Cluster Munitions And Ukraine's Summer Campaign
Another week of steady grind was marked by another nuclear scare and a perverse media controversy over cluster bombs.
Despite little confirmed movement on the ground this past week in Ukraine, quite a lot has been happening at the diplomatic level ahead of the NATO summit presently underway.
Western NATO countries appear dead set on keeping Ukraine out of the alliance by insisting that the war ends before Kyiv becomes a formal member. This gives Putin an effective veto over Ukraine’s membership because until he is out of power the war will never end.
Which is ironic, because now that Putin’s criminal empire is on the edge in the wake of the Wagner revolt nuclear terror is about all he’s got left. Though no ruscist attack has struck the Enerhodar nuclear power plant yet - intelligence reports were pointing towards a possible sabotage event around July 5th - most NATO leaders remain dangerously silent about the risk and what happens after.
Instead, many have decided to spend time decrying the USA’s much belated decision to supply Ukraine with cluster munitions. Worse, media-anointed experts are emerging to downplay the impacts of any nuclear incident, correctly pointing out that Enerhodar is not Chernobyl but failing to address the fact that the core issue at stake is not the amount of radiation released in a catastrophe but whether Putin uses any release as a justification for a nuclear strike in Ukraine or even a NATO country.
Nothing like that is imminent, but the endgame of the Ukraine War almost cannot fail to involve a nuclear showdown now. That is not a call for backing off from offering Ukraine all the support it needs and even immediate NATO membership, just a realistic forecast. If and when it happens panic will be the worst enemy, because contrary to popular speculation there is no straight line between one or even a few nukes going off and all-out nuclear armageddon - but political leaders everywhere will absolutely make full use of the crisis for their own purposes.
In the English speaking world, controversial topics like nuclear weapons and cluster bombs have essentially been colonized by a caste of experts who have a professional stake in who talks about them and what the broader world accepts to be true. This has led to many serious public misconceptions about war and the tools used to wage it, the product of an essentially arbitrary slicing and dicing of military systems leading inexorably to bad policy.
Which, in war, means mutilated flesh and lives lost, the victims most often the people least responsible for the conflict escalating to violence in the first place.
One of the more attractive but dangerous beliefs about warfare is that certain categories of weapons can be successfully banned as an incremental step towards stopping war altogether. Nuclear weapons are said to be controlled by a social taboo against their use; similar arguments are made to back the banning of cluster bombs and land mines.
Neither claim is scientifically proven or even plausible. Both represent something altogether different than their proponents claim: an effort to impose a moral framing on war.
One that is always doomed to break down in times of crisis into mutual recriminations about which side is good or in the right. Which is ultimately what all wars are about: people can’t agree on something fundamental, so they resort to using violence to get their way.
War never changes, and trying to sanitize it by making certain weapons off-limits doesn’t work. And nuclear weapons, despite their owners claiming otherwise, like chemical and biological agents aren’t true weapons at all: they are pure instruments of terror with precious little use on a real battlefield.
Too many civilian efforts to try and make war less awful in fact do nothing but create a system where the people who fight wars are transformed from fellow members of society into a class of other whose association with violence renders them a potential danger to decent folk. This tendency is one of the biggest reasons why so many veterans have such a difficult time coping with civilian life, the message routinely spread through media that people who have participate in war are somehow inherently broken.
It represents an ongoing form of active social alienation dressed up as ritualistic hero-worship and is part of a cruel social game that is at least partly responsible for driving far too many service members to end their lives. Morality must be separated from warfare to the degree possible - this isn’t a call for anything goes behavior, but a recognition of the complexity of the situation and the limits of what the average person in a war is able to control.
So, two sections this week: the first offers an overview of the recent fighting while the second dives into the moral hypocrisy over the opposition to Ukraine receiving cluster munitions.
Cracking The Surovikin Line
Mick Ryan has taken to calling the network of defenses Moscow has dug into southern Ukraine the Surovikin Line after the ruscist general apparently in charge of creating it, and this seems right to me. Given his brutal reputation in Syria Surovikin deserves to be remembered for failing to stop a numerically inferior force from destroying Putin’s precious land bridge to Crimea along the Azov Coast in the summer of 2023.
Much of the English speaking media continues to push the false narrative that Ukraine’s progress in the summer campaign has been slower than expected. Hoped I’ll grant you - everyone is entitled to that. But expectations are something else, and the analysts making the case that Ukraine is running into trouble rarely bother to lay out what their prior expectations were in detail and fail to note the glaring lack of new footage from orc drones showing large numbers of NATO-supplied armored vehicles burning out on the steppe.
It is wise to assume that Kyiv doesn’t plan on launching any risky mass assault until it has clear evidence that Moscow’s reserves are committed and supplies on the front are running low. Right now Ukraine claims to be inflicting upwards of 5-6 times as many serious casualties as it is suffering and continues to batter orc units trying to hold lines exposed to constant artillery fire, so all is as it should be at this stage of the fight now that it is known the ruscists plan to defend forward of their main defensive line.
This isn’t to say that the cost is not horrific, just that there’s no reason to doubt Ukraine yet. As ever, ammunition supplies are the key determinant of success - that’s why unlocking US reserves of cluster ammunition is such a big deal. Biden as usual flubbed his public case - Ukraine isn’t close to running out of ammunition though it could by the end of the year in key categories, as the excellent Kyiv Independent reports, unless new shells are delivered in a timely manner - but the ordnance is finally moving.
Clearing entrenchments requires either the blood of the infantry or a whole lot of high explosives unless until someone comes up with a drone capable of doing the job. And aid for Kyiv still isn’t coming at anywhere near the speed required to dispel the perception in Moscow that the Biden Administration is actively hoping for a stalemate and frozen conflict.
Given the recent revelation that back channel talks are being held between a group of old-school US foreign policy wonks and diplomats from Moscow, the Biden Administration has now sent just about every signal possible to Putin that it hopes for a ceasefire before winter. This looks an awful lot like last fall after Moscow retreated unexpectedly from Kherson and the Biden administration dragged its feet on delivering tanks, jets, and even air defense systems until Putin’s aerial assault on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure proved he wasn’t done with his war.
Though new aid packages have been authorized in recent days and provide another two battalions worth of Bradley and Stryker infantry fighting vehicles, the pace of equipment deliveries and training of personnel is still much too slow.
I misstated last week that Ukraine has only received 50 modern Leopards - the total numbers are now at 21 Leopard 2A6 models and about 50 Leopard 2A4s, with another 10-20 of these pledged. That is in addition to 14 confirmed (hopefully it’s actually more) UK-sourced Challenger 2s in the field. About 20 Leopard 2A5 models have been pledged, but are not confirmed to be on the battlefield yet - this may change now that their partner CV-90 IFVs from Sweden are deployed.
Old Leopard 1A5 tanks are reported to be coming online in the next couple months in large numbers, but these are not in any way equivalent to the newer Leo 2s. Their armor is substantially weaker, systems older, and main gun smaller, being designed back in the 1960s to fight Soviet T-54/55s. Upgrades in the 1980s made them viable and probably a match for the T-72 models common in the ruscist ranks, but that isn’t saying a lot.
One of the harsh realities of breaking through heavy fortifications is that you go through a lot of gear, even if the majority is only damaged rather than destroyed outright, and the heavier the better from the perspective of the crew. This was why Ukraine needed to have more inventory on hand by now than it does.
Generally speaking, in a military formation you can only count on about 80% of your assigned equipment to be ready for combat at any given time. Once you start having to repair damaged kit and absorb total losses, 60-70% is more likely - that’s part of why deploying a military unit slowly degrades its combat power even if it isn’t participating in intensive operations.
Ukraine fields about 14 tanks in a single company and two companies plus a command platoon of 2-3 tanks in each brigade’s armor battalion for a total of about 31. Even if Kyiv has chosen to pair each modern tank company with one using older gear exclusively for infantry support, that only leaves 5-6 brigades in total each equipped with a dozen modern tanks backed by 1-2 battalions riding in modern infantry fighting vehicles and another 2-3 equipped with armored trucks.
The other 20 or so brigades participating in operations have legacy or lighter equipment like the thin-skinned French AMX-10s or refurbished/captured T-72s. And even outfitted to this level these brigades are still less powerful than a NATO equivalent in terms of raw firepower.
Add in the weak level of air support available thanks to the inexcusable delays in supplying F-18, F-16, and/or Gripen multirole fighters. Then layer on top of that the fact that most of Ukraine’s modern air defenses have to be used to guard major cities like Kyiv and Odesa. For good measure, remember that Ukrainian units have been dealing with severely rationed ammunition supplies for over a year.
Under these conditions, rapid progress in early June would have pretty much guaranteed that Ukrainian troops were walking into a massive ambush. Proceeding with caution is a sign of competence and probable success by the end of the summer, if not before - given the timeline of deliveries this spring Ukraine waiting until midsummer to launch its offensive seemed not only prudent but necessary. I strongly suspect that Kyiv was under pressure to make it look like it was gaining ground ahead of the NATO summit, though testing the Surovikin line early to see how the defense was planned was likely always to be the first stage so the timing might just have been convenient.
Regardless, though there haven’t been a lot of blue and yellow flags raised over villages in the past week, combat operations have been ongoing and quite intense based on available footage. Ukrainian forces are assaulting tree lines as they creep through minefields, clearing paths for follow-on forces to use, friendly artillery switching between pounding enemy fortifications on the front and artillery well behind the lines.
Soldiers have to advance through shattered tree trunks under what leaf cover remains to literally clear enemy bunkers with hand grenades. This is some of the worst kind of fighting, rivaling only urban combat, death coming randomly from bullets or bombs or traps hidden in shattered trees.
The fact that Ukraine has been making progress at all and reporting daily ruscist casualty tolls in the 1,000 range is a testament to the capabilities and bravery of its fighters. A recent Meduza/BBC investigation used some clever statistical techniques to estimate the true casualty toll among the orcs, and it largely confirms the reports of Ukraine’s own defense forces, estimating at least 47,000 ruscist war dead and as many or more seriously wounded.
Ukraine reports almost 240,000 enemies eliminated, which given the Meduza/BBC numbers appears to indicate total confirmed casualties. It appears probable that half are possibly treatable but still likely removed from the conflict permanently given the prevailing level of morale among the orcs. Putin’s regime is doing all it can to hide the scale of its losses by abandoning its dead in the field and pretending anyone who hasn’t been confirmed KIA is alive and well, but this tactic will bite it in the end when families realize they’ve been duped.
Although the Wagner revolt will ultimately take a toll on orc morale - another reason why Putin’s regime is desperate to act like it didn’t happen at all - soldiers in the field are generally so removed from anything outside of their immediate surroundings that they can’t be expected to give up and surrender just because the home front is reportedly a mess. Only once entire formations are cut off will morale crater to the point that mass surrenders start to happen.
Ukraine is bleeding, but all indications are that Moscow is bleeding out. It is worth recalling that if Moscow’s military position were not so grave there would be no talk of any contrived accident at Enerhodar. The Nova Kakhova dam would not have been blown up. Russian freedom fighters would not be launching cross-border raids every month and threatening more. Putin would not still be sending people to their death trying to advance along the northern portion of the front in order to distract Ukraine from hitting the main defensive positions in the south.
Even in Bakhmut, a city the orcs sacrificed around 20,000 dead and 40,000 seriously wounded to seize, the situation is looking awful for Putin. Ukraine has still not committed the bulk of its combat power and yet is driving the enemy back, striking the vital towns of Klischiivka and Kurdiumivka south of Bakhmut.
Kyiv’s precise plan of action is still impossible to pin down, but what seems to be developing are three separate pushes by distinct corps allocated around 10 brigades each. Only 2-3 on each front seem to be engaged, presently inflicting as many casualties on the enemy as possible as troops move closer to the main defensive lines.
Whether they then turn and clear them to open up a big hole in the forward section of the Surovikin line ahead or try to create corridors through won’t be known until liberation reports start streaming in again. But something big appears to be in the works north of Bakhmut, whether a big push by Moscow towards Lyman or Ukraine towards Lysychansk - or both - is hard to say.
Could be that neither happens and Ukraine goes all-out in the south. While open source reporting isn’t comprehensive, it certainly looks as if Ukraine has been focusing on blasting enemy positions in the sort of pattern that could develop into a push to surround and take Polohy, a linchpin along the Surovikin line.
Crack the line anywhere, it might start to crumble everywhere - this is just one way things could play out if Ukraine focuses its main effort in these areas and the attacks so far are not a diversion.
And the advantage of attacking on multiple fronts is that it can force the enemy to spread out, which if you happen to be partially surrounded - as Ukraine is, geographically speaking - allows you to take advantage of what military specialists like to call interior lines. Which mostly boils down to being able to shift your forces quickly between fronts - being surrounded can actually turn into a serious advantage for a well-prepared force.
It helps a lot if you have the right tools for the gritty job, though.
Moral Hypocrisy And Cluster Bombs
The brutal irony of war is that most of the people fighting it would prefer to be doing anything else, even the orcs. This one is the first in history to be so fully documented, the horrors of the thing revealed for anyone to witness if they have the stomach for it.
Civilian efforts to ban certain classes of weapons tend to annoy the heck out of military personnel, the very people you might think would most appreciate the effort.
The trouble is that they would much prefer that civilians didn’t make them fight in the first place. And in a situation where they have no choice - like when the leader of the country next door decides yours doesn’t even exist and launches a genocidal invasion - their sole desire is to win as swiftly and with as little bloodshed as possible among their ranks.
I’d say the rest of us owe at least that much to them. Wars of attrition grind human beings into pulp, transforming flesh into just another industrial input. They represent an abject failure of strategy by one or both sides to come up with a more creative solution to win.
Cluster munitions are absolutely horrific weapons: they are like regular bombs except that they burst open in the air before impact, releasing dozens or even hundreds of much smaller bombs that cover a wide area. They can even fall into trenches and bunkers to cause serious injuries where a bigger shell would expend most of its explosive force throwing dirt into the air.
Naturally, some bombs of any size will fail to explode, turning into mines - many are designed to operate that way. Cluster bomblets are just large enough to maim or kill anyone who doesn’t notice them in time, and children, tragically, are some of the most common victims thanks to their tendency to touch shiny things on the ground.
That is why cluster weapons, like land mines, have been the subject of several decades of activism that aims to ban them completely. It is well-meaning but horribly misguided in the same way that animal rights activists releasing livestock from captivity only makes the animals’ lives more miserable and traumatic before their inevitable demise.
What people who advocate bans on common weapons don’t understand is that if it were possible to exert meaningful control over combatants they wouldn’t send people to slaughter each other in the first place. The vast majority of efforts throughout history, going back to the crossbow, have had a cruel ulterior motive: they aim to generate an artificial divide between good violence and bad, a moral high ground that makes their violence acceptable and others’ wrong.
That’s exactly why Moscow says it has the right to do what it does in Ukraine and elsewhere: Moscow is the new Rome, the center of the Christian world, arbiter of truth and justice. The fact that Washington makes the same claims is indicative of the nature of the system shaping their mutual behavior.
Moral arguments in matters of war are always an attempt to evade the real material questions of power that drive a dispute in the first place. They nearly always do more harm than good, eroding the rules that have slowly come into place to try and make violent conflict a little less miserable. These are important ideas most people will at least say they agree with, like not harming anyone who poses no threat and exchanging prisoners, and can be enforced by the combatants themselves by focusing their activities solely on the military tasks at hand and not getting involved with civilian affairs.
One day it might be possible to convince almost every country around the world to refuse to fight in urban areas. That’s a goal worth working towards that could be achieved across most of the world because the logic of avoiding urban fights wherever possible holds true for just about everyone except insurgents and rebels, whose fights are always for autonomy and can be dealt with through siege tactics.
Why don’t people who advocate for bans on cluster munitions and land mines go down this road? Consider why they don’t push to ban bullets of certain sizes instead of going after land mines or cluster bombs.
I’ve known medics who have had to treat gunshot wounds inflicted on civilians caused by stray 5.56mm bullets used in American M-4s as well as those made by the 7.62mm rounds that classic AK-47s use; most much preferred to deal with wounds made by the latter - despite making bigger entry and exit wounds - because if the victim survives the initial shock of the hit and no critical organs or blood vessels are damaged the medic has a strong chance of giving them enough blood to keep them alive long enough to be evacuated to a field hospital.
NATO standard 5.56mm rounds, by contrast, tend to bounce around inside the body, shredding organs and blood vessels and causing internal bleeding most field medics can’t hope to stop. They are meant to injure before killing their victims because back in the Cold War some NATO bean counter realized that it harms the enemy’s overall war effort more if its soldiers linger a while before dying, absorbing scarce resources.
Is there any prominent activist movement demanding that NATO countries make their rifle rounds less inherently vicious? What about white phosphorous, an illumination tool that also happens to be fantastic at burning people taking shelter in fortifications? Or thermobaric explosives, which create a pressure wave that literally turns people’s lungs to mush?
Nope! Not even when they kill civilians. Why? Because too many people have been encouraged to distinguish between a weapon that you can blame someone for using in the moment and one that continues to do harm much later. The first kind is something the general public can be more easily convinced only harms people actually doing the fighting despite combat in any place where people almost always killing civilians.
Support for Ukraine or any other country fighting for its autonomy must be rooted in the fundamental right of all people to self-determination, not the claim that their fight is only legitimate so long as it conforms to someone’s aesthetic preferences, or you’ll never stand any hope of getting warfare under control.
Weapons are weapons and violence is violence: the real reason that weapons of mass destruction have largely been kept off modern battlefields is that they are so indiscriminate that their use can screw up the plans of the user as well as the target. Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons simply aren’t that useful of battlefield weapons, on the balance, while land mines and cluster bombs absolutely are.
There is absolutely value in creating rules to govern the conduct of warfare - these, however, have to be attached to geography or conduct. Places where no one can fight without suffering consequences; actions no one can take without undermining the morale of their own people.
The arguments against giving Ukraine cluster weapons are misguided in a number of counts, but perhaps none more than this: virtually all of Ukraine will have to go through intensive de-mining before people can feel safe in their daily lives again already. Moscow has used cluster munitions since day one of its all-out invasion, as has Ukraine, and the failure rates on old Soviet stocks are known to be ridiculously high.
More unexploded ordnance makes no difference at this point. If you really care about mitigating the impact of the war on Ukraine’s civilians and have the capital, invest in automated mine detection and clearing technology. Or automated anti-drone machine guns. Or more selective electronic warfare systems.
Just don’t pretend that you get to claim some magical moral high ground because your country eschews the use of certain tools of destruction. Such terrain doesn’t exist, because killing is killing and death is death - the ruscists have to be defeated because their behavior indicates a clear desire to do this again to some other country if the opportunity presents itself.
Putin’s war has killed upwards of ten thousand Ukrainian civilians - including over 500 children - in a conflict that had no reason for breaking out except the malignant nature of his regime and the weakness it correctly perceived in the USA’s partisan political dysfunction.
Putin, thankfully, is being slowly brought to account for everything he has done by a country he doesn’t even accept exists. His military options have dwindled to clinging to every scrap of dirt his troops can, bleeding Ukraine and its partners until the latter decide the cost is no longer worth the gain.
Which is, of course, why the world just went through another nuclear scare last week, even if the media is downplaying the threat of imminent escalation as a result of shenanigans at Enerhodar. Provoking a panicked reaction in NATO capitols is an option that will likely prove too attractive for Putin to not try once he knows for certain that his troops are beaten.
There will be more scares of that sort in the days ahead. In the meantime here’s hoping Ukraine gets some good news out of the NATO summit this week.
At some point the tension between what NATO leaders say and what the alliance does is going to snap. It’s past time to accept that if NATO has any role at all in this world it is to protect Europe from whatever challenge Moscow throws up next - including stabilizing the postrussian world when Putin is gone.
That means accepting Ukraine regardless of what Putin says or does. If he chooses open war with NATO, the fight was inevitable anyway. Better it comes when he’s not ready because most of his armed forces are foundering in Ukraine than five years from now after he’s had a chance to regroup and the veneer of NATO unity has fully frayed.