Air Denial And Reorganizing The Ground Fight In Ukraine
Bitter fighting on multiple fronts, a Flanker jet going down every day, and political paralysis in the USA - Ukraine's third spring of all-out war begins.
This week’s post will be heavier on the tactical-operational side of things than usual, with a special emphasis on the complex puzzle of waging war in the Network Age.
It’s one that can only be solved through new forms of organization along with effective doctrine and training. While Ukraine has the most battle-hardened soldiers and officers in the world now, evidence is growing of increasing rigidity, especially among middle-level to senior officers, that poses a threat to Ukraine’s military efforts.
Moscow’s ability to adapt is limited by its own inability to accept the stupidity of this war. There are too few russians to effectively occupy all of Ukraine, and unless Putin wants to go nuclear he lacks the firepower to flatten every city.
That’s why I remain certain about the inevitability of Putin’s defeat. It’s only a matter of time, with the biggest question being how many people have to die before the end. And longer it takes, the greater the odds that Moscow’s pathetic nuclear saber-rattling becomes a self-fulfilling bluff.
But there’s a long road ahead. And denial of the harsh truth of these times by leaders like Biden and Scholz only makes the situation worse. The world they knew is gone, but neither seems to understand.
Weekly Overview
The ground war this week in Ukraine has been typical, with no major gains to speak of for either side. That isn’t to say that fighting positions aren’t changing hands, or that Ukrainian troops are having an easy time of it.
But ruscist efforts on the Kupiansk, Lyman, Bakhmut, Avdiivka, Vuhledar, and Robotyne fronts have all been thwarted. The Kupiansk front saw Ukraine strike back near the town of Tabaivka, which Moscow reached in a sudden push over several kilometers a few weeks back, while the orcs continued to press Synkivka without much luck. Around Lyman fighting has been in something of a holding pattern.
Bakhmut and Avdiivka both saw the enemy advance, reaching the town of Ivanivske near the former and engaging Ukrainian units along the new defense line west of the latter, where Abrams tanks are in the fight for the first time. Likewise orc units crept into Novomykhailivka on the Vuhledar front and battles were fought over the small town of Pobeida a bit to the north. Hundreds of kilometers to the west, the enemy made a concerted effort to push Ukrainian troops out of Robotyne, but failed.
The Dnipro front has seen steady attacks against the bridgehead near Krynky, and with most of the hamlet essentially flattened the entire thing is a permanent grey zone. New bridgeheads are likely to emerge in spring - attempted development of a new one might have been one of the reasons Ukraine sent a crack commando team on a mission to the Tendra Spit. This operation ended in tragic failure, however, with at least one boat full of highly-trained soldiers wiped emerging in released photos and dozens more casualties alleged by the orcs.
Moscow’s propaganda generally relies on mixing just enough truth with a much bigger lie to make refuting the entire package difficult. That’s why their drone videos usually cut away before the actual point of impact is confirmed - it lets Moscow imply every near-miss or inconsequential strike on a NATO-standard vehicle look lethal. Ukraine, on the other hand, layers drone footage to make it clear that what they release is legit. They just don’t show their failed attempts, because this is a war, not a science experiment.
In the skies, Ukraine has had some revenge, averaging one ruscist combat jet shot down well behind the front lines every day since mid-February. The reason? Ukraine finally has enough long-range air defense systems to risk having launchers drive up close to the front to take down aircraft trying to drop glide bombs. Moscow’s answer to its own shell shortages, much exacerbated by the threat of HIMARS rockets taking out any depot spotted within 80km of the front, has been to launch numerous GPS-guided bombs from Su-34s.
These weapons, initially 500kg/1100lb but now sometimes three times that large, can annihilate vehicle concentrations or bunkers. Moscow only began deploying these weapons on a mass scale towards the middle of 2023, greatly complicating Ukraine’s counteroffensive plans by making it too risky to mass vehicles anywhere near the front. Later in the year Moscow worked out how to use them in a direct close air support role instead of executing pre-planned strike missions.
Luckily glide bombs have a maximum range of around 60km, and that is only achieved by the launching aircraft flying at high altitude and speed. This makes them ideal targets for a Patriot-class air defense system, provided two conditions are met:
A radar lock is maintained on a target jet long enough for a missile to get close enough to pick it up on its own
The jet’s own electronic countermeasure suite fails
Even the otherwise ground controller dependent orc pilots have an instrument that warns them if a radar is painting their aircraft with electromagnetic waves. It can usually differentiate between a search radar and one meant for closely tracking a target to feed data to an inbound missile, too.
Austrian analyst Tom Cooper has a theory that I see as entirely plausible to explain why ruscist jets are proving so vulnerable. Generally speaking, their countermeasure suites, which include powerful jammers that interfere with hostile radars, should offer protection. However, prior loss of Su-34 jets in Ukraine replete with intact jamming pods means that their technical characteristics are likely known to Ukraine and NATO. Their jammers might no longer work thanks to Ukraine tuning its radars to use wavelengths the system isn’t programmed to handle.
Manipulating signal information is what allowed a Serbian air defense officer to shoot down an F-117 stealth attack jet in the late 1990s using an otherwise obsolete air defense system. The fact that Ukraine was able to get an old S-200 air defense missile all the way across the Azov Sea to take down a ruscist AWACS implies that technicians are working hard behind the scenes.
AWACS patrols have lately ceased near Ukraine, meaning that enemy strike jets have lost an early warning system that would otherwise tell them when a hostile missile had been launched. Another factor likely plays in as well: reportedly, S-300 radars have been integrated with Patriot systems. Plentiful in Ukraine despite it running out of interceptors for its Soviet-era S-300 launchers, one ruscist jet apparently reported an S-300 radar tracking him right before the first AWACS shootdown over the Azov Sea earlier this winter.
Probably the biggest weakness of the Patriot is that the sophisticated radars it relies on are too vulnerable to allow anywhere near the front. Moscow can absolutely saturate a Patriot battery with strikes from ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones if it can put enough ordnance in the same part of the sky in a short enough span of time. Radars can draw anti-radar missiles, and the only way to save them is to shut them down and move out before one can hit. The command vehicle and power supply are also vulnerable.
But there are up to eight Patriot launchers per system. So even if Ukraine doesn’t let a Patriot radar come closer than about 200km from the front, it can almost certainly spare some S-300 kit. Moscow has absolutely been trying to mount an effective air defense suppression campaign, recently taking out a NASAMS mid-range air defense launcher near Zaporizhzhia for the first confirmed time, so the concern is justified.
Moscow can still launch air attacks, but it will likely have to start forming bigger strike packages to take advantage of moments when it can temporarily suppress Ukraine’s air defenses across a specific area. It can’t sustain a daily loss of an Su-34, Moscow’s premier strike jet, for more than a few months, especially if pilots aren’t making it out alive.
Ukraine’s extended air denial bubble represents the start of a stark shift in the war for the skies. If high-flying Flanker bombers have to keep well back from the front, so will its Foxhound and Flanker interceptors flying air defense patrols. F-16s and other jets will gain room to operate. Lacking effective AWACS coverage and its ground-based radars vulnerable to drone, ATACMS, and Storm Shadow strikes, Putin’s aerial circus risks being rendered almost helpless as Goering’s was by 1944.
It’s just too bad Ukraine didn’t have this many modern air defense systems a year ago. Training on Patriots and F-16s didn’t have to wait until late 2022 to begin. The lack of basic foresight afflicting Ukraine’s partners is a pretty strong indictment of their leadership at this point. D.C. had better hope it never goes to war with China, because odds are it’s bound to lose barring a paradigm shift in defense affairs.
The shell situation bears mentioning here. Failure to rapidly ramp up production and roadblocks to simply buying 155mm shells abroad thrown up by certain EU members have led to a temporary shell famine that is getting Ukrainians killed. That’s the main reason Ukraine appears on the back foot right now - it’s missing a critical ingredient of modern warfare. Drones are great for smaller targets, but lack the explosive power of an artillery shell.
Thankfully, it appears that by the end of March the situation will markedly improve. The Czech government has supposedly done a deal that’s slowly moving forward, even if the US Congress can’t. But whether or not Ukraine receives more aid from the USA, America doesn’t have enough shells to send anyway. Only by the end of the year will production reach 100,000 a month, a quantity Europe will also by then match.
Ukraine needs a minimum of 60,000 a month just to hold the line, but allied production won’t be sufficient until the middle of summer. That’s the real reason Ukraine hasn’t been more aggressive over winter, even more than fatigue among its personnel. Parity with Moscow would require closer to 180,000 shells a month, though fortunately Ukraine can get away with firing half as much as the enemy with the same effect thanks to the relative precision of most NATO-standard artillery. The 500,000 155mm shells Prague has sourced should allow Ukraine to blunt whatever moves the orcs make into early summer, when new production ought to make renewed offensives sustainable.
However, the days of armored brigades making bold dashes beyond the enemy front were mostly gone by 1945. In 2022 Ukraine’s defenders demonstrated exactly how that fails, quickly learned in 2023 that NATO gear and doctrine doesn’t automatically make it work, and in 2024 are set to repeat what worked best in the first year of the war: isolate a front and cut it off from support.
The proliferation of cheap drones has complicated the job of anyone trying to take ground. In the same way that machine guns and barbed wire forced armies to adapt a hundred years ago and tanks backed by aircraft they could talk to over the radio triggered a new reformation just two decades later, drones and networks are doing the same today.
The most overlooked aspect of turning a bloody slog like the trench warfare of 1914-1918 into the lightning victories of 1940-1941 and their counterparts in 1944 is not new technology so much as better organization of what already exists. New weapons are well and good, but it’s how they are used that counts.
Tactical-Operational Developments
The Ukrainian Armed Forces are in the middle of what looks like a fairly major reformation of how they organize, train, and field ground units. Drones have democratized fire support and surveillance to a degree most officers in NATO countries are not prepared for. Just like in the First World War, military institutions face a radically different battlefield than anything anyone presently in them was trained for.
Institutional rigidity is a mortal peril to the rapid adaptation needed to survive modern battlefields. Every paradigm of organization eventually decays, meeting a reality it wasn’t structured to face. Ukraine’s mass mobilization and necessary focus on having enough troops along the line of contact to prevent ruscist breakthroughs has also led to many brigades suffering in terms of quality.
Ukraine appears to be in the process of rebooting leadership across much of the force in an effort to restore its combat power without having to mobilize hundreds of thousands of new recruits. Ukraine’s war effort depends on its economy staying stable, and pulling people from the workforce to push them into uniform will have consequences. In addition, because of Ukraine’s demographics, there aren’t as many young people as there are middle-aged folks. Losing large numbers of people in their early twenties risks crippling Ukraine’s economy and defense efforts down the line.
While it is very likely that a portion of Ukraine’s soldiers are using rear-area duties to avoid the horrific dangers of the trenches, the recently cited claim that only some 1/3 of Ukrainian soldiers have been at the zero line is pretty normal for a typical army at war. Generally speaking, it takes two soldiers in the rear to properly support every one exchanging shots across the grey zone. And it takes half a dozen civilians to sustain a single soldier.
Ukraine’s leaders have no easy way out of this situation. You can only draw so much blood from a stone. The answer to the riddle, historically speaking, is a revamped organizational approach. This depends on identifying leaders with a proven track record over the past two years of fighting and using them to form the core of high-quality formations capable of going up against the orcs toe-to-toe in a close fight and winning lopsided victories. The bulk of the ground forces are trained and equipped to hold linear lines and slow down attacks, bleeding the enemy until the moment is right for more mobile forces unleash a vicious counterattack.
Ironically, it is the orcs themselves who showed the way forward with their battalion tactical group concept. Thankfully for Ukraine, the ruscist military system was incapable of putting the idea of distributed forces to effective use. Instead of building small combined arms formations capable of independent operations and united by intensive training, Moscow simply threw together pieces of brigades into ad-hoc groupings that had lots of firepower and vehicles but poor logistics support.
Once upon a time it used brigades and regiments much the same way. The Red Army mostly relied on overwhelming opposition, its leaders developing anything resembling finesse only very late in the Second World War then promptly forgetting it all while mythologizing the trauma of the conflict. And forgetting that had it not been for hundreds of thousands of Lend-Lease trucks from America, Stalin would have lost. There would have been no Stalingrad.
Unfortunately, the Eastern Front of the Second World War, like the early months of the Pacific War, is badly under-studied in the Anglosphere, scholars preferring to focus on America’s epic victories and Pearl Harbor, which serves to justify the conflict. That may be why so few Americans appear understand what is happening in Ukraine right now or the natural ebb and flow of war. Yes, the situation is hard and in many places quite bleak, but mainly because Ukraine has spent the past few months hobbled by lack of artillery supplies.
Lacking vital tools at the start of the 2023 counteroffensives like modern jets, frontline air defenses, cluster warheads, and long-range missiles, it’s no wonder that Ukraine was forced to pull its punch. But as tired as its troops are, as dire as the shortages of artillery ammunition have been, Ukraine is still barely giving up ground even when Moscow concentrates a massive number of troops in one area, like Avdiivka.
Going into 2024, provided Ukraine can rest a core force large enough to conduct offensive operations by the middle of summer, it will be in a position to inflict serious and possibly even crippling defeats on the occupying forces. Preserving the vast majority of the limited supplies of modern gear it received in 2023 has allowed Ukraine an opportunity to strike again before the output of Moscow’s military-industrial complex peaks in early 2025.
By 2026 it will be out of the refurbished Soviet-era kit Moscow now depends on to supply its forces with ever-deteriorating kit. RUSI has proven to be a solid research outfit for the most part during this war, and their latest report on the matter looks reliable.
Though Ukraine’s own production will also be ramping up into 2025, there’s only so much an already smaller economy can do. The uncertainty associated with foreign supplies means that Kyiv can’t count on being in a stronger position relative to Moscow in 2025 than it will be in 2024.
The question is how Ukraine can adapt its forces to best combat the enemy across most of the front line while preserving its ability to mount a major push across the Dnipro in occupied Kherson. To answer it demands understanding exactly what happens when ruscist and Ukrainian forces meet.
Recently, outside of Robotyne, a group of four Ukrainian soldiers - a single fire team - fended off a company-level orc push using armored vehicles with the help of attack drones and mortars. Four dudes took on and defeated a force more than ten times their size though all were wounded in the end.
Ruscist officers - though if put to the test, most NATO ones would do the same - are replicating the errors of their forebears. They have systematically underestimated the power of small autonomous teams.
Conventionally military scientists talk about the offensive and defensive as if these are fundamentally different things. They are not. To a soldier in contact with the enemy, there is only that part of the horizon that contains people trying to kill them. Nothing else exists. Their sole goal is to control whatever patch of dirt they can hold onto by sending firepower back at whoever is trying to kill them. Often, this requires some brave fools taking the risk of moving to get into a position where they can take the enemy by surprise.
A smart attacker moves into enemy territory then waits for the defender to push them out. So who is really attacking or defending? To an officer sitting at a headquarters behind the front the distinction may matter, but in most cases it shouldn’t. The job is to find and destroy the enemy until it stops trying to do the same.
The trick in warfare is to enable every team in a fight to share information and apply each one’s unique skillset to the task of destroying threats. A given team’s ability to do this is determined by the effective range of their weapons and information about the enemy’s disposition.
In World War One, machine guns made it possible for a small group of people to exert lethal control out to a kilometer or more. Hidden in a clump of grass, a single surviving soldier in a fighting position could literally mow down an attacking swarm of dozens. Officers took years to get over their obsessive need to prove to their superiors that they were doing their jobs by launching attacks. On the German side the situation was little better, the key difference being that Germany was mainly trying to hold its ground on the Western Front so launched fewer grand offensives after 1914.
When Germany did launch a major offensive again in 1918 its divisions very nearly broke the French fronts on the flanks of Paris. But the “stormtrooper” tactics Germany developed from its experience on the Eastern Front, where it was largely responsible for Russia’s defeat, proved costly in the extreme on the Western. By contrast the Allies, after failing to figure out how to put tanks to good use for over a year, finally adopted the Monash method of systematically destroying German defenses with a combination of tanks and infantry backed by artillery.
Machine guns and other tools of industrialized warfare, like mines, make it very difficult to move quickly on the battlefield. You have to develop a massive firepower advantage to immediately strike every enemy fighting position that could hide a machine gun nest. This was a lesson the United States Marine Corps learned the hard way when storming Japanese-held islands in the Pacific. The Japanese Army, by contrast, adopted a vision of soldiers as being literal “human bullets” who would sacrifice themselves willingly for the empire in “Banzai” charges. Where it inflicted the worst casualties on American forces late in the war, it was when commanders instead tenaciously defended cavern networks on Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
In the Second World War, blitzkrieg as most writers refer to it is in fact a myth. German sources never used this term and saw their new panzer divisions as a kind of super-cavalry meant to surround an enemy force’s flanks and trap it in a fire pocket. They sought to restore mobility to warfare and were successful despite having weaker tanks and relying more on horse transport for logistics than any of its opponents. The reason why is a combination of experienced troops, radios, and a leadership culture tolerant of subordinates outright disobeying direct orders if the situation demanded.
Thankfully for Kyiv, its battle-hardened forces already know how to beat the enemy and it appears are already working out how to send individual combined-arms battalion level formations into the fight. The recent intervention by the Third Assault Brigade in Avdiivka involved at least two different battalions, while another has appeared some ways to the south in recent days. While throwing independent battalions together has proven problematic at times, in general the reason Ukraine doesn’t mount multi-brigade operations is less a matter of having too few leaders trained in them and more their general lack of success.
Ukraine appears to understand that the way to hold off the orcs is to rely on combined-arms company level formations organized by role. While not independent formations, when five or six company-level elements are grouped together in a coherent battalion they are generally able to repel attacks by enemy forces several times larger than their own.
The ongoing democratization of firepower is a major reason why. So long as a soldier in contact with the enemy is backed by drones and has a radio connection to other units, they are able to call down the support they need to break up and defeat any attack.
This means that Ukraine can afford to hold a thin front in most places, withdrawing whenever the enemy comes with too many troops to hold off. Then, after weeding out the orcs, a swift counterattack backed by armored vehicles can finish them off and usually regain the initial positions. The next day Moscow will probably try again, and the day after that, until supposedly 30% of the unit becomes casualties and gets rotated out.
It’s a rhythm that if made maximally efficient will bleed Moscow dry across Donbas this year. You don’t need a bunch of high-level brigade commanders and their staffs to manage this kind of fighting. Brigades are more and more becoming what divisions used to be: logistics and administrative centers that detach self-sustaining battle groups into the fight.
Organized from the bottom-up, here’s how I see this working. This is a quick-and-dirty force design for Ukraine’s main striking forces, armed with modern gear delivered by its partners so far. This would not constitute the bulk of Ukraine’s brigades, at least not until a lot more equipment comes from abroad, but a core of hardened professionals differentiated from other Ukrainian soldiers by being equipped and trained for hunting down and destroying ruscist brigades.
The basic tactical element is the squad. It consists of up to a dozen people permanently assigned one duty vehicle, usually armored, and one support vehicle, ideally an armored truck but possibly an up-armored Humvee.
Because no formation is ever at 100% staffing, it’s best to assume that ten are available for active work while two others are on light duty. With two squads coming together to form a platoon and five platoons joining to make a company, this ensures a pool of twenty billets tasked with keeping things like trucks and depots secure and under cover.
Four Combat companies, the heart of what I call a Battalion Battle Group, are backed by a Fires company and a Support company. With a total complement of 720 personnel and 120 vehicles, a BBG will be expected to cover a 4-6km section of the front to a depth of 10km whether it is moving forward, backward, or holding in place as a grouping. 120 people per kilometer might not sound like a lot, but with over 1,200km of active front to consider, the numbers add up fast.
Two Combat companies will occupy the first defense line in their sector, backed by two others in the second. The pairs will swap out roles every three days and leapfrog each other whenever the BBG moves, keeping the Fires and Support Companies safely between and behind at all times. Dispersal, camouflage, and entrenchments are all of paramount concern, units being responsible for constantly improving positions when not actively engaging the enemy or resting after.
Each Combat company will be composed of 1 Tank, 3 Infantry, and 1 Scout platoons. The Fires company will have 2 Mortar, 2 Bomber drone, and 1 short-range Air Defense (short) platoons. A support company will field 2 Pioneer (frontline combat engineer), 1 Network Warfare, 1 Evacuation, and 1 Headquarters platoons.
In Combat companies, out of each squad two soldiers on light duty are responsible for the support vehicle while two others drive and fight an armored combat vehicle. Tanks are an exception, requiring a crew of three in Soviet models and four in most NATO, but they also leave eight out of twelve soldiers back from the front to cope with the burden of maintaining tanks.
Infantry squads field two fire teams of four soldiers each, one with the squad’s machine gun and the other a shoulder-fired rocket launcher good against tanks and bunkers. Their armored vehicle is used to get them as close to their fighting positions as possible, extract them when things get hot, and act as fire support from about a kilometer back if a prepared position with overhead cover is available. The two fire teams operate with a separation of up to several dozen meters, one covering the other from attacks on the flank.
Scout squads field three two-person sections, leaving an additional pair in the rear to help with logistics. Their armored vehicle typically mounts an automatic grenade launcher to offer local indirect fire support as well as a jammer to mitigate the threat of enemy drones. Typically, the sections are split up across a several hundred meter span half a kilometer or so behind the lead Infantry squads. One section operates a surveillance drone, another provides anti-drone overwatch with a shoulder fired SAM and anti-drone gun, while a third operates the squad’s anti-tank guided missile launcher.
This combination allows any typical grouping of orc troops, vehicles, and drones to be engaged and defeated provided they aren’t far superior in number or backed with a lot of firepower. Though each fighting position in an area is only lightly held, they can all direct enough fire to paralyze an inbound force until fire support comes to play. They pull back whenever required, freely trading space for a chance to inflict casualties.
The Fires company has two each drone and mortar platoons to ensure one of each can be devoted to supporting each Combat company on the zero line. Mortars and bomber drones each require a crew of about three to operate, meaning that two per squad is sustainable. Eight 120mm mortar tubes and eight bomber drones per 5km of front is enough to badly hinder a standard orc company-level attack. A FrankenSAM system using Sidewinder interceptors on old Osa launchers can reliably deal with low-flying aerial threats out to five or six kilometers, keeping helicopters and attack jets back from the front as well as the mid-sized surveillance drones the enemy uses to correct its own artillery fire.
The Support company rounds out several needed capabilities, including swift movement of casualties to stabilization points behind the front, local electronic warfare, and administration. Pioneer platoons are dedicated to supporting efforts to entrench both soldiers and vehicles, creating shelters with cover to ward off Lancet drone attacks. They also operate basic de-mining equipment.
Individual squads will have the organic ability to establish a logistics connection to the company-level depot area. When it invariably gets blown up, the company parked a couple kilometers away can swiftly assist.
Obviously, the BBG is not an entirely independent force. It’s meant to defeat tactical-level assaults by full orc brigades and counterattack at a scale measured in individual kilometers. Each BBG will be one of three attached to a brigade noted for its achievements on the battlefield, where they will have access to all the assets this higher echelon formation can sustain. Zooming out from the image above, here’s approximately what an operational-level ambush position on the road north of Avdiivka looks like, assuming Ukraine knew an attack was coming west of Niu-York.
Presently, Ukrainian brigades usually have a tank battalion, anywhere from 3-6 infantry battalions, several support battalions, and a collection of separate companies. As one of the major tells indicating when and where Ukraine meant to advance in 2023, concentration of the most modern equipment into a few companies was probably not ideal. Ukraine is already embracing a policy of pushing modern kit to the most battle-proven brigades spread across the fronts, and this should continue. To make the most effective use of its limited supply of modern gear, this BBG concept splits Ukraine’s by type - Heavy, Fast, and Assault - with one of each assigned to every experienced brigade.
The Heavy BBG includes the premier armored vehicles like Abrams, Challenger 2, or Leopard 2 tanks as well as Bradley, Marder, or CV-90 IFVs. It’s the unit you commit where the fighting is expected to be toughest.
A Fast BBG, by contrast, uses modern wheeled armored troop carriers of the Stryker type or the many equivalents donated by Ukraine’s partners. It will also field the Leopard 1A5 light tanks now entering Kyiv’s inventory, these acting purely as fire support for the infantry and not operating closer than a kilometer to the enemy wherever possible. This BBG is the workhorse unit most often holding the front in preparation for the Assault or Heavy BBG to mount a bigger attack.
And then there’s the Assault BBG, emphasizing close-quarters fighting in terrain not suited for vehicles, which rides to battle on armored trucks. They are backed up by the good old Ukrainian T-64 or T-84 Oplot or Polish PT-91 Twardy acting as an assault gun. They’re the urban and forest fighters of the bunch.
This arrangement would, based on the current inventory of modern gear, allow Ukraine to operate twelve Strike brigades build around three BBGs. Ukraine has only received around 120 modern tanks, and assuming an 80% operational rate with partners having replaced or repaired all battlefield losses it will be lucky to keep 96 in service at any one time. Giving 8 to each heavy BBG, forming a company within the brigade’s administrative tank battalion, represents a balance between concentration and total dispersion.
The IFV situation isn’t dramatically better, as there needs to be at least three times as many IFVs as tanks even if scouts ride to battle on older armored personnel carriers like the (gulp) M-113. They need the extra room for drones and missiles anyway. Ukraine has still only been pledged around 180 Bradleys, 150 Marders, and 90 CV-90s and has lost probably 10% of their inventory of each. 300-400 is enough to fill out 12 Heavy BBGs. Ukraine’s partners have been relatively more generous with wheeled armored personnel carriers, which though less heavily armored are spacious and mobile.
Backing up the BBGs in each brigade will be a Fires Battle Group and a Support Battle Group, each essentially replicating the structure of the BBG but in larger form and with therefore much deeper capabilities. Instead of two each mortar and bomber drone companies the FBG will have three companies of self-propelled 155mm artillery and one with rocket systems. While HIMARS launchers are probably too valuable to put this close to the front, Ukrainian rocket launchers can handle area fires while howitzers do precision work. The Air Defense company will feature the FrankenSAM combination of Buk launchers with Sea Sparrow missiles, allowing a brigade to shoot down aerial targets up to 12km or so behind the front lines.
The Support Battle Group will have expanded medical capabilities including a field hospital, a headquarters company to help coordinate operations, a signals company to handle electronic warfare and communications. It also gets two companies of combat engineers who can handle de-mining, fortification, and vehicle recovery.
The brigade will still have its logistics and maintenance elements, but the specific organization of these matters less for the purposes of this limited analysis. You can attach whatever you like to the back end of a brigade, but each level of organization touching on the battlefield directly has to obey the cognitive law of limited object apprehension. 4-6 is the largest number of elements in any set that the human brain can typically manage as a group. That’s why you only have so many subordinate units at each layer of a hierarchy.
Now, obviously, I’m just a guy writing from Oregon, and I’m aware this is just a rough outline. Ukraine’s leaders know better than I do how to dispose of their forces. My point in laying this out is both to experiment with ideas that have been bouncing around my head for some time but also help make anyone with any impact on policy aware of just how much more potent Ukraine’s forces could be. Twelve brigades outfitted something like this is at most 20% of Ukraine’s ground forces - Ukraine’s partners can and must do better.
Between Europe and the United States and their global customers there are thousands of tanks in the inventories of countries highly unlikely to need them in the near term. Most are now obsolete for their intended purpose, any more than two tanks showing up anywhere on the front a cause for massive enemy commitments of firepower to take them out. They need to be replaced, and if you share a border with Moscow probably within 2-4 years.
What these old weapons can still do is give more Ukrainians a chance to come back from battle alive, because even an Abrams or Leopard from 1990 is better than a T-64 older than its crew. And there’s just no comparison between a BMP and anything made west of the Dnipro river.
Having closely monitored this conflict since it escalated towards all-out war in late 2021, of this much I’m absolutely certain: western military leaders are not prepared for the future of war. If history repeats itself, it will be up to overwhelmed and outgunned personnel on the line to innovate a solution under fire to stay alive.
I’ll write more about how I see a BBG actually used in the future, but this piece is already too wordy by far. Hazard of doing this part time is that I can’t take all week writing and polishing posts.
So now for the strategic level of the conflict, where as usual the leadership is stuck.
Strategic/Global Matters
With aid from the USA still blocked by partisan wrangling in D.C., Ukraine has been forced into a holding pattern on most fronts. Naturally, Putin has taken the opportunity to yammer about his nuclear arsenal some more, triggering another round of American scholar-pundits dutifully warning that Kyiv is going to have to accept losing some of its sovereign territory to prevent the conflict from escalating.
Ukraine has been warning for a couple months that a major ruscist information warfare operation had commenced, and evidence of it is everywhere right now. The unified message that pro-Putin voices are trying to spread is an interesting paradox: that Moscow is invincible, but also any substantial confrontation with NATO is bound to lead to all-out nuclear war.
It’s a bluff that Putin’s cronies have invested a lot in, to the point that it’s likely now fated to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. He’s all but promising open war with NATO in the future if it doesn’t abandon support for Ukraine. Putin has now begun to openly describe the conflict in Ukraine as a true war, part of a NATO scheme to destroy russia. He’s also committed his empire to a war economy in a manner highly reminiscent of what Germany did after Stalingrad.
Contrary to popular myth in the USA - one of many tragic lies told to the public about that conflict - widespread aerial bombings did absolutely nothing to stop the Nazi economy from successfully converting to a total war footing. Until 1943, Berlin had done everything it possibly could to shield the domestic German economy from the impacts of the fighting, essentially making the same pact with the German people that Putin’s regime has made with russians today: let me do my thing, and most of you won’t have to pay attention.
Germany was able to compensate for nearly all the massive destruction wrought against Germany’s civilian population and industry across 1943 and most of 1944. The Allies suffered thousands of aircrew casualties thanks to a lack of long-range fighter escorts until the middle of 1944. Air power enthusiasts in the 1930s were certain that heavily armed bombers couldn’t be stopped by fighters and that mass destruction would bring the enemy to the negotiating table.
They were wrong. Their descendants, purveyors of the myth of air dominance that NATO relies on, are almost certain to lead the alliance into a tragic defeat if it ever has to fight Putin directly.
German military production and throughput to the front increased until the Allies switched to hitting critical transportation nodes. Bridges, rail yards, and locomotives are all required to keep an economy humming along. Specialized factories are good to hit and oil refineries even better, but it is possible to decentralize production of most military goods to the point that strategic bombing is futile. North Korea was all but flattened during the Korean War by American strategic bombing, yet the stalemate along the present-day DMZ could not be broken.
To defeat an army on the battlefield now more than ever depends on degrading its logistics. You also have to be able to continuously suppress most if not all enemy fighting positions whenever you attempt to move your own forces thanks to the proliferation of cheap drones.
The good news is that Moscow’s forces aren’t very effective at this, despite their much-hyped success in grinding through Avdiivka after four months and upwards of 50,000 casualties. Reverting to an essentially Soviet style of warfare, Moscow doesn’t appear to realize that the main reasons Stalin’s Red Army was able to finally beat Nazi Germany were:
Massive supplies from the USA,
Hitler’s delusional belief in the myth of his military genius,
Destruction of Germany’s early-war veterans in futile campaigns.
Time and again German field commanders throughout 1943 and the first half of 1944 demonstrated that the Red Army, while a gigantic colossus to be sure, remained brutally vulnerable. A combination of improved equipment and the adoption, largely out of necessity, of an elastic defense strategy, transformed the retreat from Stalingrad into a bitter war of attrition across the eastern portions of Ukraine.
At the same time, massive new supplies of military gear and recruits began flowing to German forces fighting on the Eastern Front thanks to Germany’s belated embrace of total war. Germany’s senior officers knew by this point that the Soviet Union backed by its allies couldn’t be defeated, but the casualties they were inflicting on the Red Army were slowly bleeding the USSR out. Though not much acknowledged today, by 1944 Stalin was considering a separate peace with Nazi Germany, suspecting that the Western Allies were playing both sides. The D-Day landings at Normandy were launched in part to follow through on the longstanding commitment to open a second front on the continent that wasn’t in easily-defended Italy and prevent Stalin from leaving the Allies to face Germany alone.
Hitler, however, was determined to win it all. He insisted that German forces go on the attack in 1943, resulting in the epic showdown at Kursk and the loss of Germany’s last substantial mobile reserves. Yet for a full year after outnumbered German forces stubbornly bled the enemy while retreating across Ukraine. The Eastern Front only collapsed in the summer of 1944 when German forces in modern-day Belarus let themselves get caught out by a massive Soviet offensive, Operation Bagration.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has managed to reprise both Stalin and Hitler’s worse mistakes. His biggest success has been acting like North Korea and waving his nuclear arsenal around.
One of the many ironies of the Cold War was that the NATO alliance was essentially founded to prevent Soviet expansion using threats of atomic, later nuclear, annihilation. Europe was so devastated by conventional conflict that its leaders realized a nuclear one wouldn’t actually be that much worse from a practical perspective. If everyone is homeless in deep winter and starving to death, radioactive contamination is the least of their concerns.
The USA, terrified by this grim view, has always been the power pressing for every NATO member to spend more on conventional arms precisely because no American leader would ever actually enter into a nuclear conflict over Europe. The dark truth at the heart of American involvement in NATO is that Article 5 is just words - nobody knows with absolute certainty what will happen if Putin attacks a member. This is the ambiguity that he targets every time he or an ally blathers on about nukes. He’s taunting Europe with the reality that the USA is a terrible ally, hardly able to govern itself much less lead the democratic world.
Ironically, now it’s European leaders who see a conventional Third World War as being likely while the Americans use fear of nuclear escalation to justify appeasing Putin on Ukraine. Once European countries again field the full suite of military capabilities America now provides, which will probably happen by 2026 as the continent ramps up military production, all of a sudden Brussels will feel less of a need to worry about what happens in D.C. It will also become more independent with respect to policy on China, and that’s the transatlantic set’s worst nightmare.
Putin’s ability to play the leaders of the West is probably Moscow’s single most useful weapon. While they dither and hope for the weather to change, he’s preparing for the worst and building arms as fast as his factories can make them. Importing missiles and shells from North Korea and Iran means the balance of power in East Asia and the Middle East are bound to change, making this conflict absolutely a Third World War in the making in any practical sense.
Right now Ukraine is bleeding Moscow’s forces along most of the contact line even as it prepares to launch another major counteroffensive in 2024. Kyiv’s has about five to six months to field a force capable of isolating a single front, gaining the ability to secure temporary air and electromagnetic superiority over the battlefield, and mount swift, overwhelming strikes. A shield-and-spear strategy coupled to an island-hopping operational pattern aimed at Crimea offers Ukraine the best path forward unless aid from abroad radically increases soon. Those twelve modern brigades I propose could and should be twenty-four by July, thirty-six by December.
It is important to keep in mind that Putin can’t win this war now even if he drags it out until 2026 and China goes after Taiwan in a fit of Imperial Japan level delusion. This isn’t a boast or rhetoric, but a plain simple truth. Even if starved of foreign aid, Ukrainian troops number in the hundreds of thousands and would wage a bloody insurgency against Moscow even if it were somehow able to take cities like Kharkiv and Dnipro. Ukraine’s own domestic arms industry is increasing output by leaps and bounds, much of it so far out of the reach of Putin’s ground forces that Ukraine will never have to stop fighting so long as its people refuse to countenance surrender.
Putin can’t win - all he can do now is not lose. That path eventually leads to a forever war against the devil West including active combat operations against NATO. For all the rhetoric about defending every inch of NATO territory, would the USA really go to war over a few square kilometers of northern Finland or Norway’s arctic islands? For that matter, what about uninhabited Attu island, at the western edge of the Aleutian chain?
Most Americans probably don’t know that this is part of Alaska, or that Japan took it over in 1942. I don’t think Putin would try this, but I also didn’t think he’d try to pull a Budapest 1956 or Prague 1968 on Kyiv in the year 2022. Destroying Ukraine’s forces in Donbas? Sure, and I was able to predict quite accurately exactly how Putin planned to accomplish that half of his mad scheme - as did Ukraine, which is why it was able to blunt the attempt, aided in no small part by Putin focusing so much combat power on trying to take Kyiv and Odesa.
It’s the job of Ukraine’s allies to reduce the overall death toll of the conflict by acting now in every way they can. If the USA is determined to be absurd, then use frozen ruscist assets to fund Ukraine’s defense. The $60 billion package stuck in Congress is nice, but only a fifth the seized Muscovite assets sitting in banks around the globe.
So long as the US is willing to make exporting arms to Ukraine a priority, the Arsenal of Democracy is intact. It’s annoying that you can’t rely on Congress to get anything important any more, but that’s how it goes. The money exists, and America will always be open for business. That’s all it’s ever been for.
All that the democratic world lacks is pure old fashioned intestinal fortitude, as a few sergeants I once knew used to say.