Here’s an important piece of news that is hard to estimate the ramifications of: Ukraine has just appointed a new military leader.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy replaced his top army general on Thursday in what amounts to a major shake-up of the country’s war strategy as the conflict with Russia grinds into its third year and Ukraine grapples with shortages of ammunition and personnel.
In a post on X, Zelenskyy said he thanked Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi — a military leader popular with troops and the general public — for his two years of service as commander-in-chief. “The time for such a renewal is now,” Zelenskyy said.
Zelenskyy appointed Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, the commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, to lead the army. Syrskyi, 58, has since 2013 been involved in the Ukrainian army’s effort to adopt NATO standards.
Snip.
Zaluzhnyi was highly regarded by his troops and by foreign military officials. Some analysts warned that his exit could bring unwelcome disruption, potentially driving a wedge between the Ukrainian army and politicians, and fueling uncertainty among Kyiv’s Western allies.
There has been little change in positions along the 1,500-kilometer (900-mile) front line over the winter, though the Kremlin’s forces have kept up their attacks at certain points. Faced with a shortfall in anticipated supplies of Western weaponry, Ukraine has been digging defenses, while Moscow has put its economy on a war footing to give its military more muscle.
At this remove, it is impossible to say whether the move is justified or not, or whether it will pay dividends. Ukraine certainly punched above its weight for the first year and a half of the war, but the last half year has been a slog for no significant gains on the ground.
Though I’ve liked what I’ve seen of their attacks on Russian logistical and naval targets, an awful lot of Ukrainian action has been a more competent version of those of their Russian enemies: small scale attacks on small tactical objectives. I am also critical about how some western weapons have been used in a piecemeal fashion against tactical targets; for example, using HIMARS against individual tanks or MLRS systems. Someone with a NATO weapons background might more successfully utilize combined arms attacks for punching through enemy positions. But that’s still probably going to require more western weapons (especially air assets, SAM systems and combat bulldozers) than Ukraine currently seems to have…
Tags: Foreign Policy, Military, Oleksandr Syrskyi, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, Ukraine, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Volodymyr Zelensky
This coupled with Putin’s failing health and cancer means Russia is finished for good I’m sure.
Abraham Lincoln sacked George McClellan for being too cautious in his approach to the civil conflict. Lincoln was impatient for victory and a subtle maneuver-style of warfare was unlikely to excite the public’s imagination or maintain war fervor.
So he found a butcher who would ruthlessly sacrifice his troops in pursuit of a quick win.
Zaluzhny has been parsimonious in surrendering his soldier’s lives. It is easier to fight a strategic retreat the way General Lee did than to assault the enemy’s main force.
Unfortunately, this looks like cowardice to the uninitiated. Americans are notoriously impatient when it comes to armed conflict. They want a quick and easy solution. Donald Trump has promised to end the war “in one day”. This boast makes the cessation of hostilities seem effortless and makes further sacrifice unpalatable.
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This puts Zelenskyy in a tough spot. He has to push his Generals to make territorial gains now, before getting called to the bargaining table.
I wish Zaluzhny well. Perhaps we will see him enter the political arena when the war ends. I hope his departure does not signal a renewed counteroffensive for which Ukraine is not yet fully prepared but politicians are occasionally called to make hasty plans before their time runs out.
Perhaps Zelenskyy can pull a rabbit out of his hat. We’re sure to find out soon.
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I ain’t sure that anything is as it seems in Ukraine.
I’m reasonably certain by way of inference that the Ukrainians are blackmailing the snot out of the various idjit-class looters in the US government who were taking advantage of the situation before the war, going back decades. I’m also reasonably sure, given the crap that’s come out, that the plan was for there to be a short, sharp shock like the takeover in Crimea that got derailed when the Ukrainians actually chose to fight, followed by what we’ve witnessed over the last two years.
So, at this point? All you can really conclude is that the Russian Federation has chosen to immolate itself in Ukraine, and that the Ukrainians are cooperating with that self-destructive desire. What comes out of this? No idea; it won’t be an intact Russian Federation bestriding the world. The demographics and economic realities will put an end to all that, along with the probable social effects.
The Russians are a delusional people. They believe, very strongly, in the idea that the “Little Father” at the top of the heap is looking out for them. It’s a “willing suspension of disbelief” that the system relies on; so long as the idiots running things keep in mind that they have to do at least enough to reinforce that belief system, irrational as it is, things will be fine. Do what Nicky the Second did during WWI? What the various apparatchiks who ran the Soviet Union into the ground did? The whole thing devolves. The Tsar would still be around, were it not for his essential and utter incompetence; so, too, would the Soviet Union. The thing that did both in? The exact same thing you can see in the eyes of all those Russian soldiers consigned to the furnace of the Ukrainian front: A loss of belief. Just like the same look in the women’s faces, as they realize their sons and husbands ain’t coming home, and are likely dead in some futile “meat assault” in Ukraine. They won’t even have bodies to bury and visit…
These are the social effects that will end the Russian Federation, just as the Brusilov Offensive did Nicky, and Afghanistan put paid to the Soviet bureaucrats. Russia exists in a fugue state of fantasy; if the leadership allows that fantasy to be punctured? They’re done for. Period.
Ukraine pilots started F-16 training last Oct, supposed to last 5-9 months, so possibly the end of this month. But more realistically, & depending on how many White House/Pentagon Politicos are involved, maybe Apr-Aug. Then real combined arms?
Air Superiority? Supremacy? (Imagine the statement that would make) It’s not obvious that Russian Air assets or defenses are any better than their troops.
TBH, the drone thing has me going “What the hell?”
I’m not certain that the ground truths of my youth are truths, any more. They’re still there, but I question the value of “combined arms” in the face of ubiquitous and pervasive drone attacks.
I’m reminded of the French columnar attacks going in against British lines; due to the steadfastly suicidal British infantry and artillery, those columns were usually shot up and militarily useless by the time they got into range. The same thing is happening to the Russian tank columns trying to advance; all that seems to be working for them is mass infantry assaults that nibble away at Ukrainian positions, and I am pretty sure that the cost in manpower/morale is far too high for those attacks to be even remotely worthwhile in either an operational or a strategic sense. How long has Russia been trying to take Avdiivka? How many Russian bodies litter the ground outside that insignificant city? What good does taking Avdiivka do them, in any operational or strategic rationale?
We’re entering into entirely new and unexplored territory, here. There are some points of congruence and connection with past experience, but… This isn’t the sort of war I spent 25 years training to fight and then fighting. The effect that drones are going to have basically means that the already insane dispersal of men and equipment is going to have to go even more dispersed, and the battle area is going to get even bigger. There’s absolutely zero safety anywhere near where a drone can fly; those FPV drones finding individual Russian soldiers and then killing them in their little hasty fighting positions miles in back of the front-line trace? Dear God, but the implications of that are terrifying to a light infantryman. And, tanker. And… Anyone else.
What’s worse? The guys and girls flying the drones are miles away, invisible, and likely sitting there with a cup of coffee and are basically playing a video game, killing you. What did was that quote by some ancient, upon being presented with a bow? Something about the “…valor of man is extinguished…”?
I dunno about “extinguished”, but it’s damn sure changed. And, changing even more, before our eyes.
“The Russians are a delusional people. They believe, very strongly, in the idea that the ‘Little Father’ at the top of the heap is looking out for them.”
The Little Father is not at the top of the heap, which presents a problem for Russians.
Yet you have hit on something essential to understanding the Russian intellect. The Little Father is SUBORDINATE to the (Big) Father, therefore subordinationism inevitably characterizes Russian society.
The people are eternally subordinate to the Tsar/Commissar. Russian Orthodoxy reinforces this understanding.
By contrast, Western Christianity holds that Jesus and God the Father are coequal, suggesting that the ruler/state is not superior to the citizenry. Therefore equality is viewed as being the divinely ordered state of affairs. “We hold these Truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator…” & etc.
Absent a doctrinal departure from Russian Orthodoxy, the state will remain perpetually ascendent over the people. Russia is doomed to suffer authoritarian control.
Malthus, given the historical fact that the Russians were doing the same thing under the atheistic regime of Lenin and Stalin… I’m not all that sure that religion plays as much a role as you seem to think. In my observation, it’s more a cultural/genetic proclivity towards fantasy and wishful thinking. It’s why they fall prey to all these crazed conspiracy theories, and it also ties in with the sort of crazy that motivated the old-school anarchists who killed off Alexander II, the only semi-successful reformist among the latter-day Tsars…
The Russians are prone to this dream-like way of dealing with the world, much like the modern left. Which isn’t surprising; they created it, after all. Reality doesn’t intrude into their thought processes, which is why Putin is up there talking about Russian history (their version of it…) for two hours with Tucker Carlson. It is fantasy piled upon fantasy, all the way down.
Going forward, drone and anti-technology is going t0o be a part of combined arms warfare. jammers, electronic countermeasures, radio frequency guided missiles to hit controllers, etc.
Also, drones have not yet been developed to take out quality airpower like F-16s, F-22s, F-35s, etc. That might come in time, but it will be difficult and expensive to develop.
It’s tempting to declare that drones will change everything, but the examples of Wild Billy Mitchell and Alfred Thayer Mahan teach us that armies adapt to just about any technological innovation, adding rather than replacing.
The wheel turns, and the cycle begins anew…
“It’s tempting to declare that drones will change everything, but the examples of Wild Billy Mitchell and Alfred Thayer Mahan teach us that armies adapt to just about any technological innovation, adding rather than replacing.”
Beware of templating past experiences onto new ones just because that worked, before.
I’ve been on that bit of ground, there where the direct combat action takes place. I do not know what the hell you do when the enemy has the capability of knowing and targeting everything you’re doing up to 5-10km back from the line of contact. Those damn drones have thermal sensors, full-color cameras, and ranges that mean they can stay up and about all you can do is pray they haven’t spotted you. The FPV aspect is even more of a problem; the decentralized firepower those damn things represent is even more of a threat than the recon, TBH.
And, countermeasures? When the ‘effing things go autonomous? What then, little man? Imagine being the guy humping the ELINT system around, and the enemy has built HARM capabilities into the drones… So, when you start up the jammer, they home in on you, personally, and take your ass out.
Which is gonna happen.
Eventually, you reach a point where you no longer have the ability to simply ratchet things onto the next belt-notch; this may be it. The Russians had excellent ELINT, world-class supposedly, before this war started. It’s done nothing for them. The place to watch for how this will work out over the long haul is likely southern Lebanon; if Hezbollah can counter the Israelis? Well, that’ll be an interesting lesson. Gaza could be isolated; Lebanon, not so much.
I think this isn’t so much a paradigm shift so much as it’s a full-scale frame switch. Going forward, everything will be different, with only some few things remaining the same. Going from rifled muzzle-loaders firing volleys to magazine-fed breechloaders? That was a paradigm shift. The transition between those massed infantry firing volleys at each other being replaced by the machinegun? That was a frame shift, and I’d argue that we still haven’t fully grasped all the ramifications and intricacies thereof. You’ve now got effective strategic-level intel about the immediate close-in battle area down to the squad, probably in more depth and detail than Kennedy had during the Cuban Missile Crisis for Cuba. How’s that going to affect everything…? One thing is for sure, I don’t put my money on the US military we have today adapting to it at all effectively. Too many stovepipes; too little imagination.
Laser cannons. Lots of laser cannons. And a few “microwave guns”.
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46925
Also, lots of DAS-style sensor-fusion passive sensors with really, really good automatic target recognition for UAVs, because there’s no way anyone’s hitting a drone with a laser cannon aimed by hand. And some form of IFF for friendly drones that isn’t easy to spoof, hack, or copy–probably tied into the whether they’re logged into the encrypted mesh network systems that the Army has been working on for years and years now.
Eventually, every major vehicle (as in, more than a JLTV) will need some form of drone detection and at least a low-powered (~50KW) laser cannon for self-defense. One side effect of this capability would be significant protection against incoming RAM and probably even most ATGMs.
All of which are going to give off significant signature and be easily targeted. You’ve got anti-drone lasers? Fine; Imma gonna build anti- anti-drone heliostat mounted lasers and other weapons that will target and kill the systems you have so nicely highlighted for me…
At some point, the added layers of complexity will totally negate the “technique of war” as we understand it. It will be just like taking a Napoleonic infantry brigade up against its firepower equivalent of today, which would probably be a second-rate support arms platoon. The mere possession of a couple of decent machineguns/crews means that that Napoleonic brigade is totally irrelevant to anyone other than the graves registration people…
That’s the sort of difference we’re talking here. Muzzle-loading muskets going up against the machine gun and barbed wire.
From what I’ve been able to make out, some of those Russian tank company-sized tank columns were taken out by five or six drone operators, max. Think about that, for a second: Call a modern Russian combined arms company about a hundred million dollars in value, in terms of ammunition, manpower/training, and vehicles: Effectively erased by five or ten guys with drones, many of which were donated or crowd-sourced.
Maybe, to be generous, a half-million dollars worth of drones and training? For what losses? Those drone operators were sitting in bunkers and effectively untouchable to the Russians.
This is an exchange ratio on the order of a WWI-era cavalry battalion attacking a dug-in company of infantry with machineguns. That’s how big a change this is…
“[G]iven the historical fact that the Russians were doing the same thing under the atheistic regime of Lenin and Stalin… I’m not all that sure that religion plays as much a role…”
Please explain how, where with few exceptions, wherever Eastern/Russian Orthodoxy took root the cultural outcome was political repression:Russia, Serbia, Ukraine, et.al.
The USSR held brief sway in the Orthodox timeline. Russia was “Christianized” in 1000 AD. The commie czars (sic) interrupted the primacy of Russian Orthodoxy from 1917 to 1991. Even then, their control over the Church was never total. In absolute terms, the atheistic ethic had very little effect on the Russian conscience.
Given that equality in the Godhead, as preached by Western churches is almost everywhere reflected by egalitarian political and social mores, how else do you account for the evident social difference between the two branches of Christianity?
“Fine; Imma gonna build anti- anti-drone heliostat mounted lasers and other weapons that will target and kill the systems you have so nicely highlighted for me…”
“Cheap and abundant” is what gives the drone its advantage. The more gadgets you affix to it, the greater the cost.
An explosive force equal to that of a cherry bomb ought to be sufficient to render most FOV drones inoperable. So countering them would not be too challenging from an engineering standpoint. The problem, of course, is the delivery system.
The Lebanon-Israeli test bed you reference has demonstrated the IDF’s ability to intercept multiple rocket launches with near 100% accuracy. An Iron Dome of MANPAD dimensions, designed to meet a scaled down target, would seem to be within the capabilities of IDF engineers.
Interesting idea, there, in reference to Orthodox Christianity. Problem with it would be that this “tendency towards authoritarianism” only seems to manifest in conjunction with Slavic cultures. And, actually, only some Slavic cultures…
Having actually known and lived around some Eastern Orthodox sorts, I would discount the idea that the religion is the proximate causal factor, here: Religion is usually downstream of the underlying culture, not the other way around. Although, they do tend to feed into each other.
The thing you use as evidence, namely that the Serbs are a lot like the Russians? Not so much; the other ethnicities in the Balkans are just as prone to authoritarianism as the Serbs are, which isn’t exactly a surprise, being as they’re the same ethnic rootstock. You have to get out of the mostly-Slav regions to start finding things like Slovenia, where the Germanic influence is much more to the front.
Regardless of how you want to argue the thing, the real deal is that the Russians have gone to authoritarianism as their go-to political solution every damn time. Even Kerensky was doing the “strong man” thing, he just wasn’t doing it at all well.
The reasons for this are highly arguable; you really just need to know that it’s “a thing”, and to behave accordingly when dealing with Russia and Russians. We stereotype for reasons, and that’s because stereotyping tends to work out, in the real world.
“All of which are going to give off significant signature and be easily targeted.”
Yes, if they’re emitting. That’s why I called for distributed passive sensors (like DAS), which requires an absurd amount of processing compared to active sensors in order to pick out targets without ruinous amounts of false alarms. However, based on what we’ve seen with the F-35, and as demonstrated with modern AR headsets (or VR with passthrough), that level of processing is feasible–it’s largely a matter of spending millions of man-hours writing and testing the software. LADAR and LPI radar are also possible solutions, as there are ways to reduce the ability of the enemy to detect your emissions, and the US has a head start in that area. Not emitting will always be harder to detect than emitting, however.
“Fine; Imma gonna build anti- anti-drone heliostat mounted lasers and other weapons that will target and kill the systems you have so nicely highlighted for me…”
Great! Those will be easier to detect first and shoot first because they’ll stand out nicely against the open sky. They also require you to spend an awful lot of money copying the twenty years of work the US has put into scaling energy weapons up to useful levels.
I don’t mean DEWs to sound like a panacea; they aren’t. There will have to be a lot of changes in how forces operate. Logistics–our greatest advantage for the last 80 years–will be harder to do safely at the scales that we’re used to. We may eventually have to go back to something more like FCS in order to reduce the size (and hence vulnerability) of our tail. Until the OPFOR comes up with their own DEWs and sensors capable of stopping RAM, we’ll probably have to rely a lot more heavily on long-range fires. And, of course, we need a *lot* more flexibility in developing and procuring drone swarms of our own; dealing with the bureaucracy and vendors will probably be more difficult than combat. But, there *are* options available to us to muddle through the next couple decades (after that, I make no promises, because between demographics and technology, things are liable to get *weird*).
I think the biggest takeaway from Ukraine is this: The way we’re doing “Big War” today is effectively DOA. Until and unless you can strip those drones away, the fact is that the “armored column advancing” thing is over with. Given what happened to the Russians advancing to Kyiv at the beginning of the war, and what’s been going on around Bakhmut and Avdiivka on a smaller scale, I’m reasonably sure that I’m safe in saying that the only thing that’s really working for them is the “meat assault” by light infantry formations. Which is a.) not the classic mechanized warfare scenario, and b.) horrendously wasteful of human life on the attacking side. Anyone other than Russians would have given this up as a bad job, and I’m rather surprised that they’re still feeding manpower into the shredder the way they are. There will inevitably be a price that they’ll have to pay, but when they pay it? That’s the question; Brusilov’s offensive has apparently been forgotten by modern Russian leaders, along with the aftermath.
The heliostat thing is something I just came up with as a potential counter; you’d have to have either local technological superiority or a means of defending, but the key thing you have to have in order to interdict the little FPV drones is altitude and something that can reach out and touch them. A heliostat with laser, fed power from the ground meets that requirement.
One thing I wonder about is just what happens should someone set off an EMP above the battlefield in Ukraine; such a thing might enable doing a traditional assault with tank columns, should they want to chance it. I wonder whether or not the Ukrainians are contemplating that sort of escalation by the Russians, and what countermeasures they might have taken… God knows, that’d be a real thing to worry about in a major peer-level attack. I rather suspect that such a thing will be the opening gambit when the Chinese go to take out Taiwan. After all, they regard the island as their territory, so they could well just say “Hey, we’re conducting a test over our territory… Get stuffed…” when anyone went to protest it.
Of course, I’m not entirely sanguine about the utility of an EMP strike in the first damn place; lots of military hardware is supposedly built to take it, but… How much do you trust the maintenance and all that, for preserving the ability to shrug those things off? Gear might have met standards when it left the factory, but after twenty years of maintenance, modifications, and no testing? Ya kinda wonder how many pieces of equipment would fail the real-world effects. As well as, how well would an EMP weapon really work? Nobody has ever done such a thing in the real world, and I’d wager that there are a thousand-and-one pitfalls we don’t know about.
“The way we’re doing “Big War” today is effectively DOA.”
I can’t really disagree with that. I will point out, however, that ISIS, the Taliban, Hamas, and Hezbollah have all had pretty poor luck using civilian drones against Western jammers, including the ubiquitous ones intended for blocking cell-phone-triggered IEDs. That suggests that the requirements for playing against us might be a little higher than anticipated. A nation with enough money and access to the proper resources (especially programmable chips and programmers) could get around that hurdle, however. I’m particularly concerned about the idea of simple autonomous drones that fly to a target area and then act like SADARM or BONUS. We won’t be able to operate against that kind of a threat without unacceptable casualties until we have widespread active protection.
One near-term counter would be to rely much more heavily on interdiction/strike and long-range fires to hinder the enemy’s ability to move drone teams around operationally or resupply them. That’s what we’d probably do against Russia if nukes were to magically disappear. That doesn’t help much if you need to take a city from a well-supplied enemy, however, and I don’t see how we can possibly garrison or occupy an area against an enemy with access to autonomous or otherwise unjammable drones. The US public isn’t willing to absorb losses like that with little hope of being able to put an end to them. That’s why I think that anti-drone systems–each with their own sensors, fire control, IFF, and “ordnance”–will have to become ubiquitous on most combat vehicles, and not just something that’s mounted on a bespoke vehicle issued at a platoon per brigade or something. Sure, we can *start* there, in order to prove that the technology works, but drone blasters have to be practically everywhere or the enemy will probe, locate, and utilize blind spots in the coverage.
As for EMP, I have no idea how effective things like CHAMP or HiJENKS are against drones, or whether anybody other than us has an effective non-nuclear EMP capability in the first place. I’ve seen DARPA’s footage of a microwave weapon disabling DJI Phantoms (both individually and en masse), but did they just jam the datalink, or force a reboot, or hard-kill the chips inside?
Just wanted to add–here’s the really scary part. What if somebody pulled off a mass attack in CONUS using drones? How many Hardened Aircraft Shelters exist in CONUS? Heck, how many *hangars*? Pull up an airbase on Google Earth: most of them have little or no way to physically protect their fighters or even bombers from a drone swarm, with aircraft largely stored out on the tarmac. What would still be mission-capable after such an attack? A casual glance at all four bomber bases suggests that only Whiteman can protect more than 6-8 bombers from a drone attack (thanks to the need for climate-controlled storage for the B-2’s RAM coatings).
Now repeat against ships in harbor. And against tank, vehicle, and helo parks in posts. Power plants and major substations. Refineries. Crane cockpits in major ports. Pentagon/DC parking lots and entrances (in order to sow confusion and delay any organized response). The sky’s the limit: it’s just a question of how many drones and warheads you can build/smuggle and whether you can develop software sufficient to allow them to fly a pre-set flight path without needing a control signal or GPS and then lock onto a pre-set target autonomously. And by keeping a few hundred (or even a few thousand) in reserve, follow-on attacks can be spread out across the next several weeks, allowing fear and panic to do the rest.
That’s the sort of thing that keeps me up at night.
I’ve said for years that they were idiots to put all the drone pilots at Nellis AFB. If you think that the enemy hasn’t tracked every one of those guys down, found out where they live out in the city…? Yeah; I don’t think it’s outside the realm of the possible that you could see most of our Predator pilots slaughtered in their beds along with their families.
It’s even more likely now that the Biden Krime Krewe opened up the borders. I strongly suspect that we’re going to see a coup-de-main attack on stateside military assets as the opening attack for anything really serious, like China going after Taiwan. I don’t even rule out that they’d go after strategic weapons like the missile fields out in the Midwest; too many convenient land purchases.
The Bidens have sold us down the river; there’s no telling what is coming. The crap they pulled with that surveillance balloon? WTF? If that’s not evidence of nefarious intent enabled by our own leadership, I don’t know what is.
I suspect that if we knew everything that is going on in DC, we’d probably put the lot of them on trial for treason, followed by summary execution.
The thing that still gets me going, looking back at it? Why did they never go after the Taliban in Pakistan? Why did they allow them refuge there, and for the Pakistanis to support them? What’s the first lesson of counter-insurgency that they teach? Isolate the battlefield; deny the insurgents safe harbors and support. Did we do that in Afghanistan, over 20 years? Nope. So… Why not? Why didn’t we have our military leadership going to Congress and testifying about that “minor oversight”? Did you see any flag-ranks fall on their swords, knowing that they’d betrayed the trust put in them by the American people and their own men? Nope; not a bit of it. And, yet… It happened.
All of them need to be dealt with, and I suspect that such a thing will never happen. Unless there’s a Pearl Harbor-level sort of thing, a Mumbai or October 7th attack here on US soil, one that can be obviously traced back to the Biden/Obama malfeasance and malignancy. Not to mention Clinton and the Bush mobs…
I doubt we have a competent and uncompromised officer above the rank of Major in the military, these days… Plan accordingly. I’d lay you long odds that every single citizen-soldier potential Cincinnatus has been purged by this point.