One of the primary aspirations of professional militaries is to field a force capable of delivering victory while circumventing attritional warfare. Attritional warfare develops when neither side is able to achieve a decisive advantage. Unless new capabilities or terrain shift the logic of a fight, attritional warfare ends when one side exhausts its supply of people, materiel or morale. This is the grim state of the current fighting in Ukraine.
For Russia, the low morale and poor cohesion of its infantry prevents its army from undertaking large offensive manoeuvres without taking unsustainable levels of losses in both personnel and equipment. So far, it has lost about a quarter of its armoured forces in Ukraine.
Russia has therefore resorted to the saturation of Ukrainian positions with artillery, destroying defended villages and tree lines until Ukrainian troops are forced to withdraw, and then advancing to occupy what has been abandoned. This is slow and resource-intensive, but Russia has enough ammunition to keep up its current rate of fire for several years.
www.theguardian.com/...
Key Takeaways
- Concentrated Russian artillery power paired with likely understrength infantry units remains insufficient to enable Russian advances within Severodonetsk.
- Russian forces continued to prepare to advance on Slovyansk from southeast of Izyum and west of Lyman.
- Russian forces are focusing on strengthening defensive positions along the Southern Axis due to recent successful Ukrainian counterattacks along the Kherson-Mykolaiv Oblast border.
- Successful Ukrainian counterattacks in the Zaporizhia area are forcing Russian forces to rush reinforcements to this weakened sector of the front line.
- Russian forces are likely conducting false-flag artillery attacks against Russian-held territory to dissuade Ukrainian sentiment and encourage the mobilization of proxy forces.
www.criticalthreats.org/...
Concentrated Russian artillery power paired with likely understrength infantry units remains insufficient to enable Russian advances within Severodonetsk, as Russian troops continued to fight for control of the city but made few gains on June 19. Russian forces continued efforts to encircle the remaining Ukrainian troops in the Azot industrial plant.[4] Russian Telegram channels additionally claimed that Russian forces are advancing on Lysychansk from the south and fighting in Berestove, Spirne, Vovchoyarivka, and the Lysychansk Oil Refinery.[5] Russian troops conducted airstrikes around Severodonetsk and Lysychansk and strengthened their grouping to the south of the area around Orikhove and Toshkivka.[6] Russian forces likely seek to levy their attempts to interdict the T1302 Bakhmut-Lysychansk highway to support offensive operations in Lysychansk.
Russian forces continued to prepare for offensive operations toward Slovyansk from southeast of Izyum and west of Lyman but did not make any confirmed advances in either direction on June 19. Russian forces conducted reconnaissance and artillery strikes against Ukrainian positions southeast of Izyum around Dibrove, Virnopillya, Kurulka, Bohorodychne, and Dolyna, as well as to the west of Lyman.[7]
Russian forces continued offensive operations to the east of Bakhmut to interdict Ukrainian lines of communication along the T1302 Bakhmut-Lysychansk highway on June 19. Russian forces reportedly fought around Nyrkove, Mykolaivka, and Berestove and conducted air, artillery, and missile strikes against Ukrainian positions east of Bakhmut and near the T1302.[8] Russian forces will likely continue efforts to gain access to the T1302 in order to support operations in Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, especially as fighting in the area has largely stalled and Russian forces are increasingly unable to consolidate control of the city, even with artillery superiority.
www.criticalthreats.org/...
2/ This week, an article by Alex Vershinin at
@RUSI_org explored the consumption rates of ammunition in the Russo-Ukraine War and how industry capacity to manufacture the large quantities of ammunition needed for modern war is limited.
3/ You can read the full article here:
4/ The article argues that “war between peer or near-peer adversaries demands the existence of a technically advanced, mass scale, industrial-age production capability.” This is true.
5/ But it is also an old lesson re-learned. In the wake of the Cold War, and the draw down on military spending, military forces were downsized (reducing demand), and militaries engaged in operations that only had short periods of high intensity combat.
6/ As a consequence, most military organisations lost the institutional memory of industrial scale activities. And the decline of war theories peddled by some lulled western societies into a false sense of security about the capacity needs of potential future conflicts.
7/ Therefore the article from Alex Vershinin is an extremely important one. In drawing observations from the war in
#Ukraine, it can assist all of us to ensure we are better prepared for large scale conflict in the 21st century.
8/ And the reality is however that Vershinin’s article is only part of the story. While he does a magnificent job examining the production of munitions, industrial scale war has other dimensions.
9/ I will briefly explore three other aspects of scaling up military capacity beyond that of munitions. These are: equipment, infrastructure and people.
10/ Equipment. As we have also seen in Ukraine, war is very expensive in consuming equipment. Tanks, trucks, artillery, weapons and even personal protective equipment are all destroyed in the course or operations. Sometimes in large quantities.
11/ Any strategy for scaling up the capacity of military forces to fight at scale and high intensity for anything longer that a few days requires a step up in the ability to build large numbers of complex modern weapon systems.
12/ Doing this for land equipment is tough. Tanks and trucks, artillery and helicopters are expensive and are currently produced in limited numbers. The problem is magnified for ships and aircraft which are produced slowly at a limited number of shipyards and factories.
13/ Not only does this drive the need to expand manufacturing capacity, it will also result in the greater use of smaller, cheaper autonomous systems. Necessity will drive this in even the most conservative and risk adverse military cultures.
14/ Infrastructure. This is an often-overlooked element of building military capability. Militaries need infrastructure such as bases (where they live and store equipment), jetties and ports, airfields and fuel farms, logistics bases and transport hubs, and training areas.
15/ Currently, most western military forces have scaled their infrastructure for their ‘force in being’. Consequently, any expansion to larger forces to fight a large-scale threat in the near future needs to consider this need for expanded infrastructure.
16/ People. The central capability of any good military institution is its people. This includes recruiting (or conscription), training, education, experience, leadership, personnel policies, pay and conditions. Unfortunately, wars are expensive in people.
17/ Since the end of the Cold War, most military institutions have moved to smaller all-volunteer forces. These smaller forces are trained and educated to a very high level, regardless of their speciality.
18/ However, the exquisite training and education systems we have developed in the last three decades (and I have been part of this) is unlikely to scale up if we need to undertake a significant expansion in the size of military forces.
19/ The throughput of current training institutions is designed to fill the force in being, not a much larger institution. Additionally, the length of many military courses, which is suitable for peace time, will be too long for expanded organisations.
20/ So, a shift to industrial scale warfare, and building the larger military institutions for this, requires a different approach to training and education. One that has a massively increased throughput capacity, and one that focusses just on combat needs.
21/ And finally, the force these people will be fed into will probably not look like the current forces in being in most western military institutions. Given lags in equipment production – but no lag in having to fight the enemy – force structures may be different by necessity
22/ In my book, "War Transformed" (published 9 days before the war in Ukraine began), I explored the key trends that are likely to shape 21st century warfare. One of these trends is that ‘mass is back’.
23/ I wrote that 21st century conflict “involves large-scale conventional forces, the massed use of autonomous systems, and the wide-scale use of the tools of influence, including sophisticated algorithms.” We are seeing this play out in Ukraine.
24/ As the article from Vershinin shows, there is much we can learn from the war in
#Ukraine. But to demonstrate we have learned, western military institutions will have to act, and build the capacity for a sustained fight at an industrial scale. End
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