WINNING AT A PRICE

My last post was a longer ago than I would like it to have been, and they will still be sparse through November, as it will be after the middle of the month before we move in and likely mid-December before my library/office is kitted out as its all bespoke. I apologise but that’s the way property buying and selling is in this country, average time frame 20 weeks!

When I look back over the past few months we have seen the most extraordinary changes in drone use, missile development and strategic war fighting between Russia and Ukraine. We have seen the most extraordinary failure of the United States which made a spectacle of itself in its war with Iran – a war that it now turns out the Pentagon’s internal strategising warned was doomed to fail without an exit plan, but which the regime sided with anyway. It seems to have resulted in whole sections of the highest level command chain being ignored and bypassed, but everyone is keeping quiet – Hegsethian toxicity knows no bounds as many have found. Its a question of keeping quiet and waiting the regime out because it will be gone in a little over two years.

In my article “Ukraine: Winning and loosing all at once“, I referred extensively to the fundamental principles of war as outlined by Sun Tzu. The following matters more now because Ukraine has used these very basic principles to effect a defeat on Russia over several months.

Operation Vivaldi was already underway when I wrote that article. The level of operational security was beyond exceptional. Nobody talked about it and in many ways even though we know what has happened and some of the results have been explained oficially, its a constantly evolving scenario, and similar operations are now being revealed to have occured – not by the Ukrainians who remain tight lipped about the subject, but by the horrified Russian milbloggers, who are witnessing the defeat of their army and admitting that the losses of ground and men and equipment are down to paralysis, lies and being totally outclassed by what is now, the number one technologically advanced army in the world, that of Ukraine.

New strategy, new tactics, new technologies and new thinking that’s been in the works for a year has begun to deliver results.

As Russia maintains this extraordinary capacity to advance its long range strategic drone and missile warfare in an almost ridiculously close parallel to that of the Third Reich in 1944, on the front lines almost nothing has changed, it may even have gotten worse. Their response is not to produce or innovate but drag yet more men to their deaths in the hope that enough corpses pilled up will create some kind of victory. It was their answer in both world wars and it remains their answer now. They seem to believe that sending thousands of barely armed men without even a basic uniform – the state has actually cut back what it provides due to costs – and pour them into the field with three days basic training if they’re lucky, will overwhelm Ukrainian forces.

Instead what Ukraine finds is hundreds of men, some of the largest surrendered groups of the war and often including officers, who are so broken, so desperate for water they have been drinking their own urine. These men are mentally shattered, starving, emaciated and abandoned. Ukraine’s denial of logistics and supplies to the Russians on the front has left them stranded by their commanders, many of whom the prisoners say, just ran off.

So what has Ukraine been doing that has regained so much territory that Russia wasted so many lives to obtain?

One of the first requirements was to restore mobility to the front lines and let the tanks free again. But to do that the enemy drones have to be completely removed from the equation – a tall order at best. Then their capacity to use artillery needed to be curtailed. Their supplies had to be cut, right the way back to their primary bases. Nothing must get through. Then you have to recall that the war by late spring had become one of Zones of Control rather than the early WW1 type of trench warfare that required masses of men Ukraine did not have and masses of artillery, again they did not have. But Russia did.

Since late 2023 Ukraine embarked on a remarkably consistent and effective campaign to destroy Russian artillery. Numbers of 10:1 in Russia’s favour have been reduced to 1.8:1 and most of what they’re using is equipment that’s old style towed artillery dragged out of storage or sourced from North Korea. Ukrainian drones have become so sophisticated they’re able to hit the barrels of these guns right near the breach and damage it – they don’t need to destroy it – because such an attack damages the barrel sufficiently to prevent the shell from firing. Another type of drone actually drops a shaped charge down the barrel from the muzzle end!

The loss of Starlink for Russia at the start of the year has been devastating – their parsimonius effort to build their own system has been an abject failure with the first 200 satellites basically failing to reach their designated orbit. They are burning up in the atmosphere almost daily. That led them to rush a program of battlefield radios and terrestrial transceivers into the field, but that too has proven to be a qualititive and numeric failure. Ukrainian drones have made locating the aerials and relays a priority and communications remain deeply problematic when Ukraine wants them to be.

The Ukrainians used every one of Sun Tzu’s rules. They picked the fight, they were given free rein by the President to do what they thought was best. They picked their time and place and they knew what to do. It required an extraordinary amount of battlefield shaping over a period of weeks. The logistics denial took time, it was atritional but it had to reach a point where it almost became impossible for Russia to supply its forces. The artillery had to be removed and made almost useless. Drone operators had to be found, and when appropriate their bases rapidly destroyed all at once so that no other team could take up the slack from another. Add exceptionally heavy EW to that so that what drones they were operating barely worked or failed, comms were impossible, and the initial ground work was laid. The battlefield was ready.

The next awesome phase was to use the heavy ‘bomber’ octocopters to ferry in tracked ground robots with heavy machine guns and grenade lauchers, these were used to attack small-medium strong points and exterminate Russians holding them. This actually resulted in the first ever recorded surrender of soldiers to a ground robot.

Gathering more robots together these would begin assaulting the stronger defence point perimeters. At this stage, with Russian artillery and drones silenced, it was clear to bring in tanks – maybe a handful, three, maybe five. These would then blast away at the strong points. Remember at this stage tanks are few and rarely seen so the Russians aren’t equipped with anti tank weapons. Job done the tanks would withdraw. Time to move to the next target.

By saying nothing and keeping operations under wraps week in week out, the Russians had nothing to counter claim and were busy making fools of themselves saying they had captured this town or that village – at one time in early September Putin personally mad a claim, only to have a Ukrainian general walk over a bridge without a helmet and body armour in said town – making it obvious there wasn’t a Russian anywhere near, and that Ukraine controlled the town. This was shown to Putin who allegedly had a fit about it and wanted to know who was lying – the problem he hasn’t yet had dawn on him, is that its pretty much everyone.

When the milbloggers finally broke the story that Lyman was lost and the Ukrainians had actually appeared back over the Sherevovets river, the Russians tried not to look stunned.

This week another operation using similar tactics appears to have shoved Russian forces back from Slovyansk and Kramatorsk – a result that horrified the bloggers because it took so long to take the ground and cost so much in manpower. Its put pay to Putin’s dream of securing the fortress belt any time in the next twelve months if it was ever possible in the first place, which I doubt.

Putin’s mobilisation by stealth has to continue, and the Ukrainians are well aware fresh recruits are arriving daily. But the losses are so dramatic and their effectiveness increasingly minimal because the Russian state makes no effort to make them useful. Ukraine spends a lot of time attacking their assembly areas and their logistics paths. The appearance of the FP-7 tactical ballistic missile is going to be important here, as is the shorter ranged variant of the FP-1 and 2 they use for tactical operations. Keeping logistics suppressed is essential.

Overall Ukraine has mastered a new tactical format – and we know the Russians were planning to use a similar system, largely because its the logical thing to do. The difference is this needs unity of purpose, belief in the mission and men who know why and what they’re doing. Russia absolutley does not have those characteristics in its arsenal. Its a sclerotic top down system with unmotivated poorly trained men who don’t want to be there. They would never make it work without a mindset shift a dictatorship just cannot countenance.

Ukraine has not had it all their own way. Russia’s anti-infrastructure and anti-civillian campaign is both ugly and typical of their barbarity. Its painful to see, to witness and to deal with. Despite it, it is of little consequence in the larger strategic picture because there is no scenario where it helps Russia win the war. If anything its huge cost, the price of production, money and resources it consumes is way more than it returns. It will not change the war, just make it hurt and uncomfortable for those affected. Ukraine’s attacks however can – and they are in combination with defeats on the battlefield, grinding down the Russian economy and its dilapidated war machine. Even the Russian milbloggers accept that the war cannot go on to the end of 2027 without destroying and collapsing the economy. Putin thinks otherwise, but I supect the truth has never been told to him, and it never will be, if that is, he could even recognise it anymore.

The Analyst

militaryanalyst@bsky.social