Diagnosing Failure: Ukraine's Summer 2023 Counteroffensive
Another excellent RUSI report offers the best picture yet of what happened on the road to Tokmak. A solution to the challenge of conducting offensive operations in the Network Age is in sight.
This special feature serves a kind of prequel to my upcoming piece on The Scout’s Way of War. RUSI’s fascinating in-depth account of the inner workings of Ukraine’s 2023 Summer Counteroffensive confirms a number of theories about modern warfare that I’ve been developing for almost two decades.
I approach war and warfare as a doctor might cancer. Though inevitable, incidence can be minimized and unchecked spread largely prevented with rigorous surveillance and active treatment. Sadly, the study of war as a science is roughly at the level European medicine was two hundred years ago. Many doctors were still employing bloodletting in 1824.
Every battle in every war is a natural scientific experiment. Lessons about humans from the individual level right up to whole of society can be drawn. Despite the frontline chaos and era-specific technology, the natural principles of war will never change. The trouble is always figuring out how to apply them in the field. Scientists run into the same problem in their work: an experiment might sound fantastic in the lab, but actually performing it is another story.
Ukraine’s attempt to reach the Azov sea and cut Moscow’s supply lines supporting the occupation of Kherson and Crimea was one of the most hyped and closely watched military campaigns of all time. In point of fact, to label it a failure is a mistake: it achieved a great deal, just not what the planners had hoped.
However, according to the standards set by its designers it did fail. In a very real sense, success was always impossible barring a total ruscist collapse because of how slow and limited allied support was - and remains.
Aside from resources, though, another reason the counteroffensive failed was that contemporary military professionals are equipped with doctrine - a theory of warfare - which has been proven as faulty as Putin’s assumption that his ill-prepared forces could take Kyiv by storm in three days. To state the situation bluntly, high-level military leaders in the USA and NATO do not understand how to fight a modern war.
If a serious threat capable of drawing the right lessons emerges, they won’t be prepared. A lot of good people will die.
Averting the same fate that the British and French suffered at the hands of German forces in 1940 is entirely possible. No professional military organization around the world fully appreciated the power of drones and networks before ordinary Ukrainians innovated their way into the history books. As it turns out, big, expensive, slow Predator drones controlled from Florida weren’t the future of warfare. Useful for plinking insurgents lacking proper air defenses, even the Houthis and Hezbollah can now shoot them down. They stay well back from the front lines in Ukraine.
Smaller drones that simply crash into targets to kill them won’t work forever thanks to electronic warfare and active protection systems, but for the next few years they represent a serious threat. Eventually they will be replaced by miniature combat aircraft firing small, laser-guided munitions in conjunction with spotter drones and ground troops. These will be opposed by drone interceptors, and slowly but surely organization and strategy will be of paramount importance in breaking battlefield deadlocks.
To cope with the highly chaotic battlespace of today demands that military institutions be rebuilt from the ground up - or replaced. Heritage is important and must be preserved in spirit, but many past practices and assumptions have to fall by the wayside. Just as drill and ceremony faded in importance during my time in uniform, as counterinsurgency training expanded to fill every extra working hour, do do defense services in democratic countries have to get back to the basics and shed any unnecessary baggage.
Combat operations have to be rescaled to handle the miniaturization of air support and democratization of information that define the Network Age. A company now fills the same space that a battalion used to, and battalions operate like brigades - this is a lesson that far too many scholars and practitioners alike appear to be missing. They don’t feel in their bones what it’s like to be an ordinary soldier on the ground in an environment where everything you do is seen and lethal force comes down swiftly and with terrifying precision.
To fully appreciate the intellectual gap that led to a less than optimal battle plan in 2023 requires some context. To be clear: the fault lies as much if not more with NATO doctrine than Ukrainian. However, even Ukraine’s high-level officers show signs of failing to appreciate how decisively practices must change.
In the fall of 2024, after the current wave of orc attacks have culminated, Ukraine will begin pushing back. But this won’t look like the counteroffensive of 2023.
The Azov Front, 2022-2023
Preparing and launching military operations involves so many moving pieces that planning has to begin months in advance. The stage for Ukraine’s operations in 2023 was set by the successful counteroffensives that began in late fall of 2022.
When Putin’s invasion didn’t succeed in three days, I forecast that the worst case scenario would be Kyiv and Kharkiv falling under siege while Ukraine was forced to retreat from Donbas. Much of the country east of the Dnipro would be lost, perhaps forever, with Ukraine saving Kyiv and hopefully entering NATO to ward off any new aggression.
Thankfully Ukraine’s first counterattacks in April and May forced Putin to retreat from the north of the country, ending the threat to Kyiv. They also pushed back ruscist troops north of Kharkiv, removing the immediate threat there. But in the east and south, Muscovite forces kept coming, and Ukraine was running out of artillery.
While most American observers that summer were trumpeting the few dozen HIMARS and M270 rocket launchers and their immediate impact on Moscow’s centralized logistics, I was watching as the orcs fully consolidated their control over the land bridge to Crimea. They were also still dangerously close to breaking through near Izium and possibly Velyka Novosilka to encircle Ukraine’s forces fighting in Donbas. Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk fell, and enemy forces were pressing on urban Donbas:
Moscow’s forces finally ran out of steam in summer, and the start of counteroffensive operations in Kherson was an encouraging sign that Ukraine was not similarly exhausted. Unfortunately, despite severely limiting Moscow’s ability to supply troops on the north bank of the Dnipro, progress was slow going. The one thing the orcs are good at is digging in.
But with Putin’s invasion force stretched thin on all fronts, having to dispatch the last ready reserves to Kherson left the occupied eastern portion of Kharkiv district vulnerable. After launching a series of probing attacks in the area west of Izium, Ukrainian forces surprised a ruscist unit and overran it, triggering a chain reaction that sent the enemy running. In days an area the size of Belgium was liberated, ending the threat of Sloviansk being attacked from the north and east at once.
It was this spectacular success that proved to the world that Ukraine could not only withstand the ruscist tide, but throw it back. At that time there were real fears that Putin would go nuclear in response, as one of the longstanding scenarios involving nuclear escalation by Moscow involves a serious battlefield setback that its leaders decide threaten the stability of the regime. These fears only escalated when Ukraine’s offensive in Kherson began to make headway at last. With Moscow fearing a general collapse of the entire then 1,500km front, Putin belatedly allowed a retreat over the Dnipro while ramping up threats of nuclear war.
Fortunately, the scenario where ruscist sabotage of the occupied power plant at Enerhodar leads to a release of radiation that Moscow then uses to justify a tactical nuclear strike has not yet come to pass. Instead, Putin tried to play off the retreats as goodwill gestures ahead of negotiations, a ploy that gained him several critical months of delay in the provision of allied aid to Ukraine.
The success of the 2022 counteroffensives let Ukraine make the case that with the right level of military support it could break the ruscist lines and avoid a stalemate. Cutting off Crimea should even today be enough to bring Putin to the bargaining table if not collapse his regime outright. At this stage, a ceasefire in exchange for both sides returning to their pre-2022 positions might even satisfy Ukraine’s public, especially with Crimea now fairly easy to neutralize.
Ukraine’s challenge in late 2022 was convincing allies to provide it with modern armored vehicles, air defenses, and combat jets. Biden appeared inclined to take Putin’s offer for talks at face value - at least until the campaign to destroy Ukraine’s energy and heating infrastructure began that winter. This forced NATO’s hand, leading to the provision of modern long-range air defenses. Putin followed up by unleashing an assault on Bakhmut that was so reckless NATO leaders again had no choice but to respond to Ukraine’s pleas.
Yet Ukraine only received around a third of what Zaluzhnyi asked for, and gear only began to arrive in Ukraine during the spring of 2023. Then Ukraine needed time to train troops on the use of NATO-style gear as well as figure out how to keep a veritable zoo of different designs in working order.
It wasn’t difficult for an independent observer to time the start of the operation, nor was locating approximately where Ukraine would strike. In fact, before the Kherson counteroffensive began I had thought Ukraine would try to make a run at Melitopol to break the land bridge to Crimea then and there. As it turns out, per RUSI, that’s exactly what Ukraine would have liked to try.
After the disaster in Kharkiv, Moscow became positively obsessed with preventing a repeat. That along with the relative success of the fortifications that made Ukraine’s push in Kherson a slow grind encouraged the orcs to construct the Surovikin Line - starting at the bend of the Dnipro where Ukraine would have tried to attack if had been able to in autumn of 2022.
On top of that, Putin ate the political cost of mobilizing, and with every month that passed more recruits flowed into the orc ranks. Their individual performance hardly improved, but numbers have a quality of their own when your ammunition supplies are constantly rationed.
In short, the restoration of ruscist combat power was able to keep pace with the increase in Ukraine’s. Still, it’s one thing to mobilize hundreds of thousands of soldiers and another to make them willing to fight on foreign soil. And Melitopol wasn’t the only or even necessarily the best target of a counteroffensive after the end of 2022.
The major rail trunk that Moscow uses to keep Crimea connected to the rest of the ruscist logistics network runs about halfway between the front lines in southern Ukraine and the Azov Sea. Melitopol, Berdiansk, and Mariupol are all equally worthy targets, and if Ukrainian troops can ever get within comfortable artillery range of the tracks this plus the slow strangulation of Crimea can render Moscow’s entire position west of the cutoff point untenable.
The limited number of armored vehicles given to Ukraine by its allies made it even easier to predict where and even when Ukraine was going to move. Its only option was to achieve surprise by striking on more than one front in order to make it difficult for Moscow to know where to dispatch reserves. This is a rough map of my thinking in the spring of 2023:
This doesn’t go into detail about how the big arrow would be constructed, but the basic idea is that two 20-30km fronts would open up between Huliaipole and Velyka Novosilka. The Surovikin Line at that point lacked a second barrier line extending all the way across the Azov Front, and this offered hope of getting around the worst of it and leaving a large ruscist force stuck holding Melitopol. If Ukraine had been able to reach Bilmak or Rozivka, the rail line would be cut.
Even as late as July, when Ukraine’s actual deployments were known, the potential for a pincer move remained strong. While I’d have kept the pincers closer together at the start, at this scale the operation could have theoretically worked the same way.
The goal in this kind of operation is to force a portion of the defending force into a pocket, or kettle, as Germans termed it. A double envelopment is one of the oldest and most effective battlefield tactics across history, and the basic concept scales quite well. Even a squad of 10-12 soldiers may attempt to hit an enemy position from two sides while keeping the defenders fixated on the threat of a direct frontal assault.
Defending against this is a matter of carefully allocating resources to break up the attacker’s rhythm. While holding the center, troops rush back and forth between the endangered flanks to slow the enemy’s progress. The trouble for the defender is that their forces can soon be so compressed in space that they lose the ability to freely maneuver, selecting the best places to fight. Another problem is the difficulty of sending in supplies and reinforcements when the pincers extend on either flank.
At the local level, this is what ruscist ground forces almost always try to do whenever they encounter Ukrainian defenses: fix them in place then work around the flanks. A defining feature of this war has been the devolution of the logic that once held across an entire campaign down to the tactical echelon. The strategic, operational, and tactical levels no longer correspond to proximity to the frontline - they’re distinct but tightly coupled domains, like someone safely driving a car in the moment while also making sure it has enough fuel and stays on the correct highway.
Offensive actions now demand that small units act like whole battalions and brigades once did. The reduction in the number of troops in the contact zone is offset by drone-backed surveillance and fires.
In thinking through how I’d apply theory to design a Ukrainian offensive a year and a half ago, I applied a simple set of rules.
Ukraine needed to avoid as much of the Surovikin Line as possible.
Two distinct but mutually supporting operational attack vectors were needed to complicate the enemy’s defense plan.
Terrain had to be as clear of natural obstacles as possible, with the end goal being to get Ukrainian forces onto the Azov highlands where they would have more cover to help ward off counterattacks.
The attack had to move quickly enough to prevent Moscow from having time to deploy a new echelon of reserves.
Each thrust, east and west, would have faced the exact same problems that Ukrainian troops did along the road to Tokmak. Moscow chose to defend forward of its main defense line, sacrificing a lot of troops to prevent Ukraine’s forces from gathering momentum. This allowed the orcs to push reinforcements to the main Ukrainian thrust once it was identified. My plan could easily have failed.
However, with two distinct and equally threatening pincers to contend with, Moscow would have had a tougher time concentrating enough troops to stop both without making them extremely vulnerable to HIMARS attacks. Ukraine could have converted the double thrust into a single axis offensive if it ran into trouble. Often in the history of warfare that has been enough to generate a breakthrough sufficient to force the enemy into a vulnerable position, turning its flank and transforming the stalled pincer into a wall the enemy can be pressed against.
The objective of every military campaign is to destroy the enemy’s ability to resist. You do this, in the baldest sense, by developing a tighter reaction loop - OODA, for those into Boyd’s theory - than your opponent can cope with. This advantage can be developed at any level, and once accomplished will generate an asymmetry vulnerable to rigorous exploitation.
Put more simply: wherever possible, force the enemy to throw resources into a losing battle. If they don’t realize they’re being bled out, even better. Find their weakest units and hit them relentlessly.
The biggest problem with this approach was that Ukraine’s backers didn’t give it enough modern gear. Western armored vehicles were not designed to lead charges into the enemy front. Their purpose was to defeat these, using quality to offset Soviet numbers. Armored vehicles punch through the enemy lines after scouts and combat engineers working in conjunction with infantry teams have created a vulnerability. Vehicles offer mobility and fire support, but they are not in and of themselves meant to spearhead every fight. They make it possible to attack deeper into an enemy defense zone than infantry on their feet ever could, then hold what they took. But they are not magic.
Ukraine wasn’t given enough equipment to operate in this way. Kyiv also probably should not have concentrated most NATO gear in a few brigades that were also staffed by fresh troops. For logistical reasons, this made some sense, but it should have been experienced soldiers who got modern gear first, not new recruits.
In conjunction with NATO planners, at least insofar as the Ukrainian sources informing the RUSI report are willing to say, Ukraine was pressured to push all its formations equipped with modern NATO gear in a single-axis push straight through the heaviest ruscist defenses along the Surovikin Line. US/NATO officers essentially tried to replicate Desert Storm, with Ukraine launching a feint towards Bakhmut or Mariupol to confuse the enemy.
A number of Ukrainian leaders have commented to the effect that the battle plan was leaked to the enemy through espionage, but sadly that wasn’t required. It was exactly what you’d expect a committee of senior NATO and Ukrainian generals trying to bridge their respective philosophical differences to come up with. Tragically, the entire 2023 counteroffensive was, as I came to suspect, at least partly a political show.
Ukraine had to convince NATO experts that modern armored vehicles, training, and advice would turn the tide in a few weeks in order to get hold of any at all. What was contributed and in what quantities, along with where it was deployed in Ukraine, told Moscow almost everything it needed to know.
In effect, Ukraine was forced to pitch a plan so early on and was equipped by its partners solely to carry the thing that it could have only worked had every planning assumption gone right and luck been on Ukraine’s side. To make some effort at surprise, Kyiv chose to launch two diversionary attacks, one in Bakhmut and the other south of Velyka Novosilka.
The latter axis in particular could have evolved into the eastern pincer I had hoped to see had ruscist troops not maintained a stubborn defense aided by some Ukrainian mistakes. Ukraine’s Marine brigades leading the push up the Mokri Yali valley actually liberated more towns and about as much territory than the bigger offensive south of Orihiv.
Still, Moscow could tell where Ukraine wanted to focus its efforts by where brigades like 47th and 33rd Mechanized and 82nd Air Assault were positioned. Thanks to delays in receiving vital aid, Ukraine’s counteroffensive was also rushed. Naturally, as soon as Ukraine ran into trouble, leading media-facing Ivory Tower “experts” like Michael Kofman pivoted to blaming Ukrainians for everything that had gone wrong.
Never mind that Ukraine lacked modern aircraft, considered essential in all NATO doctrine. Or that the USA didn’t send cluster munitions until the offensive had already faltered. Though Ukraine did receive Storm Shadow/SCALP cruise missiles, there have always been strict limits on their use, and strike planning takes up to a day because everything has to be pre-programmed with the help of industry contacts before the missiles are loaded onto Su-24 jets. ATACMS was still taboo at that time.
It was the summer of 2023 that all of a sudden people stopped talking about Ukraine winning the war and began whispering that Putin couldn’t lose. Though Ukraine is blamed by the English speaking media for allegedly hyping what it could achieve, Ukraine’s leaders were in a Catch-22. They still are.
To avoid repeating past mistakes, Ukraine’s allies need to move quickly to replenish its stocks of modern gear. There is no excuse for any NATO member to cling to anything now, not when Moscow’s ability to sustain the burn rate in armored vehicles and artillery barrels appears to be reaching a critical point early than predicted.
Now, without further ado, to a partial dissection of the RUSI report.
RUSI Report - Critical Commentary
While RUSI’s research is excellent, it suffers from the same conceptual flaws that made the counteroffensive a bust in the first place. This is nobody’s fault: every paradigm has its blind spots.
But these prove deadly in war, so constructive critique is a literal lifesaver when practical lessons will be drawn from a report. A number of the criticisms the authors leveled, while reasonable, still miss a critical point: World War Two is not always the best ideal conceptual model for combined arms operations.
In academia, I gravitated towards the pragmatic-critical school of thought in most matters. Critical Theory has been politicized by activists who have completely distorted what it’s about and the role it can play. While certainly influenced by Marxist thinking, most working Critical Theory long ago rejected Marxist dogma. Diehard Marxists tend to hate systems thinking because it views their progressive vision of historical evolution as an illusion.
Critical Theory has almost nothing to do with Critical Race Theory, which despite using some of the same language is fundamentally Postmodern in nature and impact and emerged from legal, not scientific, scholarship.
Critical Theory is at the heart of any effective Systems approach involving people. It centers all analysis around the universal ethical principle of maximum freedom for all, however individuals define it for themselves. Negotiating necessary boundaries to secure the right of everyone to pursue life and happiness in a world where their priorities are bound to conflict is what politics is for. Diversity is healthy because it’s the ultimate source of adaptive capacity. But communities still require a sense of unity around certain values, with individuals free to move where they prefer to be.
Analysis of rhetoric is an important part of Critical Theory. The way people speak says a lot about what they believe. So a close examination of the RUSI report is highly valuable if you want to understand the state of mind of the people planning military operations.
That’s why much of this section will be comprised of quotes that I'll follow up with commentary to offer added context. Hopefully this offers a sense of the dialog that scholars are supposed to be having when they publish research.
It’s important to keep in mind that not everything stated in the RUSI report is entirely accurate - something the authors are up front about. Ukraine probably always aimed to evolve the fight differently than the RUSI authors assume. It’s better for ruscist intelligence analysts to believe that Ukraine’s plan was obvious and its leaders’ thinking totally straightforward than get a complete portrait of the various options that were almost certainly considered.
With that, to the analysis! Here’s a good quote to begin, discussing the state of Ukrainian planning in the fall of 2022.
In terms of impact on the war if successful, the most attractive plan was to push south from Zaporizhzhia towards Melitopol and thereby sever the neck of Crimea, while simultaneously cutting the supply lines to Russian forces holding the right bank of the Dnipro River around Kherson. This axis was high risk. The consequence of the thrust would be a long and thin penetration with Russian forces on both sides. If the Russians responded aggressively this thrust could fail.
Isn’t it ironic that this is exactly what NATO leaders advised Ukraine to do nine months later? And that was after Moscow had already pulled out of its exposed bridgehead in Kherson, when it was known how potent fortifications could be thanks to the trouble Ukrainian troops had punching through before Moscow retreated for want of supplies.
As far as preparing brigades for future offensive action, here are some useful bits:
The expansion of the AFU after the invasion increased the number of troops, but there was not a proportional number of experienced brigade staffs so that brigades tended to be given more battalions under command… If the AFU was to conduct further successful offensive operations, it needed to build new brigades, appropriately equipped for the task.
This is why I recommend expanding existing brigades that have proven staffs and fitting them out with modern kit. 3rd Assault, 47th Mechanized, and a dozen or so others stand out so much that they have little trouble attracting recruits. The reality is that any formation larger than a battalion is so visible that intense brigade-level attacks are probably a relic of the past anyway. A good brigade needs as many battlegroups as it can manage and an area of responsibility to match.
In terms of having enough resources to wage a successful campaign in the summer of 2023, Ukraine’s stubborn defense of Bakhmut has attracted a great deal of flak from American sources in particular. Saying that Kyiv wasted too many people and shells on the Bakmut front in early 2023 was for a time a popular way to explain the failure of NATO doctrine and equipment to magically win the Ukraine War in a month.
As I argued at the time, the truth is more complicated. While Bakhmut was indeed held too long, until Ukrainian forces were partly surrounded by ruscist advances to the north and south the fight on this front was worthwhile. Wagner group was annihilated at - initially - a low exchange rate. As this worsened over time, however, Ukraine didn’t pull back as fast as it should. Here’s the RUSI report on Bakhmut:
There has been a protracted debate about the efforts expended by the AFU in the defence of Bakhmut. Once depopulated by shelling, the city itself was of little value. However, the concern within the Ukrainian General Staff was that if Bakhmut fell without the AFRF culminating there, their next objective would be Chasiv Yar. Chasiv Yar not only straddles a ridge that would have facilitated further offensive operations, but if captured would also bring the rail and ground lines of communication from Kostyantynivka under Russian fire control and could bring Kramatorsk within range of Russian artillery, risking its depopulation.
Ukrainian troops have been fighting all year to defend Chasiv Yar against fierce ruscist attacks for exactly this reason. The sooner Moscow occupied Bakhmut, the earlier it would begin the inevitable push on Chasiv Yar. And Ukraine can only lose so much ground on this front: if urban Donbas falls, Moscow will have an extremely powerful fortress a knife’s thrust from severing the road connecting Dnipro and Kharkiv.
Both sides in this conflict have certain political pressure points that, if struck, will likely force someone to accept a bitter peace. For Moscow this is Crimea, and in Ukraine’s case it’s any of its major cities. Each depends on foreign backers who will take certain kinds of defeats as a signal to pull back. Convincing China to cease its tacit backing for Moscow depends on Crimea becoming untenable.
Here’s a taste of how politics intersects with operational choices in the modern world:
Thus, while Ukraine was losing experienced personnel, Russia was expending what it considered disposable untrained troops to fix the AFU… Militarily, it is evident that the optimal tactical course of action would have been to withdraw to a new defence line once the AFRF had artillery control of the ground lines of communication into the city.
Politically, however, the Ukrainian government believed that withdrawing from Bakhmut came with considerable risk. The decision point for the withdrawal coincided with several key decisions on the release of critical equipment, including tanks, munitions and enablers to Ukraine, mainly from Germany, for the planned offensive. The idea of the news from the front being Russia’s success against its main objective was, therefore, judged to endanger the speed with which Ukraine’s international partners would push materiel forward. Thus, the city was allowed to acquire a strategic symbolic significance that defied operational military logic.
War is politics. Politics is war. Policy can be more or less effective depending on dozens of variables - that’s why a holistic, systems approach is so important. Everything is an ecosystem. Hence:
It could be argued that there was and to some extent is a significant cognitive dissonance between what Ukraine’s international partners gave to Ukraine and what they thought could be achieved. In essence, while what was gifted was a significant proportion of the national stocks of Ukraine’s partners, that did not make the volume of equipment commensurate with the task. The inability of Western officials to grasp the scale of the fighting sat behind a persistent misalignment of expectations and outcome that haunted the 2023 Ukrainian offensive.
The result of improper resourcing was a plan too obvious by half:
The offensive plan envisaged Ukraine fielding 12 brigades. As originally conceived, three brigades were to support a fixing operation against Russian forces in the east. Three armoured brigades would then be committed to breach the Russian defence line, with another three mechanised brigades echeloning through to defeat Russian forces defending Tokmak. The final three brigades were to function as an exploitation force. In principle, the breach was to be accomplished within seven days. Such a tempo would mean that the Ukrainian forces would need to defeat six AFRF regiments, producing a favourable local force ratio. In practice, the original plan could not be executed at the time when the offensive was launched because of the equipment and readiness of the brigades.
Better to have two attack vectors some 30km apart that converge on a point 50km behind the front. This is why I’d have struck between Huliaipole and Velyka Novosilka. A pincer emanating from Orihiv and aiming at Polohy along with a supporting thrust from Huliaipole, the two focusing on Kamianka, might have also achieved the same effect.
Instead, Ukraine’s military leadership apparently made one of those errors that usually comes back to haunt senior generals - Rommel and Patton were both guilty of this:
Lacking the units of action to execute the plan as originally intended, Ukrainian planners nevertheless felt that an offensive had to be attempted, and so began to hypothesise that if the initial attack applied enough pressure, they could advance into a numerically superior enemy by breaking its morale. The defeat mechanism of the Russian defence lines was premised on deep strike and shock action causing localised collapse. It was hoped that this would thereafter lead to a manoeuvre defence that would see Russian troops lose cohesion. These were very optimistic assumptions.
Indeed, guys. This is always what you hope for, but you can never rely on the enemy just falling apart because you hit them hard enough. Not unless you are able to keep on hitting them without relent. It’s been established that this was not the case.
I am not really blaming Zaluzhnyi and his staff - they were making due with what they had. Expectations emanating from NATO officerdom constrained what they could openly prepare to try. And credit to Zaluzhnyi for shifting tactics then calling the offensive off when he did.
The fighting itself didn’t go as poorly as many English-speaking commentators insisted in their rush to pretend that NATO doctrine was improperly implemented. Moscow threw in its best troops and saw them ground down to such a degree that they’ve remained unable to make more than shallow lunges that slowly force Ukrainian troops to withdraw to more secure positions.
Still, nothing about the first days of the campaign can be said to have gone well.
Battalions of the 47th, 65th, and 33rd Brigades from 9th Corps opened the offensive with a series of attempted breaches by mechanised companies. MICLIC and UR-77 Meteorit explosive breaching lines were used to create lanes in the minefields, but these were often of insufficient depth to deliver a complete breach, while inexperienced vehicle crews deviated from the cleared path. A lack of demining equipment then became a problem. The corps had 10 demining vehicles, mainly Vincent-1s. These could clear ground but would overheat and shut down after ploughing for a sustained period. Russian units concentrated ATGMs, fired from infantry positions and from tanks stationed on high ground, against the demining equipment. Furthermore, a shortage of mine ploughs meant that usually only the leading vehicle had clearing equipment in each breach.
The result was that multiple company attacks suffered the same fate. They entered the narrow breaching lanes, only for the lead vehicle to be knocked out or immobilised. At this point, the cleared lane was too narrow for vehicles to turn, so that, when following vehicles, if either tried to turn around or to move around the destroyed leading vehicle, they would become immobilised by mines. This led to large concentrated groupings of immobilised Ukrainian armour, which would then be targeted by Russian artillery.
This is what I meant in my last weekly update by every major offensive move now being like crossing a water barrier. The old emphasis on rapid, violent action now leads military forces into awful traps that waste a lot of lives. How does one fight in quicksand? Between drones and mines, surprise cannot be achieved with dense armored thrusts.
As Ukrainian forces got deeper into the defences, new challenges started to emerge. First, by late June, Russian troops started to counterattack. At first, this involved the use of their artillery, held out of range of the front, to destroy abandoned fighting positions once they were occupied by Ukrainian troops. Second, Russian troops began to use dismounted infantry supported by armour to attack the positions at night. Given that each Ukrainian battalion produces at best two platoons of fully capable assault troops, it was vital that Ukrainian forces replaced assault troops with line infantry on positions they occupied.
German military theorist general Heinz Guderian, father of the German armor division of World War Two, always repeated klotzen, nicht kleckern. The roughly translates to punch, don’t poke. His innovation was combining tanks with truck mounted infantry and close air support to apply such tremendous pressure on an enemy front that it would dissolve too quickly for reinforcements to arrive. Every element of the panzerdivison was structured to enable rapid, coherent movement.
But every panzerdivision was supported by multiple infantry divisionen that would handle the more rote traditional job of securing the ever-vulnerable logistics tether that keeps the beast going. Mechanized operations consume a lot of beans, bullets, and gas. And Guderian didn’t have to content with drones!
One of Ukraine’s biggest challenges is producing enough combat units with the right combination of training, equipment, and morale to sustain offensive operations. It is going to have to have storm brigades that focus on advancing backed by a much larger number of line brigades that mainly defend.
There’s a reason that Ukraine’s counteroffensive switched gears and the objectives scaled back less than a month in.
Politically, halting the offensive seemed unacceptable. Fears that there would not be another chance and hopes that the Russian resistance would falter if the attack were sustained led to the decision to continue pushing south, but with the revised objective of capturing Tokmak.
I agree with the RUSI authors that the offensive probably should have been called off by August. Especially if Tokmak, the main ruscist defense node in the area, was the target. Once any vestige of surprise was lost and Moscow still had reinforcements to throw in, pushing through the most densely defended part of the front was madness. If Ukraine had ever reached Tokmak, its troops would have been exhausted and vulnerable to counterattack.
In retrospect, it is now fully apparent that Ukraine was forced to sacrifice a lot of people in a campaign that was never adequately supported. If Ukraine had been properly resourced, especially if given the full spectrum of modern gear that is only now appearing today, a better plan might have worked. But Ukraine was even short on artillery ammo going in.
The largest number of 155-calibre guns simultaneously operating on the Orikhiv–Tokmak axis was 55 units. Ammunition levels for Ukrainian artillery varied throughout the offensive. At its peak, these reached approximately 70 rounds per gun per day for those guns on the main effort. However, ammunition supplies were uneven and would peak and trough, so that for periods of the offensive, Ukrainian guns had as little as 10 rounds per day.
4,000 rounds per day on a front 30km wide is pretty much going to be the standard in a major, sustained attack. But if this can no longer be accompanied by a major movement of ground forces through a breach in the front line, what’s the point? It’s better to go slower, play it safer, and make each shot count, transforming the front into quicksand for enemy forces trying to approach friendly lines.
As far as achieving surprise in any major military operation goes, the future is bleak. All the RUSI authors have to recommend is:
The lesson is clear: future operations must be accompanied by appropriate deception and more effective operational security. For Ukraine, this means less public telegraphing of intentions. However, there are also lessons for Ukraine’s partners about the transparency of its political discourse on collective planning.
It doesn’t matter whether you telegraph public intentions or not if the limits of your capabilities are obvious. And there is almost no chance of launching an op with hundreds of vehicles without drawing attention ahead of time.
A modern military must learn to achieve surprise in other dimensions. The rate at which it can identify and destroy individual fighting positions across a targets area is one. The ability to sustain fires across the depth of an enemy formation is another. Even if your enemy knows your exact intentions, if they lack a counter it doesn’t much matter.
Another big issue with sustained offensive operations deep into the enemy’s zone of control is the vulnerability of logistics. Frontline units have to be able to fight for several days without resupply and expect to have to fight to secure logistics routes when the time comes.
The persistence of surveillance over the frontline, combined with cheap and scalable precision strike using UAVs, poses a particular threat to the resupply of forces on the offence because the available ground lines of communication become constrained to established breaches and are therefore easy to monitor. Furthermore, deception and other methods aimed at keeping resupply vehicles alive are irrelevant once they are forced to traverse known routes, where the enemy will not have to deal with false positives. Moreover, the pressure put by the enemy on lead elements through counterattack means that they can impose when resupply and casualty evacuation is most critical, limiting the agency the offensive force has to shape conditions to enable last-mile resupply. Resupply vehicles must also be supported in breaching artillery-delivered scattered mines.
One answer for this is that last-mile resupply becomes a combined arms endeavour requiring the layering of air defence, counterbattery fires, EW, engineering support and other measures to create windows of opportunity for movement. This is extremely resource intensive and, in Ukraine’s case, resources are lacking. In certain circumstances, resupply may have to become the main effort of a force’s supporting arms, but this is highly undesirable and, in any case, limits the number of resupplies that can be achieved. Although not directly related to last-mile resupply, the inability to advance less protected support platforms such as artillery and medical support, owing to the persistent threat of precision strike over the forward line of own troops (FLOT), is a further challenge that limits the ability to keep support and enablers moving forwards with the combat arms.
Welcome to the modern battlefield, where you can take nothing for granted once within range of enemy weapons. The net effect is bound to be an ever-expanding gray zone between secured areas, with offensives characterized by broad but shallow attacks that seize a few key locations just inside the enemy’s defense zone then expand the grey zone beyond.
Lessons Learned
The RUSI report implies that Ukraine isn’t likely to go on the attack any time soon, well into 2025, until standing problems are solved. On this point I must disagree.
Ukraine began a major reboot of its military system early this year. Initial after-action reports likely revealed everything that RUSI authors are only now making public. It takes between six and eight months to pull off a reset that sets up a working rotation schedule, new training practices, and reforms brigade structures. Syrskyi replaced Zaluzhnyi and began reforming Ukraine’s military system less than six months ago.
In a couple more months, with signs of ruscist exhaustion mounting, this becomes a very different war. What is still missing are the volumes of armored vehicles required to sustain aggressive operations. These will not look like the operations of 2023, at least not until the orc ranks are well thinned. But they’re being planned - and for as early as September 2024.
Ukraine will need to basically rewrite NATO doctrine to coordinate the second half of the Liberation Campaign. As the ruscist military system has attempted to adapt, it’s become ever more rigid. In the end, that will make it easier to kill. Fighting in the Network Age requires patience and caution 90% of the time, ruthlessly violent action the other 10%. Military science and practice has to shed outdated habits and focus on the present reality.