Ukraine's Victory Campaign: Creep, Then Counter
Trump chooses to play more vain games; the Ukrainians dismantle the last European empire. The shape of Ukraine's push to win the war, not simply pause it, is becoming clear.
It’s mighty rare to have two presidents confirm the standing theory of this blog in the same week, but Trump and Zelensky both made statements recently which indicate that Ukraine does indeed intend to mount a serious counteroffensive - in truth, has begun the first phases already. It remains to be seen whether a Ukrainian counter-punch can escalate into an operational triumph on the order of what happened in 2022, but the possibility is real.
Sometime in 2026, if trends continue, Ukraine’s growing power and reach will become too much for Putin’s empire to bear. Slowly, often painfully so, but nevertheless quite surely, Ukraine has turned the tide. It hasn’t been by accident.
Creep and Counter is a term taken from the world of real time strategy games like Starcraft and Warcraft. In these, players manage economic and military systems in a competitive race to build the biggest, toughest army in the shortest amount of time. The winner musters enough combat power in the correct combination to overcome their opponent’s mix and destroy their base.
Two default meta-strategic approaches soon came to predominate once RTS titles began incorporating extra-tough hero characters who would gain skills as they obtained experience points from defeating enemy units. Maps usually had groups of hostile neutral units, termed creeps, sitting near nodes of resources, which effectively became experience mines for heroes as much as barriers to expansion.
To prevent your opponent from freely leveling up to dangerous levels by creeping, or invest in the higher-tier infrastructure that enabled production of more effective fighting units, rushing cheap fighting units at them as early and often as possible could be incredibly effective. Every time their army left the base to creep, it would soon find itself running back home to protect it. Having to replace casualties would hinder the process of improving the base and army, and eventually the rushes would grow too large to stop.
On the other hand, the side committing energy to constant rushes usually couldn’t rapidly improve its own base as quickly, either. And if the target found ways to be efficient at both creeping and defending, the situation could turn around in a hurry, particularly by using the attacking mobs as creeps! When faced with a determined rusher, a capable player could divide the match into two phases: careful and patient development, then, after a tipping point is reached, inexorably turning the tide.
Welcome to the essence of Ukraine’s meta-strategy since early 2024. The tipping point has arrived.
Trump being Trump, his frank admission about Ukraine being able to push the orcs back, was naturally overshadowed by a return to parroting Putin’s favorite talking points, even considering another summit, this time in pro-Putin Orban’s Hungary, though looks like that won’t pan out. What I consider far more important than his predictable zag back to putting pressure on Ukraine was Trump feeling the need to first state that the Ukrainians could actually win back all their territory. Trump may be dishonest, but that doesn’t mean he never tells the truth, at least part of it, when it suits his interests.
He admitted Ukraine’s potential for two reasons: the first is that he was simply setting Zelensky up for another ambush meeting, which reportedly happened when the two spoke in D.C. He loves to play with whiplash like that - all flattery going into the meeting then showing his true face when it happens.
The second reason is that Trump does not want to be caught out wrong like Biden was time and time again. Trump is still carefully hedging his bets, almost certainly receiving intelligence reports that back up what Kellogg, the sane deputy working on the Ukraine War, has been telling him all year: yes, Ukraine can win this.
Zelensky, for his part, simply stated that “certain measures” are being prepared at the front. This is the language Kyiv usually employs to before unleashing something.
It’s something of a meme these days in pro-orc - and even a portion of (supposedly) pro-Ukraine - circles to insist that Ukraine has no reserves, nobody wants to fight, and other patent nonsense like that. But based on the best available evidence, even using pessimistic assumptions, Ukrainian mobilization and recruitment is more than able to keep pace with casualties. In large part because casualty rates have reportedly dropped by more than half since Syrskyi took over from Zaluzhnyi, largely thanks to drone-first tactics.
Extrapolating from historic death rates, assuming they’re roughly a third of total unrecoverable losses - dead, critically injured, deserted, each generally occurring in roughly equal proportion - Ukrainian forces need fewer than ten thousand recruits each year to maintain standing combat power. Reported capacity for training replacements can cover that in a month or two. Though up to about two hundred thousand permanent losses is a horrific toll, the Ukrainians still maintain an army of over a million people. Reports of brigades operating at 40% strength still emerge, but there’s nearly always context missing.
Fewer casualties, along with the equally reduced rate of equipment losses over the past year, together suggest that the Ukrainians have been regenerating combat power faster than the enemy can destroy it. Compared to 2023 and the first half of 2024, when Ukraine was probably breaking even, for this past year much of Ukraine’s combat power has been getting a degree of rest behind a wall of drones.
How much ground have the Ukrainians gained in the race? Tough to be sure - the Ukrainians naturally keep that kind of information under wraps. But I think it’s fair to estimate that roughly thirty thousand Ukrainian fighters, close to enough to staff a corps, have been preserved.
On the equipment side, the situation continues to improve. Though US support for Ukraine has waned, domestic production has ramped up to keep pace, even offset the need for imports from European partners when it comes to artillery systems and increasingly armored vehicles. Domestic Ukrainian armored vehicles like the BTR-4E are worthy weapons, equivalent to a US Stryker, and tracked IFVs are entering production as well.
Contrast this to the prevailing state of affairs among the orcs. Leaked Muscovite casualty reports have confirmed that the Ukrainians have been completely honest in their public statements this whole time - if anything, they’ve actually missed a consistent fraction of casualties inflicted for which there were no clear visual records. When a HIMARS cluster shot hits a training ground, it’s pretty tough to be 100% certain if there are ninety fading heat blobs on the screen or eighty. Especially when the bodies don’t stay intact. Often in counterbattery work you’re shooting at a spot triangulated by radars, not a confirmed target on a drone feed. Old techniques still work.
Thanks to the fighting over the first eight months of this year alone, the orcs are down almost three hundred thousand bodies, with the fatality fraction over forty percent and rising every month. This toll of course masks even higher fatality rates among assault troops, who are used as meat shields to soak up Ukrainian fire and reveal positions.
In those cases where the orc officers run out of meat before receiving their next batch from Moscow, however, even elite orcs are made to play cannon fodder. An operational vulnerability Ukraine will be certain to exploit. When an army is run like a pyramid scheme, it’s prone to rapid collapse when layers that think themselves reasonably secure come under threat. Recall how Muscovite professionals broke and ran from Izium three years ago.
With desertions upping the unrecoverable toll another ten percent, the orcs are rocking a deficit of up to ten thousand bodies a month, depending on how many of the wounded can be returned to health. Plenty are soon sent out on crutches to soak up another drone. Coupled to the near-depletion of equipment reserves and insufficient new production forcing a reliance on North Korean imports, this loss rate puts the orcs short about a full combined arms army.
Even The Economist in a recent issue caught on to the quadratic increase in orc fatalities over the course of the conflict. If this continues for another year, Moscow is going to be losing a combined arms army every month.
As for now, the Ukrainians getting about 5% stronger while the orcs have become at least 10% weaker on the ground is not, in and of itself, sufficient to turn the tide. But once you layer that onto Ukraine’s ever-escalating deep strike campaign, fast-spreading cracks in the Muscovite war economy, and emerging Ukrainian dominance in the next generation of drones, and the picture for Moscow looks extraordinarily bleak.
Which begs that constant question of mine: why is this not the story you’ll get from most of the news? Pick a big-name publication, from BBC to any US partisan rag you like, and Ukraine’s fight is portrayed in universally negative terms. I guess I should pitch them to advocate for a better view, but I doubt they’d bite, since I didn’t bother to finish my PhD. Funny how nobody will fund remote doctoral candidates.
The clear message to Ukrainians from these outlets: Give up while you still own some of Donbas. You’ve had your fifteen minutes in the spotlight.
What a contrast to 2022, when serious people were insisting that Putin was on the verge of dying from a chronic illness or (my favorite) that he only did this because he was too isolated during the pandemic (what, because normally he’s kissing everyone in reach?).
So: if Trump is well aware of Ukrainian intentions and actual capabilities, then why is he still hedging his bets? Another two-part answer. It’s one half partisanship, the other vanity. The first, funny enough, is why it’s a net plus that he’s back to being stupid on Ukraine - the people in the US and Europe who let Trump live in their subconscious are bound to turn on Kyiv if he ever does actually embrace Ukraine for real.
In any case, Trump is facing a midterm election cycle that stands to go very badly for his party, because that’s just how the US partisan system works at the federal level. The incumbent president's party gets blamed for every silly campaign promise they couldn’t immediately fulfill and all problems someone with power decides that the country currently faces, so loses seats in Congress. There are exceptions, but they’re rare. And Trump is no more popular now than he was in 2018, the last time he faced this dynamic.
The Senate is pretty much lost to Democrats for the rest of this decade, but despite around eighty percent of House seats being non-competitive, a few dozen are still subject to switching, and the Republican margin in the House is in single digits. Which explains the new rush by Team Trump to convince Republican-dominated states to do an out of cycle redistrict as the Supreme Court decides that race can’t be a factor in creating districts. Will it be enough? Probably not, but you’d better believe that the Democrats are chomping at the bit to find any excuse to place the part of California I grew up in with uber-liberal Marin County, a six-hour drive away. Good luck ever turning me out to vote in the Oregon swing district I happen to live in now, pricks. You are what you fight.
So: the US economy bound to be either in a deep recession by 2026 thanks to the generative AI bubble bursting or coping with a lethal form of stagflation because it didn’t. Facing strong headwinds, Trump will need every vote he can possibly get, and midterm elections are dominated by older, established partisan voters - about a third of voters from presidential years, mainly independents, sit out midterms. Older Republicans tend to be more pro-Ukraine than the younger ones attracted to Trump by his juvenile antics seeming edgy for lack of a proper contrast anywhere else in mainstream American politics.
Trump’s coalition has three key wings: the remaining old-school Republicans like Rubio and Haley, christian nationalist Putin-lovers like Vance and Hegseth, and techno-fascists like Musk and Thiel. The broader coalition is split 50/50 on Ukraine. The christian nationalists and tech allies like Thiel hate Ukraine because they imagine Putin built something special in his empire instead of stitching together various bits of the Soviet system into a shambling zombie. Real republicans and the techno-pseudolibertarians like Musk who are into MAGA for the cash see either the logic in kneecapping the USA’s most serious rival or the money to be made backing the innovative underdog.
To satisfy both sides, Trump has to throw each their share of red meat. That’s part of his endless rhetorical zig-zags: people only pay attention to the media that caters to them, and most outlets only report the stuff he says that’s of interest to their audience. So Trump rambles off seemingly random nonsense in the verbal equivalent of keyword stuffing on a webpage to boost it’s Google profile - one of the tricks that made Google just give up and let sites with lots of traffic have an edge in search results.
On Ukraine, accordingly, about a third to half the time Trump takes care to reassure the relevant portion of his base that Kellogg is really his guy, not Witkoff, on Ukraine. Luckily, this is enough of a commitment to prevent Trump totally siding with Putin in his ridiculous quest to be hailed as a peacemaker - despite constantly having boats blown up in the Caribbean that may or may not be involved in drug smuggling.
With respect to the vanity side, Trump desperately wants a Nobel Peace Prize - or at least to be able to make more than a half-assed case for being robbed of it. This, he seems to have decided, means ending any war that was underway when Biden was president, because Biden bad, Trump good.
For Trump’s brand, actually ending a war isn’t required: all that has to happen is a deal being signed that he can say ended it. Once the US partisan machine kicks in, anyone who disagrees will come off like a partisan. Just look at his team’s rhetoric around the ceasefire that released the last living hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. That’s not peace or anything close to it - all that happened was that Hamas decided it was a better look to be unilaterally victimized by Israel instead of releasing heart-wrenching videos of abused hostages, which helps Israeli actions appear justified, even if they’ve only dragged this whole disaster out.
Never mind that short ceasefires had been established and soon broken in the past, even when Hamas had the leverage offered by hostages. Or that a ceasefire is only step on on a long road to peace even according to Team Trump. All that matters to Trump is being the center of attention. No matter what happens, even renewed fighting between Israel and Hamas, it won’t be the same war in Trump’s eyes. The same logic will hold in Ukraine if he can wrangle the sides into even the most temporary of ceasefires.
Trump is determined to position himself as the supposed arbiter of peace, the one guy who can get Zelensky and Putin to shake hands on a deal. Where Team Biden was happy to have Ukraine as a simmering forever war keeping Europe under the USA’s thumb as the price for protecting the continent against Moscow, Team Trump’s coalition dynamic demands that the USA act like a father impatiently observing two estranged sons fight for his affection.
Now that we’ve been through the loop a few times, the strategy Trump employs to push any pair of combatants towards his desired position is clear. He alternates between flattery and threats, promising everything under the moon to the side willing to make a show of cooperation and fire and fury if they are reluctant. Once at the table, the actual causes of the conflict can be ignored in the interests of that photogenic moment he craves. His is the role of a paternal figure who aims to sweep a troublesome dispute under the rug by siding with whoever agrees to agree first. This, he thinks, makes him look strong.
Under the right circumstances, this approach might have merit. In the case of the Ukraine War, it is interpreted by one side as obvious weakness and the other as cruelly deceptive. Both are correct. Countries are not families in any sense, and this entire charade is being put on for domestic purposes.
Zelensky once again went to D.C. with his eyes wide open, fortunately. Though the confrontation didn’t play out in public this time, he’s been pressing the question of Tomahawk missiles to force Trump to reveal his true position. It’s telling that, when Trump shifted a few weeks ago to talking about piling pressure on Putin, Zelensky didn’t simply tout this support and insist that Trump had been won over at last. Instead, he made Trump put his money where his mouth is by requesting Tomahawks, a weapon that Ukraine doesn’t strictly need to win but is a potent symbol of US power. If Trump was going to act like he was finally willing to be the antithesis to the weakness that characterized Biden’s policy on Ukraine, he had a golden opportunity.
Frankly I don’t think anyone in Zelensky’s circle ever truly believed that they’d get Tomahawks - or the approval to use them on the right targets if a few dozen actually came. The point of the exercise was to remind Europeans that though Trump might start saying the right words, his policy remains unchanged. He constantly plays good cop-bad cop games with both sides in a bid to gain a measure of control.
As far as Ukraine’s Victory Campaign goes, it says a great deal that Zelensky’s meeting with Trump reportedly involved maps that Trump didn’t show much interest in. Aside from military affairs being completely beyond his ken, Trump almost certainly aimed to claim “letting” Ukraine hit Muscovite oil infrastructure as a major concession that demanded a favor in return - namely, Ukraine accepting in principle that it will have to surrender territory to get a ceasefire. This is the sticking point that prevents any deal from working, and Trump knows it, so he really wants to be able to leverage something against Ukraine that won’t destroy the parallel effort to keep Europe dependent on the USA.
The USA under this administration isn’t even bothering to mask its duplicity, which I find rather refreshing. US allies should take the warning for what it represents. The US isn’t actually an ally at all. Biden was a bad ally. Trump is a friendly enemy. But he’s also trapped, and the most likely outcome looks to be him throwing up his hands and focusing on domestic issues, leaving Europe to handle Ukraine.
The equilibrium that now prevails suggests that all talk of peace negotiations is just that. What happens this next year on the battlefield, which now extends two thousand kilometers into Putin’s empire, will decide which way the conflict goes.
Conventional wisdom around Ukrainian operations in the field holds that the active phase of the war is all but over, stalemate conditions prevailing from here on out. I maintain that this is dead wrong, an illusion created by examining data at the wrong scale, and what’s more, the narrative itself is part of a broader effort by senior military professionals to bury their heads in the sand when it comes to the lessons Ukraine’s fight has to teach about the future of warfare.
That the Ukrainians are in the early stages of a broader counteroffensive timed to take advantage of stormy weather to roll back orc progress on multiple fronts is proving as difficult for many to accept as the hard truth that the Ukraine War indicates a deeper rot. There are two extremely problematic cognitive glitches impairing proper responses to what the past few years have unleashed.
One is to imagine that the conflict can be put into a box, another series of Minsk accords returning it to the status of a permanent heavy border skirmish, an eternal frontier fight between west and east. The other is to assume that what is happening in Ukraine is not universally applicable everywhere else.
It is to the latter error that I’ll turn now, before delving into the past week of operations. Frankly, it’s the view that worries me more, because failure to heed the lessons of the Ukraine War stands to kill even more people in uniform around the world before the decade is out.
Diagnosing Institutional Failure To Adapt
Lately, I’ve seen what amounts to a recurring meme pop up in writing about the lessons that NATO countries, especially the USA, should be learning from the fighting in Ukraine. It can be summed up as: the fighting in Ukraine is unique and can’t be compared to any war we’d ever wage because obviously we would never fight like that.
Sorry, but I have to call bullshit.
There exists a dangerous, misguided, laughable delusion that because NATO doctrine wills that war is to be fought a certain way, it shall be so. It’s as if nobody bothered to learn a damn thing from Iraq and Afghanistan. The Taliban, a rag-tag bunch if there ever was one, and Iraqi insurgent groups killed thousands of NATO soldiers. Learn something from their blood, idiots!
I get real tetchy about this because there was a time when every day I’d check the fatality lists from Iraq to see if a name I knew appeared. It happened twice to people I’d worked with, and I have no idea about wounded. Our leaders underestimated the enemy, and thousands of good people under their command paid the price. Mostly enlisted soldiers, whose surviving comrades rarely go on to be university professors who tell it like it was, not how David Petraeus or J.D. Vance want the world to remember it.
A pernicious mythology about the US military’s performance in Iraq and Afghanistan has been constructed over the past decade. Today, virtually no one seems to remember how an entire paradigm of fighting was swiftly rendered obsolete by the ubiquitous improvised explosive device threat. Where in 2006 buddies of mine mostly drove mine-infested routes, by 2011 the US Army had resorted to flying as many troops places as it could by helicopter, something that would likely not be possible today thanks to drones.
Iraqi insurgents are remembered in popular US history as a bunch of walking Arab stereotypes backed by shadowy Iranian agents instead of the clever and largely patriotic improvisers they actually were. A population filled with mechanical and chemical engineers, most of whom had basic military training, many with combat experience across two vicious wars, and it comes as a surprise when they work out how to make and lay mines for years that kill thousands of US and allied personnel without the good guys coming up with a comprehensive solution? Other than fly around and generally stop pissing off the locals to the degree possible before leaving for home.
And we’re all supposed to blindly believe that a force that wasn’t able to work out how to beat the Taliban is going to magically crush China, a power that has been relentlessly studying and preparing for a showdown with the USA’s fighting bureaucracies for thirty years? A force filled with officers who insist to the media that we’ve got to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater when working out how to apply lessons in Ukraine?
This is institutional inertia incarnate. A machine protecting itself at any cost because each component part fears losing out in the necessary process of reform. It will not end well. China, meanwhile, just did another purge of under-performing senior personnel. Those who believe that Xi is individually powerful enough within the CCP system to put ideological loyalists in every position know nothing about China. Fat is being trimmed ahead of a move.
Whenever a US military official is questioned about the fighting in Ukraine these days, the answer is nearly always disappointing. Their first job, it seems, is to never call into question the might and supremacy of the Pentagon or the handful of major arms manufacturers that dominate the market. All of whom have a vested interest in selling the latest edition of the highest priced product, like any US corporate behemoth.
I do realize that much of this defensive posture within the military establishment stems from the popularity of equally wrong takes on the fighting in Ukraine that spread across social media because they sound good. It’s very easy to proclaim that drones and AI are future of warfare and that tanks and artillery are obsolete when so many drone videos are available to give this impression. And if you’re heavily invested in drones and AI as a business, well, then it’s almost a law in the USA that you must over-hype your products and industry.
And so the debate about drones and AI breaks along familiar and entirely stupid lines: traditionalist against technophiliac, the curmudgeon facing down the innovator, or some other insipid binary. This much I can predict with confidence about drones and AI: they are extremely important, and will be relevant to warfare in some form forever. But they will only be component elements in an increasingly complex machine, and the interaction between them and all the other parts will produce constant dynamic churn. The specific details of their employment will forever be shifting between temporarily stable equilibrium points forged by innovation.
It is true that the Ukraine War will not forecast every aspect of the future of warfare in every situation perfectly, because technology marches on, and geography matters. However, the argument that the fighting there can’t have too much of an influence on military thinking abroad is the exact sort of error which caused the vast majority of European observers to fail to understand the lessons of the United States Civil War.
What the Ukrainians have done is discover a whole set of ecological niches that have existed for years but lack of the right evolutionary pressure meant remained undiscovered - just like the IED threat, which will always remain a serious danger. When a process evolves spontaneously and organically, like Ukraine’s use of drones, that means it’s very likely adaptive. NATO armies in extended combat would be forced to innovate along the same lines as Ukraine’s, because there just aren’t enough shiny toys or trained professionals to sustain prolonged intensive warfare and never will be.
Again, the US Civil War is a potent case study. Like today, military professionals from around the world traveled to the combatant armies to learn what they could and sometimes teach lessons of their own. Had it not been for an expatriate French general named Lafayette, the USA very likely would not exist. Military knowledge is highly portable in any era, and even vast differences in technology still lead to warfare taking certain familiar forms.
During the USCW, reports constantly made it into European newspapers and military archives detailing tactical, operational, and strategic factors which all later played a decisive role in the First World War. And yet, when the combatants in that miserable conflict were fully engaged, none had fully absorbed the lessons of how bitterly fought industrial total war is bound to be.
Had Union operational skill not been so sorely lacking, the Confederacy could have been crushed in months, not years, thanks to the combined industrial might of the Union states. Numerous operational failures bedeviled an otherwise sound strategy to strangle the Confederacy over time, leading to atrocious casualties. Aspects of the fighting, like reliance on trenches, railroad logistics, and mass mobilization, afforded the Union a serious edge the Confederacy could not withstand forever despite boasting better military leaders during the first half of the conflict. That early edge was blunted because Confederate operations never combined to achieve a decisive result at the strategic level, and when they tried they fought on Union territory with all the logistical limits that entailed.
Decades later, European military leaders did not understand how the balance of industry between the Central Powers and Entente could all too easily lead to years of bloody deadlock if new tactical and operational patterns were not devised. Even if the Europeans had not widely employed machine guns by 1914, the slaughter would have turned out much the same in the end, even if it took longer for Germany to finally bleed out.
It was not so much new technology that led to Allied triumph, but a new way of using it developed through trial, error, and a lot of lives during the course of the fighting. Primarily by Australian and Canadian generals, as I understand it, saying a lot about where innovative ideas emerge in most empires.
Today, US and NATO military leaders are at serious risk of missing the same essential lesson. Wars rarely unfold as anticipated in every respect, even those like the Pacific War where US leaders like Nimitz later said that at a high level it went pretty much as expected. Operations in the event looked completely different than anticipated even if their end goal - marching west across the Pacific to strangle the Japanese Empire - was the same.
I know that it’s mighty tough for people educated a certain way and steeped in a particular way of thinking to accept that it might be flawed. But it happens.
The fundamental reason for this state state of affairs is the institutional inertia caused by people and groups within the machine fearing where they’ll fall if it gets properly rebooted. Groupthink is real, a common affliction of teams which can only be countered by having layers of teams working at different scale levels granted defined powers in their area of responsibility.
Groupthink-induced inertia is one of the oldest challenges any armed force has to deal with in peacetime. Once the threat of violence becomes increasingly theoretical, actions take on a rote character. A garrison mentality sets in where a huge amount of energy goes into seeking status. This is a potent hazard for any permanent professional military, as opposed to one mostly staffed by mobilized or reserve troops called up for a specific mission.
After a time, the incentive structures that impact promotions alter behavior. If there is any intrusion of systematic cognitive bias - and the smaller the pool of people, the higher the probability of that happening - you’ll wind up with senior personnel reflecting an artificial standard devoid of real accountability. Work becomes makework, and actual competence in the field suffers.
Wartime brings its own challenges in this regard, and Ukraine is dealing with them after years of total war, but the pressure to do things that improve survival odds is a powerful force lacking in garrison. The challenge is only magnified when you start working with abstract stuff like strategy and doctrine. Where a line soldier’s experience with the bureaucracy can be limited to checklists, range rules, and tons of paperwork, a general officer is bound to encounter nuances where The Answer is a matter of opinion. Yet express the wrong one, and suddenly you’re on the outside, at risk when promotion time comes.
US and NATO military doctrine are provably painfully outdated, yet asserting this automatically threatens the professional status of thousands of people. As the only alternative popularly discussed is the one pushed by Musk, Thiel, and a few other tech con artists exploiting scientific and military ignorance, people in uniform below OF-5 and above OR-4 had better get educated on their own.
The Ukraine War calls for a full revamp of standing doctrine, a shift on the order of what finally happened during the Iraq War after years of junior officers and senior enlisted cribbing together the working counterinsurgency approach that Petraeus later slapped his name on. No, a NATO or US military force would not fight like the orcs have in Ukraine. They’d make their own fatal mistakes, then wind up imitating the Ukrainians.
Network Age technologies like drones and agent-based AI (not generative, very different, and much harder to get right, therefore much more useful) make the standard US aesthetic obsession with dominance and lethality look like a toddler throwing a tantrum. Survivors of the styles of warfare that decentralized technologies make possible are not bound to be interested in stomping across the battlefield like an armored war elephant trumpeting challenges. Yet while many of the tactics that forces in the field will have to use may resemble those of special forces operators, it’s the team and its average capabilities, not individual prowess or the ability to endure adverse environments, which offers the decisive edge.
The Ukraine War’s length, stakes, and the highly organic nature of Ukraine’s fight in a technological and organizational sense suggest that lessons from Ukraine will be extremely relevant applied elsewhere. It’s already happening: small countries like Croatia and Thailand as well as drug cartels understand what kind of equalizers they can be.
Raw combat is like that: when the stakes are survival, anything inefficient or ineffective must be swiftly discarded. Combat is anarchy in its purest form: order is a luxury imposed and sustained by energy and blood. Early in the all-out invasion, it was not central command from Kyiv under Zaluzhnyi, but the dedication, courage, and skill of fighters and civilian volunteers much closer to the scene that turned the tide.
Ever since, this participatory element has been a vital source of innovative and adaptive capacity that cannot be replicated save by facing a true existential threat felt by a majority of the population. In scientific terms, Ukraine’s fight is a natural experiment of a most rare sort, an engine producing data of incredible value and extreme relevance. A cold way to look at so much death and pain, but it’s when data-driven science stops driving analysis that such disasters become impossible to prevent.
It’s a real shame that the default portrayal of Ukraine in US media is as a victim in need, automatically making Ukrainian experiences less relevant. Because they don’t fight like Pentagon planners imagine is proper, somehow that means if put to the test these Pentagon types wouldn’t do far worse.
It’s one thing to think about fighting a war that is in some respect on your terms, but quite another to be locked in a running battle to figure out how to not die, with one misstep easily proving fatal. However, the latter is the war that professionals are usually called to fight.
The single experience that the modern US military as an institution has with a conflict even remotely close to the scope and intensity of the Ukraine War came back in 1991. Then, though the outcome of Desert Storm now feels ordained, the best expert advice put the cost of liberating Kuwait back then as at least thousands of lives. That didn’t happen, which is great, but the triumph fostered the terrible illusion that all wars properly waged go that way. The typical best-case scenario for winning a major war against a numerically superior enemy is bound to look more like the conflict in Ukraine.
Pentagon doctrine today all but requires that any fight go in a particular way. The US has to fully dominate every domain to eliminate all risk of the enemy upending carefully laid plans or inflicting casualties. Yet the history of warfare going back thousands of years warns that this is really just a way to avoid hard choices about where to invest scarce resources. You can never dominate everything, everywhere. He who tries dominates nothing. When put to the test, this sort of doctrine collapses under its own weight.
Too many professionals are downplaying or even ignoring what’s happened and happening in Ukraine because the lessons are deeply uncomfortable to those steeped in either the Cold War or War on Terror paradigm. The two have to be merged, because the future is already trending towards smaller and fewer teams playing specialized roles, like organs in an organism. Mutual aid must still be guaranteed, mediated through networks centered on data exchange. But that kind of intellectual fusion is scary for US academics, so they don’t teach students how to do it.
If I’m right, US adversaries understand the US system as a system better than nearly anyone. They actively exploit this asymmetric advantage.
Since intellectual foundations are a major issue, I strongly recommend that anyone involved in military affairs expand their reading of scientific philosophy and methods. If I were to suggest a single field, I’d advocate systems ecology, or at the very least it’s more approachable child, environmental science. Odum - H.T. and his brother Eugene both - are worthy reads. Panarchy, by Gunderson and Holling, is another great one - Holling, as I recall, was a student of Odum’s in Florida.
A reader reminded me recently that there are many different varieties of systems theory out there, and what most people in the USA who get into systems at all is only a truncated branch. General systems theory, as envisioned by folks like Bertalanffy and H.T. Odum and updated by Eugene’s ecosystems theory as well as Luhmann’s social systems, enables understanding of how and why systems theories themselves are produced. It is this outer layer of meta analysis that enables truly holistic understanding minimally impacted by observer bias.
Put more plainly, you can avoid screwing up and getting people needlessly killed by taking a step back once in a while and evaluating the entire framework used to evaluate and make decisions. But doing this is not easy in a big organization where a change in policy affects people’s entire career path. So those shifts are usually targeted at people at the bottom end of the chain of command - the ones with the least flexibility, because more and more their concerns revolve around simple survival.
First rule of real Mission Command is to not become a casualty - at least not an easy one. That imperative overcomes all other orders about 95% of the time. Another reason why getting operations right is so important.
Overview of the Fronts: Week 42
Now, to the past week at the fronts, where Ukraine’s counteroffensive is still slowly gaining strength and punching back where an opportunity presents creeping is still underway, but counters are getting more vicious all the time. It’s tough to spot Ukraine’s definite shift over the past two months when Moscow is throwing everything it has left into the fight for Donbas, but it’s happening.
Fighting has reached one of the most consistently intense levels of the war lately, no doubt as Putin attempts to reinforce Trump’s mistaken belief that Ukrainian morale can be destroyed by any means that Putin hasn’t already tried. Over two hundred orc attacks are launched every day, with the average loss standing at five per attempt.
Each side’s strategy for the next few months has come into view. Moscow’s is almost perfectly symmetrical, with two primary attack axes forming jaws around urban Donbas aimed at Pokrovsk and Lyman, supported on the flanks by attacks in Kharkiv-Kupiansk and along the southern Vovcha westward towards Zaporizhzhia. For good measure, a third pair of distraction vectors, Dnipro and Sumy, try to keep the Ukrainians maximally tied down.
Ukraine’s strategy is to intensify the front-level counteroffensives launched starting in August as the weather creates gaps in orc surveillance coverage. Improved ability to mount ground attacks capable of overpowering orc defenses when drones can’t fly makes fall and winter the ideal season for Ukrainian offensive moves. Fewer places for orcs to hide should let Ukrainian operations focus their efforts, especially when modern armor is in play. Ground drones may be more robust to bad weather than traditional logistics vehicles thanks to the ability to more easily customize tires to cope with the present level of mud.
Ukrainian attacks must also coincide with weaknesses that appear in the enemy’s formations as they exhaust themselves trying to advance. Even if Ukraine’s true goal now is only to stabilize the front lines ahead a ceasefire, it will still be necessary to push orc forces back from Kupiansk, Lyman, Kostyantynivka, and Pokrovsk. The danger of enemy combat power concentrating in such islands of cover then pushing out across the open plains when Moscow decides to throw away a few thousand more lives for a few square kilometers demands some breathing room. Further, the ever-increasing range of orc drones means that logistics into these fortresses will depend on holding the flanks.
I still hold that Ukraine will ultimately put together a counteroffensive push that strikes deeper, and I’m increasingly convinced that this will happen in occupied Luhansk thanks to the local terrain and weather. For both sides, control over the Siverskyi Donets river valley is crucial to the outcome of the war. If Ukraine can liberate Siverskodonets, reclaiming the rest of Luhansk should be possible in time. This would let the Ukrainians wedge their way into a position where drones could fly past Moscow’s own defenses in Donbas and into the rear of the occupation.
This, or a successful landing on Crimea after Moscow can no longer ship supplies and fuel to the peninsula, are almost certainly war-winning events. Either would signify Moscow’s permanent loss of control over the situation despite all the blood spilled. Only this will push Putin to sincerely negotiate in hopes that some degree of international normalization accompanying a military withdrawal from all of Ukraine would let him to cling to power.
In light of the emerging operational paradigm, I’ll shift from covering the fronts in a clockwise manner to ranking them in order of present importance. First on the list is Pokrovsk.
Pokrovsk
Moscow’s Pokrovsk offensive forms the southern jaw of the bid to finally surround urban Donbas. The effort has now reached what ought to be its ultimate stage, with the orcs resorting to infiltration waves in a bid to collapse the perimeter now that flanking efforts have failed.
This has been the pattern going back to early 2023: the orcs push as far as they can on the flanks of a target, and once halted shift to a narrower bite. Eventually this degenerates into an all-out frontal assault. Chasiv Yar and Toretsk this year both witnessed the orcs going down the same road, ultimately exhausted by the time Ukrainian troops withdrew to the outskirts.
Ukraine’s Dobropillya counteroffensive continues to slowly clear the orc bridgehead over the Kazenyi Torets and strangle efforts to reinforce. I’m now fairly certain that I understand Syrskyi’s plan here, and I expect that it’s being replicated elsewhere, too.
Everywhere the orcs have advanced, the Ukrainians have channeled their efforts into killzones. For the most part, the orcs rely on creeping up stream and river valleys where the terrain makes drone observation and attack somewhat more difficult. They reinforce any bastion of cover they seize to act as a launchpad for the next wave of attacks, literally island hopping their way into the Ukrainian front at ridiculous cost. As these island chains extend, Ukrainian drone operators gain additional opportunities to kill orcs and burn their supplies.
Syrskyi - and I expect Drapatyi was involved - timed the Dobropillya counterattack perfectly. As the Germans finally learned when fighting the Soviets after Stalingrad, Manstein’s clever management preventing the total collapse of the Eastern Front in 1943, you have to let the enemy advance proceed to the last possible moment. At the risk of being unable to dig the survivors of the vanguard out for a while, allowing a Soviet force to expend most of its energy during the early phases of an attack leaves it strung out and vulnerable.
It was no accident that the Dobropillya counteroffensive began as soon as the orcs had committed to their bridgehead over the Kazenyi Torets. This marked a moment when Kyiv could safely assume that the orcs wouldn’t head due north from the Nova Poltavka towards Druzhkivka as part of an assault on Kostyantynivka. It was also the last possible moment to act before the northern supply lines heading into Pokrovsk became untenable - I wrote the week before it began and the extent of the orc infiltration effort was known that it was pretty much now or never, and it seems that was spot on.
Moscow’s attempt to sustain the advance in the Dobropillya direction by sending theoretically elite naval infantry brigades - including the infamous Vladivostok-based 155th - from Kursk to 51st CAA’s area of operations has not restored the situation. Multiple attempts to burst through Ukrainian lines with armored columns ended in fiery failure. 1st and 7th Corps continue to hold positions that could easily cut off hundreds of orcs on the wrong side of the Kazenyi Torets. And if 51 CAA continues to burn through personnel fighting to relieve them and resume the advance, the Ukrainians might go a lot farther.
Moscow has, as expected, begun launching frontal assaults on Pokrovsk with the refreshed 2 CAA. These are taking the form of the now familiar infiltration meat waves, three or two orcs, even one at a time, dispatched into the grey zone with instructions to go to a location and hold it until reinforcements arrive. Most die, but those that keep to cover do manage to creep past the outlying Ukrainian positions when artillery or drones have driven defenders into bunkers thanks to how thinly the lines have to be held because of the glide bomb threat. When the weather is bad and drones can’t cover all the gaps, orcs slip through. When enough of them gather, they try to attack drone and mortar teams.
In Pokrovsk, infiltrators have managed to reach as far as downtown, where they’ve been caught on camera murdering civilians, because orcs. They don’t control more than a basement here or there, and have tried this sort of thing before, but the Ukrainians are still forced to push infantry teams in to reinforce positions and clear infiltrators out before they accumulate.
Aside from these kinds of clearing ops being very dangerous on the best of days, Moscow is ramping up glide bomb attacks on Pokrovsk, slowly transforming it into a ruin. The more infantry Ukraine has to deploy to hold it, the more people are lost. But as Pokrovsk can’t be allowed to become a large island of cover the orcs can shelter in during winter, the orcs have to be defeated when they enter the town and counterattacks must secure one or both flanks.
The orcs are also trying to infiltrate past Ukrainian defenses southwest of Pokrovsk, aiming to reach Ukrainian supply lines to the town. Nothing new or unexpected about this, save that 41 CAA may be starting to hand over this area to 2 CAA and build up troops closer to Novopavlivka.
Kostyantynivka
The strength of the Ukrainian defense of Chasiv Yar and Toretsk looks to have convinced Moscow to prioritize the Pokrovsk direction and escalate the land grab on the Vovcha-Zaporizhzhia front. This is probably a serious error, with Vovcha-Zaporizhzhia a reactive move that will prevent Ukraine from reclaiming Velyka Novosilka, but in exchange removes pressure from a front adjacent to both of the main jaws of Moscow’s 2025 campaign.
Muscovite forces aren’t giving up the fight on this front completely, and another infiltration wave attack is underway between Chasiv Yar and Toretsk. But the ground gained has been minimal, and 19th Corps appears fine handling it without substantial support from 1st or 11th. Got to help that 8 CAA is distracted trying to save 51 CAA.
Siverskyi Donets
11th Corps is supposedly responsible for the front through Siversk all the way to Lyman now, with 3rd handling matters further north. There has been no major movement in either direction along the 3rd Corps sector this week, leading me to suspect that it is preparing to expand its nascent counteroffensive against the enemy bridgehead over the Zherebets. This isn’t a corps that wastes moments of reduced pressure.
11th Corps is fending off a major infiltration wave aimed at Lyman between Yampil and Torske. A shallow valley west of occupied Zarichne and an extension of the forest tracts along the Siverskyi Donets river - the Holy Mountains National Nature Park, according to one map I use - are prime infiltration targets. 3rd Corps this week posted footage of some of its fighters clearing infiltration teams from the west bank of the Nitrius on the northern side of Lyman with their usual attitude, so a sustained orc presence on the western bank remains unlikely for now.
The Ukrainian fight on this front also bears out my theory about Ukrainian operational planning in 2025. Rather than attack and secure a vulnerable bridgehead, the Ukrainians have only slowed its expansion while pummeling orc forces trying to hold it from three sides. The downside of the approach is also evident: the enemy is able to entrench close to important areas, and a slight miscalculation can let them punch deeper than expected into Ukrainian lines, which may be happening in Kupiansk.
I still expect 3rd Corps to have to mount a substantial counteroffensive to clear the space between the Zherebets and Nitrius in the next few months. The risk of the orcs creeping through the forests to seize Lyman is rising.
Kupiansk-Kharkiv
The situation in Kupiansk offers a warning about the gutsy game the Ukrainians are playing here. For the record, I don’t think they’re wrong. But there’s always a price.
Like the Siverskyi Donets sector, but less like Pokrovsk, woodlands offer the orcs in Kupiansk an opportunity to exploit gaps in Ukrainian drone coverage. If forests are difficult to patrol in good weather, even leaf fall can’t compensate for the impact of winter storms. The Ukrainians have no choice but to commit more infantry or more armed remotely controlled vehicles to limit the enemy’s space for tactical maneuver.
Kupiansk, like Pokrovsk, now has confirmed orc infiltration teams are operating downtown. The broader Kupiansk front will not be immediately impacted by even the complete loss of the downtown section, but over time the orcs will use it as a staging area for as many bodies as they can filter in. If they are able to slowly extend control over both banks of the Oskil down to Kupiansk, kicking them out or surrounding them may become impossible.
Muscovite attacks on Kupiansk and Kharkiv, though they’d dearly love for successful pushes to converge here, remain of the same character as the fighting along the southern Vovcha and in Zaporizhzhia. Insufficiently supported to break through, they aim to keep the Ukrainians spread out and maybe nibble off some territory on the side.
The Ukrainians, for their part, look to have been enjoying an extremely advantageous exchange rate in Kupiansk due to the orcs having to struggle across the Oskil. At some point the benefit of this will, however, outweigh the risk of the orcs pushing south from Kupiansk along the west bank of the Oskil.
Near Kharkiv, the orcs actually managed to advance a bit in Vovchansk, moving back into an industrial area in the grey zone. Still, hardly what Moscow was hoping for in 2024 when the orcs invaded this area a second time.
I still see Ukraine moving one of the corps reportedly covering Kharkiv to support the defense of Kupiansk. Kyiv is likely waiting for the right weather.
Southern Vovcha - Zaporizhzhia
Though this area has seen the Ukrainians lose more territory lately than anywhere else, it’s ranked below the Kupiansk-Kharkiv front in terms of priority because the Ukrainians have mainly been ceding small villages with little tactical value, while the orcs are forced to drive supplies farther and farther from Velyka Novosilka. Once more the Ukrainian approach is very sensible: don’t hold some fixed arbitrary line, like the edge of Dnipro district, instead let the enemy come to you.
Muscovite progress should slow significantly soon, because once the orcs get between Hulyaipole and Pokrovske, they’ll have drones and artillery coming at them from both flanks. The orcs are trying to reach the Yanchur, which they can follow down to the Vovcha by Pokrovske. Advance elements reached it south of Vyshneve this week, and are close to the other natural end of the Ukrainian line along the river near Uspenivka.
So whether 17th corps can hold, with 110th Mechanized Brigade apparently covering this sector, should be known within a couple weeks. It’s good to keep in mind that Moscow’s fun with flags games don’t say much about actual control.
What intrigues me about this area is that it didn’t seem like an auspicious place for Moscow to advance when the push began, and still doesn’t today. The main orc goal looks to be boosting its square kilometers seized score, because that metric gets talked about a lot. Another, I personally like to think, is fear of Ukraine pulling what I argued six months ago looked optimal in 2025: going after Volnovakha. If in any way my analysis somehow helped convince the orcs to worry about that, then mission effing accomplished.
Another mass armor assault was tried in the Orikhiv area. It went as well as all the others. The orcs are still trying to infiltrate Stepnohirsk, though.
The pressure on both flanks of 17th Corps’ area of responsibility would be far more worrying if the orcs had another combined arms army to throw at it. So far, one corps can usually cope with two CAAs. 20th has been facing down three. They’d have been of more use to Moscow in Chasiv Yar or Siversk.
Sumy & North
Not much new to report on the northern arc of Ukraine’s defense, which I see as stretching from Sumy all the way to Poland now. Sabotage and infiltration attempts are often made by both sides on the Bryansk-Chernihiv border, and the heavy skirmishes along the Sumy-Kursk border can be expected to continue for some time. Ukraine is still basically starving out the orcs occupying several border towns in Ukraine, plus one in Kursk.
Moscow has reinforced the detachment fighting in Sumy, so at least wants to threaten a renewed push to Sumy. This is hardly a credible threat. I really do expect the veteran brigades of 18th corps to show up elsewhere soon.
Black Sea & Kherson
Moscow’s constant probes along the Dnipro delta are the twin of efforts to hold Ukrainian territory in Sumy. As much as possible, Moscow prefers Ukrainian forces spread out. But the whole Kherson area is easily handled by the coastal defense brigades of 30th Corps, which farms its four regular Marine brigades to other corps - 20th, 7th, and 1st, looks like.
The orcs mostly use the area to recuperate formations decimated in the fighting elsewhere. On the whole, the Dnipro and Black Sea are both so hostile to large-scale Muscovite ground movements that the name of the game is simply inflicting terror on the Ukrainian population where possible. Kherson is used as a training ground for drone operators, and the orcs fire missiles from jets at Odesa whenever their pride is particularly wounded by a Ukrainian strike. It’s symbolic: the orcs have a real obsession with Odesa, same as they do Crimea. I bet it’s the weather.
Strike Campaigns
The Ukrainians are up to striking an orc fuel facility at least every other day now, with more orc refineries hit almost two thousand kilometers from Ukraine this week and a major oil depot in Crimea finished off after being set ablaze in previous attacks. Ukraine has gone after some Muscovite power infrastructure in places too, especially Bryansk and Belgorod - late breaking news this week was a Storm Shadow strike on a major chemical plant in Bryansk. Funny enough, orc channels publicly warned the strike was inbound when a squadron of Ukrainian jets took off from western Ukraine, yet their mighty defenses couldn’t stop it.
Fair is fair on hitting Muscovite power and heating infrastructure, since the orcs haven’t stopped trying to knock out Ukraine’s power grid by degrading it one district at a time, starting with the least defended ones. This doesn’t look likely to go any differently than previous Muscovite terror campaigns. Yes, damage will be inflicted, and civilians will die. Won’t make the Ukrainians beg for peace, though. And this year, Ukraine can fight back on close to even terms.
Moscow hasn’t seen a major blackout yet, so Zelensky’s vow to cause one in revenge for killing the power in Kyiv remains unfulfilled. But it’s only a matter of time. The trouble with hitting Moscow isn’t blowing something there to smithereens - Ukraine has accomplished that before. It’s that you need a very large number of drones, plus missiles, if damage to targets is meant to be lasting. Moscow reportedly hosts half of all orc air defense assets. It’s the kind of target that you’d rather hit hard once than try to frequently probe.
Besides, it’s a win that Putin feels so paranoid about the capitol, if the airtight seal around it pulls air defense systems from other duties. As far as oil infrastructure goes, this Reuters infographic gives a solid overview of why Moscow will have a lot of trouble keeping it going. Summed up: the Muscovite fossil fuel production system can be crippled by the destruction of a select few component parts. If Putin’s orcs can’t stop drones from whacking one every night, there’s no way to keep up with the pace of needed repairs.
The orcs will always prioritize fuel deliveries to the front, but too much scarcity on the domestic side will spawn a potent black market from the inherent arbitrage potential. All of a sudden officers will be able to make tidy sums selling off their allotments of fuel and having porters with some poor donkeys move supplies.
It should start first in Crimea. Ukraine is visibly aiming to make it a soft spot in the orc defense through lack of fuel and a general breakdown in military logistics. An interesting way to outflank the enemy if you ask me.
Moscow’s own missile and drone campaign has yet to reach its peak, however. So it’s great news that Ukraine is contracting for twenty-five Patriot batteries from the US - not so great is certain to be the timeline for delivery. Though if the Europeans will collectively accept that hoarding systems doesn’t make a bit of sense, because they’ll never have enough to fully protect against orc missiles anyway, Ukraine could get systems a lot faster and let Europe incorporate new ones as they come off the assembly lines.
Putin can only do so much to Europe while he’s occupied with Ukraine. He can fire a bunch of missiles and hurt a lot of people, sure. But that will be true no matter what. Missile defenses are important, because they raise the cost of a successful attack on certain targets. But they will never be universal - there will never be any working “Golden Dome” covering the whole USA outside of fantasy. Europe’s surest defense against Putin is full commitment to Ukraine’s victory. In the short term, this will absorb nearly all of Moscow’s military attention. In the longer term, there will be no Putin to worry about. Fragments of an empire are always easier to contain than the thing united.
Air & Sea
Ukraine’s long Gripen marathon is finally nearing the finish line; those of us who have been pushing for these nifty little Saab jets to head to Ukraine can claim a long-fought triumph. First deliveries could come as soon as next year, and pilot training is already underway. Those Swedes aren’t all talk: call them out, and they will see you in the ring. Gratuitous Swedish melodic death metal music video link fully justified.
Sweden is also looking at moving more aggressively to get Ukraine additional AWACS - an excellent idea, since Ukraine needs a minimum of six right away and has just two. Situational awareness is a lifesaver in any domain, and continuous radar coverage of the airspace over friendly and ideally deep behind enemy lines is extremely valuable. In addition, developments in Moscow’s glide bomb game have begun to erode the potential for even Meteor missiles to stop these attacks. The newest models now entering service can reach two hundred kilometers using a rocket booster, as far as a Meteor can fly.
Many orc bombers are flying close enough to the front to take down with Meteors, but the moment Ukraine started using them the enemy would shift to using glide bombs with a longer range to preserve aircraft and crews. Weapons with less range would be delivered in a short pulse by large strike packages that even Ukrainian Gripens couldn’t risk taking on. On the plus side, a projectile of this size flying at high altitude for a longer period of time should be very vulnerable to jamming of satellite guidance signals. And shooting them down with short-range air defenses located near the target is definitely possible.
If it’s a choice between AWACS or Gripens, I’d actually have to choose the former. Further, the war is far enough along that I have to suspect that a domestic Ukrainian very long range air-to-air missile is in the advanced stages of development. Also, recently, news broke that India is looking to up-arm its Su-30 fleet with Meteor missiles, a worrying development given the need for Muscovite engineers to participate. But this raises an intriguing possibility: how hard is it to integrate Meteor with the F-16 - or even more likely, the Mirage 2000?
French Rafales can fire Meteors. If the older Mirage 2000s can carry and release them safely, AWACS controllers should be able to handle sending mid-course updates by datalink to complete the intercept. Giving Ukraine a handful of the jets would make a lot more sense in retrospect if they were mostly there for testing a setup like that. It does sound like Greek Mirage 2000s are on the table, though.
Aside from maximizing the challenges faced by Moscow’s glide bomb delivery machine, the ability to outrange hostile fighters is of particular value over the Black Sea. Moscow now relies on aircraft to patrol it, using the superior range of the radars and missiles on MiG-31 and Su-30/35 type jets to keep Ukrainian Vipers at bay. The risk from Ukrainian boats carrying SAMs can be effectively negated by flying at high altitude, which the lack of long-range SAM launch sites in the middle of the ocean allows.
But if the Ukrainians are able to keep a flight of AWACS-backed Mirage 2000s on standby near Odesa, any orc jets trying to patrol the western Black Sea would be vulnerable to ambush. Pull that off a time or two without loss, and they’ll have to cede control of the skies over the Black Sea.
That would open up space for naval drones to more freely operate, breaking Moscow’s most important line of defense. It takes hours to cross the Black Sea by boat; the journey to Novorossiysk is up to a thousand kilometers from Odesa depending on the route, and boats tend to cruise well below their top speed to conserve fuel. That gives aircraft plenty of time to plan and execute attacks.
If they’re forced from the skies over the Black Sea, Ukrainian naval drone raids will stand a much higher chance of taking the orcs by surprise. Oh, and it hardly bears mentioning, but launching Taurus cruise missiles at the Kerch Strait Bridge, if Merz will get the transfer done at long last, will be more likely to beat the orc defenses if the missiles come from the south. Be kind of funny if Meteor-armed Mirages backed by Saab AWACS flew top cover for Taurus-carrying Vipers. Also some fantastic symbolism.
With Crimea’s air defense system relentlessly knocked back by drones, it does make a fella wonder if the path to a surprise air raid isn’t being smoothed. Can only hope!
Also, the Ukrainians are starting to get old AH-1 and UH-1 helicopters the Marine Corps doesn’t want any more. They’ll make great Shahed hunters. Depending on their numbers and how badly orc air defenses in Crimea are battered, landings on the peninsula might be possible. From Vietnam to Ukraine, the Huey gets around.
Signals Fight
There aren’t any new developments in this domain as such, but it is enmeshed with all the others thanks to the need for forces to stay in communication. That’s why I tweaked the name: whether we’re talking drone control, radio nets, or hacking, it’s all about the signals.
In the world of signals, there are two dominant over-arching priorities: maintaining links, and assembling data into a consistent picture. The first depends on passing signals between elements, a mostly material process, while the second requires making sense of them, which is highly cognitive. AI, notably, is important to both, but cannot fully replace humans in either. Some level of wet-mind management is always needed.
At the moment, Ukraine’s biggest challenge in this area is developing full situational awareness of what’s transpiring in the lower skies. Intercepting the increasing number of drones passing over the battlefield depends on knowing how many there are and where they’re heading. Multiple sensors have to be bound in a mesh and there has to be a process in place for replacing them when destroyed.
Active sensors broadcast signals and transform returns into data. This means they can be detected and attacked, but they remain important because they tend to have high resolution. Passive sensors use visible, infrared, or ultraviolet light, pressure waves like sound and vibration, and detectors looking for signals from emitting active sensors, so they can cover a lot, but suffer from information overload and low resolutions.
Joined together, the data - properly geolocated and evaluated by operators - is priceless. Situational awareness is a massive force multiplier, which is why eventually personnel in the field will wear fully enclosed helmets featuring customizable augmented reality visors. Glasses will never do, and the danger of chemical attack - not to mention the atmospheric contaminants left by burning gear - suggests an opportunity to merge environmental protection and computing.
Yeah, that’s an image from the Fallout series of RPG games, but it isn’t far off the mark. Other benefits of a fully enclosed helmet are hearing protection with integrated comms, basic protection against shrapnel and fragments, and padding to offer some protection against concussive blasts that cause so many traumatic brain injuries.
When it comes to drones, being able to give personnel location-specific alerts on an augmented reality display should also assist in shooting them down. In the Network Age, everyone becomes a cyborg.
Ukraine, obviously, isn’t going to be able to roll out tech like that any time soon. But the rudiments - a command center able to constantly collate data and issue alerts to personnel in the field - are already possible to establish. Whether the necessary density of sensors can be maintained is an important unknown.
Staff Affairs
I am increasingly suspicious of the initial open source estimates of Ukraine’s assigned corps sectors, including my own. Most of us, it seems, were cross-referencing corps brigade assignments published by Ukrainian sources with reliable reports of their last location in the field to decide where corps were fighting. However, of Ukraine’s eighteen corps, no more than a dozen routinely show up in battlefield reports. Those that do are covering sectors where entirely different brigades than the ones they’re officially in command of are operating.
This has led to the assertion that corps exist only in nominal form, with brigades and battalions scattered across the front in haphazard fashion. One variant of the story goes that Syrskyi is micromanaging all of this and the corps reforms are for show.
A different and I believe much more supportable interpretation is that each corps has two divisions, one field and the other administrative, and though it would be ideal for these to perfectly overlap, they don’t strictly need to. One has the function of actively overseeing brigade operations in the field and arranging support, while the other is focused on staffing and equipping brigades in the first place. This allows a corps staff used to working in a particular area and familiar with the nuances of the terrain to stay where they’re most useful, brigades entering the corps and leaving based on how beaten down by operations they become.
Based on the sources I rely on, 1st, 3rd, 7th, 10th, 11th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, and 30th are the corps in active combat. I’m about 50/50 on 2nd Corps, and have no confidence that 8th, 9th, 12th, 14th, 15th, or 21st are actually on the line as coherent entities. 9th used to be in Pokrovsk, but seems to have handed over the defense of the town to 7th. Could be on the western flank, but by the same token 2nd may be working with 16th up in Kharkiv.
Logically, it makes a lot of sense to have twelve deployed corps with six in reserve. Even corps staffs need a break, and ideally one corps can swap out with another after a period of close cooperation in the field to hand over the sector. With Ukraine having to cover about 1,200km of front, this means that each of the five assigned line brigades is expected to handle a 20km sector on average. With the typical brigade fielding six infantry battalions, that should allow for four to be on duty at a given time, two in the operational reserve waiting to rotate in. Each of the four deployed companies in the battalion would be responsible or a kilometer of front to a depth of several kilometers to sustain multiple barriers between the enemy and friendly support elements, like drone and mortar teams.
Historically this looks like a dangerously thin front, but having a squad of twelve split in pairs stretched out along several kilometers of tree line is now more adaptive than working in three fire teams of four. Infantry have to stay as light and mobile as possible, letting drones tote supplies and cover positions with squad fires - machine guns and grenade launchers. The job of infantry teams is twofold: fend off infiltrators, and bog down assault teams long enough for fire support to kill them.
Being able to rest personnel is one of those often overlooked factors in warfare that makes a huge difference over time. Having reserves also hedges against surprises, which the enemy should always be trying to throw. If a third of Ukraine’s brigades are in corps behind the front, those that need a deep recuperation will gain the space for it, while the portion in better shape but in need of rest can stand ready to reinforce if required.
It’s also entirely possible that several of Ukraine’s corps are meant to be inserted into the front at a critical point when the time is right. 7th might have already done it, while 9th is enjoying a shorter front to the west as it prepared to re-enter the fight in a big way around Novopavlivka.
Concluding Comments
Lots going on, so another lengthy post. Here’s the most important takeaway: Ukraine didn’t get this far without having a plan.
If, as I hold, it involves a form of energy management theory, then there’s no way the Ukrainians are going to hold the line until 2030 playing attrition warfare. There will be an all-out push, and when it’s over, then negotiations will begin.
As of right now, the pace of Ukraine’s Victory Campaign looks geared to peak in 2026, after a lot of fighting along the way. The sooner the Ukrainians win, the better for everyone. Even most orcs.
"Frankly I don’t think anyone in Zelensky’s circle ever truly believed that they’d get Tomahawks -" agree 👍. They've been burned too many times from trusting the administration, surely by now they know to go 'nice to have' rather than 'vital'
BTW I did heads up ur brilliance recently https://medium.com/@doctor_27995/russian-shill-1f89fdd4e290