Ukraine's Summer Counteroffensive: Coping With The Challenge Of Advancing In 2025
What is today termed combined arms warfare has never been new. Every major shift in warfighting across history has forced combatants to adapt by applying different combinations of tools.
To end the Ukraine War, sooner or later Ukrainian forces will have to mount a series of counteroffensives that liberate substantial chunks of occupied territory. There is no other way out of the nightmare: genocidal wars are not terminated through negotiations - unless the aggressor has already been defeated in the field. Absent that, they are only ever on pause.
The (hopefully last) Muscovite empire is locked in a genocidal struggle against Ukraine that itself is only a prelude to a bigger conflict meant to restore the Soviet Union. Even if empires do themselves in like this time and again, it still takes the active destruction of their fighting potential to bring about the final fall. Structural factors may have doomed (and will doom) every would-be world empire in time, but it still required moments where their combat power was brought to bear and dismantled to bring about their deserved end. Otherwise, they would have kept on seizing resources to fuel expansion and beat down rivals.
Never has an empire been brought down without at least some soldiers physically moving into territory the enemy feels it must control. Putin’s onslaught in Ukraine is so scattered and unfocused in both the spatial and temporal senses that, so long as Ukrainian forces are not dissipated directly reversing every orc gain, Ukraine is able to build up reserves of people and gear. At some point, these will be unleashed in a counteroffensive campaign.
The Ukrainians will, however, have to solve the problem of moving forward under drone-infested skies. Laying out the architecture of a way to do this is the focus of the second section of the post.
Before getting into that, however, I’ll cover the last week’s movement on the fronts. The third part will address China’s real interest in the Ukraine War and the opportunity that Trump is inadvertently offering Europe.
Up front: this one’s a long piece. Tried to cover too much in one go. Best read in several sittings, I expect. One reason why posts are now broken into sections is to make this easier.
Overview of the Fronts: Week 27
The second half of 2025 looks set to be even bloodier than the first, with an all-important caveat: the orcs are suffering a lot more than the Ukrainians. Despite average ruscist casualty counts remaining a bit above 30,000 a month - down from nearly 40,000 in May - this overall reduction masks a substantial increase in fatality component.
Moscow has never done well with battlefield evacuation, preferring that soldiers simply disappear rather than soak up resources being healed or earning death payouts for their families. But in 2022 and 2023 Putin’s troops did what they could for their own and retained a degree of professionalism, so despite the Muscovites suffering a million casualties in total only a quarter of these have been fatalities to this point.
The resort to meat grinder tactics upped the fatality proportion of total casualties from twenty to forty percent. Ukraine’s breakneck adoption of drone-led tactics has pushed this to eighty percent in many areas thanks to the inability of the orcs to evacuate the injured even when they have the training and support to try. Now, it’s only orcs at the front who suffer this horrendous toll - of the quarter to third of casualties who still fall victim to other causes, like artillery and air strikes, which often fall well behind the drone front, receiving medical aid is still possible. But the vicious math is pretty straightforward: 1,500 casualties, 40% fatal (600 cargo 200), is the same as 1,000 casualties, 60% fatal (also 600 cargo 200). And sixty percent is a conservative estimate.
On the flip side, despite facing the same challenge evacuating wounded from the front as the enemy, the greatly reduced density of personnel in the worst danger compared to just a year ago has led to a steady decrease in Ukrainian fatalities.
The website UAlosses is not particularly reliable, with even a cursory examination of its methods for estimating Ukrainian casualties revealing serious flaws. For one, scraping social media and other internet posts to generate raw counts of deaths is bound to create a large population of inadvertent duplicates. On the flip side, there will also be a sizable population of casualties missed in any digital survey, so the effects could ultimately cancel out. Or one could be twice as impactful as another - we just don’t know.
I’m not criticizing the effort, it’s just important to highlight caveats to data that can skew downstream analysis. There are problems with every data set. Nothing is without a tradeoff.
In any case, even the most flawed methodology, if consistently applied over time, can usually shed some light on underlying trends. That’s definitely true of UAlosses - the tone of the site’s few social media posts echo orc propaganda to a degree, but mainly insofar as the enemy has aggressively latched on to a very real unsolved problem in Ukraine of tens of thousands of missing personnel. Many are AWOL, others were taken prisoner - Moscow won’t confirm POW numbers - and a fair few were killed but their bodies could not be recovered. Sometimes there isn’t much left.
So the raw numbers below are not what they seem, and are almost certainly highly incorrect. But they should all be incorrect in the about same way, so long as the estimation method never changed, meaning that the rough trend lines I drew in yellow should correspond to actual shifts in the true fatality rate over time. The result is a sense of the relative blood price paid by too many Ukrainians for their country’s survival in a temporal sense. That’s useful data for anyone trying to design good policy, and reveals some intriguing patterns.
The trend lines I drew in yellow are a rough linearization that smooths out variation on shorter timeframes, but reveals critical moments where policy shifts led to material impacts on the battlefield. At the start of Putin’s all-out invasion in 2022, Ukrainian fatalities were at their all-time peak as everyone who could fight was thrown at what was then a reasonably professional army. Disorganization was extreme on both sides. Once the enemy advance bogged down Ukrainian fatalities rapidly declined, albeit with small increases apparent during the early counteroffensive operations that spring.
In autumn of 2022 the fighting underwent a definite phase shift as Ukraine mounted more aggressive counteroffensive actions in Kharkiv and Kherson under a more fully established command structure. Even as these wrapped up, Moscow unleashed Wagner on Bakhmut, the private military company creating the flawed model that the rest of Putin’s forces later adopted thanks to the illusion of Bakhmut being a substantial victory. It did keep Ukrainian casualty rates high, however, as in those days frontline positions were held by more soldiers. Ukraine’s counteroffensive in 2023 further increased fatality rates, with the overall result being a year and a half where Zaluzhnyi presided over a slow degradation of Ukraine’s strength.
Syrskyi’s promotion in Zaluzhnyi’s place appears to have reversed the trend, though it’s unclear how much anything he did was directly responsible. A serious complicating factor in analysis is the concurrent shift to a drone-led fight made necessary by the cutoff of American aid in late 2023. The two variables are almost certainly bound together. Though it’s possible that Syrskyi actually slowed the fatality reductions drones enabled, the lack of sufficient artillery support could have had undone some of his efforts. Or command shifts played no role at all - I’d need to create a proper dataset and run some models to get a better sense.
But I read the data this way: Syrskyi began a series of reforms in 2024 that helped minimize Ukrainian casualties - in exchange for losing some territory. This let Ukraine build up combat power to be unleashed in focused counteroffensives at opportune locations. Kursk was chosen for the first in 2024, and though fatality rates went up, they peaked over a month after the battle had been joined and Ukrainian forces were once again stuck in a war of attrition. Rationalizing the perimeter in Kursk and adopting a broadly defensive posture lowered casualty rates again.
From that point on, at least on a monthly basis they’ve continued to decline - by about half over the past nine months. That’s a serious achievement, if the real numbers reflect the estimate to any degree.
What this translates to is Ukraine storing up combat power even as Moscow’s is dissipated in endless attacks. If Kursk was like a small volcanic eruption, 2025 stands to bear witness to something on the order of Krakatoa. But if and only if Ukrainian forces get the combined arms mix right in time. And the leadership and training part. It would also help if Team Trump would stop playing games with military aid, but one has to hope that’s been priced in. It should be.
As Syrskyi stated recently - another sign of something in the works for later this year - no war is won by merely holding ground. Another Ukrainian counteroffensive is inevitable. But first, the orcs have to be induced to exhaust themselves as much as possible. Otherwise, that’s all the more personnel that Ukrainian fighters have to wade through, and statistically some will make the ultimate sacrifice in the process.
Northern Theater
Across the north, signs of ruscist exhaustion are mounting, with the push into Sumy seemingly all but defeated. Kyiv has effectively declared victory on this front, with Syrskyi even talking about reclaiming positions inside Kursk - not a move I’d make, but he seems like the type to issue a public bluff to mess with Putin’s head. Intense Ukrainian counterattacks in Sumy and the veritable knife fight Ukrainian forces have been waging around Tetkino do suggest that Ukrainian command senses weakness on the other side of the front.
On the whole, the ruscist push into Sumy went pretty much as predicted: Ukrainian forces pulled back to the forested high ground north of the district center, letting the enemy walk into a planned killzone. I didn’t anticipate the intense attacks on the flanks of the enemy advance, but they make perfect sense as attempts to dissipate orc efforts to weaken the main assault.
Ukrainian forces might be planning to overwhelm a now-weakened enemy front and push back into Kursk. I would not recommend this. Not unless the Ukrainians shift the axis of their advance to the west, seizing the forested high ground along the west bank of the Reka Seym and possibly the logistics hub of Rylsk. Last year something of this nature appears to have been planned, but called off once the ruscist defense between Sudzha and Rylsk firmed up.
I don’t expect that intense of a move, though, as the entire northern front presently functions as a sink of ruscist combat power that would otherwise deploy to some other area. Ukraine expending resources moving back into the ruscist empire is only reasonable if the enemy’s attempts to fight back are disorganized and disproportionately costly. Now that a working operational command is in place on the orc side, attacking so close to an active front is very risky. Reaction times should be quicker than average.
However, if Putin’s legions are as badly overstretched as they appear, if the Ukrainians land a heavy enough punch anywhere they ought to trigger a chain reaction. One to fix the enemy’s attention while another is unleashed on the opposite side of Ukraine is probably ideal, if enough resources are available.
As for Kharkiv, the enemy has been intensifying assaults again recently, once more trying to establish full control of the Vovchansk ruins. They’ve even managed to advance by about a block. Casualties are reportedly very high, as the 13th Khartia Brigade of Ukraine’s National Guard has been pioneering effective drone tactics and presumably teaching adjacent brigades some neat tricks.
There is a new concern in the area, though. Right at the seam of what I term the northern and eastern theaters, the orcs have crossed the border between Kharkiv and Kupiansk. It’s actually another of those eerie situations where either someone in Moscow is reading this here blog or (more likely) some planners are reading maps the way I do. For some time I’ve maintained that Ukraine might go after Valuyki, an essential hub supporting the occupation of Luhansk district, what I generally refer to as north Donbas.
So here the orcs are, probing over the border west of Valuyki - just like they’re testing Ukraine a bit east of Huliaypole, at the junction of the eastern and southern fronts, where I’ve suggested Ukraine might launch a major counteroffensive this summer. Whatever the reason, this incursion could easily pose as much of a risk to Ukraine’s forces as a successful assault on Valuyki would Putin’s dreams of conquest. If the enemy is able to secure a chunk of Ukrainian territory here, forces deployed can threaten the fights to defend both Kupiansk and Vovchansk.
Eastern Theater
Kupiansk is the more likely target. To retake the town, an essential logistics hub liberated by Ukraine in the fall of 2022, the orcs have to substantially expand their bridgehead upstream by Dvorichna. Efforts towards this end have not been quick enough to prevent Ukraine from reinforcing, but conversely Ukraine hasn’t been able to clear the western bank. Seizing control of the west bank of the Oskil all the way from the international border to the northern outskirts of Kupiansk would allow the enemy to move armored vehicles in to support assaults.
Despite most orc attacks these days involving only infantry - increasingly transported by motorcycles, even though this isn’t working as hoped anywhere but the flat fields of southern Donbas - tanks and troop carriers remain essential for actually securing positions taken by surviving assault team members. Their presence distracts drone operators and if Ukrainian positions are pinned down a tank’s main gun can take them apart. Armored vehicles are far from obsolete, they just can’t be used as if insurgents are the main threat.
Sorry, literally every American officer with combat experience, but your institutions were transformed for the worse by the War on Terror. You’ve been transformed into colonial enforcers, lacking the intellectual training or intestinal fortitude for sustained high-intensity combat. It’s not your fault - incentives have skewed your professional education and promotion structure. Thank goodness the NCO corps remains mostly untouched by the academic fad of the moment that now appears to drive most mid to senior level officers, probably because of their exposure to American higher education. A sergeant’s job is always basically the same, even if the tools constantly change. Probably nobody should ever be an officer without serving a couple years as a sergeant first. Smart officers are always partners with their NCOs.
Back to business - along the Oskil, Ukrainian forces are fighting to prevent a consolidated and secure bridgehead, so this new ruscist cross-border push has to be stopped cold fast. Lately, the orcs have been proving relatively adept at pushing up river valleys, taking advantage of the vegetative cover these usually provide, especially in summer. When they can move along both banks of a water body, it’s proving difficult for Ukrainian lines to hold.
Normally low ground is very dangerous to occupy, because it’s never good to have the enemy firing down at you from above - makes it hard to see where to shoot back, among other troubles. Control of high ground is also useful in drone operations, because any signal that depends on line of sight - which is most electromagnetic transmissions that don’t bounce off a satellite or drone relay - has a longer effective range.
But cover is life, so with Ukrainian positions thinly held these days due to the glide bomb threat - never gone, even if jamming helps a lot - advancing orcs creeping in unseen by drones have a chance of seizing positions. An 80% fatality rate looks pretty good when they’re otherwise over 90% and you’re the second-to-last dude left in the assault team. So I see the general thrust of recent Muscovite operations near the Oskil as being the collapse of the Kupiansk defense by taking control of both sides of the Oskil to the north, while applying relentless pressure on the Ukrainian bridgehead on the east bank.
Ukraine, notably, has already initiated some local counterattacks near Kupiansk. It remains to be seen whether a broader counterpush is launched.
South of Kupiansk, the Ukrainian bridgehead east of the Oskil on the Borova and Lyman fronts held firm until the weekend, when renewed attacks towards Lyman from the orc bridgehead over the Zherebets gained some ground. Ukrainian fighters reportedly counterattacked on the opposite flank, by Ridkodub, but the results remain unclear. The past weeks have seen little progress towards the Muscovite goal of pushing Third Army Corps back to Borova. And the Siversk front, somewhat surprisingly, is still stable. Though it had seemed as if the orcs were ramping up operations east of Siversk ahead of a big push, so far Ukrainian forces are having no trouble fending off the inbound waves.
I’ve included the sketch of a deeply hypothetical continuation of a Ukrainian success further north to show what Moscow fears on this front: the liberation of Svatove, which unlocks the gate to other parts of Luhansk district. In some ways, a Ukrainian breakthrough here would be as devastating to Putin as cutting off Crimea.
On the Kostyantynivka front, ruscist progress has slowed to a literal crawl as Ukrainian reinforcements bring more pressure to bear on the orcs advancing towards Yablunivka and the Kleban-Byk reservoir. A few blocks were lost to the enemy near Toretsk, and the enemy keeps probing for weaknesses near Chasiv Yar, but overall the Muscovite advance here is already starting to look exhausted. The inability to fully secure Toretsk is very telling: it’s basically a suburb of Horlivka, a sizable urban area long occupied by Moscow’s troops. The enemy is no more than ten kilometers from the line of contact in place for years before the all-out invasion. Tens of thousands of ruscist soldiers have died or been maimed to get this far.
Only someone so utterly ignorant of basic science - and not even military - can imagine this debacle as evidence of inevitable Muscovite triumph over Ukraine. For centuries or more people will look back on the madness of this war and wonder how so many could have been so blind as to try a high-tech redo of 1914-1918. I’ve been playing Starcraft again lately, and if you don’t know anything about the game, just know that it’s a universe deeply influenced by Starship Troopers - more the movie than the book. The human faction - known as terrans - is basically the Soviet Union meets the Confederate States from the Civil War. Standard tactics are to deploy large numbers of infantry in armored suits recruited from the prison population and treated as disposable.
I never thought I’d live to see a policy system try out an intentionally ironic take on human wave tactics in real life, but here we are. The shapers of the Postwar Order must be turning in their graves. The sacrifices of the Greatest Generation are daily being desecrated by cowards in Moscow and D.C. My late father, a veteran from the Vietnam era, was certainly appalled.
If Ukrainian forces can hold the line in Kostyantynivka this summer, It is extremely unlikely that Moscow will ever conquer the Donbas fortress belt. Ukraine might even go over to the offensive this summer around both Kostyantynivka and Pokrovsk. Simply reversing Moscow’s gains in Donbas over the past two years might in and of itself be enough to do in Putin’s regime at this point. So much has been invested into a debacle of a campaign that at times looked to be on the verge of a serious orc victory that Putin might not recover from a major reversal.
The line around Pokrovsk has held very firm lately despite numerous ruscist attacks every day. Pokrovsk is still the hottest front, with Moscow working to get around the flanks of the Ukrainian defense here about six months too late to succeed. On the eastern flank, the enemy advance to the Kazenyi Torets has gone no further, and crossing it would be a real challenge unless the orcs can push a lot closer to Shakhove. Muscovite troops have secured a portion of the high ground west of the Bychok river they need to sustain operations against either Pokrovsk or Kostyantynivka, but not all of it.
Moscow is reportedly starting to divert reinforcements from the Kostyantyniva front to Pokrovsk in a bid to gain some momentum. But the Ukrainians have also brought in forces, and Moscow’s troops between Pokrovsk and Kostyantynivka are facing threats from three sides. With both towns almost certainly host hives of drone operators, ruscist soldiers may be kept as far from both as possible, pushing northwest roughly towards Druzhivka. That would mean sustaining logistics through a salient the Ukrainians could hit from three sides at once with drones and counterattacks. This didn’t work out too well for the orcs west of Pokrovsk, and there Ukrainian reinforcements didn’t have another large urban area to stage from.
The ongoing fight for the Solona river valley southwest of Pokrovsk has also seen the enemy advance halt almost completely this past week. As I’ve argued would prove the case for months, the closer Ukrainian forces are to their supply bases, the better they fight. This is a natural function of logistics: the more time it takes for a supply shipment to move from depot to front, the greater the odds of being struck by a drone. Just as the the orcs have to spend more time moving out of cover, Ukrainian drones have increasingly shorter distances to fly. Not an easy curve to beat.
Although, this definitely cuts two ways. One of the few adaptations that Moscow has made which isn’t a trap is the rapid embrace of fiber-optic controlled first-person drones. Able to hit Ukrainian vehicles on the move as far as twenty kilometers behind the front line, with some models reaching double that, the greater ease of shooting these drones down doesn’t fully compensate for having to allocate personnel to the task in the first place. And the logistics lines leading into both Pokrovsk and Kostyantynivka are within range of the front.
Fortunately for Ukraine, the inaccuracy of Soviet-style artillery and its shorter range means that drone nets are typically more effective at protecting Ukrainian movements more than about ten klicks away from forward orc positions, since guns hide another ten still behind those. Still, hiking with a load sucks and is dangerous, hence the rapid adoption of ground drones for logistics, even medical evacuations. Scouting and demolition work is increasingly done by drones too.
Drones should allow Ukraine to embrace a highly decentralized logistics model that allows for remote seeding and resupply of caches in the grey zone. That will mean fewer attractive targets for hostile drones in places that nets and drone-hunting teams can’t cover. Ideally, Ukrainian teams can move to a desired position and start digging in with several days of supplies already available. Every time a shipment arrives the enemy has a chance to track it and detect the positions it is intended to serve, so small scattered caches are optimal. This is something that the UK’s Royal Marines have already practiced to great effect in exercises with their American counterparts, I understand. And down in Pendleton, too, near San Diego - I’ve been there, and that country is so open that I’m shocked anyone can hide. Certainly isn’t like that in Cascadia!
As far as the Pokrovsk front goes, Ukraine still appears to hold the edge in the drone fight. Expanding it could enable a counteroffensive that pushes the orcs back out of drone and artillery range. But at present, the fact that the front is holding well is more than enough, since it draws the largest number of Muscovite attacks.
Once again this week, it has been the Novopavlivka front - specifically the southern portion between the Vovcha and Mokri Yali rivers - where the orcs have scored their biggest gains. June was a rough month for Ukraine in terms of territory lost because two large areas that were too difficult to defend to make holding them worthwhile had to be abandoned. One was between Toretsk and Pokrovsk - dangerously close to Horlivka - the other here in the south, where the flat ground and limited natural obstacles complicate the defense.
As you’d expect from orc and fellow-traveler propaganda, the uptick in territory losses is being portrayed as a sign of Ukrainian forces growing weaker. But if anything, these were two areas that Ukrainian high command had to know would inevitably be lost, likely before midsummer. The goal should always have been to maximize enemy losses while retreating to a more suitable line farther from occupied urban Donbas.
The Vovcha river that flows through this area - there’s another in Kharkiv, passing through Vovchansk (I’m slowly picking up on Ukrainian place name patterns after three years!) - runs north-south in some areas and east-west in others. For about a year the enemy has deliberately worked to maintain a presence on both banks, advancing towards the confluence of the Vovcha with the Mokri Yali and Solona rivers.
One of the few clever ruscist operational moves, it’s also about to run out of road. After the rivers meet, the bank on the Ukrainian-held side of the Vovcha’s southward turn is very steep. This is also true for some distance up the Solona, where it passes through Novopavlivka. Though the settlements in this area tend to sit at the base of the slope, making them vulnerable to orc infestation, having a ridge overlooking them transforms them into a deadly trap. Velyka Novosilka might have held out had the orcs not already been in control of both banks of the Mokri Yali to the south. Novopavlivka and Ivanivka will be a lot harder to encircle.
Unfortunately, the line of the Mokri Yali south of the Vovcha probably can’t be held because of the orcs attacking along both banks. The ruscist breakthrough between the Mokri Yali and Vovcha managed to cross the former and get into Piddubne this week, which had been expected to anchor a new Ukrainian line. It seems the Ukrainians must be planning to fight closer to the ridge west of the Vovcha and the forest plantations that are conveniently mostly on the western bank.
Moscow might try to envelop the whole area from the west, but that would require a major shift in resource allocations that doesn’t look justified. The flanking attack on Ukrainian forces to the south near Zelene Pole looks to have stalled; despite DeepState reporting a Ukrainian-held salient holding out in the area for some time, I expect local command simply didn’t admit a retreat had already happened long before. Aside from filling in that space, recent ruscist attacks here have made no visible progress.
The same is true of the small offensive over near Huliaypole. I’ve been hoping that the ruscist push towards Novopavlivka and Pokrovsk would leave the enemy overstretched and vulnerable. So far, Moscow seems to be walking right into the trap I’d set were I in Syrskyi’s boots. Brigades assigned to the 35th Combined Arms Army, which appears to handle the area between Huliaypole to somewhere south of the bend of the Vovcha near Novopavlivika, have reportedly been fighting close to Zelene Pole. This suggests that the ruscist CAAs assigned to the Azov coast are being forced to send forces east to prop up the Novopavlivka push.
If so, that could leave 35 CAA struggling to cover a crucial fifty kilometer stretch of front. Striking this formation to its full depth could open the door to Volnovakha if the adjacent 5th and 38th are effectively engaged and unable to dispatch reinforcements.
Southern Theater
Muscovite troops have actually managed some minor progress on the Orikhiv front, pushing into the town of Kamianka, which sits next to what are now marshes where the Dnipro used to run. The orcs are slowly consolidating control over a road passing atop a small ridge in the area, but are also facing a steep slope just a few kilometers to the north. Here’s a map of the local area, since I haven’t shown one in a while.
Fortunately, a successful offensive here remains highly doubtful. Motorcycles aren’t much use in swamps, and attacking frontally up a steep slope is a recipe for extreme losses - more than can be physically sustained. Here Moscow is once again trying to over-extend Ukrainian forces, but doing as much damage to itself in the process.
The Kherson front is unchanged: skirmishes in the Dnipro delta while orc drone operators hunt civilians just because they can. Endangered pelicans, too - orc drone operators even released a video proving the deed for some mad reason. Another reason why it’s fair to call all of Putin’s soldiers orcs - and all witting or unwitting allies orc-lovers.
Sad truth about humanity, and a big reason why I reject most flavors of humanism: a goodly chunk of the population loves nothing better than to witness a boot crash down onto someone’s neck. There is absolutely no justification in all of science for viewing humans as special or superior in any way, particularly when it comes to morality. Ours usually defaults, when properly stressed, so something any chimpanzee would recognize. By their own actions do humans transform themselves into the worst monsters, Graendel and his mother living in their swamp. Fortunately, redemption is possible, even for orcs and their friends: behave better, and make amends. Or nobody will care when the boot comes for them.
Across the south, Moscow inflicts violence now solely to prove it can. There will be no march across the Dnipro and Bug to Odesa, no “novorossiya” or whatever it’s supposed to be called. On the contrary: even Crimea is a lot more vulnerable than the orcs know. One of these days a complex operation will culminate in a landing that persists for several days before teams evacuate back to mainland Ukraine. Effective control of the Black Sea plus enough drones mean that complex naval raids are in the realm of possibility.
I just hope that everyone in Ukraine with leadership responsibilities works out that holding territory for its own sake is almost always wrong. There’s always got to be a fallback position or three, and every enemy advance is an opportunity to isolate and destroy combat power, not a challenge to be dominated.
At least the important trends are nearly all heading in the right direction. Ukraine’s victory isn’t a matter of faith, but hard science. Acquire good tools, use them well, scale up fast, and keep landing hits. There has never been any other way.
Staff Affairs
Speaking of leadership, I’ve decided to rename the related section staff affairs from leadership and personnel. Same front, different nomenclature - just feel like this fits better with the other section titles. And is slightly tongue in cheek. If I were to write a mockumentary comedy about the military, it would be a dark one about an army headquarters in the middle of a successful insurgency.
Anyway, this week produced additional evidence that both sides are anticipating Ukrainian counteroffensive operations in the near future. A dedicated campaign to kill orc military leaders is definitely underway, and Moscow is doing its best to reply in kind. The commander of Ukraine’s 110th Mechanized Brigade was killed during some kind of conference that drew an Iskander strike. I get the rough sense that a meeting of brigade commanders coming together in a new corps was targeted, suggesting a major counterintelligence failure.
But so long as this doesn’t become systematic, it’s a one-off tragedy. Ukraine’s attempt to decapitate portions of the orc chain of command, on the other hand, are visibly part of a broader shaping operation. In one most excellent strike, four HIMARS rockets - delivery of more temporarily paused thanks to Team Trump games last week that everyone is going to pretend was all that idiot Hegseth’s fault, with Trump having no idea whatsoever - nailed the command staff of the infamous 155th Naval Infantry Brigade up on the Kursk front. A russian warblogger posted a video rant, picked up by the excellent WarTranslated, alleging that the whole command staff had been wiped out.
Warfare is a grim business, and I don’t celebrate suffering - except when war crimes are involved. The 155th likes to execute and mutilate POWs, so any officer or senior sergeant associated with them is marked for life. Classic behavior of a colonial military formation - their home base is in Vladivostok, in Muscovy’s old Pacific holdings. Those groups tend to be more brutal than their masters for some reason. I’d have been pleased to pull the trigger on the HIMARS kill shot myself.
As excellent as slaughtering the leaders of a brigade that have watched their unit bleed out and be reconstituted multiple times was also killing a former leader who had been given a promotion. Guess he was back visiting his buddies? Nice job whoever put that one together! Maybe they were helped by a brigade veteran seeking redemption. Nobody has to be an orc forever.
And in a completely different theater, the Ukrainian campaign to knock out high-level command posts saw two separate strikes on the headquarters of 8th Combined Arms Army down in Donetsk. 8 CAA is responsible for the advance towards Kostyantynivka from the south east of the Bychok to Toretsk, so disrupting the leadership ought to have useful impacts at the front. The first strike appears to have involved Ukrainian drones knocking back orc air defenses in Crimea for a few days before a dozen Storm Shadow missiles and decoys punched through the gap.
But instead of pressing on to Crimea, where they would encounter more defenses, they seem to have instead turned east towards Donbas, flying behind the ruscist air defenses closer to the front in an area where it would have been very difficult for the orcs to know who the projectiles flying overhead belonged to. Moscow’s missiles overfly the area all the time. Sneaking into Donetsk through the back door, the Storm Shadows struck home.
The second attack on the headquarters might have involved more Storm Shadows, but could have been done by drones. Either way, Moscow is admitting high ranking fatalities, which should mean a lot more were inflicted. Which CAA headquarters is next to go down, I wonder?
As far as Ukrainian staff affairs go, the most significant development is probably the general sense that the corps reformation is entering the final stages. The composition and leadership teams of all are likely set, so formal announcements have begun to accelerate. Militaryland.net is an excellent English-language source covering these in detail.
That a fairly controversial officer has been appointed to lead a corps that includes several Territorial Guard brigades suggests the best-performing teams are already in place. This could also be contributing to reduced Ukrainian casualty rates in recent months.
Hopefully 21st Army Corps and its attached brigades operate on low-intensity fronts, because it seems that the corps commander in charge is the one responsible for a series of near encirclements that Ukrainian forces only barely escaped along the Sukhi Yali river late last year. Kurakhove might have held out had the southern flank of the defense not collapsed.
I don’t like to second-guess what someone actually experiencing a situation chose in the moment, but almost half a dozen times during the fighting near Kurakhove Ukrainian forces held on to a town long past the point it made any sense to fight on. Slowly, the front south of Kurakhove crumbled, forcing brigades that were otherwise fighting incredibly well against steep odds to fall back. There is now testimonial evidence suggesting that the cause was a leader refusing to accept reality, ordering local counterattacks to keep the map from turning red.
Ukraine can only tolerate so much of that sort of thing before the cumulative impacts become too much to bear. Institutions everywhere must always be alert to the dangers posed by insufficient accountability. Had Ukrainian forces pulled back and properly fortified a line they could actually hope to hold for a long time sooner, there may never have been a Novopavlivka front at all. I’m sure that this guy wasn’t exclusively to blame. But making him a corps commander sure does seem odd. There was nobody available less distrusted by fellow officers?
Aviation Duel
The Ukrainian air force has been busy fending off Shahed waves and dispatching glide bombs to frontline orc positions, but there have been no notable losses or victories in the sky. Most sorties involve pretty repetitive work: hunting drones and slinging bombs - or covering the jets doing the latter with air-to-air and radar-seeking air-to-ground ordnance.
Thanks to Ukraine’s Viper fleet being donated by Europe, US aid halts shouldn’t impact logistics in the short run. So long as the US doesn’t restrict third-party technology transfers - and isn’t so far - international support can keep Ukraine’s Vipers armed and in the sky indefinitely, so far as I’m aware.
Team Trump is definitely using any arms that Ukraine can only source from the US as blackmail, now, meaning that Kyiv is down to begging for Patriot interceptors and having to be grateful when D.C. promises to send ten. Japan likely maintains deep stocks, since Tokyo is only licensed to produce thirty missiles annually, but having to worry about North Korea means that Japan’s inventories are spoken for. Now that Team Trump can perpetually use the fact that Iran can still bomb Israel if struck again - over a dozen targets were hit and at least 10% of shots got through during the recent exchanges - Ukraine’s Patriot rations will be heavily restricted.
In the medium term, the US is going to suffer a lot for its two-faced double-dealing. Right now, though, Europeans are stuck being politer than Trump deserves until they can ramp up Aster production and modify the system to better cope with ballistic targets. The days of Ukraine being able to fully protect even Kyiv from ballistic attacks are ending, so it’s fortunate that so much Ukrainian industry is dispersed and people have bomb shelters.
Using mothership drones to hunt Iskander launchers is a major priority for Ukraine now. It’s very, very difficult to successfully whack mobile ballistic missiles before they can fire. But presenting a constant threat will constrain operations to some degree.
As far as the other main threat to Ukraine from the skies goes, the rate of Sukhoi Flankers getting blown up at their bases is on the rise. Another five were destroyed or damaged - and really, the two are the same for most jets - in a single attack. Others may have been hit or were lost in accidents. It hasn’t been a great week for orc air.
Another benefit of Ukraine getting AWACS from Sweden is that it should be much easier to track jets as they return to base. Timing a drone attack for when the aircraft have just landed and are being refueled and rearmed for the next sortie is ideal. Not all maintenance or arming operations can be safely done indoors, but you can bet that these activities are completed in as narrow a window as possible to minimize risk. So any hard data on when jets are expected to land is good.
Strike Campaigns
When it comes to the broader deep strike campaign, Ukraine isn’t letting up one bit, and is apparently going to start hitting oil facilities again. Electrical plants, chemical facilities, warehouses - if it can be mapped and has military value, Ukraine is going to bonk it with drones. A hundred a night seems to be about average, with Moscow never able to knock them all down. Shock is palpable in the voices of nearly every russian citizen who observes a drone strike and posts a video. The sort of shock that leads to disgust with a regime that can’t protect its own stuff, much less the people it rules.
While morale is always good to damage if you can, the impacts are hard to quantify or count on. Hence it being wise of Ukraine to hit targets that, if destroyed, will complicate downstream activities. Many commentators have already likened Ukraine’s campaign to the American destruction of the centralized German ball bearing facilities during the Second World War. Even though the Germans adapted and decentralized, the threat of losing a vital resource structured many policy choices made at the time.
A war machine is a complex organism where all the necessary raw materials flow in to industry and the essential elements of combat power flow out. There are always critical resources or productive nodes that, if even partially disabled, will cripple overall output. Adaptation is almost always possible - cutting Germany off from imported explosives components in World War One accelerated the development of synthetic ammonia - but takes time.
So Ukraine hitting so many different pieces of ruscist industry only makes good sense. Coupled to the inflationary impact of high levels of military spending funded by bad debt, the Muscovite war economy is doomed to hit a wall.
The Muscovites prefer to hit lots and lots of civilian targets in a direct continuation of the Syria strategy of making places uninhabitable to raise the cost of continuing the war to unacceptable levels. Israel has also adopted this sad strategy in Gaza, in the process demonstrating that success is possible, but only at an obscene cost in civilian life over a long period of time. Moscow cannot hope to scale up Israeli practices in Ukraine. Gaza is tiny, and the world has decided to let the Palestinians die because their rights are held to be subordinate to Israeli.
Ukrainians will only get angrier and more determined to endure. Only apocalyptic levels of annihilation get the job done, and it has to happen over such an extended period of time that people lose all hope. It would take repeated nuclear bombardments to achieve that in Ukraine. I doubt even that could ever work.
Naval Matters
Aside from more drones launching drones to hit radars in Crimea from the Black Sea and the orcs reporting a drone raid on Novorossisyk repelled, it’s been another muted week on the waters off Ukraine. It remains striking how despite controlling more coastline the orcs are unable to secure more of the Black Sea. Ukraine claims to be able to freely operate across ninety percent of it.
An American administration truly committed to a display of strength would send the Ford and her battle group through the Dardannelles when they arrive in the area this summer. Not happening, of course, as she’ll need to park off Israel or maybe bomb the Houthis some more, now that they’re hitting ships in the Red Sea again and the Pentagon will want to display its newest troubled but don’t worry because contractors fixed all the problems, trust us! platform in combat. Especially after her sister ship’s arrival in the fleet has been delayed by two years! Ugh, just cancel the Ford-class already…
Could be that keeping big US ships out of the Black Sea is best. Ukraine would probably run some exercise that proves how vulnerable carriers are to drones anyway. I mean, the United States Navy is only just now, in 2025, deploying torpedo-killing torpedoes to protect surface ships. Just in time to face down dozens of Soviet submarines pushing into the Atlantic, guys! But hey, at least it won’t be quite as easy for a lurking Chinese submarine to disable a supercarrier. Instead, it’ll just be a smart drone minefield or something.
As I’ll get into in the next section, old ways of thinking about war tend to prevail until proven disastrously outdated. Military paradigms rise and fall just like they do in science. Often enough, both are driven by the same scholarly fads.
Combined Arms 2025: The Struggle To Advance
Now, some more on the difficult problem that is presently vexing military leaders who understand just how badly classical rhythms will be impacted by masses of drones, whether they swarm or not. How, with the enemy able to spot every move, can forces advance at the scale required to seize ground from the enemy without extreme cost?
Warfare will always boil down to teams taking physical control of key objectives on some resource-constrained landscape. Though any number of supporting domains can be posited, it’s the ground battle that ultimately decides everything, because it is only once core physical objectives are out of enemy control that it will lose the ability to sustain itself. Even cyber operations ultimately depend on physical servers with a power supply.
Hence the universal importance of restricting and eventually eliminating the enemy’s ability to reinforce and resupply physical locales. Logistics is a critical factor governing what is possible in warfare, because you can’t get teams to desired ground if they lack the proverbial beans, bullets, and gas in sufficient quantities. Entire empires overreach and collapse once logistics at the frontier become untenable, usually as a function of the ill-gotten gains of imperial expansion never satisfying demand for endless growth back in Rome, so to speak.
Efficient warfare always strives to cut off enemy logistic on some level rather than achieve the physical destruction of the enemy down to the individual team. Retreats and routs happen because team members come to perceive that to continue fighting risks that sad end with no chance of tasting victory in compensation, however hollow it might prove. Most soldiers surrender not because they much believe in their enemy’s promises of good treatment, but because they believe they’re dead anyway, so even a slim chance of surviving imprisonment seems good. Unless it involves torture - hence the orcs routinely using it while falsely promising that the Ukrainians behave the same. All orcs must believe that torture is universal to remain sufficiently motivated under stress.
Incidentally, the few soldiers in Ukraine who have been accused of atrocities like murdering prisoners tend to be foreign fighters. Adventurers appear in every war, and some are nothing more than psychopaths looking for an opportunity to get away with what they never could otherwise. This is why rigorous commitment to ethical standards and full transparency, no excuses, is essential.
But back to doing warfare less stupidly, an odd lifetime obsession of mine: just as attrition/maneuver is a false binary, so is the old argument about whether you are fighting the enemy’s body or mind. The two are inseparable halves, each containing a seed of the other. Yin and Yang. Both act on the same target: logistics. An enemy lacking food and water will eventually surrender - or perish.
The trouble is that in a combat situation you can’t just leave enemy teams sitting in the midst of your positions. People can survive days without water, even if they run out, and during that time they can call down fire and defend themselves, even mount desperate attacks. To get your teams to a place that you seek to control requires clearing enough territory to sustain logistics linking it to other places you own.
For thousands of years, most warfare has been organized around the principle that if one side wants to take a place, anyone opposing them has to invest energy in keeping them away. If that fails, making sure they never consolidate control is the default plan B. Either way, teams have to be deployed and sustained in advantageous locations to stop the enemy from doing as they please.
The specifics of how this is best accomplished depends, as you might expect, on the tools available. Technology has always forced innovation in tactical dispositions, which wind up informing how broader operations are constructed and even informed strategic decision-making. And there is never any shortage of ideas on how to standardize practices in a given way and what effects a shift in practices may have. Og the warlord ruling over her band of three dozen, six of whom could wield a club, no doubt engaged in long grunting discourse that sometimes escalated to bashing over how many clubs should fight in the first and second row.
In Ukraine, warfare has taken a path that I’m fairly confident no one predicted: high-priced industry-designed drones have not replaced infantry, tanks, or combat jets (yet), instead huge numbers of small ones filled a niche between traditional artillery and crew served weapons used by combat teams. The ability to precisely place a rocket propelled grenade shot at the weakest point of an enemy vehicle five, ten, or even twenty kilometers away can’t help but prompt serious shifts in tactical and operational patterns - even strategy.
Likening the situation to the Harry Potter universe is perhaps helpful. Combat has reached a point that, thanks to networks and drones, individual soldiers can call down an Avadakedavra killing spell on anything they see without being immediately attacked in like kind. This is bound to get messy.
As a quick refresher, I use the terms tactical/operational/strategic not to indicate different scale levels, but basic functions of any organism. Tactics is problem solving; some problems are universal, but implementation is governed by context, and human creativity is almost limitless. Operations are about organizing action at multiple levels to ensure that teams cooperatively pursue objectives. Strategy covers the why of it all: the theory of how a particular action represents an essential step on the road to victory.
An example: if victory is shooting Putin in the face, because that almost certainly prevents him from continuing the war, I’ve got to come up with a way to get a shooter in position to deliver the killing blow - that’s strategy. Then I’ve got to work out all the logistics involved, which given his security probably means generating a series of massive military defeats that make members of his regime prefer that he not continue to draw breath even before an assassin is finally moved into place once a vulnerability is identified.
When it comes to actually making it happen in real time, there’s an infinite number of things that could go wrong, so teams assigned to do the deed have to be ready to independently react to any contingency or simply abort. They may even have to decide that a head shot is too risky and go center of mass using an armor-piercing round. Or just use a drone. That I specified a means of elimination was my error: obviously, my intent in framing victory as I did is his death, and anyone who can bring that happy moment achieves it even if he doesn’t take a bullet to the noggin live on TV like I wanted. Can’t always get what you want in this life. Hopefully that’s not true in another.
The proliferation of drones has accelerated a process underway since the Second World War: the rise of the tactical and operational levels to ever greater relevance than the strategic, even as strategists think they’re able to have unprecedented levels of high resolution control. Strategic possibilities arise from disparities in tactics and operational art, because at the strategic level all leaders can really go any more is decide where resources flow. Actual combat is so dynamic and unpredictable in the moment that no high-level strategic plan can possibly anticipate the corrosive friction of chaos.
Higher levels of any institution are so remote from the events on the ground, despite the illusion provided by ready access to gobs of data, that the inherent delay in requiring that teams wait for instructions to act is disastrous. All senior leaders can do is evaluate broader trends in how their teams are performing and strive to improve support channels. Command and control in the classic sense is obsolete, and professional practices must rapidly evolve to embrace chaos instead of trying to mash new technological developments together with established standards and practices.
Incidentally, the way drones are being integrated in the American military is mostly a case study in how not to proceed. Having a drone operator in every team is the kind of solution a militant bureaucracy like the Pentagon would latch on to. To be fair, I originally thought the same way - then I learned from the Ukrainians. But I’m not paid, and working with unclassified sources. Pentagon types have no excuse.
To win this war, Ukraine has to come up with a means of conducting large-scale sustained military operations in a panopticon - a landscape where anything that breaks cover can be swiftly detected and attacked. Drones are cheap enough that using several to hunt down a single soldier is economical, and they’re also diverse enough to customize the size and type of explosive delivered as needed to suit any known battlefield target. Surprise in the traditional sense is incredibly difficult - what can surprise an enemy is the intensity and duration of an effort.
Now, fielding drones isn’t a matter of just shipping units to teams and expecting results. In fact, most combat teams fighting on the front line shouldn’t expect to use them at all. They’re better off receiving dedicated support from drone teams working some distance behind the front. The reason, in a nutshell? Workload. The more independent tasks that a person or team has to keep track of, the greater the chance of something important getting forgotten. So teams should always be naturally constructed to balance a range of capabilities needed to complete the mission - but also have a clearly defined mission set to handle.
The need for skill-focused but constantly communicating teams creates a distinct structure to effective operations. Everything flows from the reality experienced by the people with eyes on their chunk of the front. They know what needs to happen to accomplish their mission, which in any counteroffensive means going out and taking positions. Teams have to both accomplish their physical mission and transmit signals about their status to a command team of some kind. They also, of course, have to cope with the limits of logistics. Some of which will be set by higher-level commanders who have to balance competing demands.
And if you can’t protect teams from attack, by drones, tanks, or whatever, you’re in deep trouble. The first step is making real-time observation difficult, and the second is to make it harder to conclude a strike. Minimizing time out of cover is one tactic that achieves both. Being able to shoot drones is another.
The most critical impact of drones has been, much as was the case with machine guns a century ago, to enable a relatively small group of people to exert incredible influence over their chunk of the battlefield. Where sheer mass could overwhelm an opponent equipped with rifles, machine guns plus barbed wire made this suicidal. And both could be carried into position by an infantry platoon that, once entrenched and surrounded by mines, could make a square kilometer their own forever, barring the arrival of a lot of enemy artillery.
It isn’t that leaders didn’t know that machine guns were dangerous back then, it’s that they could be so easily and rapidly set up in such densities that breakthroughs were quickly blocked - a factor senior leaders didn’t adequately account for. When war broke out, timetables soon backed up, rail schedules were swiftly impacted, and the German Schlieffen Plan, the attempt to outflank French forces by invading through Belgium, was too slow to succeed - it also brought Britain into the war when Germany couldn’t afford another enemy.
Drones and airpower combined to stall Ukraine’s counteroffensives in 2023. Hence Ukraine’s pulled punch that summer, and the transition to matching Moscow’s war of attrition with drone technology. Over the past two years, Ukraine has finally gained access to all the essential aspects of modern combined arms warfare, but also incorporated drones into the mix.
Still, even the ability to transform the ten or fifteen kilometers of ground closest to friendly positions into a killzone isn’t in and of itself sufficient to power an offensive. Ukraine still must surmount the challenge of moving teams close to orc positions, clearing those they must and lay siege to the rest. And this has to happen across a front spanning tens of kilometers for several weeks straight. Not only that, the operation must successfully wrap after no more than two months, because Moscow will eventually throw everything it has at any Ukrainian gains won.
The experience of of analyzing the fighting in Ukraine these past three and a half years has forced me to discard half of what I thought I knew a fair few times, but essential core aspects of the systems theory of war I’ve developed over the years have proven themselves. The importance of terrain and logistics are two; a third is a distillation of my experience training as a scout twenty years ago.
Everyone on the contemporary battlefield is now a scout: whatever illusions anyone ever held about ground forces being run by gravel-chewing grunts straight of Starcraft must be disbanded post-haste. It’s those of us who were trained never to assume air superiority - or even that we’d have backup if things went bad on a mission - who understand best the style of fighting that keeps people alive in Ukraine. Hiding whenever possible and calling down fire are now two of the primary tasks of infantry, with defending positions against an orc rush being another. Retreating in good order is a definite fourth.
Scouts back in the day also knew a thing or two about keeping armored vehicles hidden and dispersed, because they - American cavalry scouts at least - expected to operate outnumbered and outgunned with Warsaw Pact divisions closing in backed by helicopter gunships. Vehicles helped scouts avoid wasting energy hiking unnecessary distances with a load as well as covering a hasty exit with firepower. Cavalry scouts fully anticipated the possibility of being cut off and having to exfiltrate in teams of four or even two while calling down accurate fire from available assets.
This is the sort of fighting that predominates when ground forces directly clash in Ukraine. Neither side can afford to keep a lot of people above ground for long, unless offensive efforts are happening on such a scale that the enemy lacks the resources to respond adequately everywhere. That’s still the trick to any offensive.
Moscow has tried to solve the problem of advancing by accepting extreme casualties among disposable troops. This has only worked at anything approaching the necessary scale to achieve an operational success on the most favorable terrain for over a year - southern Donbas, where the wide open mostly-flat spaces offer a nice shooting gallery for Ukrainian forces but also fewer places to hide drone operators than, say, Pokrovsk.
Ukraine cannot accept the same casualties as the orcs, though rates returning to mid-2024 levels must be expected during any offensive campaign - another limit on duration. So the Ukrainians are moving to establish what I call a drone shieldwall: this features both a defensive drone line capable of bringing most orc assaults to a halt before they threaten infantry positions, as well an offensive spear capable of thrusting into enemy territory and forcing the entire line to fall back, enabling a broad Ukrainian advance.
Why hasn’t Moscow worked out how to do this? Mostly an inability to concentrate the logistics sufficient to get it done, partly thanks to inaccurate artillery requiring several times more shells to achieve the same results as Ukrainian gunners enjoy. The orcs also long ago had to push their railheads back at least a hundred kilometers from the front and rely on less efficient truck transport to ferry supplies to field depots, which then have to be widely distributed to avoid losing a huge stock to a Himars strike - which becomes increasingly likely the more vehicles show up at a given location. Lacking the precision strike capabilities that Ukraine now boasts, orc offensives can only ever be so efficient. Moscow’s response to this reality emerging three years ago - political appearances played as much of a role as material factors, probably - was to try and break Ukraine by fighting on numerous fronts.
That wasn’t bright, because Ukraine can more easily shuttle scarce assets between fronts. Ukraine has worked very hard to avoid facing simultaneous large offensives on numerous fronts by launching counterattacks where possible. The cost has been bitter for Ukraine, but the past two years of fighting have broken key elements of the ruscist combat system, especially the ability to generate a wall of fire and steel capable of pushing through a major urban area, like Bakhmut.
Ukraine’s campaign will by no means be easy going, even so. Moscow’s defenses have not been strongly tested in two years, save in Kursk, where surprise was possible because Moscow wrongly assumed that the Biden Administration could restrain Kyiv from taking such a bold step. The political consequences for Putin have been grave, Kursk shattering the last vestiges of the con job that is his regime and all its promises of making russia great again or whatever.
Ukraine’s next counteroffensive seems most likely to strike the occupied territories, meaning that Moscow is going to pick up the signs soon after it gets underway. All Ukraine can do is move with enough speed and force to outpace the ruscist response, which Kursk shows takes days to get going at the army level, two weeks at the theater level, and up to two months for Moscow to wake up. The enemy can always find enough reserves to throw at a Ukrainian success in six to eight weeks to bring it to a halt, so the clock is ticking from moment one.
That means Ukrainian troops won’t have the time or immediately available reserves to mop up large numbers of ruscist positions. When the time to push comes, in each corps sector, as small of teams as possible will strike along as many different paths as can be managed along the entire scope of an opposing ruscist combined arms army’s frontage. At the same time, huge numbers of drones will blanket any spotted target to a depth of a hundred kilometers, while squadron-strength strike packages unleash Hammer glide bombs, HARM anti-radiation missiles, and Storm Shadow cruise missiles on air defense and command positions.
To make the movement of Ukrainian teams as safe as possible, effective orc command and control of the surviving positions in the target area must be seriously, aggressively, and continuously degraded. If surprise in the classic sense - be where the enemy doesn’t expect - isn’t possible, then it has to be generated through impacts beyond the target’s ability to cope. Muscovite troops will fight hard for their own bunkers, but if they aren’t receiving clear orders from officers with a solid picture of what’s happening, the teams moving in to assault what positions must be taken will have a much better chance of winning through without loss.
Hence the extreme importance of drone interceptors and electromagnetic warfare. Neither can totally blind the enemy, but sufficient interference will reduce response times and make tracking what is happening a whole lot harder. Surveillance and strike drones both have to be knocked down as soon as possible after entering the battlespace. Targeting drone operators will naturally be necessary, though finding the source of fiber-optic drone attacks is proving difficult. Area fires with cluster munitions may be highly effective, if stocks allow for liberal use.
Ukrainian commanders will have to manage the progress of numerous spearheads advancing in parallel as well as moving enough forces up in their wake to secure supply corridors leading back to the rest of Ukraine. That will prove the trickiest part of all, I expect. At each stage drone defenses must be swiftly erected, because drone interceptions will never reach 100%. Drone defense requires a classic layered, Swiss cheese pattern: no solution is total, but in combination several can provide strong protection.
The initial assaults will be difficult, but straightforward. Ukrainian pioneer teams - scouts and engineers - have to breach minefields to let scouts led by ground drones move to their targets. They likely won’t assault ruscist positions, but take them under observation and correct fire while establishing rough fighting positions of their own under cover. Behind, engineers can take advantage of ongoing intensive drone strikes and artillery barrages to the depth of the targeted CAA to help full assault teams riding in armored vehicles to rapidly approach and clear any positions required to secure a foothold and prepare for the next lunge.
These cannot be large strike teams, either. Instead of trying to penetrate a narrow front at extreme depth in a bid to physically cut off defenders across an entire front from support, it is necessary to instead crumble the front across a broad area with relentless pressure applied across every channel available to the depth of the enemy’s deployment. The size of the target sector is determined by how well the attacker can isolate it from the rest of the enemy’s network - this will depend a lot on terrain. An advantage of this approach is that the individual spears can each function as a separate test revealing where the enemy is most likely to fall back the quickest, potentially triggering a broader collapse. Success should be reinforced, and failure used as an excuse to redirect efforts somewhere else.
Another benefit of a distributed assault is that preparations can be made less obvious. A lot of personnel and vehicles appearing in one place raises suspicions. If they’re spread out over a wider area, the movement looks more defensive in nature. Yet to to my mind the biggest advantage of all is the simplicity of the tasks assigned to front line teams. Only those enemy positions that can directly threaten a line of advance need to be cleared. Provided that drones and the threat posed by other parallel advances can paralyze enemy action on the flanks, spearheads can drive as far as they can go as fast as they can get there, going to ground whenever things get heavy.
A kind of telescoping process defines the process of advancing, fresh companies sent to keep extending the spearheads towards key targets. Once a designated halt line is reached, new battalions will take over advancing further while the original vanguard turns to properly securing the corridors so far seized. Here again, rather than dig out each and every orc position, the goal will be to cut off as many as possible from support and wait them out. Drones can establish continuous surveillance, calling down strikes any time the orcs try to leave their holes while communications are aggressively jammed. So long as they can’t move or receive support, they’re neutralized and bound to surrender in time.
What I’ve described isn’t exactly military rocket science - it’s just letting drones fill useful niches, particularly ones that risk the lives of personnel, mixing them into the classic combined arms recipe.
This is how mass is best achieved in the Network Age: lots and lots of disaggregated components moving as they are separately able towards the same goal. Drone interceptor hunting zones paired with large numbers of short-range converted air-to-air missiles fired from improvised FrankenSAM systems can do the job. Drone mass isn’t the easiest thing to guarantee because of limited bandwidth meaning that only so many can be over an area at once, but the advent of fiber-optic drones should mean that many missions can be pushed onto them, leaving more signal space for ones on networks to use.
If Ukrainian forces can master the right combination of tools applied with the right rhythm at scale, cracking a couple combined arms armies is reasonable to expect in 2025. That could easily result in a Kursk-style salient forming somewhere Putin cannot afford.
The sizable reduction in Ukrainian fatality rates this year coupled to Muscovite exhaustion of sufficient armored vehicles and substantially reduced artillery efficiency suggests that the time for a counteroffensive is near. Ukraine is building up combat power, while Moscow’s continues to be frittered away. It isn’t that Moscow lacks reserves so much as their quality leaves much to be desired. Even if the orcs were to muster and deploy one of their CAAs to take a slice of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, or Poland, it would be shredded in a matter of days.
That’s a gift that Ukraine has given to the future. Good thing too, because a certain class of idiot is dead set on pushing Moscow and Beijing even closer together.
World System Brief - Tragedy of the Clash of Civilizations
It’s tragic that the addled twits who worship at the altar of Samuel Huntington look set to get that Clash of Civilizations they’ve fantasized about for decades. Meeting with EU foreign minister Kaja Kallas recently, her equivalent from Beijing had an extremely meaningful message to deliver: China won’t allow Moscow to be defeated in Ukraine. The reason - whether this fact was baldly stated at the time or the understanding was transmitted through parallel channels, it’s not considered a secret by anyone - is that Beijing does not want the fools in D.C. to be able to fixate on the Western Pacific.
If that happens, a horrific war is basically inevitable, because - as the attack on Iran proved - Trump is anything but an isolationist. A certain type in America firmly believes, against all material evidence to the contrary, that if you can tag someone with enough negative labels they’ll lose popular support. So the Military-Industrial-Media complex tried to call Trump an isolationist as a way to signal to him that he’d better tread lightly on their pet issues. Hitting Iran in conjunction with Israel proved that he’s never been serious about America First, only having more power, which suits them just fine. He won’t be in the White House forever, though it might not survive his tenure. I’m fine with that.
Note how the American media and affiliates abroad were in lockstep celebration of the Israel/USA bombing campaign in Iran? They did the same thing when Trump nearly started a war with Iran the first time he was president, brazenly killing Iranian general Soleimani in Iraq. A hundred Americans were injured during the missile barrage that came in retaliation, but the American media didn’t care. It long ago stopped being a check on power, and instead cheers it on. Partisanship is a pain.
When Trump decides to do something aggressive towards China to back up his false tough-guy image (oh, he’ll fight the hapless mullahs in Iran, but knees get as wobbly as Biden’s at the thought of battling Moscow), Beijing has to avoid being diplomatically isolated. When evaluating the rhetoric of a Chinese official, their cultural tendency towards leaving the most important message unstated must be taken into account.
Talking about cultural tendencies immediately places the analyst on exceptionally unstable ground, so let me unpack for a second. By that, I mean typical patterns of communication that evolved in a distinct direction. Stuff like which hand gestures or words are considered vulgar differs from region to region - sometimes neighborhood to neighborhood - the same way accents do.
While there is no true cultural “east” or “west” (or “north” or “south”) in a scientific sense, the relative geographic isolation of eastern Asia led to certain typical behavioral patterns in China, Korea, and Japan bearing more of a resemblance than any of the three do to, say, any culture in West Africa. A standard East Asian practice is to avoid social tension or discomfort by carefully couching language to make criticisms indirect. And every critique or complaint contains an offer. Not everyone in a cultural province follows the rules, but politicians and diplomats tend to. Part of their jobs.
Military personnel from European-derived cultures often have a lot of trouble interacting with colleagues from East Asia because the former are trained to be direct in most situations, leading to them perceiving their Japanese or Korean counterparts as too deferential to authority or lacking initiative. This is an error: what’s really going on is that people from very different places have been socialized to place initiative at its proper level. Trying to force people to operate under a system with a wholly different structure is hazardous in situations where everyone needs to synchronize. Much training is needed to develop common standards.
In the language of diplomacy, a Chinese official being so blunt about their objectives is also an invitation to change them. What Beijing is trying to get across to Brussels is that they have mutual problems in D.C. and Moscow, both ruled by unstable, slowly fragmenting regimes. The Chinese have made it clear in the past that they are extremely concerned about the Ukraine War going nuclear and have moved to restrain Putin in this regard. Now that D.C. and Moscow are openly treating the number of nuclear weapons in an arsenal as a proxy for hard power, China needs a few years to deploy more of its own. Until recently, Chinese nuclear policy has been to maintain a posture enabling vicious retaliation against any nuclear attack, but no first strike capability.
Now that nobody really believes anyone will dare to use nukes, but D.C. and Moscow are both using the danger of nuclear arms as a justification for military actions against longstanding targets, China needs more. And the Chinese do not want anyone playing nuclear one-upmanship until they’re ready to fight on equal terms. Beijing also obviously understands that Europe is in the same situation.
Confluences of interest are real, material forces. Culture may govern the expression and prioritization of interest, but it always resolves to material factors. The Allies partnered up with the Soviets not because they had anything in common, but because each needed the other to occupy as much of Germany’s military might as possible. As soon as the endgame was near, the Soviets moved in to (re)colonize eastern Europe while the Americans outright let them to avert the risk of the Second World War simply carrying on. From promoting national self-determination in 1919 to ignoring it in 1946 - that’s America for you.
Deep down, D.C. and Moscow are both moving to recolonize Europe as they can. The USA failed to defend Ukraine as it was obligated to in 2022 - or 2014, for that matter - because Ukraine is on Moscow’s side of an imaginary sphere of influence. D.C.’s aggressively duplicitous diplomacy of late is all part of a new Molotrov-Ribbentrop Pact forming up without any ink spilling onto paper. Who needs any conspiracy when you can predict what moves the other side plans to make? Is a dance a conspiracy - or a game?
I’m hardly a friend of the regime in Beijing, but to deal with a hostile system, understanding it is the first essential step. Thanks to a combination of internal rhetorical commitments tied to China’s painful recent history and the genuine threat of war posed by western ideology’s obsession with dominating all rival groupings, Beijing sees the first step in its own defeat being geopolitical isolation.
Which brings me back to the facile Clash of Civilizations nonsense that has taken over the minds of America’s Beltway set, the fools now acting so much like Putin’s propagandists it’s sad. Summed up, Samuel Huntington argued that the world is divided into distinct civilizations, namely the Christian West along with the Islamic, Indian, and Asian Easts, with Africa and South America thrown in as an afterthought. These civilizations, he claimed, were inherently oppositional and bound to claim spheres of influence. Because the Islamic and Chinese East are ancestrally and ideologically opposed to the West, war is inevitable.
This ascientific tripe pairs nicely with the popular Thucydides Trap theory, which foreordains conflict between a rising China and a West trying to maintain its power, Athens and Sparta reborn. As with nearly every idea that claims to descend from the ancient Greeks, this is a misread of history so profound it could only have become popular because it fits in with some very rich people’s pre-conceived notions.
Material factors drive the course of history, but really dumb ideas play a decisive role in convincing people with power to do silly things with it. World War One happened as much because policymakers all assumed that science ordained a war to prove which countries were best as the desire of Germany to get more territory from France. Beijing has ever reason to expect a military provocation from D.C., up to and including a pre-emptive attack on Beijing’s nuclear arsenal to cripple China’s bargaining position in the new Great Game. Just as Israel was willing to risk hundreds, even thousands of Jewish lives to put on a show of mowing the grass in Iran that’s bound to backfire within a few years, so may American leaders talk themselves into believing that a conventional strike on certain nuclear assets could make Beijing negotiate. Most of Beijing’s nukes are stored under mountains, after all. If access were prevented for any length of time, well, hence Beijing building a whole lot of missile silos lately.
However unlikely, a US strike is a scenario that Beijing has to plan for. So it wants to make the stakes of the Ukraine War clear: if Europe goes along with the US-led effort to contain China, Moscow gets all the support it needs to tie up Europe’s resources indefinitely. However, commit to ditching the unreliable Americans, and all of a sudden what happens to Moscow isn’t Beijing’s main concern, provided that the Muscovite nuclear arsenal doesn’t risk falling into the wrong hands and the country doesn’t end up mired in a bloody civil war that could impact Chinese economic activity or geopolitical hold over Central Asia.
In China’s world, D.C. and Brussels are effective equals, so for the regime in Beijing to survive one must be neutral, or even an ally. Second tier powers like russia, India, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Israel all shift their allegiances frequently, in a historic sense, so putting together a coalition from them is dicey, the way Beijing sees the world. Europe is China’s best natural ally, each side of Eurasia complementing the other without posing a direct military threat, both primarily interested in stability.
Unless, of course, Europe remains an essential link in the US-dominated logistics network that allows D.C. to threaten Chinese interests in the Middle East, its main energy provider at present and for many years to come. And so Europe faces a stark and pressing choice: become more independent fast, demonstrating that it understands its interests as China does, or be seen as a permanent American tool.
Look, countries can be expected to adopt or invent whatever moral arguments they think will suffice to justify their actions. In the final resort, their leaders will often lie about how committed the other side really is to their total destruction. Putin and Netanyahu both love to play this game despite commanding an arsenal of nuclear weapons, something their targets notably lack. Both will outright insist that they must commit genocide to prevent one, despite lack of evidence their enemy could hope to carry one out.
In Ukraine’s case, virtually no one has an incentive to lie about the proven nature of Putin’s assault, because if there was any real hope that he would see the error of his ways and relent, a majority of Ukrainians would accept a frozen conflict right now to end the ongoing loss of Ukrainian life. Ukraine gains nothing from this war but its own right to exist. Something Ukrainians shouldn’t even have to fight for. If a people want self-determination, let them have it!
Putin proves his intentions by constantly killing Ukrainian civilians who aren’t even close to military targets. Double-tap strikes using expensive missiles to kill rescuers is the sort of action that proves a real hatred of Ukrainians. You can’t expect Ukrainians to give up and accept Putin’s claim to the right to use violence however he pleases whenever he decides he wants to take another chunk of land.
Every generation, some idiots think that they will be the ones to defy reality and discover some magic solution to the ancient problem of executing effective policy without coping with the persistent friction of reality. Clausewitz was right about this and many other matters, but especially that war is policy - the two are one and the same. Only means of implementation vary, with violence always an option absent some guarantee of proportional retribution. Failing to understand this, leaders wind up going through the same bitter ordeal and getting burned just like their predecessors did.
It doesn’t seem to matter how strongly the historical record warns against making the same old mistakes: in the moment, everyone latches on to their favorite narrative and proceeds from there. Which forms a lovely trap - historians respond to market pressures and build narratives to suit an audience that then deploys this skewed history to justify policy!
If the weird proclamations made by American leaders and talking heads these days make less and less sense to outsiders, that’s a function of an increasingly senescent and insular audience with enough disposable income to throw at anyone willing to tell them how great America is. The hard truth of the con is that the people who want to hear this have been trained to personally identify with what amounts to a cartoon. They’ve been primed to buy whatever the person who spouts the right words sells, thinking that this equals participation in some sort of bigger movement. The comedown from that high is so painful that self-immolation through participation in mass violence feels preferable to many.
Any criticism of America - especially its military - generates an automatic outrage response, just like in Putin’s empire. This reflex is bipartisan too: these days plenty of Team Blue types are just as jingoistic and bigoted as their Team Trump twins - that sleazy asshat Fetterman from Pennsylvania, for example. Military disaster is inevitable once accountability structures break down.
As much as Americans are taught to think themselves special, the essential pattern is quite common in any society - groupings of any size, really. Mass delusions are common, and anyone caught in one will automatically fight any attempt to peel back the veil of social hypnosis, feeling compelled to defend the narrative. It can be a necessary form of self-protection, because a mob loves nothing more than to immolate a heretic. But for many, the emotional connection to the story is real.
A similar mass delusion sits at the heart of Putin’s russian fascist empire. It holds that so long as anything exists which can somehow be construed as evidence supporting the grander narrative about the alleged russian world’s ultimate triumph over all foes, russia is winning. It’s a straight-up port of the old Soviet propaganda about true socialism in our time, but that probably feels familiar to the demographics that most strongly back the regime. So Putin and his cronies latch onto the most insignificant gains in Ukraine to push the weak argument that the Muscovites slowly beating the combined power of the NATO alliance by trading a thousand lives for a few ruined Donbas villages every month.
To sustain the increasingly pathetic deception, Putin throws combat power at Ukraine continuously so that combat never ceases and a few square kilometers are taken every day. This is another ancient pattern: lacking the capability win a conflict it started, a power comes to accept continuation of action as a policy end unto itself. The only winner is sitting in Beijing, but that doesn’t matter: only the belief that Ukraine is losing is relevant.
Nobody in Moscow wants to admit out loud that the assault on Ukraine has been a total disaster, because as soon as anyone does the doubt cascade will start and the narrative will unravel. Hence Putin ensuring Wagner head Prigozhin’s death after doing a deal to end his rebellion two years ago. Most people in the future will laugh that anyone believed the russian world nonsense in the first place, just like we do Hitler’s dreams of a thousand-year Reich. I expect the recent spate of Muscovite transportation ministry officials dying suddenly under strange circumstances is related to someone telling Putin something he didn’t want to hear about the impact of Ukraine’s drone strikes on the sustainability of the war effort.
This is a form of rigidity trap: a situation where a necessary collapse cycle is artificially prevented through determined - but misguided - investment of resources. The result is always maladaptive: collapse is triggered by larger forces than can be wholly controlled. Mitigated, yes - even exploited for advantage if you get ahead of the curve. I expect that Ukraine’s leaders have bet everything on doing exactly that. Forcing Putin’s inner circle to recognize that the game is up is the beginning of serious peace talks.
Trying to hold back the onset of winter by turning up the heat only leads to stresses accumulating that have to out somehow while costs exponentially increase. You only put off and ultimately magnify the pain through direct resistance. Everyone fears collapse because there is no real guarantee of renewal on the other side - a common mistake people new to complex systems make is to presume that systems always restore themselves. That, however, is never guaranteed: only if internal factors drove collapse is that true, because after the system unravels all the elements that produced it in the first place remain. If external structural forces are the cause, the balance that produced the previous state may never again be achieved.
That’s the main reason for there being so little hope of any sort of great American civic renewal any time soon absent regional separation of some sort. When people no longer speak the same language, and these differences overlap with with physical geography, division is inevitable. Every eighty years America dies and is reborn - but never quite the same as it was, and in the civil war it almost didn’t survive at all. Moscow’s fate is even worse, because it’s even more rooted in violence.
Empires destroy themselves by overreaching while locked in a contest with a countervailing power. Rome against every neighbor. Napoleon fighting all of Europe. The Confederate States taking on the Union. Germany versus Allies and Muscovy in not one, but two world wars. Imperial Japan against all neighbors. Muscovy multiple times fighting various enemies. And the USA, in its own way, has been treading the same path since 2001, now reduced to damaging the nuclear program of a dramatically weaker power and pretending that a single limited strike could ever amount to total obliteration of a country’s nuclear potential. Opposing Moscow, or even Beijing, except by accident? Not likely.
With Trump trying to manipulate anyone who negotiates then doing whatever suits his interests in the moment whatever is agreed, Beijing has a golden opportunity to reach out to Europe. It remains to be seen whether European leaders are capable of using this chance to convince China to pull back from assisting Moscow by becoming more independent and critical of D.C. The lasting damage to American interests done by self-promoting pseudo-scholars like Huntington - also responsible for convincing most American officers that whatever the president says goes, regardless of their oath to the Constitution - is impossible to overstate. Unfortunately, a lot of Europeans go along with this nonsense too.
The recent effort to suck up to Trump during his visit to Europe was a case in point. After catering to his whims for days, what did he go home and do? Let that Putin-loving Christian fascist Hegseth cut aid to Ukraine again. Media sources are already trying to pretend that he’s going rogue, but come on, people. How often can Team Trump play good cop-bad cop this baldly before you catch on?
Oh wait, the answer is infinity - because it’s all a damn show. One minute Trump is a fascist, the next he’s calling active duty Marines up on a bullshit pretext to guard ICE agents with partisan judges saying the Constitution allows it and the media doesn’t seem to care. I wonder how many senior Marines deployed in LA are old enough to remember doing the exact same thing in Iraq so that special forces or even mercenary contractors could go grab some people to be dumped in Abu Ghraib on their way to becoming ISIS leaders?
For decades, media and broader society in the alleged West have been spinning in ever-tighter self-destructive circles. An adamant denial to accept the harsh reality of our times leads to calamitous errors made over and over again.
Deep down, the core global challenge the human species collectively faces is extreme inequality in multiple dimensions - economic, social, and political. This is driving more and more people to do truly crazy things. Ideological wars against distant enemies is nothing more than an attractive distraction, a way to feel connected to history and take control over what feels like a rising tide of chaos. Instead, what actually needs to be happening is a global hardening of communities everywhere. Energy needs to be directed at building local-scale systems that enable greater autonomy wherever possible. It isn’t unity that people need, but the ability to more easily separate, congregating by choice instead of through coercion by society or the state.
Concluding Comments
That’s at the heart of the mission that Earth Forces must perform someday. The missing link in almost every effort to improve the condition of people in need is ensuring that they gain true autonomy: the ability to live as free as they can be, pursuing happiness as and in what form they choose. Solid fences make good neighbors, as they say, and individual rights are everywhere sacrosanct. But locally, ways can and must vary. And that’s something imperialist academics like Huntington could never accept.
Communities can never be entirely insulated from the broader world, however, and so the power struggles that take place at the global level can’t be ignored. Another purpose of Earth Forces is to generate countervailing power where required. Autonomy is, after all, only sustainable if it can be defended against hazards of every kind.
That’s why I hold out strong hope that the Europeans - and Ukrainians - will understand the need and potential for intensive quiet outreach to China in hopes of limiting Muscovite military potential. It’s important not to be naive - Beijing is playing its own game here. But it’s also one others can join and win. China has its own problems, with external threats being the best means of holding the massive country together.
Now that Team Trump is playing games with aid again, it’s best to focus on getting only one thing directly from the USA: Patriot interceptors. There will never be enough, but there are now two kinds of ruscist targets in Ukraine: ones that can be dispersed so widely that blowing up even a few isn’t worth the cost of the Iskander, and those which can’t, meaning that scarce Patriot - maybe Aster - shots have to be reserved to protect them.
It would be really nice if the USA would part with vehicles it’s not going to refurbish to make ready for a drone-based war. Bradleys are the biggest Ukrainian ask, but M1A1 Abrams are still happily used and do good work when a tank is required. But ideally they would come through a third-party user anyway - Saudi Arabia could potentially offer a couple hundred, if given the proper incentives. Another regime I don’t much like doing business with, but… priorities.
The only way that Trump can now be convinced to take a harder stand in support of Ukraine is if it looks like Europe and China might do a deal. A plus side of the guy’s personality is that you know if he wants something - like Europe toeing the American line on Beijing - it’s because he knows he’s vulnerable. The only hope the USA has of not getting caught out alone and kicked in the teeth by China is maintaining robust alliances. Something you can’t do if nobody trusts you.
I’ll be back in a week with more analysis. First Earth Forces Bulletin already under construction. Thanks to all!