Ukraine ping
On the 3rd day of the Ukraine campaign, February 27, 2022, Kamil Galeev, a young Tatar scholar in exile from Russia, made a bold claim - that Russia would lose this war. While the war’s resolution remains unclear, this proposition was diametrically opposed to what the solons and the chatterati, the great and the good, were telling us - viz that Russia was bound to win it all in a matter of days. Just over 7 months later, it appears Galeev was closer to the truth than many of the experts whose job was to have a good grasp of such contingencies. This essay goes into a number of topics:
- The problem of limited resources, once the Russian state decided to downsize military spending drastically from perhaps 1/3 of the economy during the Soviet era to around 4%
- The failure of military reform, due to entrenched interests each looking to preserve its piece of a much smaller pie
- The difficulty reconciling Putin’s desire for a big army *and* a powerful navy with Russia’s much smaller military budget
- The evolution of the Ukrainian military from a non-functional organization into a real army, starting with the Russian invasion in 2014
- The reappearance of the kind of nationalism in Ukraine, after its 2014 military defeat in Crimea and a part of the Donbass, that is willing to bleed, and die, to defend the nation’s continued existence.
Thank you for your timely post.
And, if we and NATO keep pushing things in Ukraine, they will either take every inch of it or scorch earth what's left of it out of existence.
It's time you delusional freaks infected with Russian Derangement Syndrome let it go and Ukraine do what Donald Trump suggests -- negotiate and end to the war.
Americans have NO desire to see WWIII start over this or see billions more wasted on a war Ukraine can't win on its on. The madness must end.
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, SEPTEMBER 30
Institute for the Study of War
Sep 30, 2022 - Press ISW
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-september-30
Kamil is always very good. A young fellow, who is ethnically Tatar.... Thanks for posting from that thread spinner app for Twitter. So easy to read this way.
“There was another issue. Shoygu is ethnic Tuvan”
Half Tuvan, though he grew up in Tuvan land. His mother is Ukrainian.
At least someone is finally admitting the war Ukraine has been waging on Russian-speaking Donbas since 2014 was a pretty big and bloody one.
The author refers to Blitzkrieg, but the technique of multiple echelons is Soviet, not German.
The Prussians and then Germans always knew that their army was too small to fight the large enemies it would be called on to combat.
So they devised a simple but very effective set of techniques:
1) Mobility: minimum logistics train;
2) multiple semi-independent groups advancing simultaneously to find the enemy;
3) The 1st group making contact pins the enemy so he can neither advance nor retreat;
4) The other units envelop the flanks, encircle the mass of the enemy's army, and annihilate it.
5) This technique of advance, pin, envelop was applied recursively. In Barbarossa, Army Group Center was to advance on Moscow and pin the mass of the Soviet Army, North and South were to outflank. This technique extended down to division, regiment, company and even squad. Wehrmacht squads had two machine gunners and two assistants. Their job was to pin the enemy with covering fire while the rest of the squad enveloped the flanks. This technique requires very well trained soldiers and officers.
Note that the point was to kill or capture and not allow the enemy to retreat, and thereby destroy the enemy's means of resistance.
What the Germans failed to count on was that Stalin's political control of the Soviet Union was greater than Hitler's in Germany. It didn't matter how many men were killed or captured. Stalin could simply order up new divisions. The Wehrmacht performed five envelopments during June - October 1941 as big as or larger than than the 1940 campaign against France, killing or capturing over 3 million Red Army soldiers. It wasn't enough.
The thin forces and lack of logistics of the Germans meant they always had a horror of partisan or "franc tireur" activity in the rear. This encouraged heavy handed atrocities as a purportedly "efficient" way of dealing with the problem. This was already a feature of the Franco-Prussian War where the Prussian/German army would just shell the heck out of any village from which fire supposedly came. It showed up again in the destruction of Louvain and other towns in reprisals in WWI. Thin logistics also meant that in a long war the Germans used forced labor and stole what they could, as they already did in occupied France in WWI.
Putin seems to be trying to reconstitute enough units to pursue a Soviet style assault. I doubt this will succeed as he doesn't have the means of adequately arming or training the soldiers he has. The only real threat to Ukraine is Putin reconstituting another front in the north from Belarus to threaten Kiev again, which would relieve pressure in the east and south. This is also the one operation that would risk direct intervention by NATO and/or Poland. And I am certain that with better artillery and missiles, the Ukrainians would attack Russian forces in Belarus. Not sure the Crap Weasel in Chief Lukashenko is willing to risk that.
Nice find. Does this guy have a further take after the intervening 6+ months?
Putin could have kept the aura of a powerful Russia and grabbed slices of Ukraine if he hadn’t let hubris get the better of him.
Russia will not lose this war . European economy will collapse . Europe will eventually break away from the USA .
Russia will not lose the war?
