My primary purpose writing today is hoping to make sure Mark and Kos read the latest post from the Ukraine Volunteer Transcripts. He posts irregularly so its easy to forget to check. My apologies for a story when a comment in one of their threads would be better, but I’m traveling and by the time I get to post something, a few hundred comments have been posted on a story many hours old.
For those unfamiliar with the Ukraine Volunteer Transcripts they are primarily written by an American Vietnam and Iraq vet who volunteered to fight in Ukraine. Yes, this guy is in his 70s. His latest post entitled “On the way back we ran across a lot of dead Russians.” had two observations I wanted to lift up. One on Ukrainian misinformation and the other on training times for equipment. The Ukraine Volunteer Transcripts are always worth a read and this one is no different. There’s a lot more interesting and useful observations in it so I encourage everyone to read the whole thing.
But with regards to Ukrainian misinformation, I wanted to make sure Kos and Mark in particular read the section on Ukrainian troop movements as it directly pertains to their map making.
... Things seem to be moving a bit quick, so are in a dynamic state.
Earlier one of the guys was talking about the info that is on the web about troop positions. “It seems a handful of people produce this stuff, then everybody repeats it, and it becomes sort of the truth, whether it has any basis in fact or not.” C— laughed, “command is leaking out misinformation on the location of recon units, as well as troops.”
I’m sure Mark and Kos have both been on the lookout for this sort of thing so it won’t come as a surprise to them. But it both serves as a good reminder to those of us in the cheap seats why conservative maps are a good thing, and useful to the map makers to confirm what they may have suspected regarding troop locations. Mark and Kos do not have an easy job.
The second bit is just buttressing my side of the “Ukraine can handle American tanks and planes” argument:
Another bullshit thing out there is how long it takes to train on some of these systems, using US military standards. Well, we have the luxury of time to do these things, and they are overburdened with bureaucracy and how the military apportions time for grades and rank. This is the wrong metric to use during a shooting war. The US has an accelerated schedule for this, but it is still slower than achievable when the shit hits the fan.
From what I understand, Ukrainian soldiers have also proven themselves to be very motivated and fast learners. The “too much time needed to train” excuse is just that, an excuse. [Italics is the editors comment]
This doesn’t address the logistics side of the equation, but it does give a different perspective on the issue. Do note that the Ukrainian Volunteer is in force recon, and not the job Kos had in artillery. Kos was responsible for keeping a unit of high tech/ high need equipment in supply and running therefor his experience may be more relevant when talking about M1s and F-16s. The Ukrainian volunteer is very experienced and in Ukraine, but his speciality is recon, not logistics. He knows a great many things but no one can specialize in everything. But I couldn’t help not pointing out this comment. ;)
I’m still traveling so please forgive me if I am unable to respond in the comments section.
Follow me on Mastodon at @olandt@mstdn.social
Click here to create a new Mastodon account and follow me.
Apologies to those who couldn’t read my previous article. Apparently some people trying to read it on iPhone or Android only got a “Something Went Wrong” message. I put a ticket into the Daily Kos desk so hopefully they figure out what went wrong. My best guess is my messing around with the “Insert Horizontal Line” tool and the H3 and H4 headers messed up the underlying html somehow. I’m reposting the article below. I’m attempting to post straight text without the links so I hopefully don’t kill this article as well. The RUSI article is one I’ve linked to previously. If anyone wants it I can post it separately.
“Ukraine War year end review”
Tis the season for end of year stories. I’d like to take this opportunity for reviewing what we’ve learned about and from Ukraine and Russia. I’ll tackle Ukraine’s international support which I will call NATO+ later. As for my own writing, I did a review of my early Ukraine writing back in September so I’m not going to go into that here more than to say that I predicted the general path of Ukraine well, but failed big time on how fast it would happen. I make liberal use of RUSI’s reports on statements of fact below. Assume any statement of fact comes from their report.
Ukraine
Mostly lost in the fog of war and reporting at the time, Ukraine actually began their defense with some rather large mistakes.
First, they mistakenly predicted that Russia’s major offensive was going to come from the partisan occupied territory in the Donbas. They had insufficient forces in the north of the country and had to rush forces north at the last possible minute.
This resulted in Ukrainian forces in the north not having the benefit of being dug in on the defensive. Many forces were racing to beat Russia to critical locations. If Russia had been more competent on the execution of its plan Ukraine may have ended in a much more dire position.
The second major mistake was the failure to sufficiently defend the Crimean isthmus. There were no significant Ukrainian brigades to hold back Russia at the natural choke point of the isthmus. Even if they couldn’t hold indefinitely, a holding action for even a day or two would have made it potentially possible to hold Russia at the Dnipro and Melitopol. Instead, Russia rushed to Kherson and with the assistance of treachery they crossed the Dnipro.
Meanwhile Melitopol fell quickly and Mariupol was surrounded and besieged. How much longer might Mariupol have held out, if a land supply line had been maintained? The failure to defend the isthmus is reported by RUSI to still be under investigation as to why it wasn’t.
Other than those early mistakes, the Ukrainian defense has been inspired. They responded to overextended and mostly unprotected Russian supply lines with small unit hit and run tactics causing damage far out of proportion to the size of the units conducting them. Ukrainian special forces and artillery brigades saved Kyiv from being taken, successfully defending against a Russian force initially 12 times larger.
Meanwhile the internet was awash with clips and stories of Javelin, NLAW, and friends blowing up Russian tanks and vehicles nonstop. But what was conspicuously absent from such videos was footage of Ukrainian tanks engaging Russian tanks. There were some, but not many. We now know that around Chernihiv at the very least, but also elsewhere, Ukrainian tanks were able to engage successfully with Russian tanks at close range. At longer visual ranges, Russian tanks had superior performance than the mostly older Ukrainian tanks. One notable exception is that Ukraine developed a system to use tanks for indirect fire.
Once Russia was forced to pull back its highly exposed northern forces, action shifted to the south and east. There was a long slog in the spring and summer as Ukraine inflicted maximum casualties on Russia. The events of Bucha and other Russian war crimes put Ukraine in a position of holding strong for as long as they could to most locations in order to limit the war crimes Russia could inflict on other parts of Ukraine. Even so, they pulled back from Severodonetsk without a collapse, threading the needle as best they could.
Ukraine used these months to prepare a force to retake Kherson . Russia, did you hear that? WE’RE ATTACKING KHERSON NEXT! Would you like our plans? Stunningly, Russia took the most obvious bait, more akin to a Road Runner cartoon than to Operation Bodyguard (the deceptions around D-Day in WW2). It wasn’t so much a deception on Ukraines part. Rather, it forced Russia to make a decision to either defend Kherson or retreat from it (had they retreated, Ukraine would have won back Kherson essentially for free).
Russia chose to fight and reinforced Kherson by taking forces out of Izyum and other eastern parts. Which is where Ukraine then attacked to take much of occupied Kharkiv Oblast in a very short time. After a brief pause, they also retook Lyman and eventually all the way to the hills above Svatove where we are now.
Ukraine let the Russian forces in western Kherson oblast sit under fire while hitting Russian logistics to starve the area. Eventually Russia had to retreat from Kherson anyway. It would have been better for Russia to leave in the first place.
Ukraine has demonstrated tactics and technology use that will be taught in military schools everywhere (except apparently Russia). After their rocky start Ukrainian forces have fought far beyond the capabilities that many expected of them. They have stood up to a reputed juggernaught to find it to be vicious scavengers instead. If Ukraine were to be graded, it would be high marks off the charts.
Russia
Russia meanwhile can’t be graded in the same way. Ukraine fights for freedom, democracy, and prosperity for its people. Russia fights to be amongst the Hitlers, Ghengis Khans, Alexanders, and Stalins of the world. Their goal is not peace but ruthless butchery of those they deem beneath them. Grading on this scale, they rate far lower than Mussolini. Putin inherited the might of the Soviet army and turned it into what would be a bad joke if they weren’t so horrific in what they do to those who are weaker.
From a military standpoint, Russia is quixotic. Their ineptness at major tactics, logistics, and planning hides some competencies that they actually do have. Russia botched the early campaign by not properly preparing their ground forces. Many Russian forces didn’t realize they were invading Ukraine until they were there getting fired on by Ukrainian forces. Russia’s overemphasis on secrecy in attempting to surprise Ukraine from the north kept those forces from being prepared. The worst part for Russia was that Western intelligence still saw through their plans.
But we laugh at Russian buffoonery at our own peril. Russian soldiers are clearly willing to kill those weaker than them quickly and without apparent remorse. They are thugs of the worst sort. And they are thugs with even nastier leadership willing to sacrifice their own soldiers to accomplish even petty gains.
Russian artillery is competent with respect to area saturation. Russian logistics via railroads is very capable of moving large volumes of artillery shells to units close to the railhead. Under these circumstances Russia has enough competency to annihilate unprepared Ukrainian units as well as wear down even the best of Ukrainian units. Russia also has some equipment that works very well such as the S-300 air defense system, Russian cruise missiles, some drone tech, related electronic warfare, and other areas. Their problem is that they can never put it all together in a coordinated way.
In trying to find a metaphor for the Russian army, the best I could come up with was some fantastical steam-punk mega tank that takes many different people to operate. Each function of the tank is efficient and deadly in its narrow scope. But the different operators are unable to coordinate effectively. On occasion, enough operators get in synch with each other so that the war machine roars forward smashing everything. But once it encounters something different, the operators get out of synch and the machine flails around wildly. Deadly to those unfortunate to be hit by a random attack, but overall not very effective. Even as parts of the war machine get disabled or torn off, the mere mass of the tank makes it dangerous and difficult to push back.
This war has put Russia on the path to national collapse. They may avert it, but that is their current direction. Putin will only be remembered by historians specializing in Russia of this time period. He has no military accomplishments that rate with history's great yet terrible conquerors. He’s just a mean, nasty man wasting the last of the Soviet Union’s competencies.