to Bayrak. Which means they were probably involved in the push on Lyman. Husarivka is just east of Barvinkova in the bottom left of this map.

  • As has become the norm, retreating Russian soldiers left behind buttloads of ammo. The Russians may have depleted their smart munitions, but they don’t appear to have any shortage of the dumb variety. “A 15 kilometer forest was full of empty ammo boxes.”
  • Troops breaking and retreating despite plenty of ammo suggests continuing low morale among the invading Russians (or their local conscript cannon fodder).
  • “There was good coordination between our infantry, tanks and artillery.” Classic western combined arms doctrine, something the Russians have seemed mostly incapable of pulling off.
  • Also, the Ukrainian military have reported entering Lyman:

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    12 Responses to “The Ukrainian Way of War”

    1. Earth Pig says:

      Good to see that the UA has learned hard lessons since 24 February. UA training of its replacements seems to have been effective. This is still Russia’s war to lose.

    2. Kirk says:

      I’ve been saying for years that there would be a massive defeat inflicted on one of the major powers because they’d tackle a smaller power that would be ahead of them on the tech curve. The use of drones to drop munitions on enemy vehicles is exactly what I was thinking would happen, and here we have Ukraine proving me right.

      This is an inflection point in how war is fought. It’s a moment during the ever-ongoing ratcheting effect between technologies, giving advantage to one side or another, making attack stronger versus defense. It’s like with armor; build a better shell to penetrate it, and the armor manufacturers just came up with better armor.

      The next phase is going to be anti-drone provisions. Likely directed energy weapons combined with missiles for taking out the bigger ones. Until you can get a bubble of anti-drone protections up around your forces, they’re flatly f*cked the way the Azerbaijani forces have done in the Armenians. All modern formations are at risk to drones, right now.

      What I remain baffled by is the consistent lack of precautions taken by Russian troops, and to a somewhat lesser extent, the Ukrainians. They bunch up, they have shitty signature discipline, and they do not pay the slightest heed to the fact that they’re leaving obvious tracks everywhere they go with their vehicles. So far, the Russians are demonstrating precisely zero ability to identify lessons all about them in their environments or to learn from them.

      Every Russian position you see is full of trash, they leave obvious markings on the ground to lead recon drones to their positions, they don’t police their areas, and with the huge amount of wooden packing crates they ship their munitions in, which they just leave laying around…?

      Dear God, the incompetence… It BURNS, it burns…

      As a professional soldier, I feel like I’m watching a bunch of halfwit degenerates LARPing as real soldiers. If this was the best the Russians could put into the field? Dealing with the “mobiks” is going to be even more like shooting fish in a barrel.

      There are so many indicators of amateur-hour soldiering with all these ass-clowns. No air guards on moving vehicles. No attempt at even the slightest amount of signature discipline–I’d wager they’re probably using white lights, at night. Zero field discipline, not even half-ass attempts at camouflaging positions, especially from all-round observation. I mean, how many of these idiots do you see looking up, before the drone-dropped munition hits?

      One thing is for certain… Unless the Russians somehow get their act together, there’s going to be yet another “lost generation” of dead young men who won’t manage to breed more Russians. I think in about five-ten years, there are going to be an awful lot of Russian women on the world market for human trafficking… Yet again. I have horrified memories of my tour in Korea during the late 1990s, when most of the Korean bar girls were Russians. You had to pity them, because when you talked to them, it’d be like “Oh, at home I was a translator… I have a Ph.D in languages, speak four fluently…” You’d be sitting there talking to them, and they’d blithely say that they were able to make more money in Korea than they could at home, and we weren’t talking lower-class women with no education. They all should have had prospects, at home; yet, there they were in a Korean bar outside a small US Army base a few miles south of the DMZ. Totally mind-boggling, for someone who grew up with the “Soviets are ten feet tall and are gonna kill us all…” mentality I did.

      I’m really not sure if the contempt I feel is stronger than the pity, but it’s a narrowly-run thing at the moment. Stupid bastards, all of them…

    3. B Metcalf says:

      Which side is using the proper pronouns most consistently?

    4. elsworth says:

      Um Kirk,

      Some of those Russian “bar girls” were spies.

    5. JohnTyler says:

      Putin and his pals will keep sending more and more soldiers to Ukraine, irrespective of the Russian death toll. If they are poorly equipped, trained, etc., it’s no big deal for the Russian leadership.
      Russia has never given a hoot about how many dead Russians it takes to prevail in a military conflict. If their soldiers have to arm themselves with the guns of their dead comrades, so be it.

      The Russians lived under Stalin for about 25 years and he murdered more Russians than Hitler’s Wehrmacht; about 25 to 50 MILLION ! The Russian people and those in Stalin’s inner circle basically accepted their fate. Stalin never had a problem finding others to do his dirty work. His inner circle or the puppets within their parliament – knowing exactly what was going on – never did anything to kill or stop Stalin.

      That’s because they all believed you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelette. They believed that there was no price to dear to pay – as long as it was the “other guy” that paid the price – in efforts to achieve their ultimate , fictitious goal ; their fantasy of a worker’s paradise.

      Do not forget that during WWII , there were “political” advisors at the front lines assigned to military units. One of their jobs was to shoot dead any Russian soldier retreating or simply not moving forward as well on reporting on those not following orders.

      Putin will not give up. The Russian ruble is near all time highs and he is selling plenty of oil/gas to China and India. If it takes a million dead Russian soldiers to subdue Ukraine, so be it.
      Putin and his bunch do not care.
      If Russian civilians engage in protests and rioting, Putin will simply arrest or shoot dead the top leadership of the protesters. If he has to re-open some Gulags, so be it. If tens of thousands of protesters have to be imprisoned or shot, no big deal for the ex-KGB goon.

      Putin will not give up. He will have to be “taken out,” existentially, for before Russia gives up on it’s Ukrainian adventure.

    6. Rollory says:

      Putin does not HAVE a million soldiers to throw at the problem.

      Russia does not have enough young men to do things like that anymore.

      Demographics matters.

      This war is not Russia’s to lose; Russia lost it by mid-March. Everything else has been logical consequences working themselves out along a consistent trend line.

    7. John says:

      @Elsworth, so were some of the Korean ones.

    8. Kirk says:

      @Ellsworth,

      I doubt that the FSB had it sh*t together enough at that point to put spies in place like that, or whether the “spies” would have gotten paid.

      It was ‘effin-eh surreal for me as a senior NCO who came up in the Cold War Army to walk through the gate-guard shack and see passports in Cyrillic up on the wall showing who had passes issued to them. I literally had a little bit of a freak-out, seeing that, and observing the blase manner things were being handled by the guys on guard and the Korean augmentee guards on duty. I was assured, however, that such things were approved and the norm for things.

      Spent a lot of time that tour talking to those girls every time we did Courtesy Patrol out in the ‘ville. Again, surreal… You’re standing there in a tiny little South Korean village outside a US Army camp, and they have actual Russians from all across the former Soviet Union just casually sitting there in the bars, while soaking up all the fake “drinkys” the bars could sell while GIs were crawling all over them. If you talked to them like you were another human being, a lot of it was just sheer human tragedy and pathos. I remember one girl who’d just graduated from what I recognized as the premier foreign language university in St. Petersburg when the wall came down, and her prospects inside the former Soviet Union at that time were basically starve or become a prostitute somewhere. She’d gotten roped into going to South Korea because the guy she now recognized was a procurer told her she was going to work as a translator for a multi-national Korean company. She wound up in a bar outside Camp Howze, persuading American GIs to buy drinks from the bar for her in return for… Not too sure what. They all claimed it was “companionship” and that nobody forced them to have sex, but it was pretty much an openly-acknowledged lie that they weren’t on the clock for horizontal work.

      The really sad and f*cked-up thing? That young woman was grateful she had the job, and could even send money back to her family. At that point, she was the sole breadwinner for her family, who were all what you would think were kinda-sorta upper class–Retired college professors and translators.

      I’m sure that there were a few agents salted in with that crew, but I’m also pretty sure that few of them were really enthusiastic about the work or expecting pay from the FSB. Hell, it was so bad that the South Koreans were able to turn a couple of deep-cover FSB types in Seoul simply because the poor bastards couldn’t afford the cost of living there, and were literally starving on what the FSB was paying them at the time. Friend of mine worked CI in Seoul about that timeframe, and his later description to me of what that was like was like hearing a le Carre novel as written by Terry Pratchett… And, it actually happened!

      It got so bad, from what I hear, that a former Soviet spy tried selling his crypto devices to the US, the South Koreans, and the Japanese. Thing was, they already had them, and nobody was interested. Ten years earlier, he’d have gotten millions, but by the time he got desperate enough to sell them, it was like “Yeah, we’ve got multiple copies, and they’re more up-to-date than your examples… Thanks, but no thanks. Do make sure to get your immigration status regularized, please…”

    9. BigFire says:

      The overall assault commander appears to be no more than just a lieutenant, and he’s probably command a squad of 4 tanks plus infantry and artillery troops. He probably have the most up to date training, as noted by his use of the drone to oversee the overall battlefield, and sending out the command to the individual units, almost as he’s playing a RTS game. He’s certainly younger than the other NCOs interviewed in the video.

    10. Howard says:

      Not gonna lie, seeing the drone’s view on the tablet, Starcraft came to mind.

      It’s been years and years since I was watching videos of the Syrian civil war, with drones dropping munitions on tanks and trucks. In fact, some of those videos even had augmented reality drawing real-time green rectangles etc around enemy vehicles as well as friendlies.

    11. Kirk says:

      Despite it all, it would behoove everyone to remember that this isn’t going to change everything.

      Horse cavalry still had (and, in some very limited roles, still does) its uses after the initial wave of technological change took the ground out from under its hooves. And, the further development of technology turned cavalry’s role into vehicle-borne interpretations of it, sans horsies.

      You’re still going to have the ratcheting effect between attack and defense: Plagued by drones observing you? Buy hunter-killer drones; better fine-grain air defenses; practice better camouflage discipline; work on energy emissions; do anything at all to make it harder for the drones to find you.

      Right now, you’re seeing the results of drones going after the Russian Army. The same Russian Army that the Tsar’s fielded, seemingly: If you remember your history, while the Tsar’s Imperial Russian Army was vast and apparently on several cutting edges, they were overall fscking incompetent to a degree that was mind-boggling to the Germans that fought them to a standstill. Operational matters? Dear God, they were transmitting orders in the clear, over the radio back before Tannenberg. They had no choice, because they had no other communications, and no idea at all about encryption. Where the Tsar had incompetent boob aristocrats as officers, Putin has incompetent boob kleptocrats. Same thing, same results in the end.

      The trick with this particular “cusp of war” is to figure out how to adapt to the new conditions. I really doubt that it’s going to turn everything we know and currently do on its figurative head, but I do know we’re going to have to adapt, and adapt quickly.

      You have guys turning toys and 3D printed parts into effective weapons. There are ways of dealing with that… You just have to find them, and put countermeasures into place, maintaining awareness that there will be counter-counter-measures ad infinitum, going into the brave new drone-saddled world of the future.

      Thing I worry about is that the US military isn’t exactly the most forward-thinking, lesson-learning adaptable force in the history of the world. The various unions in the military structure, like that of fighter pilots, probably militate against us doing anything pro-active and effective. Until we lose the next battle or war, that is…

    12. BigFire says:

      Here’s a funny video of Colonel Pavlo Fedosenko commander of 92nd Mechanized Brigade drove off a captured T90-A in the Khariv theater after just changing 2 batters.
      https://twitter.com/DefenceU/status/1577331943217274880

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