Ukraine's 2024 Military Reboot: Part 2
More clues about how Syrskyi is reforming Ukraine's military efforts are starting to emerge. The ongoing battle along the Durna west of Avdiivka is a case study in area defense.
Moscow’s spring offensive isn’t exactly gathering steam, but in a few sectors the orcs are moving forward. For a variety of reasons this is to be expected.
Putin’s military machine is using the same tactics that bled Germany out in France in the spring of 1918. By focusing a tremendous amount of firepower and shock troops along a narrow portion of a front, it can now penetrate around 5km into Ukraine’s defensive lines at will… if it then takes a week to consolidate those gains. That’s an achievement in a tactical sense, but little more. This isn’t Deep Battle, but a pale imitation. And it’s mainly working to the degree it kind is because Ukraine hasn’t been able to put its artillery to full effect because of shell shortages.
The trouble with this sort of adaptation is that it boosts short term strength at the expense of long term resilience. The limited ability of any force to supply troops pushed into an exposed position limits how far any classic mechanized breakthrough is able to go. With forces on a tight tether they can’t freely maneuver to exploit weaknesses behind the front. That allows the defender time to set up new defense lines while still inflicting tremendous pain on the side trying to advance. And time is not on Putin’s side.
Aid is coming, arriving already. Much likely comes from stocks already in Europe. The flow will ramp up in the coming months, hopefully enough to restore some thirty brigades to full fighting strength and give them modern gear.
Moscow’s tactical successes will prove difficult to translate into operational wins of sufficient size and power to alter the strategic balance in this war. While it’s not quite safe to call the next few month’s the orcs’ last gasps, Putin’s war machine is presently operating at an unsustainable peak, desperate to score politically significant gains in order to proclaim victory and press for a ceasefire.
Weekly Overview
The major action this week has been on the Avdiivka front, where the orc breakthrough to Ocheretyne was not repelled. It in fact continues to widen and deepen, causing recriminations to spread across the media. Some allege that the 115th Mechanized Brigade abandoned its positions during a rotation, but Jerome over at Militaryland.net has a sharp eye for detail and debunked this.
What appears to have happened was that the 115th and attached Skala battalion were hit on both flanks by a determined orc assault a division strong - likely twice their numbers or more. Yes, the enemy timed the strike for when a battalion-led group of the 115th had recently conducted a personnel rotation, but attempting this is standard practice for both sides. The 47th Mechanized Brigade has apparently been slated for replacement by another brigade, possibly the 100th Mechanized Brigade that just appeared in the area, but the delay in its departure isn’t tied to the 115th having to pull back from Ocheretyne and Novokalynove.
This kind of thing happens. I don’t mean to downplay the pain of losing a line, something that almost always comes with loss of life. It’s never ideal to have the enemy advance six kilometers in a week and seize the majority of a tactically significant town. Ukraine’s defense of the Durna line is nowcompromised, and it probably makes sense for the brigades holding the ridge west of the river to conduct a fighting withdrawal over the next couple weeks to economize the line and shift forces back to the north to block the road to Kostiantynivka.
But this is classic area defense. A patch of dirt is only worth fighting for if the cost to you is substantially less than the price the enemy will pay to take and hold it. On a battlefield where drones can savage anything that moves within about 5km from the front lines, a seeming breakthrough can easily become a bloody sink for combat power.
That’s why Ukraine under Zaluzhnyi pulled its punch this past summer: trying to bash through the dense fortifications of the Surovikin line wasn’t worth it. The slow and cautious approach made progress, but in a military operation the point of sending people into dangerous tactical situations is to make these work together to produce emergent effects, in systems science speak - situations where the product of parts exceeds the strict sum of their efforts.
Operational art is about making this happen. Most of the effective military leaders you’ve ever heard about were masters at assembling ingredients and motivating people they couldn’t possibly directly command in the middle of a fight to act with the same purpose. War is pure anarchy and all control illusory. Fleeting chances are missed when those who can take action are forced to delay because of communication failures - or fail to comprehend the bigger picture and their place in it, getting at cross-purposes with other forces.
Metrics like square kilometers occupied and liberated have their place, but when looking at a battlefield map it’s important to see each location in purely functional terms. High ground and rapid shifts in elevation indicate a place where troops can see and shoot farther, all things being equal. Rivers restrict movement, making crossing points very important.
Sometimes the loss of one key position makes an entire network of them untenable. It alters the cost of holding others. Fighting hard to gain or regain control is sometimes necessary, but in a lot of situations it’s better to roll with the punch and look for ways to make the enemy suffer so much that their success cannot be repeated.
The question now is whether Ukraine can prevent the breach at Ocheretyne from extending all the way across a low ridge that runs from the rail line leading to Pokrovsk to the outskirts of Kostiantynivka, about 15km north. The village of Novooleksandrivka is an important focal point now; if Ukraine can hold a line passing from it to Prohres on the Vovcha, this can anchor another one from Novooleksandrivka through Kalynove and over to Olexandropil to prevent Moscow from trying to surround Niu York and Toretsk from the south.
This line will be farther from Avdiivka, complicating orc resupply, while maintaining control of the ridges Moscow would very much like to seize. Moscow’s thrust beyond Ocheretyne is visibly aimed at a road junction between Kostiantynivka and Pokrovsk. This, like the push on Chasiv Yar, needs to be halted more than Ukraine needs to hang onto embattled towns like Krasnohorivka a bit farther south if a choice must be made. Luckily Moscow’s progress here, though swift in relative terms, is still likely much too slow to have major success, needing another week or two merely to stabilize the flanks of the penetration.
Ukraine has a natural fallback line in Donbas that would relieve some of the pressure on its supply lines while adding to Moscow’s, but moving to it will require accepting the loss of some towns. I know this suggestion will sound callous, but I grew up in fire country. Northern California was prone to major wildfires years before the rest of the state and country apparently realized that nature is combustible. Granted, fires didn’t wipe out whole towns without warning thirty years ago, but it’s a sad truth of the wildland-human interface firefighting that you can’t always save everything. Property can be replaced, lives can’t.
Elsewhere, Chasiv Yar remains a focal point of the ruscist offensive effort in Donbas, but Moscow has made virtually no visible progress this past week. The orcs can apparently get close to the outlying Kanal district, but not maintain a large presence on the top of the slope it sits on.
About a kilometer to the north and south of the Kanal district are ravines some 50m deep. Moscow’s forces have pushed into these, but they remain exposed whenever they try to move reinforcements up. Glide bombs are demolishing the Kanal district, but the rubble still has to be occupied for Moscow to advance far beyond. Meanwhile Ukrainian forces in the Fifth Assault Brigade’s sector on the slopes beyond the ravine south of Chasiv Yar have counterattacked in at least one spot.
At this point Ukraine’s defense effort in and around Chasiv Yar looks manageable, if tense. Unlike Bakhmut, which was a fortress mainly by grace of having a lot of tall structures and being covered by high ground from the west, Chasiv Yar is like the inner keep of a castle with a supporting bastion across the moat. Moscow will have to spend a week or two just clearing the bastion before it can begin working around the towns’ flanks. It should be at least a month before Ukrainian forces face a crisis, if they ever do now that more shells should be arriving.
Moscow is making moves in a few other places, mostly the usual ones. Robotyne is now largely in the grey zone as a result of the place being pummeled into rubble, but Ukraine is still holding on, the defense now apparently led by the new 141st Infantry Brigade and established 65th Mechanized. Marine-held Krynky draws a few attacks every day, but these have little effect other than to churn the rubble, and Ukraine is supposedly expanding the perimeter. Further down the Dnipro one of the lower islands on the Ukrainian side of the main channel has been fully liberated, too.
Worth pointing out is a recent increase in the provision of boats to Ukraine from the UK, Sweden, and a few others. I don’t know how many are needed to supply a brigade in a cross-river operation, but I would not be surprised if in summer we find out.
In odd news, an AP story made the rounds this week alleging that Ukraine has withdrawn all its M1 Abrams tanks from the front line. Many analysts are taking this as established fact because AP said it, but the 47th Mechanized Brigade, the unit either equipped or directly supported by them near Avdiivka, has denied the report. I know who I trust more even if the info does come through translation. Comparing the coverage of American politics by AP and Reuters lately is illustrative of where American journalism is going wrong.
That of thirty-one Abrams five have been destroyed and several others damaged across two months of hard fighting isn’t remarkable in the least. The whole 47th Mechanized brigade is on the verge of being withdrawn because it’s been in constant action since last June and needs a break.
Americans get fed a lot of marketing nonsense from the defense industry that leads to many folks thinking that US gear is magical. It is not. A common task of a cavalry scout, one I was qualified to perform almost twenty years ago, is basically to shepherd armored vehicles around so they don’t get ambushed and blown up. Drones just reduce the wiggle room armor operators once had when it came to rushing between hides. Every experienced scout I met who had been through a National Training Center cycle or two had stories about hunting tanks with rocket launchers in small teams. Tanks are not invincible.
You might ask why tanks are useful these days, but if you’ve ever heard a 120mm cannon fire or seen the effects in a drone feed the answer is self-explanatory. Nobody asks if infantry fighting vehicles are obsolete even though they get blown up more often and usually with worse losses because people aren’t trained to see them as magic.
But there is pretty much zero chance that a Ukrainian tanker will trade an Abrams, Leopard 2, or Challenger 2 for a T-64. And every Ukrainian brigade needs at least a dozen modern tanks, ideally two, for the missions they perform best: exploiting a breakthrough or smashing one. And with thirty brigades to fit out, that’s a lot tanks that need to be prepped and loaded onto rail cars.
Zaluzhnyi and Syrskyi: A Tale Of Two Leadership Styles
Supporters of Ukraine need to keep in mind that the ideal scenario over the next two months, as new aid and fresh troops are mustered and organized, is one where Putin’s forces make reckless efforts to advance and leave themselves vulnerable to a counterattack in early fall. The best way to make that happen is to draw the orcs on, forcing them to effectively crawl across broken glass simply to move the front five or six kilometers farther west one painful lunge at a time. As artillery supplies substantially increase heading into June, any extended fingers Moscow presses into Ukraine’s defenses can be chopped off with extreme prejudice.
Meanwhile, Ukraine can allocate a subset of its renewed strength to the task of crossing the Dnipro and laying siege to Crimea by the end of 2024. The best way to liberate Donbas is to induce a crisis in Putin’s regime that opens the door to a general russian withdrawal back behind its sovereign borders. With Ukraine on the cusp of victory in the Black Sea, modern air power arriving soon, and long-range precision weapons like the 300km version of ATACMS, Moscow’s position in Crimea is no longer tenable.
In the short term, however, minimizing casualties and preserving combat power is essential. Syrskyi’s style of leadership and focus are turning out to be what Ukraine needed, though his promotion understandably made a lot of observers nervous. So far, however, Syrskyi is looking more and more like the guy who learned how to kill the institution that trained him.
As someone who probably missed his calling as the dude who runs Red Team in wargames and simulations, I’m probably biased here. But when you see the inside of an institution subjected to substantial myth-making, it’s often possible to see aspects that insiders miss. The year I spent in uniform before being selected for officer training came after graduating from UC Berkeley, that legendary bastion of leftist activism, gave me a view into the United States Army that probably only folks from other countries ever get.
Every leader has their own style, a persona cultivated to suit a purpose. I hesitate to call it a brand, because to my Western American mind that is something you burn into cattle, not a term appropriate to apply to a human being. But call it whatever you like, a leader has to develop one to easily communicate with the many people who depend on them. A drill sergeant I highly respected long ago advised his soldiers to combine the good from every leadership style they run into and try to squeeze out the bad.
Zelensky acts the part of the inspirational showman, Budanov the smug provacateur. Zaluzhnyi was the popular general, the dude who understands war both at the theoretical as well as personal level, the Patton or Rommel. Syrskyi appears to be the grim technician, the Bradley, Montgomery, or Manstein. At least, that’s how they come off in the media.
Zaluzhnyi’s leadership style was probably ideal given his task: first prepare for Putin’s inevitable assault, then when it came transform Ukraine into a nation at arms. He had to take hundreds of thousands of citizens with no recent military training or experience and field them in brigades capable of winning however they could, expanding Ukraine’s armed forces by a factor of five in under a year.
To do that requires leadership which emphasizes inspiration and individual autonomy. A people’s army is not the same as one run by professionals and you can’t expect it to follow standard military procedure. A scrappy, anarchic defense was the perfect foil to Putin’s haphazard machine in 2022, but but by 2023 it was already starting to display fragility as the Red Army mentality went into full gear.
There continue to be reports that Zaluzhnyi and Zelensky butted heads, the latter bypassing the former to issue orders. This might be true, but another plausible explanation is simply that Zaluzhnyi was overloaded trying to keep all the moving pieces together. And like any professional, he was intellectually and professionally committed to a military paradigm that could only continue to operate if a full half a million additional Ukrainians were mobilized. Syrskyi naturally believes he can achieve better results a different way. But so far I’m not seing units get sacrificed or any other warning signs that the “butcher” moniker is particularly deserved.
Ukraine has actually had more senior level turnover than the Biden Administration, despite one succeeding time and again against the odds while the other… well, doesn’t. That says a lot about which is subject to more democratic accountability, so far as I’m concerned. After a few years, any leader or policy maker needs a break. Quite frankly American presidents ought to be limited to a single term from now on - House speakers and Senate majority leaders too.
Anyway, others who worked with Syrskyi in the past dubbed him “Snow Leopard” in apparent reference to his patient yet devious approach. He was apparently in charge of a Ukrainian mechanized force back in 2015 that operated deep behind ruscist lines with great success.
Part of Zaluzhnyi’s job, and a big reason why he’ll likely make a great ambassador to the UK, was bringing Ukraine’s armed forces up to NATO standard. He’s spent much of his career steeped in NATO military thinking. Ukraine’s 2023 Summer Campaign was structured as a NATO combined arms operation minus air support and with three fronts instead of one or two. But Ukraine’s partners did not correctly resource it to fight as this style of warfare demands, either in terms of air power or the depth of armored vehicle inventory sent by June of 2023.
One of the big reasons why most observers got so dour about Ukraine’s chances after last summer, with “experts” like the predictably awful Michael Kofman blaming inadequate training within weeks of offensive operations kicking off, was that they had to watch a lot of precious assumptions about the inherent superiority of NATO kit and ways die in public view. Combined arms operations even if performed by fully equipped forces are not a silver bullet, something purely civilian observers who have never witnessed half a column of armored vehicles stranded because of breakdowns or lost because the lieutenant can’t read a map rarely seem to understand.
A lot of analysts throughout this conflict have ignored basic lessons taught by years of intensive fighting on the Eastern Front in the 1940s. They were also too enamored of the rapid Allied success in France in the summer of 1944, forgetting the hard year of fighting in Italy or the blood-drenched storming of Tarawa and half a dozen other Japanese-held Islands in the Central and Southern Pacific. Most Americans have no idea that my guys like my granddad were sent to India to help Commonwealth forces fight off the Japanese there.
Shifting from Zaluzhnyi to Syrskyi is turning out to be a wiser move than it seemed at first. As Stefan Korshak with the Kyiv Post noted last week, Ukraine’s behavior has changed. While troops do launch limited counterattacks, the emphasis is on letting the enemy push forward while exposed so Ukraine’s drones can tear them apart. What shells Ukrainian artillery units are given are used sparingly, but to good effect. Once supplies are restored, things will get vicious within 40km of wherever they happen to be.
Blood is worth more than territory, and if the enemy commits to punching on one front it’s often easier to impose costs while falling back to focus your strength somewhere entirely different. Effective warfare is applied asymmetry.
There are limits to where you can fall back without suffering operational level consequences, of course, which is why I’m more concerned about the fight for Chasiv Yar at the moment than stabilizing the Avdiivka front. It’s flexibility that Ukrainian forces need right now, and contrary to the expectations of those who though Syrski might prove too Soviet what I see so far in his efforts is a decided emphasis on building quality over quantity even if that means pulling back from fights where the exchange looks unpromising.
Again, it isn’t that Zaluzhnyi lacked flexibility or Syrskyi is a genius, but the kind of motivational leadership the former embraced is better suited to a period of a conflict where much is uncertain about what each side is capable of. Now the time has come to meld NATO and Soviet doctrine from the training ground to the battlefield, systematizing and organizing Ukraine’s fight for maximum efficiency at every level.
Of late I’ve noted a reduction in the number of heavier Ukrainian brigades, the Mechanized ones reporting from several fronts. The changes in Ukraine’s overall disposition are subtle, but a key effort in Syrskyi’s renewal campaign is almost certain to be creating a deep strategic reserve equipped with fresh bodies and new gear from Ukraine’s allies. Part of why Ukraine is falling back is that it has fewer people on the front lines.
The troops holding the lines today are increasingly personnel who Syrskyi’s audit revealed were capable of fighting on the front but hadn’t been assigned there, likely for one of two primary reasons. Because of the rapid expansion of Ukraine’s ground forces starting in 2022 there are all kinds of brigades of various types and structures deployed. Many are territorial defense units partly staffed with people who volunteered to fight when Ukraine was standing up any unit it could. A fair few have probably been with their units guarding the Belarus frontier for a long while or otherwise kept in rear guard duties.
Some of these formations are now being reflagged as full-on Mechanized Brigades - the 100th being an example, probably handed equipment used by other formations being rotated off the line. In others, personnel are probably being shifted individually or in groups to fill out existing line units. The net effect is to allow as many people who have been serving since 2022 as possible to have a turn handling rear area duties or, for those fortunate enough to still be healthy after two years of war, acting as sergeants and lieutenants for a couple hundred thousand newly mobilized personnel starting in May.
I’ve estimated before that Ukraine will likely put around 180,000 new bodies in uniform this summer, enough to fully staff 30 brigades. A portion will be held back for the general replacement pool, perhaps 1/3, with the other 120,000 get paired with some 60,000 veterans. The first cohort will arrive at training centers in late May, receive basic instruction in contemporary tactics for 4-6 weeks, then by July be integrated with their assigned brigades for another six weeks of focused group training. By September the first 5-10 brigades ought to be ready for deployment, equal numbers appearing in the months after depending on Ukraine’s training throughput.
These can then replace the most worn out brigades along the front line and generate a small operational strike force of 8-10 brigades able to strike across the Dnipro to Crimea. In the meantime the approximately 60 brigades and 360,000 Ukrainians covering the 1,200km front stretching from the Dnipro in Zaporizhzhia to the international border north of Kupiansk. Those troop levels will stay even, ensuring that a third of Ukraine’s brigades are resting at any given time.
And as for the fighting quality of the brigades being restored, new bodies properly trained are only part of the equation. They’ve got to have modern equipment, and that means Ukraine’s partners contributing a whole lot more than they have.
A standard Ukrainian brigade has one armor, 3-4 organic and 1-2 attached infantry battalions, and an artillery battalion, plus a drone battalion (or three). A series of supporting companies tasked with engineering, air defense, and other vital functions together comprise the equivalent of another 2 battalions, plus you’ve got to have one for admin and logistics. Depending on role a battalion will have between 400-800 personnel, for around 6,000 per brigade.
Each armor battalion has around 30 tanks, every infantry battalion gets about 40 armored troop carriers, and the artillery battalion gets approximately 20 guns. The other battalions get their own armored vehicles and trucks too. To put together thirty brigades you need about 900 tanks, 600 guns, and 7-8,000 armored vehicles of various types along with about ten thousand trucks.
This is a lot of kit. Most or all of it needs to be modern to mitigate casualties. The good news is that there’s enough in allied inventories. The bad is that too many will probably cling to what they’ve got as a hedge against unnamed contingencies. Ukraine is set to receive $61 billion in US aid, and total European aid once the next round of commitments follows in the wake of Congress finally doing its job will probably equal this amount. But how much gear this buys is something of an open question.
For many years I’ve had the ambition to design a grand strategic simulator that is accessible enough to market as a game. There are good operational level games that get way too into military details for most players and decent high strategy titles, but nothing that links grand strategy and operations to my satisfaction. Hearts of Iron is fun, but focused on World War Two when I’d like something covering two full centuries of history to illustrate and play with how technology, tactics, and strategy co-evolve.
This isn’t the place to lay out details of that; the connection to Ukraine’s fight is that this sort of simulation/game depends on converting economic productivity to raw military power in a realistic but simplified way. Essentially, there has to be a conversion factor that can be expressed in units of currency that indicate how much an armed force costs to sustain and deploy.
For Ukraine, evaluating how much its money can buy depends on how donor countries account for the value of items like M1A1 tanks or Marder infantry fighting vehicles. If Ukraine’s account is charged the $10 million it costs the Pentagon to buy a new, fully modernized M1A2 to replace an M1A1 sitting in storage, that wouldn’t be ideal. On the other hand, if Ukraine is charged the depreciated value of the asset, presuming the US has already used up 90% of an item’s ability to do work, 900 M1A1s would only set Ukraine back about a billion dollars.
The latter methodology is more sensible, but who knows when politics gets involved. And high-price one-shot stuff like Patriot interceptors will cost several million because the depreciation on something like that is small at first then rapidly goes to 100%. Ukraine needs at least a thousand, which I suspect will take up a good 10% of everything the US allocated.
Artillery shells and air defense weapons are the immediate priority, but a massive chunk of the aid Ukraine receives has to come in the form of modern armored vehicles. A significant fraction, maybe even half, will be destroyed. If the crews survive, they’ve done their job.
The open question now is how many armored vehicles suitable for transfer to Ukraine actually exist. While thousands of Leopard 2s and Abrams have been built, it appears that many owners failed to perform proper maintenance, with the result they are almost worthless. NATO countries have been reluctant to dip into the reserves of gear they presume would be needed to stop an all-out ruscist attack, meaning that the vehicles in working order are clung to as a hedge.
This has got to stop. European countries need to recognize that they’re undermining their own credibility by not rushing everything that works to Ukraine right away, save some high-end stuff needed to ensure a brigade or two can deploy to the Baltic countries or Finland if Moscow tries anything suicidal. But the behavior of NATO countries with respect to Ukraine, a country they all insist will be a member one day, is a window into how they’ll act if Estonia comes under attack.
Estonia, it should be noted, has contributed the highest fraction of its gross domestic product of any country despite the threat it faces from Moscow. Denmark is in second place - and also happens to be country where Rogue Systems Recon has the most readers per capita. Both facts intrigue me, as I have no ready explanations. Danish awareness of Moscow’s ships passing through the Danish straits might be part of it. I’m not complaining, though.
Anyway, the way historical trajectories seem to work it is highly unlikely that NATO will face a threat like this again for a generation. Either what Putin began in Ukraine spreads more or less neatly over the next few years into other countries, likely triggering a third world war, or his defeat heralds the final collapse of the imaginary russian world into sustainable autonomous geographic regions.
European countries holding back for fear of some future crisis are missing the plot: it’s already here. If I share borders with Putin’s empire - and the US West Coast effectively does, even if they’re watery - NATO’s behavior in holding back everything from armored vehicles to Patriot air defense systems is a warning sign of extreme fragility. That Greece in particular is hoarding its air defenses, jets, and armored vehicles against the day it fights a war with Turkey, a fellow NATO member, is another sign of a rot that might well prove fatal.
Other NATO members are as guilty, though. The refusal to part with Patriot batteries is especially galling because most of Europe is close enough to the sea to receive protection from US ship based air defenses. Aegis cruisers and destroyers of the Ticonderoga and Arleigh Burke types are floating Patriot batteries that have spent the past few months proving the system against Houthi and Iranian weapons of all types.
Ukraine has just 3-4 Patriot and 1-2 SAMP/T systems. Give the country another seven Patriot-class systems like it’s asking for and that puts it to around a solid dozen. Until it ran out of missiles, Ukraine was able to stop even the largest and most complex attacks against Kyiv in large part because it probably keeps two long-range systems on station within each one’s 45km maximum range for coverage against ballistic threats. If Ukraine has enough systems to deploy them in pairs along vital parts of the front it should be able to all but prevent glide bomb attacks while simultaneously warding off inevitable ruscist attempts to overwhelm and destroy them.
Stop the glide bombs, restore Ukraine’s artillery supply, and provide it with adequate numbers of armored vehicles, and victory is in sight. When it comes to the vehicle side of the equation every Leopard 2 model A6 or older needs to be heading to Poland to be shipped across the border. With the UK both upgrading its tank fleet from Challenger 2 to 3 (really 2.5, but whatever) and reducing the inventory by around 100 it’s a good time to up the original provision of 14 by about an order of magnitude. The 70-odd Leopard 2s Ukraine received has to be only a tenth of the vehicles in storage unless NATO secretly has no tank reserves at all. Abrams can make up the difference.
As far as artillery systems go Ukraine is actually producing quite a few modern Bohdana systems, to the tune of up to 10 a month and ramping up, and allies have been decent with slowly boosting its arsenal. One of the big unknowns in the official tallies of aid deliveries is whether a country donating ten tanks is doing so once or agreeing to maintain ten in action, that is, send supplies for repair. Indications are no, which is a shame if true. Reportedly only one Challenger 2 tank has been lost in action but ten or eleven others are in need of parts. This could be why modern tanks are appearing less on the front while Ukrainian tankers in T-64 are still showing up. Regardless, another one or two hundred self-propelled artillery systems are still badly required.
And then there is the sheer mass of infantry fighting vehicles, armored personnel carriers, and protected transports that modern combat requires. While it would be wonderful to have Ukrainian brigades roll out with 160 Bradleys, there just aren’t enough to go around - it’s been given just around 200 so far. I suspect Ukraine can make due with having four infantry battalions in each brigade, one with IFVs like the Bradley/Marder/CV-90, another with tracked APCs like the M-113, a third with wheeled APCs like the Stryker of VAB, and a fourth (fifth, in some) that rolls out in MRAP armored trucks.
I’m not positive, but very sure, that Ukrainian brigades are functionally administrative formations split into 3-4 battlegroups to allow a degree of unit rotation away from the contact line and local reserves. Nobody uses intact battalions of 30 tanks any more, unless they’re the orcs trying an experiment they don’t soon repeat. Instead, an infantry battalion will be paired with a bunch of supporting assets, including tanks, fire support, and other specialties, the group commanded by a single officer.
What that means in practice is that a brigade with Challenger 2 tanks, CV-90 IFVs, M-113 tracked APCs, Stryker wheeled APCs, and MRAPs will deploy whatever mix of actual vehicles is needed in a given mission. All things being equal IFVs pack a heavier punch but carry fewer soldiers in the back than APCs, tracked or wheeled. Often the speed of a wheeled APC and its size makes it ideal for rotating squads, while an M-113 can handle rough terrain. MRAPs are fast and light, great for moving supplies.
A standard Ukrainian brigade would have about 40 of each, backed by 20-30 tanks and 20 artillery pieces, 4-6 of them modern 155mm models. That’s a lot of hardware, but enough combined firepower to hold a 20km stretch of front line against an orc division twice as strong in numerical terms. In greater densities, Ukrainian battle groups can advance on select fronts.
Drone’s can’t be forgotten, of course: they are set to be a feature of ground forces long into the future. The specific types will change, but as a recent and excellent RUSI research paper argues will likely to fill one of four roles: local recon, area surveillance, prompt fire support, and long-range strike.
I suspect a fifth will also emerge: counter-drone. Just like the first fighter planes were modified recon aircraft tasked with sweeping the skies of counterparts, soon drones will start being used to hunt other drones in an attempt to blind the enemy. Piloted aircraft are even being used by Ukraine’s Civil Air Patrol to shoot down orc surveillance drones when they stray too far into Ukrainian airspace.
And if you’re looking at easy ways to integrate AI into a drone, restricting it to aerial targets mitigates one of the biggest issues with autonomous targeting. A drone with limited range could be fired at an area just like an anti-aircraft missile, ordered to lock optically onto a target by a user and run it down after loitering for a spell seeking targets.
Ukraine’s ground forces are at a critical point in their evolution. On the battlefield Ukraine will be on the back foot for at least another month as supplies ramp up again. A truly massive training effort is set to begin alongside an influx of material from allies to dwarf anything yet seen. But it had better be only the beginning.
Strategy and Geopolitics
I do have to give credit where it’s due: the Biden Administration did something right when it approved ATACMS deliveries without fanfare back in March. Ukraine now has access to the longer ranged version with a unitary warhead that can bonk hardened targets from 300km distant. Nice. I just hope Ukraine gets about 500. It will need them to blanket Crimea, knocking out the air bases sustaining ruscist patrols over the Black Sea and air defense systems around them.
ATACMS even in those numbers won’t alone represent a game changer in the war, just one more piece of an ever shifting puzzle. The enemy can develop countermeasures to any single weapon, as the apparent failure of the Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb only recently fielded in Ukraine proves. But it’s nice to see that even old dogs like Biden can be house trained, given time.
Unfortunately, with American leaders a step in the right direction is usually a reluctant concession preceding two leaps backward. There has been another intensification of anti-China rhetoric from the administration, which remains bound and determined to convince Beijing that it had better give Moscow open military support since it’ll be accused of it anyway. Gods forbid that China be so drawn into stabilizing post-russia that it can’t afford a conflict on the Pacific front - that would make all the new Cold War nonsense a poor investment.
I remain concerned that the Biden Administration will attempt the same game with Ukraine that it is Israel, saying one thing in public to cover a dirty deed in private, namely force Ukraine to give up territory in exchange for a ceasefire.
The price for Israel’s muted reaction to Iran’s unprecedented show of force the other week was likely a green light to go hard into Rafah. I’d like to hope that the latest truce talks will pan out, but so far both Netanyahu and Hamas appear to calculate that more fighting benefits them. Biden needs to look like he’s being tough on Netanyahu for domestic political reasons, namely being stuck statistically tied in polls he led by a wide margin in 2020. But leading Democratic pundits are already talking down the relevance of Gaza, a clear prelude to the media pointedly ignoring domestic protests or at least characterizing them as the work of extremists.
The danger is that Biden liberals will soon decide they’ve done enough and that Ukraine’s survival in any form without a nuclear war means that victory parades can be held in New York and D.C. come October. Hopefully supporters of Ukraine with sway in the US can begin laying the groundwork for quick passage of a similarly sized aid bill in early fall to cover 2025. The current one gets Ukraine back to fighting on equal terms: another should secure victory outright.
Ideally, both Biden and Trump will have to walk into November eager to claim that they are the one more determined to see Putin defeated. If Trump tacks that way, similar to what he’s doing with his new public stance on abortion, it will neutralize a major vulnerability at little cost since his diehard supporters love him no matter what he says about Putin. He’s getting dangerously rational these days, which is something Ukraine supporters can play into until the election.
Do I like or trust Trump? No. His movement represents a threat to the Constitution. Unfortunately, so does a solid chunk of Biden’s.
Morality, integrity, honor - none of that matters to partisans. They define them all however it suits them in the moment. The one accidental bonus of the charade of the past half year has been stripping away the last shreds of the veil from the eyes of folks around the globe.
Small wonder most of America’s traditional allies are preparing for a world without US leadership. Whoever wins the upcoming presidential elections, the fact won’t change that countries which have long depended on the USA now have absolute proof that all the pretty words D.C. leaders spout about defending democracy, human rights, or international law are just that and nothing more.
Nobody will ever trust the USA to be a reliable security guarantor ever again. Sooner or later it will take an isolationist turn. Under these circumstances, reliable allies brought together by a common interest in maintaining stability to the degree possible wherever it can be sustained are the only ones that matter. We might even see groups of American states working together with democratic allies abroad on key issues, bypassing D.C. entirely.
As for myself, looking at the world from the West Coast, I’d frankly like to see Washington, Oregon, California, Alaska, Hawai’i, and the Pacific Territories, along with the 20% of the US military budget we provide with our tax dollars, work directly with Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and Taiwan in a kind of Pacific NATO. Call if the Pacific Defense Force; plug 2% of each member’s GDP into a coherent system of procurement and doctrine focused solely on deterring China and North Korea while guaranteeing the defeat of russia.
Beats the heck out of relying on D.C. to accomplish anything based on the evidence of the past half year. If Ukraine was forced to lose thousands of lives because of partisan stupidity, I sincerely doubt that Taiwan has much hope. At least not if China is smart enough to move slowly and divide it from its allies, using the threat of America being simultaneously unreliable and fixated on a military showdown with Beijing as a salve for the USA’s domestic divides.
If there really is an Authoritarian Axis forming up, under present American leadership Democracy is likely to lose. And I’m not sure there are any saner voices in the up and coming generation because the only ones who get any traction are selected by those presently in power - the very people who screwed things up. This includes most progressives in the USA, who should learn a thing or two about solidarity and standing up to bullies from Ukraine.
So while resumption of aid is essential and wonderful and something to be grateful for, it’s also work keeping in mind what it took to get to this point. And that it remains to be seen whether Congress will move on a like issue with appropriate speed ever again.
Now we get to see if the EU can up its game. It had better, because Ukraine’s Armed Forces are fast becoming, if they didn’t by default in February of 2022, Europe’s self-defense force.