Ukraine's Military Reboot: Into 2025
Institutional change is not an exact science, but certain factors are always present. It takes time, and progress is proven. Meanwhile, Ukraine still holds firm in Kursk and most of Donbas.
The past week in Ukraine has been busy, to say the least. There was Putin’s terror strike with an unusually big missile on Dnipro that turned out to be more bark than bite. This came after Ukraine used American ATACMS ballistic missiles to wipe out a weapons depot in Bryansk and British Storm Shadow cruise missiles to smash an underground headquarters in Kursk.
Though Oregon might not actually notice a nuclear war for days or even weeks if it happened - nothing to bomb here, really - I take it that Putin didn’t unleash Nuclear Armageddon as yet another of his red lines fades into dust. I’m shocked, shocked…
On the ground, Moscow’s self-destructive grind in Donbas continues, slow progress on the Kurakhove-Velyka Novosilka front belying how effectively the advance on Pokrovsk has so far been checked. The orcs are still launching desperate attacks in Kursk, Ukraine adeptly defending a tighter perimeter than it once tried to maintain and showing no appetite for retreat.
It’s tough out there, no doubt - and the rapid expansion of Ukraine’s ground forces over the past three years has generated structural issues. The science section of this week’s post will focus on that, as the challenges involved with rebooting Ukraine’s military are mostly natural, not down to incompetence or corruption as both ruscist and western propaganda would have it. Before turning to that I’ll cover developments on the fronts; after will come a quick brief on global affairs.
Weekly Overview
Northern Theater
Kursk has seen heavy fighting with only a little ruscist progress, Ukrainian forces finally abandoning a forest area south of Kremyanoe where they had been holding against attacks from three directions for weeks. More Ukrainian POWs were executed here, and this is also the area where last week I wrote about some orc footage showing a Ukrainian team probably getting wiped out, so I do have to wonder why Ukraine held this area for so long.
I have to consider it evidence of difficult fighting that Ukraine is still largely getting the better of, or else the front lines would be shifting much more. Moscow continues to prioritize the western flank, perhaps out of concern that Ukraine might turn around and launch a surprise attack in this area. North Korean troops are supposed to enter battle soon, so I have to expect a big wave will hit in a week or two.
The Kursk Campaign is getting old in operational terms, and has achieved real strategic impact, shattering the perception of russian strength more than even the brief Wagner revolt did in 2023. Moscow now has to rely on North Korea to sustain the defense of its own territory while scrabbling forward at tremendous cost in Donbas.
In an operational sense, continuing the Kursk Campaign makes sense only if Ukrainian troops maintain a high kill-loss ratio, though I know that sounds cold. Instead of deploying an overwhelming force to push Ukraine out - probably at the cost of being unable to take a couple thousand square kilometers in Donbas, Putin tried to have it both ways and undermined both efforts. He’s exposed his forces to ongoing attrition on their own territory while fifty thousand soldiers are prevented from reinforcing other fronts.
All things considered, there is probably no better place to fix and fight a major ruscist force right now than in Kursk. Ukraine would have to deploy most of the same troops it has there now to protect against a ruscist attack - a push to Dnipro west of Kharkiv has always been a deadly danger. This explains Ukraine’s decision to fight on in Kursk better than any alleged desire to trade it in future negotiations.
Eastern Theater
The Kurakhove-Velyka Novosilka front remains the focus of ruscist efforts to advance in occupied Ukraine. This past week the orcs have pushed directly at Velyka Novosilka from the east, a concerning development that has fortunately not been matched by further progress to the west. What appears to be happening is that Ukrainian troops allow ruscist columns to cross through the grey zone, after which they’re annihilated by drones and artillery fire as weather permits
Something to keep in mind with any map is that it is only a representation of reality, not ground truth. The color layers that everyone adds are intended only to signify the best estimate of what’s under firm control and where both sides may be operating. DeepState Map and Ukraine Control Map use gray and UA Map shades of yellow to signify the areas of uncertainty. It’s always best to assume that the fighting here is dynamic even when the media is talking about a stalemate. Probably doesn’t feel that way if your daily routine involves storming trenches.
If orc progress is not halted, however, Velyka Novosilka could fall rather quickly. The town itself, anyway - a ridge overlooking it to the west should prove much harder to clear. Ukraine is also defending the town of Rozdolne to the north against attacks, and if Moscow can break through here one of the major supply arteries heading into Velyka Novosilka would be in danger.
The arc from Rozlyv down to Uspenivka has held pretty firm this week, which is good news for 79th Air Assault. They’re finally out of Illinka, after defending it ferociously for about two weeks longer than a lot of observers expected possible. But the ruscist push beyond Dalnie has been stalled by 33rd Mechanized, which released a drone feed showing one of its Leopard 2A4s shooting up an approaching orc column from ambush - the mission nature intended for this Cold War predator. Very Red Storm Rising, guys. Well done!
The 79th and the 33rd must have a solid working relationship, because each has covered the other during their mutual slow retreat from Pobeida and Kostyantynivka this past year. Moscow apparently hoped to surround both brigades with this offensive, but the arrival of 37th Marine on the southern flank has helped both pull back behind the highway connecting Kurakhove and Uspenivka. Marine detachments appear to be firming up a defense line along the Sukhi Yali river, which should in turn allow 128th Mountain Assault and attached Territorials to focus on the fifteen kilometer stretch of front to the west.
After that the defenders of Velyka Novosilka take over. A major question right now is how prepared Ukrainian formations on the Velyka Novosilka flank are. This region is a boundary zone between the Eastern and Southern Theaters, and it looks as if Moscow is trying to find and turn Ukraine’s flank. But Moscow’s got its own vulnerabilities in that regard, especially with what reserves are available in the Southern Theater flowing to Donbas.
Kurakhove itself is now embattled, but the situation does not appear to be critical just yet. Though the orcs have occupied the eastern suburbs and sent at least one advance party into the downtown high rise area, 46th Airmobile and 116th Territorial have the orcs coming straight at them down a two kilometer front, allies only able to offer fire support from the north bank of the reservoir a couple kilometers away. To take Kurakhove, any sensible commander will prefer to cut off the road heading west and compel the defenders to retreat. But the Sukhi Yali river line is holding to the south, and to the northwest the orcs have been halted for a week in Sontsivka by 59th Motorized and 35th Marine Brigade.
Ukrainian forces might swiftly abandon Kurakhove, but right now it appears that they’ve withdrawn to the citadel to make a stand, so to speak. This might be one of those rare cases where a hard fight for territory is worth it, provided the costs aren’t too high, because of Kurakhove featuring quite a few built up areas along the main logistics route in. There’s almost no point in not trying to fight for it if this road is secure. Just not much like it for a good ways back.
Still, hanging over all operations on this front is the simple fact that if Ukraine pulls back thirty kilometers and loses both Kurakhove and Velyka Novosilka before next spring, this will not change the course of the war. If Pokrovsk holds, as I expect it will, this whole offensive could turn into a golden opportunity for Ukraine. Neither side is winning or losing in Donbas - it will be the ability to sustain forces around the urban areas that decides who owns them when the guns finally fall silent. And negotiations only stick after both sides are done fighting.
Pokrovsk, which a few weeks ago some seemed certain would fall any minute, still stands. Aside from some nibbles on the southern flank, Moscow’s attacks on this front aren’t going anywhere. That could change, as the worsening weather appears to be allowing Moscow to make small lunges when drones have trouble operating, but each time this happens Ukraine usually destroys the attackers and restores the line unless an adjacent sector is also collapsing.
There continues to be a great deal of local back and forth in Toretsk, Moscow moving into a few blocks at the center of the town then losing them again. This sort of urban fighting is hard to track thanks to the underground layer no sensors can penetrate. The fighting in Chasiv Yar is the same: the latest orc movement has come on the northern bridgehead they seized over the canal weeks ago. Now assault groups are hunted down and destroyed in the suburbs and forests between downtown and the canal. This could go on for many weeks.
On the Siversk front, the orc attacks that began several weeks ago have lately petered out. Only slight progress was made towards either Terny, Borova, or Kupiansk. The orcs haven’t tried charging straight into Kupiansk again. They are able to learn. But a maladaptive system can only adapt so much.
Southern Theater
This broad stretch of country continues to see little but drone raids. Every week the orcs attack civilian vehicles in Kherson, everyone gets to wonder if the orcs will finally accidentally or intentionally sabotage the Enerhodar Nuclear Power Plant, and most of the Black Sea Fleet cowers in port. If Ukraine does anything here on the ground beyond raids over the next few months that will come as a big surprise.
Sky & Strike
As covered last week, the US and UK - probably France too - let Ukraine start using missiles inside russia. The first strike used a reported six to eight ATACMS missiles against what appears to have been a depot in Bryansk. A few days later came an attack by Storm Shadow missiles against a command center in Kursk, reportedly taking out some senior officers - North Koreans included. And just yesterday a cluster strike obliterated an S-400 air defense system at an airfield in Kursk. The last should open the door to more strikes and make air support missions a bit easier.
As you might have heard, Putin threw a bit of tantrum after the first two, unleashing nuclear apocalypse… a single intermediate-range missile with six cluster warheads - or unitary charges plus five decoys - against Dnipro. It had surprisingly little impact for all the fireworks produced by re-entry. The spectacle might even have the benefit of making Ukraine’s partners talk seriously about providing new capabilities.
I haven’t written about them because the odds of success seem so improbable. Still, it is entirely reasonable to talk about the really good hardware the USA and other allies have tucked away in their arsenals. Tomahawk cruise missiles are famous for a good reason, and though like most of Putin’s arsenal originally designed to deliver nuclear payloads, they’ve only ever been tasked with conventional missions - at which they excel. There are plenty of other examples being written about online, true anti-ballistic missile defenses among them. Ukraine needs Aegis-capable ships eventually - now is a good time to get the ball rolling.
Some will predictably cry what about China?! but sorry, if you can’t win in Ukraine, you won’t win in Taiwan, people. The USA has been holding out and making excuses for too long. Biden has about eight weeks to do what he can to rectify this gross strategic error.
For all Putin’s fury there was little meaningful in his actions. He used one of perhaps ten converted strategic missiles. If I were commanding a US carrier battle group right now I’d be mildly concerned, because a cluster of small objects hitting my flight deck from orbit does tend to put the ship out of action for a good while, and the USA only has eleven. But the accuracy of multiple warheads delivered by a road-mobile missile leaves a lot to be desired - Moscow would have to fire them all in hopes of scoring a single hit on a moving target at range.
Of greater concern is his existing arsenal of missiles, most of which carry much larger warheads. Ukraine still lacks sufficient air defenses to cope with these, and whether it can yet field more than 10-12 F-16s remains unclear. They aren’t yet equipped to ambush glide bombers with any regularity, that much is clear. Although, the recent Storm Shadow strike Ukraine ran in Kursk required its venerable Su-24 strike jets to fly dangerously close to russia’s vaunted air defenses, so perhaps the Vipers are flying close escort with their powerful jammers switched to active.
Fortunately, by summer it appears very possible that Ukraine will operate a squadron of Gripen fighters backed by AWACS aircraft. If that pans out, these jets and their super-long range Meteor missiles can routinely plink hostile Flankers. Do this, and if properly equipped ground forces are available in any force, the battlefield deadlock will break faster than many suspect.
On Ukraine and the Science of Institutional Change1
Ukraine’s fight on the ground since Syrskyi took over in 2024 appears to have been defined by careful husbanding of resources. He’s moved from Zaluzhnyi’s hold the line at any cost stance to an area defense posture that aims to exhaust Moscow’s resources as much as possible, giving Ukraine the best possible chance to unleash a series of powerful counteroffensives in 2025 that power it to victory. The approach looks a lot like a real time strategy gamer employing the creep-counter technique.
Creep-counter is a term that, so far as I’m aware, originated in the glory days of real time strategy games about twenty years ago. Many titles featured innovations like hero units, veteran status for experienced troops, and other stat boosts granted after surviving enough combat.
The rhythm in most games is set by how quickly one side or the other launches their first attack on the enemy’s base. A lot of players soon learned to actively scout the map and engage non-player characters that dropped experience points and stat-boosting loot before engaging the other team. This offers a quality advantage in the first battles, usually waged near their home base, opening the door to a vicious counterattack against the enemy’s base. After doing some solid damage there, it’s often possible to race so far ahead in the fight to gather more resources and pump out better units that the enemy never recovers.
I once managed a win in a 4v4 team game where my three allies all abandoned me after one lost their base in the first round, leaving me controlling the rest. It was fun to watch my opponents go from sending insulting messages meant to convince me to just give up to typing all-caps insults at each other once their disorganization and overconfidence led to me rolling them up.
That was just a game, obviously, but games imitate life for a reason. Over the past year I’ve seen Ukraine retreat much more readily than it did in 2023 while inflicting proportionally more casualties. This reads as a deliberate strategic choice, and a smart one at that, even if it leads to erroneous pundit claims about Moscow’s invasion gaining steam or Ukraine’s defense simply crumbling.
A limited counteroffensive like the Kursk Campaign was necessary to wage in 2024 to prevent certain interests from slowly shifting the world’s focus away from Ukraine. It also proved that Ukraine’s ground forces were capable of accomplishing more than in 2023. As a proof of concept, it now appears directly tied to the recent announcement that Ukraine’s ground forces would adopt a corps-brigade structure. The reboot continues, and though progress is uneven, change is coming.
I do not mean to downplay how hard the fighting is for Ukrainian soldiers right now. Effective area defense is incredibly challenging, made possible only by always according frontline fighters maximum flexibility, even to retreat. This is challenging under the best of circumstances, and many Ukrainian soldiers have been offering compelling testimony detailing serious issues that have to be addressed - fast.
The good news is that the biggest problems mainly stem from the rapid expansion of Ukraine’s army, which is fixable. Yes, there’s incompetence and some corruption, but little more than in most NATO countries - possibly less. If you take a force of 200,000 professionals and expand it through mobilization to around a million, the hundred active brigades and equivalent number of non-frontline formations will exhibit varying quality. Especially if you’ve lost close to a hundred thousand permanently injured or killed, a quarter to a third of that from the original professional force.
Every brigade is its own individual organism formed by the relationships that link the people within. Each develops its own culture, and every command team has a unique dynamic. The underlying skills each officer, sergeant, and private brings to the table vary as well.
The process of expanding Ukraine’s forces was not closely planned or managed. It was incredibly ad-hoc, and the ground forces maintain a bunch of semi-separate branches within: Air Assault, Marine, National Guard, Offensive Guard, Territorial, Regulars - and those are just the biggest ones. Much of Ukraine’s present force evolved organically on the initiative of a leadership team backed by civilian finances. This flexibility helped shatter the initial ruscist invasion, but also makes organized counteroffensive efforts difficult.
The U.S. Army maintains a huge institution called TRADOC - Training and Doctrine Command - that develops coherent standards and practices as well as training programs to teach a common language to all soldiers. Ukraine hasn’t had the time or support to build anything like this to my knowledge. Most Ukrainians have basic military training, so refresher courses for mobilized personnel can be relatively short, however the quality of training centers varies.
Recently, on Syrskyi’s order, training courses were improved and lengthened to six weeks - not a lot of time, but better than four. But there’s only so much to be done with a system that is reportedly still, like much of the veterans healthcare system, deeply Soviet. Something to keep in mind whenever an expert insists that Ukraine just has to mobilize more people is that if you throw good money into a broken machine, all you’ve done is waste scarce resources.
Brigades have already been responsible for the bulk of the most important training, partly because this lets soldiers work in their specialty with their actual team but also to bypass quality issues. Training soldiers abroad is another way to get around the training center problem, but capacity has been limited. Unfortunately, this means that any poorly managed brigade can wind up fielding improperly trained soldiers.
Figuring out which brigades are well-led and why their culture works is an immense challenge, the sort of puzzle I could study for years if I knew how to get the funding. You have to get both qualitative and qualitative data, then weave them together in a coherent system. But even once you figure out where changes are needed, making it happen is a whole other challenge.
The Soviet inheritance left Ukraine with an incredibly creaky bureaucracy that the country is slowly beating through relentless digitization and decentralization. Corruption is tougher when everything is done through apps - presuming appropriate safeguards are in place - and the less capital you have in one place, the less incentive there is for an oligarch to take control. It’s also good that soldiers can now request transfers - this should help out bad leadership, so long as the requests are kept private at least until transfer orders arrive.
The most effective Ukrainian brigades have learned to recruit directly from the population after building reputations for effectively training and fielding their personnel. Similarly, drones have become an indispensable part of every combat team’s inventory because individual commanders began working with private startups to set up drone companies that are swiftly growing into battalions. Best practices have spread horizontally, not controlled by the general staff in Kyiv or the operational commands.
Over the past thirty years, brigades have come to handle many military functions once housed in what NATO doctrine terms divisions. This was originally seen as advantageous for handling lower-intensity conflicts, but is now necessary because of how easy it is to detect and target dense concentrations of people and gear.
Brigades are, however, intended to be rotated as an entire unit, fully replaced in their area of responsibility every six to twelve months. It went to fifteen for the people I served with who deployed to Iraq during the surge.
In Ukraine, the absolute requirement for a minimum number of bodies to be available to cover a vast front demanded building a lot of new brigades from scratch. Many have questioned why Ukraine does this rather than reinforce veteran formations, and the simplest answer is that you can never rotate brigades if there isn’t an uncommitted reserve amounting to at least a quarter, ideally a third, of the total force. Ukraine still doesn’t have enough, with huge chunks of the front covered by relatively few soldiers.
With nearly every asset actively covering some area, Ukrainian brigades have to work out internal rotations. In military organization, brigades are composed of battalions that historically have fought as a coherent formation. Ukraine tends to form brigades with a core of three infantry battalions backed by armor and artillery battalions as well as several battalions’ worth of specialty companies - scouts, engineers, air defense, so on. Often a fourth or even fifth light infantry battalion is attached, adding to the brigade’s size.
Naturally, this structure lends itself to dividing all assets up into three or even four groupings - I usually call them battlegroups, from the German kampfgruppen - with one essentially perpetually inactive, staffed by as little as a third of its total complement while awaiting reinforcements to fill out the roster. This allows for personnel who trained together to stay together rather than being split into smaller groups and fed into their new brigade wherever gaps happen to exist.
As with every practice there are benefits and challenges to doing it either way. A veteran unit can swiftly take on a small batch of recruits and ease them in; alternatively, a culture may form which sees the new meat as effectively disposable. Of course, a well trained battalion may join a brigade with leadership that throws it away in days.
Accountability is required, but difficult to guarantee. Another natural result of fielding so many brigades has been difficulties with coordination. The seams between areas of responsibility can become dead zones where neither party takes decisive action. Brigades are only able to field two, maybe three battlegroups at a time, each effectively its own semi-independent organism acting like brigades used to do under their parent divisions.
That’s fine in principle; in practice it leaves Ukrainian brigades with only a limited ability to sustain operations deep into enemy territory. Brigade leaders have only two subordinate elements to work with, meaning that once one is committed to a fight half their force is invested.
The natural solution, one that Ukraine has been testing out since 2023, is to give the most competent brigade leadership teams additional battalions to work with. There are limits to how far this can go, though, as hard cognitive limits prevent a leadership team from managing more than five or six component parts.
And that is, no doubt, why this week Ukraine announced the adoption of a formal corps-brigade system. Zaluzhnyi’s solution to the challenge of managing a huge gaggle of brigades was to more or less put them into today’s Operational Strategic Groupings. Their size varies dramatically, the one handling most of Donbas tasked with keeping track of around forty.
In Kursk, a much smaller number of brigades has been effectively managed for over three months. This was likely a test run of a new style of command and control that will be broadly applied.
It’s best not to get too caught up in the specific terminology - those calling for Ukraine to form divisions are getting what they asked for. NATO doctrine uses corps to handle a level of organization above the division, but that’s not the point here. By 2025, Ukrainian brigades ought to sit in groupings of 10-12, the corps level managing not brigades themselves, but the individual battlegroups they already field. These can function like small brigades, at least a third kept off the front line to properly integrate replacements and rest veterans.
Those used to how NATO does things should keep in mind that it isn’t the traditional hierarchical structure that has to change, only the levels at which stuff happens. In Ukraine squads of 4-6 now handle tasks once given to 10-13. Platoons still consist of three or four frontline squads plus another handling support duties, but staffing is closer to 20 than 40.
The company with five or six platoons and a hundred or so bodies now performs the same function that the combined-arms battalions most armies adopted over the past thirty years did. Battlegroups exist to smooth cooperation between multiple task-oriented companies that work together to control their assigned area. Multiple battlegroups can maneuver in conjunction to apply combat power to an even broader area, overseen by the parent corps.
Operations at the corps level will involve coordinating up to several dozen battlegroups divided by their assigned function - frontline, support, reserve. This echelon handles logistics and operational planning, serving as a nexus of cooperation. Brigades become basically administrative formations, much like their child battalions.
There’s nothing new about this sort of arrangement: historically armies have always had two distinct but parallel modes of operation: garrison and field. That’s part of why a military seeks common standards in training and doctrine - it allows one component to swap out cleanly with another. Actual military operations routinely see subordinate units from one command chopped over to another.
Only reason I ever sat through five sweltering weeks in upstate Louisiana once upon a time was that the unit I was assigned to got told to contribute a few dozen bodies for a special detail where we’d role-play as Iraqi Army soldiers working with a brigade preparing to deploy to Baghdad. That was an experience.
There’s a reason I’m a little sensitive when certain observers start talking up how many more bodies Ukraine should mobilize to prove it deserves more western aid. If every Ukrainian recruit was guaranteed US-level equipment and a solid four months of quality training before their first deployment, more would sign a contract without needing to be mobilized.
A brigade - the new 155th Mechanized, Anna of Kyiv (I previously wrote the name wrong as Anne, sorry), appears to offer an excellent template - should come with at least thirty tanks, over a hundred armored troop carriers, and twenty artillery pieces, plus air defense, engineering, drone, and other vital assets. That’s gives Ukraine’s forces a total requirement of 3,000 tanks, 10,000 APC/IFVs, and 2,000 heavy artillery pieces - this obviously doesn’t include mortars, grenade launchers, or any other essential tools.
Get Ukraine to even two dozen fully equipped, led, and trained brigades, and the ability to dominate the right front at the correct time will utterly redraw the map of the conflict. Something essential to keep in mind if you want to understand what’s set to happen in 2025 is that in nearly every campaign that Ukraine has waged so far, it has pulled its punches. Ukraine is slowly building up the capacity required to launch a sustained series of counteroffensives when Moscow’s effective strength begins to wane in 2025.
Anyone familiar with American military theorist John Boyd should be aware of his energy management theory which systematized aerial combat to an incredible degree in the twentieth century. Working directly with many of the same concepts I rely on, Boyd recognized that the availability of energy was the single most important variable in knowing who had the upper hand in a fight.
Victory is a function both of how much energy a pilot has, but also how they use it. The trick is managing your own energy reserves until the enemy bleeds off theirs, giving you the choice of whether to continue the engagement. A pilot in an inferior aircraft who begins in the worst possible defensive position can, through strategic and skilled flying, transform the relationship and wind up with an insurmountable advantage - or escape to fight another day. Rhythm and timing are key, and though aerial dogfights are a particularly clean case, the same pattern defines all efficient fighting.
The entire objective in a fight is to generate and exploit some kind of asymmetry. Every writer or director who ever portrayed combat as two mindless hordes charging into a melee should, in my subjective opinion, simply be lined up and shot for doing an incredible disservice to humanity and every soldier who ever bled in war.
Area defense in service of a creep-counter play is the ideal response when faced with a numerically superior foe steadily running down its stocks of equipment and you have lots of production lines spooling up. People really ought to get it into their minds that offense and defense are not distinct, but complementary. Few successful professional sports teams focus on one at the exclusion of the other. You gain control over your opponent by leveraging both however you are able.
Again, I’m not trying to suggest that everything Ukraine has done was wise, or that the issues soldiers are reporting aren’t serious. There’s a level of detail that no one unable to directly observe brigades in action can ever reliably perceive. And it’s rarely ideal to give ground - I’m only saying that there appears to be a consistent and reasonable logic involved.
Not swiftly pulling the marines from Krynky after the surprise of that raid wore off last winter was a mistake worth keeping in mind. Ukrainska Pravda published an excellent report on that operation this week, and unlike most journalism a full range of views was presented. Sodol - a subordinate of Zaluzhnyi who, like him, retired on medical grounds - came up with a decent plan to cross the Dnipro, but refused to let go when it ran into rather predictable trouble with logistics that he failed to adequately plan for. A promising operation that could have been repeated instead decimated the combat power of some well-trained forces.
Issues being identified by personnel in active service have got to be fixed, one way or another. The ultimate test of Syrskyi’s leadership will come in the middle of 2025, where Ukraine is either able to spring back or sees offensive efforts stymied again. It’s worth noting that, just a few months off after Syrskyi called time on the op, Ukraine’s replenished Marine Corps brigades are back on the front, fighting near Kursk, Pokrovsk, and Kurakove. I expect the similarly hard-fought 72nd Mechanized Brigade to appear again refreshed in a few weeks as well - if it isn’t already.
Done right, Ukraine’s new corps echelon should help address the challenge with effective coordination. It is unclear how Syrskyi plans to implement them - I would suggest, based on some fairly extensive graduate level study in using systems science to improve organizational function, that these be built around proven leadership teams, not set up independently then staffed with people promoted from brigade command.
Instead of designating a corps commander and assigning brigades, transition to giving the most effective brigade on each front operational control of the others near it. The semi-subordinated brigade teams will shed active combat management responsibilities and focus on the training and logistics side, managing corps-level affairs for battlegroups not on the front line. Their task is keeping fit battlegroups ready to swap in for those worn down by active combat.
You don’t want to re-invent the wheel to match some imaginary ideal organization chart in the middle of a war. Slow adaptation based on evaluation of proven practices is best. And there’s only a limited set of variables any external force can really impact: Zaluzhnyi, Syrskyi, someone else, it doesn’t really matter. Institutional inertia is real, and it’s a healthy sign that Ukraine does not appear to be simply following a script set in World War Two, as Putin’s orc generals appear intent to.
To build an offensive force capable of breaking the orc front and reaching critical operational objectives Ukraine’s ongoing reforms ultimately must produce a structure capable of pooling the efforts of forces that will often be very scattered. The goal isn’t to launch a classic shock-based offensive that rapidly crumbles the target front. Instead, corps leaders must ensure that the overall rhythm and pattern of actions taken by many distinct company-sized elements come together in just the right way to present the local orc commander with a series of impossible dilemmas.
The best historical analogy is probably the Hundred Days Offensive that broke the German front in France in the summer of 1918. This was a relentless series of battles that systematically destroyed German positions in France and Belgium using an early mode of combined arms tactics. Now, instead of tanks, drones will lead the way - though Ukraine needs the tanks too.
Moscow has responded to Syrskyi’s strategy in pretty much the exact way that Ukraine needs it to if my analysis is on the mark. Instead of accepting that the bid to destroy Ukraine has failed, digging in, and rebuilding his army’s strength to hold off Ukraine’s inevitable counter, Putin is stuck in a classic rigidity trap. To avoid admitting failure he must continue the advance at any cost. His target audience with this gambit is western leaders who are afraid of what might happen when Putin’s regime falls, as it almost certainly will the moment he’s no longer around.
His best hope now is that Trump helps him pull a technical victory from the jaws of bitter defeat. Putin needs craven politicians in the west to accept his framing of the conflict as leading inexorably to apocalypse unless he get his way. Many, along with allied pundits in the media who wouldn’t be caught anywhere near a real battlefield for any money - especially fake-macho scam artists like Elon Musk and Joe Rogan - are happy to bow down to Daddy Vlad if it gets them attention.
That’s why they’ve lately been describing support for Ukraine as a “Left” issue, when progressive support has been laughably weak, even supportive of a ceasefire, because anything military related is sad and therefore bad. American masculinity, such as a thing could ever be said to exist in the first damned place, is broken because yapping retreads of last generation’s con artists have convinced millions of weak-willed twits to navel gaze as intently as any Taylor Swift or Beyonce obsessive. These celebrities are all just products.
American society isn’t all that different than russia’s. Neither has ever truly given up egoist delusions of grandeur and worship of power for its own sake. Like America is proving to be, the last Muscovite empire is a ticking time bomb that western politicians keep hoping will explode on someone else’s watch. Putin’s missile terror this week was calculated to make them do exactly what too many are: worrying about what he might do to us instead of reminding him what we can do to his doddering empire.
World War Three is not a flipped switch where everyone is conscripted and sent to the front lines. Every major war is a series of discrete events that only in retrospect get assigned arbitrary start and end dates so that historians can easily measure their students’ success by having them repeat rote facts on an exam.
Why else does World War Two start in 1941 for Americans and Soviets, 1939 for most non-Soviet Europeans, and as far back as 1937 or even 1931 for Japan and China? Yet the underlying collapse of the tenuous order that emerged after the First World War consumed everyone all the same. Turning away and pretending the wildfire won’t blaze up on you and travel in an unexpected direction is a good way to get burned.
Strategic Brief2
Ukraine-US Relations
For all the attention paid to the palace intrigue around Trump, little has materially changed - and as far as he’s concerned, nothing will for about two more months. Until then, this is still Joe Biden’s show, and despite finally authorizing use of long-range weapons on Muscovite soil there is still no reported large scale movement of new arms. Ukraine needs about a thousand Bradleys at least, guys, and the clock is ticking.
Hopefully Biden is waiting for his people to come up with a way to secure deliveries against anything Trump might try, but it’s also possible that Putin’s missile tantrum will be used to justify inaction. Domestically, the Democratic Party is now evaluating its options, having to backpedal from the allegations of fascism that animate their affluent faction now that this rhetoric demands concrete action. One wing of the party wants to shift rightward to appeal to supposed “bro” voters; it seeks excuses to wind down American support for Ukraine.
The failure to appreciate that people have multiple overlapping identities leads a chunk of the American professional class astray time and again. It’s almost painful how oligarch apologists (as long as they’re our oligarchs, right?) at supposedly liberal rags like The Atlantic are determined to blame everyone but themselves for losing an eminently winnable election - even with Harris as the candidate - to Trump. Funny how the data now emerging shows that her blind rush to cater to wealthy suburbanites and the Cheney family alienated much of the party’s traditional urban base. Gee, what a shock. Great advice you all got from your fancy consultants.
Though it turns out that I was incorrect when I wrote that Trump turned out fewer voters in 2024 than he did in 2020 - some states were still counting. He actually improved his raw total by almost three million, that along with about 7 million of Biden’s 2020 voters not turning out for Harris handing him a narrow popular vote lead, as if it matters.
His winning margin nationwide was still at least a million votes less than Harris’ margin of victory across the West Coast. Come on, Red States, are you sure you want to share a country with us forever? Just let us have autonomy, and we’ll handle the whole defense of democracy thing while you try to build a viable economy using tariffs. Good luck!
Ukraine-Europe
I’d be a lot more pessimistic about Ukraine’s chances except that Europe is already in Putin’s crosshairs, something evidenced by the rising number of sabotage plots recently uncovered. Drone harassment of military assets and bases may be part of this too. Cyberattacks, nuclear intimidation - this sort of thing is all part of a shaping campaign of the sort Moscow always attempts before going to war.
Putin is in too deep to give up now; fortunately he lacks the ability to do more than hit scattered targets with conventional missiles before most of his remaining military gets smashed. This will change if he gets any kind of breather. Fortunately most of Europe understands this, and the rest sees substantial opportunity investing in Ukraine over the long haul.
Already European companies are opening production lines in Ukraine. As Ukrainian air defenses slowly improve, more will come to take advantage of low labor and material costs. It will be a hard winter and year after, but assuming Trump’s return motivates the self-interest of enough NATO countries, more should start digging deeper into their stocks of kit. Media chatter notwithstanding, I doubt there’s much appetite for making Ukraine accept a bad deal just because Trump said so.
Middle East
Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas’ Deif (if he’s still even alive) were all indicted by the International Criminal Court this week, as they clearly deserve to be. As you might expect, the US response ranges from silence to outrage, another perfect example of how western rhetoric undermines itself. You can’t claim universal standards then excuse criminal actions just because your friends do it. That’s how you wind up with no allies in a pinch.
On the ground in Lebanon, Israel is slowly pushing Hezbollah back towards the Litani river and in the Bekaa Valley, but Moscow’s offensives move about as fast. In Gaza Israel remains mired in a conflict that can have no lasting end so long as Palestinian rights are not guaranteed. The bombs keep falling anyway.
Pacific
Everything has been pretty status quo on the Pacific front lately, though the Philippines is displaying some more of its unique flavor of political weirdness, members of government talking about assassinating other members. This is not a good country to found any defense of Taiwan on, I’m afraid. One of these days I have a strong suspicion that Manila is going to see its navy wiped out by a sudden Chinese attack during some dispute over those rocks in the South China Sea that both sides are always squabbling about.
That, along with a maritime blockade of Taiwan, are two steps Beijing could make to test actual US resolve when facing another nuclear power. Unfortunately, what happens to Ukraine will happen to Taiwan, so every day that the US hesitates to give Ukraine the level of support it needs and deserves is another win for Xi Jinping. He’s going to eat Trump for breakfast, as he’s already doing to Putin.
Takeaway
Okay, that’s a lot for one week. Unfortunately there doesn’t look to be much hope of Ukrainian fighters on the ground getting much of a reprieve any time soon.
But if the help they need is finally committed, 2025 can be the year the Ukraine War finally ends. When collapse arrives, it often comes fast: this will likely prove true of Putin’s imperial dream.
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