The Strategic Importance Of Bakhmut
An application of systems theory to understand a key battle in the Ukraine War.
Like any group of specialists, military professionals have developed a language of their own, a jargon outsiders often find incredibly difficult to penetrate.
Part of this can be chalked up to the fact that any systematic field of study ultimately requires its own complex terminology to understand at a basic scientific level. But another and maybe even greater part is all about simple livelihood protection.
Talking about military affairs using terms like flanking maneuver or culmination point is mostly done to make war seem mysterious to the average person. That allows experts to create a boundary separating those who are part of the club from everybody else.
Then journalists and pundits come along aiming to explain the world to their audience, and naturally they need to separate good information from bad. Consulting people from a club that purports to have special knowledge about a topic lets journalists effectively surrender some of their responsibility for critical thinking, letting them cite a supposed authority figure to back up claims.
The danger, most potent in scientific fields where people or their actions are the primary data, is that groupthink within the expert club translates into a misunderstanding of what is really happening.
As someone who spent most of my adult life working with various experts across a number of fields and has published peer-reviewed work in a high quality journal, I have a unique insight into how the knowledge production process works. And because I have a military background, I also have the ability to penetrate war jargon.
The main reason I’m building up Rogue Systems Recon is to help transmit high quality science to more people than most experts are willing to. I emphasize systems theory because my time in academia taught me that too many fields remain mired in obsolete linear paradigms, and focus on military affairs right now because:
A. War is a natural experiment in competitive organization;
B. The Ukraine War is likely to expand further, dragging in much of the world in time because it has triggered a total and irrevocable collapse of the Postwar Order.
So what do I really mean by this jargony blather of my own?
Exactly what Thomas Kuhn, one of the most important historians and philosophers of science, noted in his seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: science advances over the graves of scientists.
It takes time and effort to update lessons taught in schools, with tremendous inertia preventing major changes without someone feeling some degree of pain when their subject area or favored approach becomes obsolete.
Scientists very rarely lie or falsify data. But they do, because of professional incentives and natural desire for popularity, avoid doing or publishing work that threatens the foundations of their own career or field unless forced to by overwhelming evidence.
Trouble is, what counts as evidence varies from field to field, Chemistry and Economics using different data and so requiring different methods of investigation. And professional scientists tend to group themselves into fields that train any students who wish to enter to accept a particular canon as a kind of semi-sacred Truth among members of the expert community.
When science is focused on something extremely tangible, like the physics involved in keeping buildings and bridges working as intended or preventing the spread of infectious disease, expert advice tends to be highly reliable. When it gets more abstract, like in History or Politics, the space for doubt left in any analysis fractures the community into sub-fields who soon lose the ability to communicate with each other, leaving each faction blind in key ways.
This is basically why there are an infinite number of possible political philosophies, but only a few styles of bridge construction.
Military science is unique in that while the raw data is extremely hard and material, counted in land taken, equipment destroyed, and lives lost, expert analysis of it is almost entirely dominated by the worldview of people extremely remote from the action. What counts as data matters greatly, which is why Russians allegedly don’t track their casualties: each is an admission of failure Putin’s regime would prefer simply disappear.
A major reason that Russia, Ukraine, and America all fight very differently is because each has its own traditions of military science and art. This makes understanding what is happening and will happen very difficult unless you have a theoretical framework specifically designed to manage complexity across very different scales.
The past year of war in Ukraine has proven, as wars tend to, that many leading theories of warfare are very wrong. This has important implications for military personnel everywhere.
Unfortunately, the process of evaluation is always intensely political in areas of such importance to people in power. That’s another pattern visible in nearly every war across history. Leaders almost always misjudge the situation, then recruit loyal followers to insist otherwise while scrambling to salvage the whole affair.
If you live in the English speaking world and pay attention to the news, you are intimately familiar with this process of truth-shaping at work. Spin is everything here, because each side in the endless partisan war is determined to crowd out the narratives preferred by the other by any means necessary.
Even, at times, misrepresenting truth in the interest of so-called national security.
Now, how does this system apply to what is happening in Bakhmut?
The raging information war over Ukraine, self-negating as it ultimately is, poses the risk of creating a false impression of the true forces at play. Each side has its own competing narrative:
Russia’s is that Bakhmut is the gateway to the rest of Donbas and Ukraine’s defense of it at all costs will bleed its army and NATO dry.
America’s holds that Bakhmut is a strategic irrelevance that Russia is wasting its energy trying to seize and Ukraine probably shouldn’t keep defending so fiercely, but also insists that Ukraine’s strong defense proves that Putin’s war is doomed.
Ukraine’s insists that Bakhmut is the gateway to the urban centers of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk and its defense will bleed Russia dry.
So what is the unrelenting slaughter in Bakhmut really all about?
To avoid burying the lede, as journalists say, any more than I already always do, the answer is this: the strategic value of Bakhmut rests solely on the fact that Russia has committed resources to take it.
Ukraine’s position is ultimately closest to the mark, though Kyiv naturally does not specify its true strategic purposes out loud.
Americans tend to be terrible at strategy because American philosophical paradigms absolutely hate systems based approaches. The reason why is complicated, tied to the way the academic hierarchy operates, but boils down to an aesthetic preference among many scholars for a flavor of humanist philosophy that elevates the interests of a certain class of person.
Naturally, that is wealthy, well-connected people, who are subtly held up in American society across the media as paragons of how everyone should be. That’s why celebrities are worshiped like ancient gods in the USA, and certain names show up across the news ecosystem as named experts who are granted the right to speak with alleged authority on their assigned topic.
The Institute For The Study of War (ISW), American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Michael Kofman, Robert Lee, Mick Ryan, Ben Hodges - pay attention, and these names pop up over and over again, even if they’re not always American.
They have been consistently incorrect about the war, originally united in believing - along with US intelligence - that Russia would crush Ukraine in days and a guerilla war backed by NATO was the best way to punish Moscow. Talk among the expert class in January 2022 was focused on pulling another Afghanistan War on Russia, which is a big reason why Ukraine didn’t get modern artillery or tanks for months, despite being constantly told NATO has its back.
The other is a real fear of nuclear weapons, not entirely unjustified but sadly no longer relevant. If Putin permanently gains any Ukrainian territory, even Crimea, that basically tells every power in the world it had better wield a nuclear arsenal just in case America is too deterred to protect them. Which, of course, opens the door to global nuclear proliferation and the inevitable nuclear accidents and exchanges that will one day follow.
Most American experts are terrible at understanding war, and generally can’t win them, because systems theory is anathema to most, unless applied in a truncated form that makes dangerous assumptions about the behavior of agents in the model. Most systems approaches got a bad name back in the 1950s because early versions like structural functionalism misused systems concepts to portray people as little robots, something that offended the sensibilities of popular scholars who prefer to tell rich people that they’re special.
So US think tanks and military planners, even when they do incorporate systems-based approaches into analysis, do not integrate systems theory at a fundamental level as is required for it to work. This leads to rigid forecasts that break when boundary conditions created by basic assumptions inherent in the model prove to be flawed.
And given that the other side in a war has every incentive to not be predictable, it will always try to break your forecasts. Sometimes, it will succeed, which is why overconfidence is bad and hedge positions essential.
Systems theory differs from linear approaches by reducing complexity where it is appropriate, nesting processes inside each other to take advantage of the magic of emergence.
Emergence is a vital principle in systems theory that essentially means a group of interacting things producing some measurable effect that is not a simple function of adding up all their individual actions. The sum equals more than its parts, in other words, in the same way a group of people can often get more done together than if they work separate shifts.
When talking about warfare, analysts commonly use three terms to separate out things happening at different scale levels on the map of the action: Strategy, Operations, and Tactics.
Most of the time, when they say these things what they really mean is Local, Regional, and Global. They see tactics as nesting into operations, which combine under the auspices of a coherent strategy determined by designated leaders.
That’s why American analysts keep saying that Bakhmut has no strategic relevance - this is a rhetorical sleight of hand. They’re implying that it isn’t strategic because its fall won’t impact the ultimate outcome of the conflict, which will hinge on the liberation of territories Russia has already occupied.
What’s funny is that some will then turn around and apparently try to curry favor with Ukraine’s government by saying that the defense of Bakhmut is strategically sound, even if not strategically important. Word games matter to academics, who enjoy being able to tell someone they’re wrong when they use a different definition of some bit of jargon than is considered proper in their scientific community.
American experts are supposedly advising Ukraine to abandon Bakhmut to save resources for the upcoming summer offensives, but if trye what they don’t realize is that this would represent a strategic defeat for Ukraine.
Why? Because, properly speaking, Strategy, Operations, and Tactics are not bound to scale levels at all.
What experts like to call the tactical level is better seen as the area individual units on the front lines can reach with their weapons from where they presently are to the ground they could hit if they moved until they ran out of stuff like gas and food. On a real battlefield, a unit’s natural area of influence extends to the edge of the uncertainty bubble surrounding its position in the mind of its enemy.
When moving across a battlefield to take a new position, survival is a matter of staying in cover as much as possible when someone starts shooting at you. Bringing your enemy’s positions under fire, even sporadic, slows them down and creates space for you to move where you want to be. That’s why soldiers work in teams - one can shoot off a few rounds to force the other side to duck while another moves to a new firing point.
In general, combat at the ground level is this brutal algorithm replayed over and over at various scales and with different types of firepower. One side or the other wants to move, so it has to suppress or evade the other side or even wipe them out to get it done. Soldiers on the front line call for assistance from heavier weapons with a longer range, and a horrific game of cat and mouse mixed with whack a mole bleeds everyone until someone can’t hold their position.
Most modern military affairs seek to conduct what is called maneuver warfare because this creates space for surprising an opponent, creating local areas of overwhelming superiority where other side doesn’t even get to shoot back before being destroyed. Attack, defense - at the local level it doesn’t really matter, because even defenders have to be mobile in a world where drones spot you and call down accurate artillery fire as soon as you reveal your position by opening fire.
Tactics are adaptations made by personnel dealing with this lethal environment, at whatever their level of responsibility, and are always changing. Certain tactics, however, are so fundamental that every military adopts them, like having soldiers work in teams who follow a set of battle drills that, in time, become part of their muscle memory and help keep them alive.
Operations, by contrast, are all about organizing movements of large numbers of front line units and all their supporting forces to take advantage of the emergent effects of their combined actions across the battlefield. To keep people fighting requires a constant flow of supplies, and preventing your teams from accidentally shooting at each other demands coordination from some kind of leadership team.
Logistics, maintenance, terrain - these sorts of hard factors limit how much combat power can be amassed in an area and where it can strike. But operations and tactics are not just things happening at different zoom levels, they’re more like a human body’s muscular system working in conjunction with its cardiovascular machinery. Neither controls the other, but both have to work as intended for anything to happen.
Strategy, similarly, is like the nervous system: it is about working out where to invest combat power in operations with the greatest impact on whatever it is you are trying to achieve. Strategy shapes operations, which creates tactical problems that teams solve - or don’t - which in turn feeds back into the operational realm to determine if a given action taken in pursuit of a strategy works as planned.
Leaders, if they are wise, then use that information to reallocate their investments to minimize their losses while maximizing those of their enemy. Ultimately, all warfare is about draining your opponent’s energy, forcing them to finally give up the fight.
This systems-based conception of strategy, operations, and tactics is powerful because it is inherently flexible: any organization of any size can think of itself this way, military or not. One person or a billion - it doesn’t matter, these are natural groupings of tasks that follow tendencies in both human cognition and nature itself.
The ultimate strategic importance of Bakhmut is this: to win this war, Ukraine has to destroy Russia’s ability to make war on it.
This, sadly, requires the destruction of Russia’s combat power wherever that can be best achieved.
Russia has poured troops and equipment into the fight for Bakhmut, and so Ukraine must respond provided that it does more harm to Russia than it suffers in return during the fight. It’s exactly what France and Germany did to each other at Verdun over a century ago.
Now, let me be clear: I hate that this is necessary.
Sending thousands of soldiers up against human wave assaults to keep control of a shattered city Ukraine can afford to lose borders on the inhumane.
Yet Ukraine has to defeat Russia somewhere, and falling back leaves even more territory in Russian hands that will have to be liberated later.
The horrific atrocities committed by Russia - the recent blatant murder of a POW shown on a gruesome video that went viral is just the latest and won’t be the last - make it additionally difficult for Ukraine to pull back anywhere without a hard fight.
This can only make Ukrainian units more vulnerable and increase casualty rates. Asking soldiers to hold Bakhmut this long is one of those awful decisions people who lead countries under genocidal assault have to consider, using numbers like the ratio of friendly casualties to enemy to guide their choices.
Unless and until Russia comes to its senses and unwinds its invasion of Ukraine, Kyiv has no option but to destroy Russian forces wherever the exchange ratio remains favorable.
That is the hell of total war. It turns entire countries into machines producing nothing but death and destruction. The brutal failure to deter Russia from this monstrous course of action is a tragedy that will define the world for years to come, ending any notion of reliable and lasting American power.
Were I in Ukraine’s shoes, I would not have advised holding Bakhmut for this long, on the balance. But given the rising chances of a major counterattack in the sector to relieve the defenders and perhaps restore some of Ukraine’s original defensive lines, the strategic choice to defend Bakhmut this long might have opened the door to a unique opportunity on the ground.
Smashing the Wagner spearheads trying to push around Bakhmut, if possible, would represent an important victory in material and moral terms. Not only would the myth of Wagner be broken, but Russia would have wasted months of effort and thousands of lives for absolutely nothing.
I still think it is very likely that Russia will soon launch some kind of spectacular assault on a new front, which could make Ukraine’s commitment to Bakhmut look like it walked into a trap. Yet even if these concerns are borne out in the coming days, a counterattack in Bakhmut might still be worth it.
Ukraine’s partners abroad are still moving way too slowly in delivering modern heavy equipment and training Ukrainian troops to use it. Ukraine needed at least older fighter jets, retired British, German, or Italian Tornado strike fighters if nothing else, long ago. They will likely need a high-speed, low-altitude optimized strike jet to make full use of the new winged GPS-guided bomb adaptor kits being sent by the US.
American and NATO leaders continue to make crucial strategic mistakes that undermine their claim to be willing to support Ukraine no matter the cost. They have failed to see that everything they do and say, Putin views through a filter that sees any hesitation as a fatal weakness to be ruthlessly exploited.
That’s the trouble with groupthink. It creates a self-justifying feedback loop within a community that renders members blind to data that doesn’t conform to its preset assumptions.
Same thing is going on with China, too. There, America seems dead set on stumbling into a fight it has absolutely no viable strategy for winning, thinking it is 1941 again and the US remains the world’s leading industrial power.
The key takeaway I’d like folks to take away from this piece is that Bakhmut has extreme strategic significance because politics is an extension of war, and Putin has staked a lot of resources on taking it from Ukraine.
It’s strategic value is a classic case of emergence at work.
This unfortunately leaves Kyiv with little choice: whatever might disrupts Russia’s plans, it must try. Unless and until Russia fragments, Ukraine will face the constant threat of being adjacent to country with three times its population led by a regime that has staked its own survival on ending Ukraine’s very existence.
This might seem like an insane strategy for Moscow to embrace, and perhaps it is. But Putin clearly doesn’t yet think the war will end soon or that Russia is bound to lose.
And so the fighting will continue, and escalate, to someone’s bitter end.
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