Closing Out The Third June Of Total War In Ukraine
To break the deadlock on a hyper-surveilled front line will demand highly skilled and properly equipped ground forces. Organization matters too: how the components of the machine fit together.
The fact that the front remains largely deadlocked after almost two months of ruscist efforts to push west counts as an important win for Ukraine. Putin’s best chance to make real gains on the ground has passed, and the thrust of his recent diplomatic outreach makes it clear that he’s desperately working to maintain his standard swaggering facade.
The initiative at any level, from the tactical to the strategic, has slipped from his grasp. Putin is no longer the master of his own fate in any respect. He can either escalate in hopes of shocking NATO into submission or insist that victory is inevitable and carry on until one or more fronts in Ukraine collapses, this year or next.
Bluffing that he might just choose the former option is necessary to maintain the reflexive control that Putin has over Biden, Scholz, and the other oligarch-loving bureaucrats who think they run the mythic western world. For those who haven’t run across the concept of reflexive control, it’s a Soviet idea drawn from the USSR’s own strain of systems theory that boils down to being able to control your adversary’s perception of the possible. You encourage them to latch on to their worst fears about your capabilities and self-deter.
A bit more on that and other strategic level matters in the final section. The first will cover what’s been happening on the fronts, while the second dives into how Ukraine’s top performing brigades can be naturally expanded to sustain offensive operations starting this fall.
Overview Of The Fronts
Moscow’s forces appear to be experimenting with striking quieter sections of the front again. They do this periodically, just like local commanders shift their tactics between assault waves, sometimes sending groups of armored vehicles, other times small teams on motorcycles, and every now and again taking a shot at infiltration. The goal is to keep Ukraine off balanced while also reporting to their superiors that they’re moving forward.
In the Borova sector, between the Lyman and Kupiansk fronts on the northern wing of Ukraine’s defense, Third Assault Brigade reports fending off fierce attacks. Supposedly a division or more of orcs has gathered here for a push to the Oskil river. However there have been no observed shifts in the lines nor much footage released yet.
Third Assault has an excellent public outreach department which posts incredible videos, setting a standard that only a select few brigades like 47th Mechanized have so far been able to match. It also has earned a reputation as a kind of fire brigade, able to move to the toughest portion of any front and go toe to toe with the orcs. The broader media has developed an understandable tendency to use the deployment of any portion of Third Assault as a sign of novel developments.
But I suspect that the brigade was moved to this sector so that fewer troops need to hold the front - that’s as much of a rest cycle as these brigades get. Moscow meanwhile is seeking weaknesses in the Ukrainian fronts, hoping that enough force was pulled to northern Kharkiv to leave other sectors vulnerable.
We’ll see where this goes, but with the orcs having so much trouble advancing anywhere the Borova sector appears unlikely to serve them well. Moscow did blow up a bridge over the Oskil river near Borova, complicating logistics somewhat, but Ukraine can supply Third Assault and associated forces from Kupiansk to the north and Lyman to the south.
South of Borova, another fiercely fought battle in a less-reported sector has been shifting in Ukraine’s favor of late. Apparently, months of fighting by First Storm, 63rd Mechanized, and 12th Azov National Guard Brigades along with affiliated units in the dense forest plantations north of the Siverski Donets river have helped check the long ruscist push toward Terny that has left a bulge in the lines here. Ukraine is even retaking portions of the forest in what I see as a miniature preview of the tactics Ukraine will need to employ this fall when it begins attacking at scale again.
An interesting source that I always enjoy reading is Frontline Report by Reporting From Ukraine at Euromaidan Press. Along with Don’s Weekly at Sarcastasaurus, it’s difficult to find more thorough analysis of certain tactical level events. Part of the reason that I try to emphasize operational-strategic matters is that they and others have the tactical-operational side well covered.
The Frontline Report I linked to offers an excellent summary of what Ukrainian forces have been up to in the Serebryansky forest. It also shows why tanks remain essential on the battlefield, even if they are vulnerable to drones and other weapons.
Farther south, on the Vuhledar front, Moscow has actually managed to advance by up to 2km over the past few days. 79th Air Assault, and 72nd Mechanized along with the Bradley-equipped Skala battalion and some Territorial Guard units are doing an amazing job in this area. But the 79th and 72nd have been on duty here for many months and they’re effectively the farthest from Kyiv in a logistical sense, so Moscow probably wants to keep the pressure up to see if they are worn out.
The same is true on most fronts, of course. The Marine Corps foothold across the Dnipro around Krynky comes in for two or three dozen failed attacks every week. Moscow has placed most of the Robotyne-Verbove bulge formed a year ago in the grey zone and is continuing to apply pressure further east in the Mokri Yali river valley. Though badly affected by Himars strikes, in Kharkiv the orcs are clinging to their positions and apparently still hope to break through Vovchansk. Small wonder they’re still losing 8,000 people a week.
There was some brief excitement last week about an orc position that remains largely isolated on the north bank of the Vovcha, rumors spreading about hundreds of isolated ruscist troops. But as is usually the case with initial reports, hundreds turned out to be dozens and they’re not entirely cut off. Still, Ukrainian troops operate behind them, so their situation can’t be pleasant. Unfortunately, Vovchansk is slowly disappearing from the map just like all the other towns that wind up on the front lines. At least it is serving as a trap for orcs who would otherwise ravage some other town in Ukraine.
Overall the most intense area this past week has been the Pokrovsk Front - again. Here Moscow continues its campaign to push Ukraine west of this Vovcha River and probed north towards Kostiantynivka (this one, not the one on the Vuhledar Front). I continue to see Moscow’s goal here as securing the left flank of a push to cut off Toretsk. The orcs are moving on Vozdvyzhenka as anticipated, 110th Mechanized Brigade and possibly the 100th too standing in their path. To their south Ukrainian forces still hold portions of the high ground west of the Vovcha and though slowly pulling back aren’t doing so with any obvious haste.
As the fight for Chasiv Yar grinds on with Moscow still unable to break Ukraine’s main defenses, it appears that what started out as an attempt to get into Kostiantynivka itself is already degrading into a simple effort to repeat in Toresk what worked in Avdiivka. Moscow’s efforts in Chasiv Yar seem to be shifting south in what might soon evolve into an attempt to push Ukraine’s 28th, 22nd, and 93rd Mech along with 5th Assault off the ridge between Chasiv Yar and Toretsk.
This would track with the unexpected frontal assaults made over the past few days on Toretsk itself. Moscow has managed to quickly push into the former gray zone and threaten frontline Ukrainian positions. This is very similar to what they tried in Avdiivka - even while grinding around the flanks at extreme cost the orcs also launched frontal assaults.
But Toresk isn’t as vulnerable as Avdiivka was. There Moscow had the advantage of the large occupied urban center of Donetsk being just a short drive away. Occupied Horlivka is much smaller. But this is also the last portion of the pre-2022 Line of Contact still in Ukrainian hands, which probably makes it a psychological objective for Putin.
In effect, the ruscist Spring-Summer 2024 Campaign is a giant spoiling attack. The strategic objective is simply to preserve the illusion that the ruscist empire is strong and victory inevitable. Dissent within the ranks of Moscow’s foes is still expected to create a window that forces a ceasefire before Ukraine’s power grows too potent to roll back. It’s pure delay and pray, ironically fed by the ongoing Trump obsession in the USA. Putin’s intelligence sources are likely telling him the same thing partisan media is insisting over here: that the election will change everything. It’s a convenient narrative, but also one that glosses over important facts.
As a trained lawyer and amateur historian, Putin is prone to this sort of mistake. Neither field promotes entirely empirical habits of thought, practitioners in both are keenly aware that truth in human matters is constructed, defined by perspective. That’s why Putin invests so much in certain narratives. If you’re convinced that russia is big and strong and willing to nuke the world to get what it wants, sacrificing Ukraine almost looks like a responsible move. If instead you accept the empirical evidence that suggests Putin will get exactly one act of nuclear terror that’s probably almost entirely spectacle before his regime crumbles, his inane blather about nukes and consequences is pure theater.
That Putin is trying to make hay out of the children tragically killed in Crimea by ruscist air defense during an ATACMS strike on a nearby airfield serves as a case in point. Crimea is a fortress, but also a resort. If Ukraine was the Soviet Union’s California, Crimea remains Moscow’s version of San Diego. About 20% of the U.S. Navy is stationed there and a third of the Marine Corps is up north at Camp Pendleton. Southern California alone has enough combat power to beat Putin’s whole empire.
Unfortunately for civilians who want to hang out on beaches by military bases, falling wreckage from air defense or even missiles knocked off course by a successful intercept (though this appears to be extremely frequent with ATACMS) is lethal. Those who value the lives of their family members need to stay away.
I say this as someone who has extended family living in Rostov-on-Don as of last June. Four sweet little nieces got dragged there by parents who decided to join the russian world cult because modern America is too immoral. Now every time that Ukraine hits a base in the area with drones or missiles, I get to wonder if an S-400 interceptor will fall short and take out their house. Just have to hope that their parents aren’t stupid enough to try a beach trip to Crimea.
I fully expect that my brother-in-law will eventually get murdered by someone he annoys because the guy has a massive ego with absolutely nothing to back it up. Otherwise he’d have made it in the USA. Putting your kids into a situation like that is simply criminal, so whatever happens to him - meh. His family doesn’t deserve to go down with him though. Yet I can’t expect Ukraine to refrain from smashing the Rostov area as it did a couple times with drones this past week, setting another fuel depot and a warehouse ablaze. The area is too important to Moscow’s war on Ukraine.
The end of this war cannot come soon enough for so many reasons. But while peace negotiations sound wonderful, right now they’re a trap. Putin is trying to blame America for civilian deaths in occupied Crimea because, allegedly, Ukrainians aren’t sophisticated enough to use ATACMS on their own. This in and of itself is a reminder that none of his talk about peace is serious: he still doesn’t accept that Ukraine has a right to exist. You don’t negotiate in good faith with an entity like that because it has no standing.
Something that the conventional wisdom across the west has failed to comprehend from the very beginning is that for Putin this war is a direct confrontation with NATO. The subjugation of Ukraine is only the first essential step in dividing and destroying the alliance. There is no way to avoid escalation now: Putin refrains from attacking a NATO member solely because of the devastating impact this would have on his relationship with Beijing. He doesn’t believe that the USA will intervene or that NATO unity will hold, but he is afraid of getting dragged into a conflict and having China stab him in the back.
This means that future deterrence depends on Putin being physically forced out of Ukraine. If this does not happen, sooner or later he will gamble on all-out war with NATO. He will also do everything he can to push China to move on Taiwan.
Operational Matters - Organizing Storm Brigades
The collapse of the Postwar Order cannot be reversed, only steered. A future is possible where the world’s real democracies actually stand up and behave in accordance with their high-minded rhetoric about the existence of a rules-based order.
In the end, communities only persist if enough members rise up and take a stand on a matter of vital principle under threat. This collective action is ultimately what defines the community. It can happen in an election or war, but one way or another ideas are made real at such moments of operational closure.
When war is inevitable, the number of people who die is usually a function of how long it lasts. The quicker ended the better, provided that the peace after isn’t so horrible for so many people that the war starts right back up again - this is what Israel’s war in Gaza and the West Bank has ensured. And end means end, not a thin ceasefire everyone pretends might last long enough to become permanent.
Look around the world, from Armenia and Azerbaijan to Moscow and its former subjects and the Israel-Palestine nightmare. All the old fissures are coming alive. The world is boiling for deep, structural, mostly economic reasons. But out of control ideologies don’t help.
Ending the Ukraine War quickly has the potential to spark a new international order that resembles what was good about the last one yet works better than anything dominated by the blindness of America and its manufactured society. Accomplishing the task depends on assembling and organizing combat power in a new way.
While observing the conflict, I have constantly been trying to develop a sense of how military units can be more effectively organized to operate under contemporary battlefield conditions.
Minimizing unnecessary conflict and smoothing inevitable transitions is a broader purpose of policy. Resources lost to friction are gone forever, leaving the future that much poorer. While some conflict is healthy, eventually it serves all the purpose that it can. An important function of doctrine - general rules about how members of an organization are expected to behave - is to avoid re-fighting resolved conflicts.
The physical organization of a group, especially one focused on military affairs, is a natural expression of its doctrine. How groups of soldiers are expected to fight and the area they’ll responsible for covering are questions that receive physical answers in the equipment they’re given and in what amounts. These have to naturally plug together across an organization while staying flexible enough to adapt in a fight.
With drones and networks playing such a powerful role, it stands to reason that doctrine needs to evolve globally, but especially for military units tasked with mounting aggressive operations. It is becoming apparent that Ukraine will have to develop a dedicated core of top notch fighting formations, consisting of perhaps a third of its total personnel, that are capable of tackling the immense challenge of seizing well defended enemy positions to a physical depth that enemy defense lines cannot be swiftly restored.
Various statements made by Ukraine’s leaders seem to imply that Ukraine will be training between twenty and thirty thousand soldiers every month for the rest of this year. While a couple hundred thousand soldiers who haven’t served on the front line since 2022 take over for personnel exhausted by being there for up to two years, those they relieve will help train up fresh cohorts.
A key advantage of training newly mobilized soldiers as a cohort that joins the same combat unit is that they can be paired early on with the sergeants who will be leading them in battle. There are relatively few members of the population who can manage a group of comrades while getting shot at. Fortunately the necessary skills can be learned, and years of war will have imparted them on many survivors.
Many factors determine why some brigades, battalions, and companies perform better than others, but the quality of leadership is more decisive than most. Generally speaking, Ukraine’s leadership knows which brigades make a habit of punching above their weight. These probably number only a dozen to twenty out of perhaps 60-80 routinely deployed, but that’s to be expected: in any normal statistical distribution only 10-20% of cases will be consistently far above or below the mean.
Over the past couple years it is clear that some Ukrainian brigades are having a lot less trouble finding recruits, even for front line work. Third Assault, despite being prevented from receiving modern weapons until recently because of false ruscist allegations of their accepting Nazis into their ranks, is one of these. It’s much, much easier even as an observer to imagine walking into the grey zone when you know you’re working with competent professionals.
Third Assault also gets thrown into some of the worst situations. That’s the cost of being a member of an elite brigade. A number of others, like 47th, 21st, and 72nd Mechanized, 79th, 80th, 81st, and 82nd Air Assault, Fifth Assault, and several Marine Corps brigades appear to be used in a similar way. This list is not comprehensive, of course.
The reality of front line combat in Ukraine is that going on the attack, what most line soldiers seem to refer to as storming, requires a different level of skills, gear, and commitment than holding against orc attacks. Thanks to ongoing shortages of modern gear, Ukraine can’t hope to outfit every brigade with the right stuff.
Further, the way offensive operations are conducted has to evolve. Just as machine guns and artillery (eventually) forced (most) armies to abandon tactics like sending waves of soldiers charging over no-man’s land, so will drones require that operations spread out more to achieve useful effects. However, rolling back the enemy also requires a substantial concentration of firepower.
The solution to this conundrum will likely be campaigns that seek to isolate an entire unit or front in a logistical sense then wear down trapped units with a constant barrage of precision attacks and tactical raids. Instead of piercing the front lines, rolling up defensive positions, then smashing the enemy in a fell swoop, they’ll be effectively defeated before large amounts of territory ever changes hands. The basic objective is the oldest in war: find and destroy the enemy’s fighting strength by forcing it to fight numerous one-sided battles.
Though the statement might seem controversial, nothing has really changed about the shape of warfare since 1945. Every development that has been proven on the battlefields of Ukraine was at least tested in the Second World War. Even the networks of sensors that Ukraine uses to track inbound Shahed drones is structurally identical to the network of Coast Watchers who spotted Japanese aircraft en route from their bases during the Pacific War.
We’re witnessing the culmination of a development trend, not a revolution. Institutions are once again merely catching up with science, with creativity and innovation rewriting the rules of war only in a cultural sense. It will likely take a generation of fully militarizing Earth orbit to truly alter the fundamental parameters of warfare. Even drone swarms will still wind up forming front lines and require strategic depth, pulling flanking maneuvers and feints while trying to surprise their opponent and destroy their ability to fight. Some form of insurgent warfare will develop, too, in fact drones appear to be well suited to this.
What will constitute a true military revolution? Sustained physical occupation of the ultimate high ground - orbit - is the most likely option. Even advanced AI will only make existing methods of killing more efficient. Until it’s advanced enough to question why it is asked to kill at all, of course. Ability to swiftly target any place on Earth and use gravity to deliver ordnance or supplies to any location in minutes? That’s a revolution on the level of the one sparked by the First World War.
What Ukrainian forces have lacked since the 2023 summer campaign were two crucial capabilities above all others:
Ability to push back ruscist aviation and limit the power of glide bomb attacks;
Enough firepower to swiftly and accurately hit any target identified near the front.
Thanks to the arrival of more air defense systems, drones, jets, and long-range missiles, these gaps will soon be largely filled. Applied correctly, these new abilities will give Ukraine the ability to isolate sections of the battlefields to their full depth and induce paralysis on orc forces stranded in the target area.
That is, if Ukraine’s partners accelerate the flow of ground equipment, especially armored vehicles, starting right now. We’re talking upwards of 1000 tanks, 1000 IFVs, and 3000 APCs... this year. Around six thousand armored trucks and Humvees too.
Their purpose is not to concentrate in a giant fist, but to create a dozen much-expanded brigades capable of independent offensive operations. Instead of specific territorial objectives, these formations will be dedicated to the determined annihilation of ruscist units in their area of responsibility. Ukraine’s counteroffensive will creep forward like the spreading roots of a tree, feeling for weak spots and adding relentless pressure where found.
In a doctrinal sense, the hyper-surveilled battlefield of today has largely ruled out large-scale surprise attacks. Moving thousands of soldiers around gets noticed no matter how slowly or carefully you conduct the buildup. Surprise now has to be rooted in fostering a disconnect between what enemy leaders think is happening on the ground with what their soldiers are actually experiencing. This means comprehensive and continuous attacks in so many areas that ruscist command and control gets overwhelmed, leaving some units stranded until it’s too late.
With information hoarding being such an issue in the ruscist military system, the more that orc regiments and brigades can be isolated from their neighbors and parent divisions, the better. But Ukraine can’t push a dozen brigades to a staging area behind the front without this getting noticed, meaning that it instead will need to keep its Storm Battlegroups, as I term them, spread across the fronts. This means they will have to conduct operations over weeks or even months as they seek to induce weakness locally and as a collective.
Put simply, Ukraine’s Storm Battlegroups will be set up to go out hunting. They will have to locate, isolate, and destroy so many orc fighting positions that Moscow’s ability to reinforce trouble spots in time is severely compromised. Ukrainian forces will have to maintain a high degree of decentralization and caution to avoid suffering high casualty rates. Local commanders will need both high levels of autonomy and the full package of tools necessary to dominate enemy forces in their area of responsibility when brought to battle.
With the Atesh partisan movement growing all the time, juicy targets are now identified on a routine basis far behind orc lines. The group is extending its activities inside russia proper, something Moscow ought to fear given the hollow nature of its imperial rule in many areas as the military gets bled out in Ukraine.
It bears repeating that a year ago, when Ukrainian troops were clawing their way towards the Surovikin Line under heavy fire, they didn’t even have cluster munitions for 155mm howitzers at their disposal. One these were finally approved that summer Ukraine began inflicting atrocious casualties on the orcs, causing the advance to pick up speed until stocks of all howitzer shells began running dangerously low.
In addition, those of us who saw Ukraine finally receiving Leopards and Bradleys in the winter of 2023 counted on Zaluzhnyi’s request being entirely filled. Instead, Ukraine’s allies committed barely a third of armored vehicles requested. Once the high loss rates that attacking entails were revealed, the lack of depth made committing to the kind of concentrated all-out push that NATO advisers were suggesting utterly mad.
This dismal performance cannot be repeated. So it is concerning that Ukraine has not already begun to receive not just ten or twenty but well over a hundred modern armored vehicles every week.
That’s simply the scale required to get the job done. The vehicles exist, but it appears that NATO and the USA are continuing to find excuses not to send them. While no one wants to be short of gear if war breaks out, unless NATO countries are lying about their active stocks then they have enough to cover the Baltic States, Scandinavia, and Poland against whatever Moscow could hope to pull from Ukraine without the front lines collapsing.
Ukraine has so far had good luck either building effective battalions up into a brigade (the Third Assault model) or combining several (how 82nd Air Assault came about). Expanding the best twelve brigades that Ukraine presently fields into formations that each house and administer three Storm Battlegroups looks right for the fight ahead. Each of these will be assigned around 3,600 personnel putting them right between a traditional regiment and brigade in size. Of the nearly 11,000 personnel assigned, around 3,000 will be experienced combat veterans and the remainder volunteers from among the newly mobilized. There will of course be another 3,000-4,000 personnel in an administrative brigade, but they won’t be in front line roles.
Ukraine should be able to simultaneously train enough personnel for six Storm Battlegroups every month if each receives nearly 3,000 bodies. Each Battlegroup will need approximately 24 tanks of the Leopard 2/Abrams/Challenger 2/Leclerc class, 24 infantry fighting vehicles of the Bradley/Marder/CV-90 type, and 72 armored personnel carriers like the M-113/Stryker/VAB. It will also require about 120 armored trucks and Humvees. That much gear has to flow to Ukraine every week starting about the middle of July so that the first Battlegroups can be ready to fight by September.
The essential building block of the Battlegroups will be a five platoon Line Company assigned 100 personnel and twenty vehicles, half combat, the other utility. Six Companies will join to form a Battalion and six Battalions, half focused on direct combat, will fill out the full Battlegroup. While it will be ideal to keep three Battlegroups together to ensure a continuous rotation and constant pressure on a particular area, only one or two needs to be within 25km of the front and at immediate risk of coming under fire. The bulk of even a single Battlegroup will remain this far back behind the front, because its artillery component will need to be protected from ruscist counterbattery fire, often in the form of Lancet drones.
Generally speaking, the Battlegroup will deploy in its assigned sector across a narrow front but at substantial depth. The danger faced by vehicles out in the open is so extreme that they will need to be hidden at least 5km behind the outermost layer of friendly positions and driven to the contact zone only when it is time to fight or move troops. This has to be done with adequate fire support and coordination with electronic warfare, too.
But it is still essential to have plenty of vehicles because they are still the source of the formation’s mobility. Opportunities will arise to quickly push a battalion forward a few kilometers, where its leading companies will then have to fend off counterattacks. This means that each Line Battalion - and to a lesser degree its component Companies - has to have organic artillery, drone, air defense, engineering, electronic warfare support. What’s more, it all has to be able to contribute directly to battlefield efforts upon request from units actively engaged in running fights.
Line Companies get two Armor, six Infantry, and two Scout squads organized into five Platoons. Armor offers prompt heavy fire support from up to 2km behind the contact zone. Infantry ride to forward positions in armored personnel carriers that can support eight dismounts split into two fire teams. Each fire team packs a machine gun, grenade launcher, radio/EW kit, and shotgun in addition to the usual small arms and hand grenades. Scout teams of six ride in IFVs, working in teams of two or three to operate small air and ground drones as well as the Company’s shoulder fired SAM and anti-tank missile systems.
This allows a Line Company to cover a sector spanning up to two kilometers. It has enough organic firepower to briefly hold off an enemy force several times its size and sufficient mobility to pull back to a safer line if the situation gets tough. Two Line Companies in a battalion cover a 5km sector by leaving a mined gap between that acts as a trap. The reserve pair is able to move up and help clear any breach or even counterattack. Spread across a dozen fighting positions, a Line Company is able to surge forward up to several kilometers if the enemy forces are sufficiently beaten down.
There to support the Line Companies is the Line Fires Company, comprised of four mortar, four automatic grenade launcher, and two short-range air defense squads. These have an Osa+Sidewinder FrankenSAM, Avenger, or equivalent short-range air defense system with a 5km+ effective range. Mortar and AGL coverage ensures that Company level commanders can allocate several weapons to back up each Line Company. An additional Line Support Company packages together additional support functions and acts as a link to higher echelons which can offer more comprehensive support. One platoon with two squads each is assigned to cover casualty evacuation, combat engineer, electronic warfare, logistics, and intelligence work.
Three Line Battalions comprise a Battlegroup’s frontline strength. As having four Line Companies with two in immediate reserve preserves the unit’s ability to conduct rotations, three Line Battalions ensures that one can always be in a reserve posture while recovering from intense combat. Two set roughly side by side can cover a 10-12km sector against a division or even corps level assault while never putting more than three or four vehicles into a single 1km box that might be saturated by glide bomb or rocket strikes.
Fires, Defense, and Services Battalions round out the Battlegroup. Each Line Battalion is capable of hitting anything that comes within 5km with drones and mortars, any enemy survivors making it past the 1km threshold in for another level of pain. Unfortunately, ruscist artillery can easily strike up to 20km behind the front. Helicopters and close support jets can accurately fire rockets or missiles at advancing Ukrainian troops from 10km back.
So much as Line Fires Company can task a squad or platoon to directly support a Line Company, so can up to a full Fires Company within the Firest Battalion be dedicated to support a Line Company’s efforts. Battalion Fires is split into two Howitzer, two Drone, one Counterbattery, and one Admin Company. Each has five platoons, four of them task-oriented and one for support, the latter looking very similar to the ones in Line Companies but swapping out the combat engineer platoon for one dedicated to area drone defense.
One Fires Company gets eight wheeled 155mm howitzers of the Bohdana or Caesar type or tracked guns of the M-109 or PzH-2000 variety. The other is equipped with eight towed 155mm howitzers that operate from bunkers about 25km from the front line. The former tend to target enemy artillery, while the latter offer direct fire support on demand to the Line Companies. Regardless, they give the Battlegroup the ability to strike almost any ruscist artillery that can threaten it at any depth.
The Drone Strike Companies handle both area surveillance and attack duties, each squad operating a mid-sized recon drone that can fly above the range of shoulder fired SAMs and machine guns. It can also keep two to four FPV drones over the front line at any given time, allowing a single squad to reliably disable an armored vehicle and the eight across a Company’s four platoons to bring a ruscist company-level assault to a halt or savage efforts to resupply forward positions under fire.
The Fires Battalion’s Counterbattery Company includes platoons equipped with sensors that detect the source of enemy fire and electronic warfare gear to neutralize enemy drones. It naturally also has an Administrative Company to coordinate the different elements.
Every Battlegroup additionally needs a Defense Battalion. In addition to the usual Admin Company, this Battalion houses five others. There’s a Pioneer Company, with four platoons of combat engineers focusing on demining and bridging. An Engineer Company with the same structure handles the construction and camouflage of fortifications, including drone-resistant vehicle hides near the front lines. Together they cooperate on recovery of abandoned armored vehicles as required.
The Area Air Defense Company has eight Buk+Sparrow FrankenSAM or equivalent systems with a 15km range, allowing the Battlegroup to threaten helicopters and low-flying close-support aircraft behind the front line. A dedicated Drone Defense Company provides protection against surveillance and FPV drones through electronic warfare and interceptor drones. A Special Forces Company is able to infiltrate enemy lines to seek out high value targets like orc headquarters staff.
Finally, the Battlegroup also has a Headquarters Battalion that bundles important services and serves as a buffer against other Battlegroups and the Brigade above. The HQ Battalion’s has Field Hospital (where Casevac patients go), Maintenance (for more intensive repairs), Logistics (warehouses and depots), Replacement (holding place for new personnel), Security (military police), and Battlegroup HQ Companies.
This general structure would obviously need work once tested - I offer it as a conceptual guide to help understand the scope of Ukraine’s present need for ground kit. Air defenses and jets are extremely important, and along with artillery shells constitute Ukraine’s most desperate need. But proper equipment for its newly mobilized soldiers is next in line.
Based on everything the world has seen of Putin’s military system so far, over time ruscist lines can be eroded into a state of fragility that Moscow won’t grasp or cope with in time to avoid catastrophe. Systems collapse can be and often is best induced from the ground level, especially when a system is centrally organized and deeply hierarchical.
Both aptly describe the regime that Putin, the discount Hitler of our time, has erected to prop up his parasitic rule. Big movements, obvious buildups, these things Putin can usually figure out a way to counter because he’s always given enough time. Making it so that Ukrainian Companies at the tactical level can start racking up lopsided victories against the orcs on the other side of the grey zone, the resulting flood of bad news will make it impossible for Moscow to see where its greatest peril lies until it’s too late.
If the news even receives him at all before an over-extended orc division crumbles somewhere, Ukrainian troops jumping halfway to Crimea or the Azov Sea in a week. What happened in Kharkiv in 2022 can absolutely happen again. Truth be told, the longer Putin staves off his fall, the worse it will be when it comes.
Strategic Developments
In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Sauron, Dark Lord of Mordor, used an ancient mystical orb called a Palantir to convince Denethor, Steward of Gondor, that all resistance was doomed. A proud man secretly fearful of being supplanted by the rightful King of Gondor, should he finally emerge, Sauron was able to distort Denethor’s perception of reality and convince him that the good guys couldn’t possibly win. This ended in Denethor vainly refusing to defend his capitol city, Minas Tirith, choosing to immolate himself and trying to take his wounded son with him.
Tolkien inadvertently wrote a parable of how reflexive control operates. The only lasting victory that Putin has won is to have convinced most of the world that he and his country are magically unbeatable. This abject bluff is accepted at face value by politicians who have abdicated their responsibility to secure a better future. In their eyes, Putin is actually a kind of peer - and a useful foil whose fall would create new problems they might be expected to solve.
Unfortunately for those of us who live in the real world, this convenient dynamic is the ultimate source of the global explosion presently underway. In the Pacific, Middle East, and Europe, blazes are fueled by inept leadership across the democratic world, with Putin jumping in wherever he is able to pretend that Moscow is running the show. He loves it when American pundits credit him with stuff like interfering in elections, by the way. All part of the con.
The bitter tragedy is that every day dozens of Ukrainians have to die to sustain privileged illusions in capitols across the globe. Ukraine’s ability to win this war, not just survive it, presently hinges on its allies casting aside their intellectual fetters and accepting the need to dramatically expand the flow of support until Moscow’s troops finally depart Ukraine.
Similarly, the ability of the global community to prevent tragedies like this from happening in the future depends on securing this outcome. The Middle East is probably already lost to another generation of futile bloodshed, but if East Asia descends into the morass as well all hope of averting a worldwide nightmare is basically gone. Now that Moscow is pulling Pyongyang into a tighter embrace, victory in Ukraine is plainly a matter of national security across the Pacific, too.
Seoul’s response to this has been perfect so far. It is now publicly committed to a review of its policy that allows only non-lethal aid to be sent to Ukraine.
Well done, Putin! Your dear buddy Kim’s reported 50% fail rate for artillery shells and ballistic missiles doesn’t exactly make him an ideal source of support, but it’s good to have friends, I suppose. Though some free and 100% reliable policy advice: if you’re looking to North Korea for help with anything, you need to reconsider your life choices. Beijing holds this clown at arms’ length for a reason - he’s as liable to blackmail you with refugees as offer useful aid. This dog will always bite the hand foolish enough to feed it: North Korea is a simple distillation of the European concept of the Westphalian State down to its essence, self-justifying thuggery tolerated because the casualties in any war would be horrific.
The main implication of Putin’s nonsense threats against South Korea is that he’s getting desperate. Nothing seems to work for his troops on the ground; whenever they even start to build momentum it slips away. The dysfunction in American politics might be fun to watch from Moscow, but even the total implosion of the US federal government wouldn’t save the ruscist empire now.
As Euromaidan Press lays out in an excellent piece, the $300 billion in frozen ruscist assets is a lurking war-winner in and of itself. Ukraine is set to get a large loan secured by the profits these assets accrue as they sit in allied banks, reported to be 3-$5 billion annually. Even if Kyiv never physically gets hold of a single dollar of the assets, so long as they remain frozen and the profit stream used to secure loans, there’s no reason why Ukraine can’t get a couple hundred billion dollars over the next few years. That principle is staying put unless Moscow agrees to some serious reparations, so even a loan to the full amount carries almost no risk. Even if the US doesn’t offer another dime to Ukraine, so long as it exports war material the funding exists to cover the cost of defeating Putin once and for all.
Putin’s agents have done an excellent job of infesting the American political scene, unfortunately, with the magnitude of the problem revealed by a recent independent investigation that naturally drew intense fire from the pro-Putin crowd in the USA. Putin’s rhetoric spreads easily on both sides of the partisan divide - perhaps with more visible success in Trump and MAGA circles, but in a way more deeply among chunks of the Chomsky-citing Progressive Left.
As time has passed the usual suspects in the Liberal and Progressive crowds have begun to pronounce a negotiated settlement inevitable, saying things like but all wars end in negotiations. Aye, that’s indeed the truth of things. Even the Second World War did… after Hitler and Mussolini were dead and Japan was granted the face-saving fig leaf of the Emperor remaining nominally in charge while the US military occupation revised the Japanese Constitution.
This is the basic reason why the safest place to be in an all-out nuclear war is in a national capitol. Someone has to be around to agree to a cease fire.
In any case, the entire American Liberal-Progressive way of looking at the world is deeply challenged by the Ukraine War. This is part of the reason why it was so easy for the powers-that-be in the Beltway to signal to the media around the middle of 2023 that it was time to push Ukraine off the front page. The Hamas-Israel war was a stroke of good fortune, though it appears to have accelerated the transition towards the Democrats being the party of college educated trend followers.
Speaking of the Middle East, the deteriorating situation there bears mentioning. Israelis seem to have consolidated around the impossible position that only by killing enough of their enemies will they be able to live in peace. By resigning from Netanyahu’s government, centrist Israeli leaders get to keep their hands clean in the same way Biden’s public criticism of Israel makes it look like he’s doing something to rein in Netanyahu. Their stage-managed spats are part of the con. Similarly, Arab regimes that pretend to oppose Israel are sitting back and waiting for the whole thing to be over so they can carry on with normalization.
Trouble is, Israel has failed to destroy Hamas, having still killed more of the hostages than it has managed to rescue while sowing the seeds for a generation of insurgency. War with Hezbollah appears certain, which could well draw in Iran. While the latest round of saber rattling could be an attempt to bluff Hezbollah’s Nasrallah into ceasing rocket attacks on northern Israel, Netanyahu’s inability to destroy Hamas as even a military institution has produced a natural incentive to settle affairs in Lebanon - meaning another catastrophic, unwinnable war. What this will do to Israel’s security in the long run is a question nobody seems to want to ask anymore.
Israel crossed the moral event horizon in police procedurals where a cop starts beating suspects before being restrained by his saner colleagues about a week into going to war with Hamas. Yet for fear of being labeled antisemitic it is being allowed to kick Palestinian civilians again and again while pundits in the US question why they haven’t turned on Hamas already. It’s the blasted War on Terror all over again.
For Ukraine the persistent challenge remains securing needed support before events can spiral somewhere else, giving Biden another excuse to play it slow with military aid that Israel might ask for someday.
It’s worth pointing out that the Ukraine War ends as soon as the orcs decide to go home. This war, unlike the ones in the Middle East, is a rare case of a problem with a single, simple solution. Give Ukraine all it needs to win as fast as it can absorb the material. That’s it, that’s all. The job can be done in a year with appropriate support, or it can take another three and a lot more Ukrainian lives.
Also, nobody will ever take the USA or NATO seriously ever again. So there’s that. But at least as far as the USA goes, we’re well into go ahead, prove me wrong territory now. Even if the mucky-mucks at The Atlantic and New York Times are determined not to see what’s coming until it’s much too late - again. Only this time they’re wrong about the durability of two would-be superpowers instead of one.