Ukraine War: Learning, Adaptation
With summer now at a close, Ukraine's fairly limited progress on the ground masks the severe damage done to Putin's forces as a whole. This won't end well for him.
State Of The Fronts As October Dawns
Fighting raged on several fronts during the last week of September as ruscist forces launched heavy counterattacks against Ukrainian positions. Others like Velyka Novosilka and Lyman, meanwhile, seemed to go a little quiet.
Supposedly Putin wants Ukraine’s progress stopped by the middle of this month, and if he’s back to setting hard deadlines that probably means the domestic situation is becoming more fragile. The choice to fight in front of the Surovikin Line altered the course of Ukraine’s summer fighting and slowed Kyiv’s advance, but ruscist forces have paid a heavy price.
As I’ll discuss in more detail in the next section, the general picture of what success would look like this summer was immediately altered by the unexpected ruscist choice. A swift Ukrainian breakthrough to the coast was never going to be possible under these conditions because Ukraine’s partners did not supply enough equipment to tolerate the burn rate inherent in breaching operations. As a result, Kyiv never truly attempted the major multi-brigade assault so hotly anticipated this spring. Instead of risking the fight turning into a stalemate once its resources were exhausted, Ukraine chose a slower, more patient approach.
Evaluating success or failure requires working out what was actually, not theoretically, possible. While this naturally risks moving goalposts, practically speaking this is how all theory development operates: collect evidence, refine the theory.
In terms of what has actually been happening on the battlefield, while Kyiv isn’t giving details yet most open-source reporting appears to agree that the orcs are trying to retake Robotyne on the Orihiv Front and expel Ukrainian force from the approaches to Verbobe. This is at least the second, possibly third distinct round of this since June, with Putin’s troops so far never able to take and hold ground for long. Some ruscist reports point to a dangerous situation developing between Verbove and Novofedorivka, where I’ve been expecting Ukraine to try and advance on the slightly higher ground overlooking Verbove, but no confirmed advances yet. It still appears as if Ukraine plans to absorb the incoming counterattacks then press on to expand the bridgehead beyond the minefields.
South of Bakhmut, major counterattacks have tried to shift Ukrainian troops from the towns they’ve recently liberated there, reportedly without much success. Ukrainian forces have themselves pushed on past the railway line the orcs have been trying to hold. But a lot about the situation here is unclear, including whether Ukraine will continue to press operations on this front.
Farther afield, in both Kherson and Kharkiv the ruscists have been mounting intensive air raids against bridges, buildings, and other logistics or command nodes - some airfields too, with a number of MiG-29 fighters supposedly damaged or destroyed on the ground, though these could have been decoys or inoperable. A few likely Iskander missile strikes have been registered against trains carrying military equipment far behind the lines, further illustrating Ukraine’s need for more Patriot systems. Securing Kyiv is necessary, but eventually the difference in protection accorded to the capitol compared to cities closer to the border will probably become a point of internal tension over winter.
Interestingly, these hits on train yards coincide with a reported shift in Ukraine’s strategic disposition on the ground. It appears that a decision has been made to call the operations south of Velyka Novosilka good for the time being, with several marine brigades said to be heading from there to Kherson. Recent maps show that a second layer of the Surovikin Line’s fortifications has now crept east and a couple other defensive barriers have appeared on the road to Mariupol. The one major benefit of Moscow’s choice to fight for every scrap of dirt is that this buys time for additional engineering efforts, and as this thrust hasn’t yet reached the first major defense line it’s likely not worth pushing farther when the bridgehead at Orihiv is all the way across several.
With the dangerous bulge in the lines in this area erased and numerous ruscist formations drawn there to prevent a breakthrough, Kyiv may now feel that it can exploit weaknesses in the ruscist defense of Kherson. The spectacular success of recent operations against Crimea could indicate a softness along the entire coast - potentially the long course of the Dnipro river too. With there being no danger of a dam being blown upstream anymore, Kyiv might be able to secure and expand a major bridgehead at the outer edge of the ruscist logistics network even as this comes under intense attack from new supplies of long-range precision missiles. Depending on how hard the Dnipro freezes - something Ukraine might be able to impact by manipulating water levels upstream - that could also factor into Ukraine’s ability to push across.
The assumption that autumn would force a pause in Ukrainian operations was clearly wrong - another reason why Ukraine felt no need to push too hard too fast. Mud is a pain to deal with in the field, but its worst impact is felt at higher levels, where staff have to coordinate and sustain hundreds of vehicles and thousands of personnel on the move. With Ukrainian operations following a totally different pattern than originally anticipated, weather is a potential ally.
Last winter the lack of vegetation made it even harder to hide. The orcs took full advantage of this to blast their way through Bakhmut this winter and spring, literally saturating the ground with high explosives to pave the way for wave after wave of Wagner convicts. But Ukraine did not have DPICM - cluster munitions - from its partners yet. The delivery of these in large numbers has allowed Ukraine to take the advantage in the number and weight of the fire missions its gunners can perform.
In short, Ukraine now has the ability to carve a terrible swath through exposed enemy positions, while Moscow’s artillery is being reduced to the tune of over 200 systems each week. Many are likely mortars, not big artillery pieces, but nobody in the infantry is apt to complain that there are fewer things lobbing explosives at them. Once the orcs run low of these, they’re in serious trouble.
As this excellent video from the 47th Mechanized Brigade - clearly aiming to challenge 3rd Azov Assault in the combat documentary Olympics - plainly shows, Leopard 2 tank and Bradley infantry fighting vehicles are still operating on the front lines, using their superior capabilities to give Ukrainian troops the edge at the point of contact. No casualties in this clip, just a Leopard 2A6 covering infantry as they dismount from an M2 Bradley in a treeline ahead of an attack.
Sappers working in Ukraine report looking forward to the mud of autumn because it will play havoc with the enemy’s minefields. Tall grass in the unsown fields is apparently excellent at concealing mines. Once it dies back and the ground gets soggy clear lanes should be easier to establish and maintain.
In a very real way the ruscist troops defending the Surovikin Line have been fighting on easy mode, relatively speaking, all summer long. No, Ukraine didn’t cover as much ground as seemed possible in May, but once the ruscists committed to this plan for the defense of the land they’ve stolen - an inadvisable one for many reasons - this stopped being the best metric of success.
Thanks to the Biden Administration’s “conflict management” approach to Putin’s malevolent assault on humanity, the baseline assumption has to be a war that lasts for a very long time. Failure to fully upgrade Ukraine’s military means that rapid, high-casualty movements are too risky: if at any point Ukraine’s military reserves are exhausted the Biden Administration will absolutely say the time has sadly come to negotiate.
You don’t win reelection with polls several points lower than your previous bosses’ were at this point in his difficult first term. Or when you’re in a statistical dead heat with an almost equally unpopular guy who has just been indicted a bunch of times - and who never even came close to you in the polls during the last election.
From this point on Ukraine can’t lose the initiative, which ultimately means that it must always retain more freedom of action than Moscow. There is no guarantee that even severing the land bridge to Crimea will end the fighting: Ukraine has to plan to liberate every square inch of its territory by force in a series of counteroffensives that build on each other. It could take months to years, and proceed something like this:
This means that Kyiv must carefully cultivate its resources while draining Moscow’s. A tricky balance that is not measured in meters, but destruction of active combat potential. Movement on the battlefield occurs when the enemy can no longer resist - unless it’s setting an ambush. It’s going to look a lot like 1944 on the Eastern Front, only this time, the Nazi capitol is in the other direction. So territory alone is an improper metric for success: in terms of the effort to sever the rail connection to Crimea, efforts are ongoing. It could take a few more weeks, or several months - but it will happen. The timing is no longer as important as maintaining efficiency of effort.
Evaluating Ukraine’s Summer Counteroffensive
It is important to be clear that initial expectations - my own included - about what Ukraine could achieve on the ground in a single season did not match the hard reality of what determined engineering can accomplish. However, a strict success/failure binary is not appropriate for evaluating what happened because the definition of success in warfare is always contingent on how much it cost.
Attempts to forecast what Ukraine could accomplish were fundamentally undermined by uncertainty over two key factors:
How effective the ruscist defensive efforts would prove to be in material terms;
Whether orc morale would stay high enough to avert a collapse.
The ongoing willingness of Moscow’s soldiers to die for Putin is one of those factors that no one could easily predict in advance. It’s also partly bound up with the first question, which is why it’s always best to use material factors to structure understanding of war.
And the question of how hard it would be to crack the Surovikin Line was inherently a matter of speculation until put to the test. Unfortunately, the orcs fought hard; fortunately, their leaders’ strategy for the defense was less than optimal, sacrificing personnel for time instead of space. The result was a much slower Ukrainian offensive than anticipated, though not a failed one - and the distinction is important.
A truly failed offensive would have left Ukraine short on resources and people, vulnerable to a counterattack and resumption of Moscow’s general offensive towards the borders of Donbas. No one, not even in Moscow, is talking about anything like that these days. Hanging on to what they’ve stolen is all the ruscists can dream of, and creating the illusion that this is still possible was Putin’s primary political aim over the summer.
War is politics continued by other means, as Clausewitz said, but the reverse is also true - a point I was kind of amazed to see a U.S. military officer make in a recent publication. All Power is Local by major Robert G. Rose is focused on how insurgencies manage to survive and win in time, but the laws of war are the same for insurgents and empires. Whatever the resources at an organization’s disposal, they have to adopt a strategy for using them that takes into account the gap between what they and their opponents can actually do to each other.
I ran across this excellent article after coming across another of major Rose’s, this one at War On the Rocks about Ukraine. It is one of the best evaluations of Ukraine’s fighting this summer that I’ve seen, and though I tend to be highly suspicious of War on the Rocks for the same reason I am the rest of the defense establishment I can’t recommend it highly enough.
For the record, I’m wary of War on the Rocks because as an “insider” focused publication they are part of a system that works to keep the American public from meddling in defense affairs. The fact that Michael Kofman and Rob Lee are closely associated with War on the Rocks lends credence to my suspicions about the publication’s inherent editorial bias.
Now, that isn’t to say that the works of such insiders can’t be trusted at all - you just have to take their assessments with a grain of salt, same as with any other individual source. To become prominent in this world requires deliberate brand-building that creates incentives to skew certain assumptions and analysis in a particular direction.
Think of how it’s seen as completely normal that US foreign policy leaders lump Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, Damascus, Minsk, and Pyongyang in basically the same bucket no matter their different political characters and aims. People who get taken seriously by the media and policymakers don’t even question whether Beijing is basically evil, an utterly ascientific blind spot that makes the USA brutally vulnerable because it never tailors its policy to achievable objectives, simply prescribes endless conflict forever.
In doctoral studies, you’ll quickly encounter scholars who realized early on in their careers that the Ivory Tower works like any other kind of marketplace. Those who can sell ideas to people willing to attach value to them tend to persist in the industry. Clubs, even semi-religious orders form around certain ideas, typically because they make some group of people’s lives easier.
Naturally, quality science is put at risk as biases creep in. Crucial assumptions baked into a particular way of approaching problems leads to members adopting ever more complicated jargon, mostly to avoid having to address the lingering flaws in the paradigm. Sustaining the field or discipline’s reputation in the eyes of the public and especially anyone powerful becomes more important than scholarly integrity.
This is how you wind up with scientists expounding truly mad views like eugenics - or the warped belief now prominent among many experts of American democracy that the emergence of a new third party in US politics, No Labels, poses a “threat to democracy.” It’s a sign of how messed up partisan politics is in the USA that statements like this are common in even in mainstream media.
Evidence about the impact of third parties is politicized like everything else in the USA, however on the whole stories about a party throwing the election to one side or the other are always over-blown. Libertarian votes could, by the same logic, be said to have handed Biden the presidency in 2020 as they almost certainly came from people who would have otherwise voted for Trump and there were enough of them to swing the election too. This argument simply doesn’t get made despite leading Democrats still publicly blaming the Green Party for Clinton losing in 2016 - in partisan America all that matters is fealty to your team’s rhetoric, not facts or plain common sense.
In American academia, there are always a few media appointed experts in every field who build an entire career on the illusion of expertise granted by having a PhD in a topic too arcane for most people to question. The real trick to success in modern scholarly world - the path to lifetime tenure or an effective guarantee of permanent employment at some D.C. think-tank or lobbying firm - is building a network of allies who will all agree to defer to your particular expertise if you do the same for them.
By silent agreement certain dogmas and taboos are baked into all analysis. The process for awarding PhDs in the USA requires that a committee mostly drawn from a field certify that a candidate has passed a set of “comprehensive exams” whose topic matter is usually so specialized that no outsider can render judgement.
This allows the most adept brand-builders to impact the promotion pipeline, undermining competing ideas by creating opportunities to weed out rivals. The process is not at all different from the one used by generations of religious clerics around the world to build power.
Again: these experts do not outright lie to the public as such. They mainly work to limit what people think is possible and structure their analysis towards that end. They downplay any competing theory, even if the best they’ve got isn’t all that great. It’s a feedback loop driven by laziness and lack of creativity more than malice. The worst will, however, actively try to rewrite history to pretend they didn’t press a position that turned out to be based on flawed analysis - like Ukraine not being able to survive for a week, let alone almost two years, against Putin’s assault.
Kofmann and Lee attempted this sneaky little game in their latest War on the Rocks essay, in fact. They go out of their way to blame the media and unnamed sources in allied governments for spreading the story that Ukraine is incompetent at large-scale combined arms operations. Thing is, it was their own research trip to Ukraine in June that generated this exact narrative! They were the ones who came back from a visit to the front warning that Ukraine was making huge mistakes.
In article after article across the web it is now stated as a fact that Ukraine attempted a major mechanized assault south of Orihiv in June and was defeated by minefields protected by orc helicopter gunships. But actual interviews with soldiers who were there point to something different: a single company-level operation that fell prey to an ambush. Which happens in war, especially when you’re using western gear on a large scale for the first time, something that Moscow was always going to be watching carefully in hopes of scoring a propaganda coup.
Coming back from Ukraine weeks later, Kofman and several colleagues reported on the preliminary results of a set of interviews conducted over a span of several days. Straight away they portrayed mistakes made during one fight in some fields south of Mala Tokmacha into a tale of over-arching Ukrainian military incompetence. But now, after seeing Ukrainian forces breaching the Surovikin Line, they’ve got to turn around and make like it was the media’s fault that people were accusing Ukraine of military incompetence with Putin’s propagandists happily joining the fray. Topping this effort off, if you look closely at their latest piece, is another shot in their ongoing fight to attack Kyiv for choosing to defend Bakhmut with such ferocity this past winter and spring - a pet quarrel of theirs because they predicted it would fall and said it wasn’t important.
This is how the careers of public-facing academics are built and maintained. The saga of Anthony Fauci offers another stellar example of an expert making mistakes then failing to properly own up to them, thus losing credibility with the public and damaging his cause. The trouble with Fauci was not his aim - he sincerely wanted to do the most anyone could to get the Covid pandemic under control, a truly noble ideal - but an outdated model of public health leadership that relied on giving the impression of being the authority figure with all the answers. His initial refusal to embrace mask recommendations was an excellent example. Australia, New Zealand, and Canada all had more effective public health communication overall, the result being a lower pandemic death toll and most people accepting vaccinations.
Public Health is one of the more robust fields out there - or was until it started getting involved in the US gun violence situation. The problem is far worse in fuzzier analytical areas like politics and basically all of the humanities, which are more and more like the arts all the time thanks to the influence of postmodernism.
When it comes to Ukraine and military science, the gap between what think-tank scholars and most real military professionals are saying is yawning. As minds turn to evaluating how the summer fighting went to extract lessons in how to approach the rest of Ukraine’s Liberation Campaign, it is essential to realize that observers failed going in to appreciate the limits on what anyone could possibly achieve after Putin’s orcs were given nine full months to dig in.
Which is no fault of Ukraine’s, but the political decisions made by its partners abroad. Who had better get it into their heads soon that the theories they used to guide policy most of their careers were always flawed and are now failing under stresses that will only increase as the decade wears on.
What Ukraine discovered back in June was that a NATO-style mechanized breaching operation was going to be too costly. Its allies waited too long to get their act together and failed to give it a deep enough reserve of gear.
Most of what was damaged earlier this summer has now been repaired, but maintenance takes time. Ukraine needed a lot more modern vehicles to be able to absorb the temporary loss rates inherent in punching through prepared defenses. Using slower, more infantry-focused attacks was the only viable option, and the moment that truth was established prior expectations about how fast Ukraine could move were rendered obsolete.
Not waging the campaign everyone had braced for means that success has to be considered in different terms than anticipated. The chance to end the Ukraine War in 2023 by forcing a political crisis on Putin was already lost before Ukraine’s ground operations intensified last June. Kyiv’s leaders appear to have understood that they were attempting something exceptionally difficult and didn’t waste resources on one strategy when it did not quickly earn dividends.
It’s like taking a shot at winning a chess match with a quick four-move attack that you don’t even expect to work, but won’t be any worse off for the attempt. The moves made should allow you to evolve your approach without having to retreat, applying constant pressure to keep your opponent from moving as they’d prefer.
Had Ukraine maintained a high tempo of armor-heavy attacks in proper NATO fashion it might well have pushed a lot farther than it has by now, even taken Tokmak. But it would also have lost most of the NATO vehicles it received, and contrary to any reasonable expectation from last May a tranche of equivalent quality has not been delivered as a follow-up. That would have left Ukrainian troops potentially over-extended and vulnerable to a devastating counterattack or at the very least partners insisting that it’s time to trade land for (fake) peace.
Instead, Ukraine has managed to tear a hole in the Surovikin Line and form a dangerous bridgehead on the other side of the vast sea of mines sown by the orcs to help hold the line. It crushed a dangerous bulge in the lines around Velyka Novosilka. The orcs have been forced to retreat near Bakhmut and have made almost no new progress further north towards Lyman and Kupiansk.
When a heavyweight takes on a lightweight and has to give ground after a long face-to-face struggle, that’s not a failure or a stalemate. It isn’t unqualified success, either, but stay tuned, because the match is ongoing.
It’s the resource matchup that matters in a long-lasting fight: how well each side can sustain a flow of fresh combat power to replace what it loses. Despite committing parts of nearly every brigade in service over the past four months, there is no indication of Ukraine’s formations being too badly damaged to fight anywhere. On the other hand, whole ruscist regiments have been knocked out and pulled off the line, with Moscow having only a newly-formed and highly untested field army with 10-15,000 soldiers available to plug gaps.
Attrition and maneuver are not opposing concepts: they’re linked. One enables the other.
The fighting in Ukraine now greatly resembles the First World War, though this doesn’t mean what most people think. Historians today routinely speak of the First World War as being defined by grinding trench combat while the Second was all slashing armored battles, but this is a highly incomplete picture. It is drawn almost totally from the Anglosphere’s experience with the fighting.
Truth be told, a great deal of the soldier’s time in both wars was spent in muddy holes trying not to get sick while bullets and bombs do their cruel work outside. On the Eastern Front in the First World War mobile fighting was a lot more common than in the West mainly because there was more area to work with, but also because the Germans held the Western Front with the minimum amount of personnel it could get away with for most of the conflict.
British and French officers in 1915 and 1916 threw away thousands of lives in ridiculous attacks because they literally knew no other way to fight. The industrial capacity of the combatants was sufficient to dig trenches and place machine guns backed by field artillery from the Alps to the Atlantic. Generals in those days had to learn the hard way that a machine gun nest could usually survive the most intense artillery barrage and even if it didn’t the Germans would have another close by.
Technology made it possible for a relatively small number of people to cover a huge area for the first time. Military doctrine that relied on massing troops to create so much pressure that the defense collapse despite the casualties it was capable of inflicting failed because flesh always loses to high explosives. Professional incentives and political pressures forced a generation of soldiers to test theories until the right combination of tools was discovered to overwhelm the German defenses. It helped considerably that Germany both attempted a series of intensive offensives in early 1918 while trying to occupy half of Eastern Europe.
The Second World War saw its fair share of trench warfare too, though, even in the east. Kursk was all about the Germans trying and failing to overcome a multi-layer defense network that Moscow had several more months to prepare than was strictly necessary because Hitler wanted his armies fully equipped with the newest gear. Stuff like Panther and Tiger tanks that were insufficiently tested and had to rely on the workhorse Mark 4s and even 3s against thousands of T-34s.
Ukraine saw the writing on the wall for a pure NATO-style approach without first securing air superiority - something that probably isn’t any more possible than charging through minefields with tanks. Anti-tank weapons, drones, and networks have done to modern warfare what the machine gun and barbed wire accomplished a hundred years ago.
To make progress requires new tactics, operational paradigms, and strategic approaches. Ukraine has selected one that is working reasonably well, even if it doesn’t go very fast. In a way, it’s a bit like how combatants wage duels in Frank Herbert’s Dune series. With everyone wearing energy shields, projectile weapons are useless. But because people want to move around without a shield bubble hitting things, personal shields are set to not activate unless an object is moving at high speed towards the wearer.
Duelists have to use knives to fight, trying to slowly dance their way inside the opponent’s shield to stab for the kill. It’s a contest of stamina as much as raw firepower, something that plays to Ukraine’s strengths. Evidence continues to pile up that points to Moscow steadily depleting its stocks of war material. Quad bikes are being used to evacuate wounded. Naval anti-submarine rocket launchers are being welded onto 1950s era armored vehicles.
Inventiveness in a moment of need is one thing. But when your country is paring down Soviet Stocks to the point that North Korea becomes an attractive arms supplier, you’re losing the war.
Ukraine’s campaigns this summer have been successful where it matters most: they have steadily torn apart ruscist units in their path and made progress that sets up several months of wet weather campaigning. The nice thing about not having to drive vehicles very far to fight is that the mud is somewhat less of a factor - more importantly, however, is the fact that the turn in the weather should do significant damage to the orc minefields.
This could open up a lot of opportunities at the local level. Which is precisely what Ukraine will have to take advantage of during a sustained campaign to kick out the orcs.
In addition to equipment, Ukraine could also benefit from putting a number of brigades through intensive training with US military units at their home bases in the coming months. Though blaming Ukraine’s difficulties this summer on training and experience is unwarranted, many reports from Ukraine indicate that Ukrainian soldiers do not find the abbreviated training offered in NATO countries to be terribly useful.
Improving that should be a priority - and as I’ve written before, presents a win-win situation when it comes to keeping US military personnel alive in any future conflict.
An Escalation In Training
Most military professionals who have been to one of the brigade-level exercises held at a major training center know their worth. There is simply no substitute for making a few thousand people and all their gear fight mock battles against opponents who will find and exploit every weakness. Only by witnessing the sheer number of moving parts and experiencing all that can and will go wrong in any operation can an organization build the innate adaptive capacity required to minimize the inevitable human loss of actual battle.
I spent a little over a month early one summer almost twenty years ago at the Joint Readiness Training Center in Louisiana, and it was a learning experience that will forever remain seared into my brain. After four months of basic and advanced training as a cavalry scout in Kentucky, I would up assigned to a detail sent to role-play as Iraqi Army soldiers being trained by a brigade from the 1st Cavalry Division. It taught me more than I ever dreamed I’d learn about how to take apart a US army formation from the inside.
There is no better way to prepare for combat than to simulate it. As a side benefit, both teams in a fight learn from the experience. Trainers become better at fighting themselves.
Considering that US military personnel have zero experience in the kind of fighting Ukraine has endured but also face a very real prospect of seeing it themselves if Washington bumbles into a war with Beijing, it would behoove the United States Armed Forces to initiate a large-scale direct training program that brings entire Ukrainian brigades - or at the very least a full battle group at one time - to American bases stateside for around four months.
Here’s a rough draft plan for how this works. At six or even more bases, starting in November if the US authorities can get moving, thousands of Ukrainians from brigades pulled off the front line will fly to the continental US. After settling in and resting a spell these troops will spend four consecutive months both learning and teaching alongside a battalion-sized cohort of US personnel stationed at the post.
Month One will involve initial training on modern equipment and a focused, intensive, participatory debrief intended to elicit as many lessons as possible from the Ukrainian participants as they recount how the orcs fight. This is not for basic training, even if many Ukrainian soldiers assigned to these brigades are new recruits. The Ukrainian brigades will begin to take possession of their new kit immediately, US partners working them up on the basics of maintenance and use. Abbreviated and simplified language instruction for both sides will help smooth over inevitable cultural differences.
Month Two takes everything from a crawl to a walk: Ukrainian units begin group-level field training with help from their advisers as they get used to using modern gear. Officers and non-commissioned officers go through intense tabletop exercises and ultimately field tests to hone their ability to plan and coordinate operations using new gear and the methods it demands. US trainers move even more into partner mode during this period, assisting where asked but otherwise focusing on understanding the ruscist way of war in its present state and helping troubleshoot issues.
Month Three is when it all accelerates to a sprint: Ukrainian troops will largely be left on their own to work out how to best incorporate modern gear with Ukraine’s style of warfare in constant exercises. They will make use of all the base ranges as well as go through short field exercises where local US troops will act the part of ruscist troops - with a twist: they’ll present as competent enemies, free to adapt the orc template to pose a more complex threat and help develop best practices for countering techniques the orcs might eventually develop on their own.
Month Four brings the capstone: a three week field exercise where the Ukrainian brigade has to fight its hosts on their home turf. A local adaptation of the work done at major training centers in California, Louisiana, and Germany, this process should create plenty of chances to fail without fatal consequences. Ukrainian officers can get experience with precisely those large-scale coordination tasks the experts say they do poorly at.
Off-the-shelf technologies to mitigate the threat of drone attack can be tested as well during this training. Every effort should be made to involve industry reps from Ukraine and the USA to help develop and deploy anti-drone tech.
Though the impact on the success of Ukrainian operations over summer has been over-stated, there is no getting around the fact that the rapid expansion of Ukraine’s armed forces means that people skilled at managing combat formations are in high demand. Ukraine has not had time to built out high quality junior officer and professional non-commissioned officer training establishments.
This is an area where U.S. military personnel can do tremendous work for Ukraine in a way that improves their own long-term readiness. The experience of Ukrainian soldiers is a national security gold mine if looked at properly. And close ties to professional military counterparts in the USA will go a long way to helping Ukraine purge the lingering Soviet-era corruption from its system.
In addition, soldiers having gone through this four month cycle will go back to Ukraine able to serve as trainers themselves. Eventually Ukraine needs to be able to handle everything on its own, but for now Kyiv is still struggling to maintain enough bandwidth to handle all the demands imposed by this war. Giving large numbers of Ukrainian officers practical experience managing their troops before they are committed to combat will save lives.
Americans may not realize this, but the aid given to Ukraine so far is a pittance compared to what the Pentagon spends each year. While the US national debt is clearly way too high at 150% of so of GDP, another $100 billion isn’t going to make a whit of difference in a world where the Pentagon already gets over $800 billion annually - with one of its main jobs being to hedge against the threat posed by Moscow. If Beijing and Moscow truly are the evil duo of our time, as so many American leaders insist, then the failure of one is a drag on the other. And if one is gone, that frees up resources to focus on the other - or other things.
The cost-benefit of expanding and enhancing aid to Ukraine is ridiculously in the USA’s favor. The same is true of starting large-scale training of Ukrainian formations at US bases.
Given that one or two marine brigades are coming off the Velyka Novosilka front right now, I see an opportunity to bring either or both to the US Marine Corps bases in California and North Carolina as soon as possible. The USMC is beginning a shift away from heavy vehicle operations as a result of needing to be lighter to work in the Pacific, but much of its present inventory could be extremely useful in crossing the Dnipro or even the estuaries separating Kherson from Crimea. US Marines are also notable for, at least in my view, having a more realistic vision of modern warfare than most other branches of the US armed forces thanks to their unique intellectual culture and history.
I’ve actually spent a bit of time at Pendleton, the main Marine Corps base on the West Coast near San Diego. Before I transferred to UC Berkeley to finish my undergrad degree I did two years at UC San Diego, in La Jolla. A lot of folks don’t think of California as being a military hub thanks to the weird way the West Coast is covered by the media, but most mornings in 2003 and 2004 I woke up to Navy and Marine Corps F-18 Hornets departing Miramar zooming past my fifth-floor dorm window. Some would go vertical and kick on the afterburners at the exact moment they went feet wet over the beach, just to say hello to the super-rich folks sitting in their mansions down in La Jolla and Del Mar, no doubt. Pilots and other service members came to speak in our international relations courses, a practice I highly recommend to any military leaders out there with recruitment in their remit.
The rolling chaparral hills of southern California aren’t much like Ukraine at first glance, but spend some time out in the open on some wide grassy plain or near the sea shore and the lack of cover will likely feel a lot like home in the trenches. And given Kherson’s proximity to the Black Sea, San Diego might have more to offer than you might expect at first glance. There’s also an old nuclear power plant nearby that troops could practice storming, too.
I’ve never been to Lejeune, the East Coast’s equivalent, but I’m sure the personnel there can find suitable training grounds. And for those worried about readiness, have no fear: the other USMC division is already forward-deployed over in Okinawa. The Pacific is well covered.
Being a lot bigger, the U.S. Army can and should mount an even larger training effort. Even if you rule out Texas and other deep Red States out of an abundance of caution - who knows, their governors might object under the current partisan dynamic, which isn’t getting better soon - as well as Alaska and Hawai’i, which are tasked to cover the Arctic and Pacific, that leaves plenty of bases and divisions to work with.
Lewis-McChord up near Seattle hosts the 2nd Infantry Division’s two Stryker brigades, a vehicle Ukraine already uses and could likely absorb a lot more of. 4th Infantry Division over at Fort Carson Colorado has Stryker brigades plus a heavy brigade that could train soldiers using Abrams and Bradleys. The 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Georgia - a purple state, for the time being - is also a heavy one. And 10th Mountain Division, at Fort Drum in upstate New York, might be a light infantry division that doesn’t emphasize vehicles and operates in complex terrain, but as one that deploys often its personnel are likely highly experienced trainers.
If June 2024 rolls around and Ukraine has another six to ten fully modernized and highly trained brigades ready to enter the fight, that plus the arrival of modern combat jets should give Ukraine the ability to perform the kind of swift, crushing offensive its backers seemed to believe was possible to power with a fraction of the necessary resources. Given the nature of the fight Ukraine began this summer, Kyiv’s forces stand to grow stronger overall even without a major break in the fighting because of how they are being employed.
There’s a concept in natural resource science called maximum sustainable yield. It is a bit outdated and often abused, but the gist of the concept is that there’s an ideal rate at which you can use a resource, a balance between over-consumption and under-utilization. Ukraine remains in the position of the strategic insurgent: it must constantly bleed the enemy until it recoils and runs home. That means draining and depleting Putin’s ability to do Ukraine harm at the maximum rate that doesn’t leave Ukraine’s forces too weak.
Is this style of warfare ideal? No. But it was always highly possible that this would be required, that massing tanks and troops to achieve a narrow breakthrough and charge deep into the enemy’s rear has been obsolete since Tom Clancy and Larry Bond detailed how that would go with 1980s-level tech in Red Storm Rising. The ability to kill things quickly has not gotten less potent with time.
These days, to achieve effects like surprise, shock, momentum, and all the rest means coordinating large numbers of highly localized actions. The ruscists are trying to do it by creating a linear wall filled with eyes and backed by a lot of high explosives to compensate for being exceptionally poor at winning fights where the enemy moves too quickly to fix and crush with artillery.
Ukraine adapted to this and developed the most effective counter it could with remarkable speed. To make any progress at all under these conditions without becoming exhausted is a minor miracle.
Once again, Kyiv pulled it off. If you evaluate based on what could have happened this summer based on what we now know about ruscist plans and capabilities going in, the essential success of Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive isn’t hard to spot. Mick Ryan is right - this is a strategy of exhaustion.
It’s ultimate goal is to bring down Putin’s regime whatever leaders in NATO prefer. That’s the only way Ukraine will ever be safe, and it’s the reason why the quickest way to end the war is to force Moscow to leave by any means necessary short of all-out nuclear war.
Putin is trapped in a war that he can never win. While he and his cronies can look to the perpetual dysfunction of the United States federal government and content themselves in it probably going the way of the USSR, that will come as cold comfort when all that remains of their empire is Moscow itself.