The Tank Isn’t Obsolete, Russia Is Just Using Them Stupidly
Here’s a video from Samir Puri and the Imperial War Museum that echoes something Nicholas Moran said ten months ago, namely that the tank is not obsolete on the modern battlefield, it’s just that the Russians are using them wrong.
Takeaways:
Russia, despite a century of data, isn’t using tanks properly in combined arms operations in concert with infantry, artillery and close air support.
Ukraine is, though much of their close air support has taken the form of drones. “These unmanned aerial vehicles have proved very effective especially against slow-moving Russian armored convoys.”
“We don’t really see this kind of tight combined arms operations being mounted by the Russians. They really struggled to do this. Instead, what we saw were quite disconnected Russian elements, and that meant that often the Russians were moving into positions it was still very well defended that hadn’t been softened. Which is why as the war has moved on sixth, seventh, eighth month [this video came out two months ago], the Russians have changed tack very much to I guess quite brutal indiscriminate bombardment of the cities they want to take.”
“There are no massed tank battles for which the Cold War T-72 was designed. In fact, engagements in Ukraine are on a much smaller scale with platoons and companies clashing together rather than divisions and corps.”
“There has also been an absence of close air support, a crucial tool for supporting tanks as part of combined arms operations. There was a lot of aerial activity, there was a lot of dog fighting as well, early on in the in the invasion. But the aerial defense systems that both sides have gotten and can deploy to cover their their more fixed positions are effective enough that the attrition rate amongst combat aircraft has risen. And the Russians interestingly appear to be husbanding the resources of their air force.”
“In the early months of the war, Russia had little infantry with which to protect its tanks, particularly in urban settings. That that allowed small groups of Ukrainians to mount what almost seemed like guerrilla operations. Getting in close to Russian armor and taking them out with anti-tank guided missiles before they knew what was happening.”
“Russia has now launched a much larger mobilization of manpower to try and fix this problem, but with many of its best troops and equipment already expended, there are questions about the quality, supply, and morale of these new soldiers.”
“The fact that the Ukrainians are actually able to capture intact or largely intact T-72s is a testament to the Russian logistics. Meaning that you find in captured Russian equipment low supplies, some Russian PWOs complaining of a lack of lack of proper support from their headquarters and have simply given up or run away.”
Drone warfare has also made it much harder for Russia to use tanks in a traditional defensive role in static positions on systems of defensive trenches.
Though Russia’s forces have shown some small signs of increasing technical competence in various areas, the fact that they lost so much armor attacking Vuhledar shows that they still have a long way to go when it comes to staging competent combined arms operations.
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30 Responses to “The Tank Isn’t Obsolete, Russia Is Just Using Them Stupidly”
Have the Russians not been doing combined arms operations because they are stupid or because the Ukrainians have prevented it? Will the Ukrainians use their new tanks better than the Russians have? Better than the Ukrainians did when the Russians came in and destroyed all the Ukrainian tanks? Will drones be sufficient for the Ukrainians as air support or will they need actual aircraft? Has Russian anti armor capability been attrited? Do the Ukrainians have any tank transporters left? Sad to watch this. Thank you for keeping up with it. I hope we can learn something.
Very early on there were solid reports that Russian fixed wing aircraft couldn’t operate in the same areas as Russian ground units because they had no way to communicate across the services.
Also, smart munitions are one of the biggest enablers of combined arms operations by limiting fratricide (a huge Russian problem), and Russia seems to have radically depleted their smart munitions in the opening phases of the war.
I seem to remember the Soviets were pretty good at combined arms….
But ultimately, ground combat is unit tactics – writ large. Still a soldier or a tank firing its individual weapon at an enemy. The key is logistics: Not fun, not sexy, but absolutely essential. The Russians clearly forgot that, the US seems to never remember it at the start of a conflict
“Combined arms attacks” with a bunch of conscripted infantry who are poorly trained and even more poorly motivated. Yeah, that’s going to work.
It’s not like the infantry will hide out and let the tanks go forward without them. /sarc
How are the Zampolit going to push them forward in an urban environment? Esp. since the Ukrainians will be looking for, and preferentially killing, the Zampolit
So, other than that the Russian infantry is poorly trained, doesn’t know squat about combined arms, and even more poorly motivated, because they’re conscripts who were grabbed because they’re not ethnically related to the people Putin cares about, the Russians don’t have good communications capabilities between their ground forces and their attack planes, and the Ukrainians can use the Russian “secure communications system” better than the Russians can, what could possibly go wrong?
This is an issue as old as warfare, probably debated at the time of Hannibal’s elephants. You cannot lead with tanks against an anti-tank defense. See: British tanks against German 88s in North Africa and Caen. The Israelis ran into the same problem in 1967 (I believe the date is right) when the Arab states were provided with Russian ATGMs. Combined armed forces HAVE to take out the 2 man hunter killer teams with Javelins or you’re going to lose your tanks. Combined arms opens a hole in the enemy’s line, armor exploits that hole. Armor doesn’t make the hole. Over the last year, the Russian army has proven itself incapable of combined arms operations. NATO would drive Russia out of Ukraine in a week. I’m not advocating that, BTW, just noting it.
The problem with Yom Kipur War is that Egyptian army managed to achieve their initial objective, and there’s literally no follow up initiative. Officer are NOT allow to think on their own, least they got idea to overthrow the government. Gradually Israeli regain their footing and push them back.
I’d take that “four hour” thing with a grain of salt. The thing you have to remember is that when someone says that, unless they’ve got access to the actual casualty statistics, they’re talking out their ass. There’s no way for a guy on the ground, a participant, to be able to tell you that number with any real accuracy. It’s purely subjective, and based on the narrow slice of the combat reality he experienced. Yeah, it may have been four hours for people around him, but there are several thousand miles of front line, and not everywhere is as lethal as the fights around Bakhmut.
The whole thing is decidedly opaque from where any of us are sitting. Unless you’re tied in with the Ukrainian central command, there’s no way of getting an accurate idea of what’s going on down to that level of detail. I doubt that the chaotic Russian commanders have any idea at all about how badly things are going for them at the front line; all they’re going to know is when the whole thing finally caves in on them and it’s time for them to retreat.
We’ve yet to see any of the Ukrainian’s newly-raised forces engage with the Russians. I suspect that when we do, it’s going to be a massive shock to the Russian system as their depleted and abused troops collapse in the face of precision strikes followed up by attacks led by fully rested and well-cared for Ukrainian troops. The extraordinary abuse and utter disregard for the welfare of their men is going to result in a lot of Russian commanders watching their units evaporate around them, and I suspect that there will be a lot of Russian troops standing there, pointing the Ukrainians at their command posts.
I’ve been watching this war from the very first, and the thing that has struck me is the extreme lack of professionalism and basic proficiency displayed by the Russians. The columns heading towards Kyiv, even the supposedly “elite” VDV were run as if they were on a set-piece exercise with no regard to security or the fact that they might run into any sort of real resistance. No air-guards; no local security at halts, no herring-bone formations performed at halts… The whole thing looked like a bunch of grade-school kids play-acting at being big, bad soldiers with their older brother’s hand-me-downs. I am not kidding… I spent a goodly chunk of my career doing Observer/Controller duty at the NTC and other major Army training venues. I know what a good unit looks like, and those sad-sack supposedly “elite” VDV troops looked about like some of the less proficient National Guard guys tended to, at the beginnings of an NTC rotation. You can ID good troops at a glance, if you know what to look for; you see that observing the Finns or any of the other Baltic states. You don’t see it in the Russians, anywhere; they’re running around the battlefield like a bunch of chickens being hunted by a chicken hawk. I can only think of a couple of engagements I’ve seen the video from where they look anything at all like a professional force, and even those were a little hinky.
Russia ain’t going to win this with the military they’ve been showing off to the world over the last year. It’s going to end badly for them, and even if they pulled their crap back to the other side of the Ukrainian border, I do not see good things happening in Russia’s future.
Anyone else catch that deal with the Chinese talking about Vladivostok and Sakhalin using the old Imperial Chinese names for them? That’s what we call a “clue” in the world of people who paid attention in history class. I think Xi is probably looking south at Taiwan, seeing another potential Ukraine for him, and then looking north at all those provinces that used to be Chinese, with their recent massive influx of Chinese citizens, and going “Hmmmm… Piss off the US, or piss off the Russians, who’re looking more and more like losers…?”
We shall see. I don’t think the Russian Federation we know is going to be around by 2030. It may not even last until 2025.
I mean, honestly… Who would come to Russia’s aid, if China decided to pop the cork and return all those old Chinese provinces to their control? Anyone? Who would care, at this point? I think the US would studiously look the other way, and it might even help. The Japanese would be ecstatic to get the Kuril Islands back, and everyone else would just say “They had it comin’…”
I think the Russians did, in fact, use helicopter air guard for the first week or so of the campaign (indeed, there are videos of the Ukrainians shooting them down), but since then their use has seemed very sparing.
Lawrence, the “air guard” thing refers to having someone up and observing on every damn vehicle, typically behind the cab. There’s no way to maintain situational awareness unless someone is up and paying attention. US Army practice is to have that guy manning a machinegun, in order to return any ground fire and to fire at aircraft or drones that might be tracking the convoy.
I haven’t seen a Russian convoy in any of the video we’ve seen from this war doing what I would consider normal pragmatic things, like maintaining proper tactical distances or doing herringbones at temporary halts. It’s mind-boggling; were I the guy running the After-Actions Reviews on these guys in some exercise, I’d be spending hours going over all the f*cking idiocy they have on display. The bare-bones basics simply are not being done, by any of them.
You don’t move in hostile country without having at least one man up on top of the vehicle doing observation. The driver and co-driver are going to be too busy worrying about driving and traffic/navigation. The situational awareness to stay the hell out of ambushes means you have that guy in the back of the truck up and observing, communicating what he sees to everyone else. The Russians simply aren’t doing that.
Don’t even get me started on the latest stupidity on display as they make their lemming-like assaults on Bakhmut and Vuhledar. Those are just painful to watch, as a professional soldier. I’m watching this stuff and trying to square the circle for why the hell it was I spent most of my career living in fear of the Soviet colossus, thinking they’d overrun us in West Germany within a couple of days. The more I see of this thing in Ukraine, the more I think that some of my crazier friends were right, and we’d have been able to spot the Soviet formations by all the crap they’d looted on the way to us. If the Soviets had fought the way these assclowns are in Ukraine, WWIII would have been very, very short, and ended with us sitting somewhere along the Vistula going “What just happened…?”
re:Kirk, you mean this convoy of 3 APV that drove into an intersection where there’s already tanks and other vehicles destroyed by mines went straight into it not thinking there may be mines? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjYcVp7a4TY
Just for a laugh, the other day, I tried to look at some of the videos they’ve got up across the internet dealing with what’s been going on in Bakhmut and Vuhledar and then try to imagine myself as an Observer/Controller dealing with the events filmed in Ukraine in a training environment somewhere…
And, y’know… I can’t even imagine trying to start the After-Action Review with those poor stupid bastards, assuming we shared the same language. There are points and places as an Observer/Controller where you can only really deliver what amounts to a ball-busting ass-chewing for all concerned. I gave one of those, one time, for an event that wasn’t even supposed to be an AAR-worthy incident, but… Well… Tell ya what, when you go to pick up live anti-tank mines with your trucks and then fail to tie the loads down properly, subsequently go driving blithely down the tank trails at the NTC and wind up scattering live AT mines (and, even better, their fuses…) across a goodly chunk of the play area…? Yeah; you can expect a fulminating O/C when he nearly runs over a mine on the tank trail. The AAR I had with that crew of idjits in the aftermath was a bit over-the-top; my bosses told me that I had been wrong to make a First Sergeant and Commander cry in front of their troops after I questioned their intelligence and ability to conduct operations above that of a Boy Scout Troop. Looking back, I was an utter asshole, and I could have handled that better. However, almost running a mine over on a tank trail will tend to have that effect on one, along with having to spend a couple of hours guarding the site while it got cleaned up and having to keep other idiots from actually finding the mines with a wheel… Unfused, yes, mostly inert, but the fuses and boosters were all out there scattered along with the mines because the crates were broken up and laying in them.
Military professionalism is a highly perishable commodity. You either train continuously, which we weren’t doing under Clinton, or you lose it. The Russians have lost it, completely.
To be honest, that stretchy of road is still highly contested, and AFU was using German shell delivered mines that have a timed deactivation fuse (I think it deactivate itself after 35 days). The fact that the Russian drivers failed to see them in the first place is amazing.
You would be surprised at how hard it is to spot what the Army terms “FASCAM”, or the FAmily of SCAtterable Mines”. You’d think they’d be easily noticeable when you look at them in the classroom, up on the display boards, but… Out in the field, on the ground? Broken ground, like those plowed fields? Distinguishing one from your random clod of earth and/or your chunks of debris ain’t at all easy. Not driving at speed, from the angle that those drivers are operating from, hatches buttoned up and the snow on the ground making it even harder. Hell, even with a sunny day and thermals to pick up the temperature differential between the background soil and the much more absorbent mines, those bastards are hard to spot.
And, again… The Russians just aren’t all that professional. Why on God’s green earth you’d go running down the same road that your predecessor did and got whacked for his trouble? WTF? How is that a good idea?
Here’s a rule of thumb: The best breach is a bypass. You don’t go into the minefield unless you’ve no other choice; the smartest thing to do is find a way around it or an unmined gap. Of course, if the guy doing the planning knows his stuff, you’re probably going to find that he’s just lured you into a trap.
The thing I note about these Russian probes is that there is zero combined-arms effort going on. Where are the Russian Combat Engineers and their breaching gear? I see no deployed breaching assets at all; where are they? I know they have their MICLIC equivalents, and while those are mostly useless for actually clearing the mines, they will throw the bastards out of the charge’s path or detonate anything they come in direct contact with. None of those are deployed, which tells me that they’ve either decided to reserve those for some future need, or they don’t have them any more.
Combined arms is a hell of a lot more than a couple of tanks and some APCs or IFVs running at the enemy. There should be indirect fire support to suppress, smoke to conceal, engineers to breach, and Military Police to control the traffic at the breach lane. Not to mention, some follow-on forces behind the first echelon. Which we don’t even see; all we’re observing are half-ass attempt after half-ass attempt. The whole thing is so inept that if I were the guy on the ground opposing it, I’d be going nuts trying to figure out what the hell they were doing, and when I could expect the other boot to drop. I mean, what we’re seeing makes no damn sense whatsoever… It’s like WWI human wave tactics transcribed to the early 21st Century and performed using somewhat modern military vehicles meant for another sort of war entirely.
Seriously… I’ve been sitting here watching this stuff on Reddit and YouTube, trying to make sense of it all, and all I can conclude is that we’re watching some lemming-like instinctual Cheyne-Stokes reflexive breathing immediately before the total military collapse of the Russian Army. I mean, seriously… How the hell can anyone look at this crap and not go “WTF? Who ordered this?”
It’s madness played out on the screen, and I’d almost want to believe it’s all some huge joke being played on us, but all the bodies we see stemming from these insane actions belies that point. There’s an entire generation of young Russians being expended to no good purpose on the fields of Ukraine, and it sickens me to watch. I don’t love their cause, but I loathe the waste of human life as much or more.
As a retired professional soldier that really doesn’t want to ever go to war again in his lifetime, I have to say that probably the biggest takeaway that non-soldiers ought to have from what’s going on in Ukraine right now is this: War is always out there, and you’re never, ever completely safe from it.
And, that being the case, it’s best to pay some flippin’ attention to the mechanics of it all, in order to make good decisions about it when it comes to your doorstep. The first thing to make sure of is that your own military forces are both well-prepared and ready for whatever might happen. You do not do yourself any favors by agitating to reduce the budgets and cut training; likewise, you don’t do yourself any favors by handing your military bureaucracy a blank check.
The most expensive thing in the world is an unprepared military force that loses the war for you. Pacifism is all well and good, but when you’ve got a situation like Bucha going on around you, your high and mighty moral principles aren’t actually going to do you any good; you’re still going to get rounded up, herded into confinement, raped, and slaughtered. Hopefully, in that order. You just have to look at the things the Russian troops did, and understand that the most dangerous thing in the world is an undereducated 18 year-old with a gun in your backyard who’s been told he can do what he likes with you and yours. Most of the Russian forces have been conducting themselves on levels not much removed from that of disorganized street gangs given arms and sponsorship of a nation-state. Letting them into your country is nothing but folly; pay for and monitor what your armed forces are up to, and if they’re not demonstrating at least the competence and capability of Finland, you’d better start the emigration process or fix them. Alternatively, you could just lay there and think of England.
War is an unfortunate thing, but the problem is that it’s also an endemic thing. You can’t wish it away, you can’t stop it other than by opposing it, and you’re not going to solve the problem by rolling over for your self-declared enemies or by rolling over and going back to sleep.
Unpleasant, but true facts. Finland endures because Finland has historically proven itself to be a really tough nut to crack, and they do that through constant readiness. Emulate them, or expect the equivalent of a national-level gang rape such as Ukraine is undergoing. Just because you currently have “nice neighbors” doesn’t mean that is going to last forever.
Thing is, the current Russian Army has no Zampolits (Communist political officers with a separate reporting chain to Party HQ) now. Such a structure would have made much of the peacetime endemic corruption that we are seeing the results of now vastly more difficult, among other things.
Seems like the Russian Army kept the USSR way of doing things without the well-organized discipline of a vast (and expensive) repressive apparatus that made it kinda work. It has been said that the basic reason the USSR blew up was that Gorbachov’s generation actually believed that Communism could work without terror and repression.
They actually do have zampolits, only they don’t report to the Party, they report to the FSB, and try to act like unit chaplains.
The Russian Army has gotten really schizoid and bizarre over the Putin years. I’ve been trying to keep track of it all, and I’m here to tell you that I was pretty confident that they’d perform very much along the lines that they have. I’m actually surprised that Putin has been able to keep the farce going as long as he has… I underestimated the Russian appetite for being ass-f*cked by their leadership, it would seem. Drastically.
Still, even the Tsar drove his loyalists to general rebellion. Putin does not have centuries of veneration and the love of his people that the Tsar had, and I think he’s going to be running up against the hard stops of Russian toleration for abuse here once the economy in Russia finally tanks and most of his army lays dead fertilizing sunflowers in Ukraine. Brusilov Offensive, anyone? You can only push the Russian people so far…
Well, so I think. He might be able to push all of them into bonfire before they turn on him, but I like to think there’s at least some capacity for reality recognition left in the Russian people.
Russian troops fight like they’ve trained, but ran into some operational problems; meeting a modern army:
Tanks deployed as hammers to crush defences didn’t work. Javelins, NLAW etc, killed that.
Close Air Support was unavailable as enemy had Manpads.
Tanks supported by infantry, and thus slowed down, was losing to computerized artillery fire.
It’s a delight watching this, after us being bogged down in platoon and company level maneuver warfare so long, in ‘gahni.
I dunno. I’m trying to avoid feeling or exhibiting schadenfreude, because I know damn good and well that the way the universe tends to answer that sh*t is by inflicting nemesis on your hubris.
I actually feel kinda sorry for the Russians. Wouldn’t stop me from shooting them were I opposing them, and I would probably laugh at them while I was doing it, but… I do feel a certain pity.
Swear to God, though… As a trainer? The instincts are there to just gather those idjit f*cks up and start yelling at them: “WHAT DID YOU DO? DID THAT WORK? WHY ARE YOU DOING IT AGAIN? ARE YOU STUPID?”
Both Putin and Xi Jinping have learn the rules for ruler well. They made sure that there aren’t anyone capable of overthrowing them by many rounds of purges. This ensures regardless of how badly things goes, there’s no one to challenge them through the official channel.
Well, that works pretty well for them. Not so well for the nations they’re leading, because the primary flaw in any of these totalitarian systems comes when they hit something that the ‘supreme leader’ can’t deal with effectively, then there’s no way of correcting for it by replacing them. And, these regimes tend to blunder into such situations with a certain enthusiasm because the supreme leader starts buying into his own bullshit and overextends.
This is why these systems of governance always blow up, eventually. It’s an historical ‘thing’ if you go back and look at it all. The systems where the leadership is easily replaced when it screws up, with no major disruptions? Those tend to last; the totalitarian despot states tend to blow up with great regularity. Sometimes, quite literally; there’s nobody there to tell the Putins and the Xi’s “Hey, this ain’t working… We need to try something else…”
“If the Soviets had fought the way these assclowns are in Ukraine, WWIII would have been very, very short, and ended with us sitting somewhere along the Vistula going “What just happened…?””
Zeihan puts it this way. “Remember the 40 km convoy that stalled, because they ran out of fuel? Then they walked back because they ran out of food? At first our generals were ecstatic: ‘The Russians don’t know how to fight a war! We can totally take them!’ Then after they had a nap and some bourbon, they were terrified. ‘The Russians … don’t know how to fight a war. We can totally take them. And they know that.’ Which means any fight between Russia and NATO will involve nukes. That’s literally Russia’s only option.”
If it’s true, as Zeihan claims, that Putin wants Romania, Poland, and Latvia (etc) after finishing off Ukraine, then … as he put it recently, “We will lose some big cities.”
For his part, Monkey Werx has similar concerns. That Belgorod sub ain’t for making peace with James Cameron’s creatures down in The Abyss.
Scott Adams put this way earlier today (paraphrasing). The person Putin is most afraid of is the leader of the Wagner group. You don’t become leader of the Wagner group unless you’re ambitious for power, and have few scruples. That sort of person would replace Putin with themself in a heartbeat if they thought they could.
Therefore – SA said – Putin wants the Wagner group largely decimated, before he’ll agree to a peace deal.
To answer your first, I don’t think the Soviets would have come West after Stalin died. Too much to lose, too little to gain; playing games on the periphery of it all, and trying to win through subversion? Absolutely. Big-time war? I think the Party and the guys running things were way too realistic about it all to have actually done the run through the Fulda Gap. Of course, that’s looking back at it with what we know now; neither they nor we had any idea how clay-like the feet of the Soviet colossus actually were. I think they’d have had to have had a series of crisis situations arise, and then would have blundered West hoping for a win, throwing the dice. When that didn’t pay off? Nukes.
The problem we have now is that the guy at the top is an FSB creature; intel organizations are great at subversion and espionage, but I don’t think there’s ever been a case of one doing a great job at running much of anything. They’re not the sort of people who build things or who have an eye for the realities of military force. Putin got away with escalating from Chechnya onwards, and thought “Hey, what could go wrong…?” with this deal over the last year. Well, he found out; the yes-men he put in place over the military, the economy, and his own intel organization weren’t telling him the truth. About anything. He got bad information all the way around, mostly because of his proclivity for shooting messengers both figuratively and literally. The guys who would have told him “Hey, those intel reports about Ukrainians really loving Mother Russia? They’re lies…” are all dead. Same with everything else.
The problem with elevating someone like Putin to the top is that he’s too used to playing games; he thinks everything is a ploy, a gambit. Some things just require the clear-eyed effective use of brute force, and you can’t game them. Also, war is a place where you have to know yourself and know your enemy. He obviously doesn’t know either one; the man has been getting high on his own supply for way too long; he’s detached, utterly, from reality. I’d wager that there’s a whole minor industry in the Kremlin devoted to massaging information before it gets to Putin, just like Speer was doing with Hitler.
As an aside… Lotta folks don’t know it, but things like PowerPoint got their start when Speer found that Hitler’s brain function couldn’t handle normal written reports, and he had to set up a graphic arts department to put his briefings for Hitler into these nice, easy to understand charts. After the war, there were a bunch of those guys who got hired by the US Army in Europe, and those graphic presentation techniques migrated into the US government. PowerPoint was an outgrowth of all that…
As to Prigozin? Nope; he’s a useful sycophant, and zero threat to Putin. There’s no way he’d wind up on top of anything; he’s another Beria, a tolerated thug. Until his sponsor dies, and then he’s toast.
The guy to keep an eye on is Lukashenko. I think there’s a reasonable chance that if the Russian Federation collapses, then it might be Belarus that winds up taking in that which was Muscovy and making that the “new Russia” while all the other regions spin off on their own. He’s a canny guy; reminds me a lot of Franco dealing with Hitler, and staying the hell out of Hitler’s adventures while glad-handing him. Unlike, say… Mussolini, who wound up hanging by the heels at a gas station for his trouble. I think if the Russian Federation does cave in, then it’s likely that a bunch of the regions are going to go their own way, or they’re going to wind up as Chinese or Belarussian clients.
Prigozin is a dead man walking, no matter what. I can see no what whatsoever that he winds up in charge of anything, even the prison system. He’s nekulturny, a thug like Beria. I doubt Russians would follow him; wrong vibes entirely. Lukashenko? He’s got a shot at it, I think.
If there is still a Russian Federation as it is today in 2030, you can color me in as surprised.
The former caterer Prigozin is where he’s at because Putin allows him to exist. All of the ‘officers’ of Wagner Group are former Russian special forces. Sure they got a paycheck from Prigozin, but they knew full well who’s their real boss. Wagner Group is a useful tool of deniability, and in this war, also for clearing out of their prisoner for cannon fodders. When Prigozin’s usefulness to Putin comes to an end, expect him to fall off of a 20 story window.
Have the Russians not been doing combined arms operations because they are stupid or because the Ukrainians have prevented it? Will the Ukrainians use their new tanks better than the Russians have? Better than the Ukrainians did when the Russians came in and destroyed all the Ukrainian tanks? Will drones be sufficient for the Ukrainians as air support or will they need actual aircraft? Has Russian anti armor capability been attrited? Do the Ukrainians have any tank transporters left? Sad to watch this. Thank you for keeping up with it. I hope we can learn something.
Very early on there were solid reports that Russian fixed wing aircraft couldn’t operate in the same areas as Russian ground units because they had no way to communicate across the services.
Also, smart munitions are one of the biggest enablers of combined arms operations by limiting fratricide (a huge Russian problem), and Russia seems to have radically depleted their smart munitions in the opening phases of the war.
Meanwhile Belarus partisans have destroyed a Russian A-50U (their version of AWAC) in Belarus with drones.
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I seem to remember the Soviets were pretty good at combined arms….
But ultimately, ground combat is unit tactics – writ large. Still a soldier or a tank firing its individual weapon at an enemy. The key is logistics: Not fun, not sexy, but absolutely essential. The Russians clearly forgot that, the US seems to never remember it at the start of a conflict
“Combined arms attacks” with a bunch of conscripted infantry who are poorly trained and even more poorly motivated. Yeah, that’s going to work.
It’s not like the infantry will hide out and let the tanks go forward without them. /sarc
How are the Zampolit going to push them forward in an urban environment? Esp. since the Ukrainians will be looking for, and preferentially killing, the Zampolit
So, other than that the Russian infantry is poorly trained, doesn’t know squat about combined arms, and even more poorly motivated, because they’re conscripts who were grabbed because they’re not ethnically related to the people Putin cares about, the Russians don’t have good communications capabilities between their ground forces and their attack planes, and the Ukrainians can use the Russian “secure communications system” better than the Russians can, what could possibly go wrong?
:-)
This is an issue as old as warfare, probably debated at the time of Hannibal’s elephants. You cannot lead with tanks against an anti-tank defense. See: British tanks against German 88s in North Africa and Caen. The Israelis ran into the same problem in 1967 (I believe the date is right) when the Arab states were provided with Russian ATGMs. Combined armed forces HAVE to take out the 2 man hunter killer teams with Javelins or you’re going to lose your tanks. Combined arms opens a hole in the enemy’s line, armor exploits that hole. Armor doesn’t make the hole. Over the last year, the Russian army has proven itself incapable of combined arms operations. NATO would drive Russia out of Ukraine in a week. I’m not advocating that, BTW, just noting it.
It was the Yom Kipur War in 1973 in Sinai when Israel ran into well-positioned Egyptian anti-tank teams.
The problem with Yom Kipur War is that Egyptian army managed to achieve their initial objective, and there’s literally no follow up initiative. Officer are NOT allow to think on their own, least they got idea to overthrow the government. Gradually Israeli regain their footing and push them back.
Question for y’all: I saw this article, and wondered – is it true for both sides of the fighting? Or just one side (if so, which)?
The average life expectancy of a front-line soldier in eastern Ukraine is around 4 hours, an American fighting in ‘the meat grinder’ says
I’d take that “four hour” thing with a grain of salt. The thing you have to remember is that when someone says that, unless they’ve got access to the actual casualty statistics, they’re talking out their ass. There’s no way for a guy on the ground, a participant, to be able to tell you that number with any real accuracy. It’s purely subjective, and based on the narrow slice of the combat reality he experienced. Yeah, it may have been four hours for people around him, but there are several thousand miles of front line, and not everywhere is as lethal as the fights around Bakhmut.
The whole thing is decidedly opaque from where any of us are sitting. Unless you’re tied in with the Ukrainian central command, there’s no way of getting an accurate idea of what’s going on down to that level of detail. I doubt that the chaotic Russian commanders have any idea at all about how badly things are going for them at the front line; all they’re going to know is when the whole thing finally caves in on them and it’s time for them to retreat.
We’ve yet to see any of the Ukrainian’s newly-raised forces engage with the Russians. I suspect that when we do, it’s going to be a massive shock to the Russian system as their depleted and abused troops collapse in the face of precision strikes followed up by attacks led by fully rested and well-cared for Ukrainian troops. The extraordinary abuse and utter disregard for the welfare of their men is going to result in a lot of Russian commanders watching their units evaporate around them, and I suspect that there will be a lot of Russian troops standing there, pointing the Ukrainians at their command posts.
I’ve been watching this war from the very first, and the thing that has struck me is the extreme lack of professionalism and basic proficiency displayed by the Russians. The columns heading towards Kyiv, even the supposedly “elite” VDV were run as if they were on a set-piece exercise with no regard to security or the fact that they might run into any sort of real resistance. No air-guards; no local security at halts, no herring-bone formations performed at halts… The whole thing looked like a bunch of grade-school kids play-acting at being big, bad soldiers with their older brother’s hand-me-downs. I am not kidding… I spent a goodly chunk of my career doing Observer/Controller duty at the NTC and other major Army training venues. I know what a good unit looks like, and those sad-sack supposedly “elite” VDV troops looked about like some of the less proficient National Guard guys tended to, at the beginnings of an NTC rotation. You can ID good troops at a glance, if you know what to look for; you see that observing the Finns or any of the other Baltic states. You don’t see it in the Russians, anywhere; they’re running around the battlefield like a bunch of chickens being hunted by a chicken hawk. I can only think of a couple of engagements I’ve seen the video from where they look anything at all like a professional force, and even those were a little hinky.
Russia ain’t going to win this with the military they’ve been showing off to the world over the last year. It’s going to end badly for them, and even if they pulled their crap back to the other side of the Ukrainian border, I do not see good things happening in Russia’s future.
Anyone else catch that deal with the Chinese talking about Vladivostok and Sakhalin using the old Imperial Chinese names for them? That’s what we call a “clue” in the world of people who paid attention in history class. I think Xi is probably looking south at Taiwan, seeing another potential Ukraine for him, and then looking north at all those provinces that used to be Chinese, with their recent massive influx of Chinese citizens, and going “Hmmmm… Piss off the US, or piss off the Russians, who’re looking more and more like losers…?”
We shall see. I don’t think the Russian Federation we know is going to be around by 2030. It may not even last until 2025.
I mean, honestly… Who would come to Russia’s aid, if China decided to pop the cork and return all those old Chinese provinces to their control? Anyone? Who would care, at this point? I think the US would studiously look the other way, and it might even help. The Japanese would be ecstatic to get the Kuril Islands back, and everyone else would just say “They had it comin’…”
I think the Russians did, in fact, use helicopter air guard for the first week or so of the campaign (indeed, there are videos of the Ukrainians shooting them down), but since then their use has seemed very sparing.
Lawrence, the “air guard” thing refers to having someone up and observing on every damn vehicle, typically behind the cab. There’s no way to maintain situational awareness unless someone is up and paying attention. US Army practice is to have that guy manning a machinegun, in order to return any ground fire and to fire at aircraft or drones that might be tracking the convoy.
I haven’t seen a Russian convoy in any of the video we’ve seen from this war doing what I would consider normal pragmatic things, like maintaining proper tactical distances or doing herringbones at temporary halts. It’s mind-boggling; were I the guy running the After-Actions Reviews on these guys in some exercise, I’d be spending hours going over all the f*cking idiocy they have on display. The bare-bones basics simply are not being done, by any of them.
You don’t move in hostile country without having at least one man up on top of the vehicle doing observation. The driver and co-driver are going to be too busy worrying about driving and traffic/navigation. The situational awareness to stay the hell out of ambushes means you have that guy in the back of the truck up and observing, communicating what he sees to everyone else. The Russians simply aren’t doing that.
Don’t even get me started on the latest stupidity on display as they make their lemming-like assaults on Bakhmut and Vuhledar. Those are just painful to watch, as a professional soldier. I’m watching this stuff and trying to square the circle for why the hell it was I spent most of my career living in fear of the Soviet colossus, thinking they’d overrun us in West Germany within a couple of days. The more I see of this thing in Ukraine, the more I think that some of my crazier friends were right, and we’d have been able to spot the Soviet formations by all the crap they’d looted on the way to us. If the Soviets had fought the way these assclowns are in Ukraine, WWIII would have been very, very short, and ended with us sitting somewhere along the Vistula going “What just happened…?”
re:Kirk, you mean this convoy of 3 APV that drove into an intersection where there’s already tanks and other vehicles destroyed by mines went straight into it not thinking there may be mines? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjYcVp7a4TY
@BigFire,
Yeah, that’s one out of a myriad examples…
Just for a laugh, the other day, I tried to look at some of the videos they’ve got up across the internet dealing with what’s been going on in Bakhmut and Vuhledar and then try to imagine myself as an Observer/Controller dealing with the events filmed in Ukraine in a training environment somewhere…
And, y’know… I can’t even imagine trying to start the After-Action Review with those poor stupid bastards, assuming we shared the same language. There are points and places as an Observer/Controller where you can only really deliver what amounts to a ball-busting ass-chewing for all concerned. I gave one of those, one time, for an event that wasn’t even supposed to be an AAR-worthy incident, but… Well… Tell ya what, when you go to pick up live anti-tank mines with your trucks and then fail to tie the loads down properly, subsequently go driving blithely down the tank trails at the NTC and wind up scattering live AT mines (and, even better, their fuses…) across a goodly chunk of the play area…? Yeah; you can expect a fulminating O/C when he nearly runs over a mine on the tank trail. The AAR I had with that crew of idjits in the aftermath was a bit over-the-top; my bosses told me that I had been wrong to make a First Sergeant and Commander cry in front of their troops after I questioned their intelligence and ability to conduct operations above that of a Boy Scout Troop. Looking back, I was an utter asshole, and I could have handled that better. However, almost running a mine over on a tank trail will tend to have that effect on one, along with having to spend a couple of hours guarding the site while it got cleaned up and having to keep other idiots from actually finding the mines with a wheel… Unfused, yes, mostly inert, but the fuses and boosters were all out there scattered along with the mines because the crates were broken up and laying in them.
Military professionalism is a highly perishable commodity. You either train continuously, which we weren’t doing under Clinton, or you lose it. The Russians have lost it, completely.
To be honest, that stretchy of road is still highly contested, and AFU was using German shell delivered mines that have a timed deactivation fuse (I think it deactivate itself after 35 days). The fact that the Russian drivers failed to see them in the first place is amazing.
@BigFire,
You would be surprised at how hard it is to spot what the Army terms “FASCAM”, or the FAmily of SCAtterable Mines”. You’d think they’d be easily noticeable when you look at them in the classroom, up on the display boards, but… Out in the field, on the ground? Broken ground, like those plowed fields? Distinguishing one from your random clod of earth and/or your chunks of debris ain’t at all easy. Not driving at speed, from the angle that those drivers are operating from, hatches buttoned up and the snow on the ground making it even harder. Hell, even with a sunny day and thermals to pick up the temperature differential between the background soil and the much more absorbent mines, those bastards are hard to spot.
And, again… The Russians just aren’t all that professional. Why on God’s green earth you’d go running down the same road that your predecessor did and got whacked for his trouble? WTF? How is that a good idea?
Here’s a rule of thumb: The best breach is a bypass. You don’t go into the minefield unless you’ve no other choice; the smartest thing to do is find a way around it or an unmined gap. Of course, if the guy doing the planning knows his stuff, you’re probably going to find that he’s just lured you into a trap.
The thing I note about these Russian probes is that there is zero combined-arms effort going on. Where are the Russian Combat Engineers and their breaching gear? I see no deployed breaching assets at all; where are they? I know they have their MICLIC equivalents, and while those are mostly useless for actually clearing the mines, they will throw the bastards out of the charge’s path or detonate anything they come in direct contact with. None of those are deployed, which tells me that they’ve either decided to reserve those for some future need, or they don’t have them any more.
Combined arms is a hell of a lot more than a couple of tanks and some APCs or IFVs running at the enemy. There should be indirect fire support to suppress, smoke to conceal, engineers to breach, and Military Police to control the traffic at the breach lane. Not to mention, some follow-on forces behind the first echelon. Which we don’t even see; all we’re observing are half-ass attempt after half-ass attempt. The whole thing is so inept that if I were the guy on the ground opposing it, I’d be going nuts trying to figure out what the hell they were doing, and when I could expect the other boot to drop. I mean, what we’re seeing makes no damn sense whatsoever… It’s like WWI human wave tactics transcribed to the early 21st Century and performed using somewhat modern military vehicles meant for another sort of war entirely.
Seriously… I’ve been sitting here watching this stuff on Reddit and YouTube, trying to make sense of it all, and all I can conclude is that we’re watching some lemming-like instinctual Cheyne-Stokes reflexive breathing immediately before the total military collapse of the Russian Army. I mean, seriously… How the hell can anyone look at this crap and not go “WTF? Who ordered this?”
It’s madness played out on the screen, and I’d almost want to believe it’s all some huge joke being played on us, but all the bodies we see stemming from these insane actions belies that point. There’s an entire generation of young Russians being expended to no good purpose on the fields of Ukraine, and it sickens me to watch. I don’t love their cause, but I loathe the waste of human life as much or more.
As a retired professional soldier that really doesn’t want to ever go to war again in his lifetime, I have to say that probably the biggest takeaway that non-soldiers ought to have from what’s going on in Ukraine right now is this: War is always out there, and you’re never, ever completely safe from it.
And, that being the case, it’s best to pay some flippin’ attention to the mechanics of it all, in order to make good decisions about it when it comes to your doorstep. The first thing to make sure of is that your own military forces are both well-prepared and ready for whatever might happen. You do not do yourself any favors by agitating to reduce the budgets and cut training; likewise, you don’t do yourself any favors by handing your military bureaucracy a blank check.
The most expensive thing in the world is an unprepared military force that loses the war for you. Pacifism is all well and good, but when you’ve got a situation like Bucha going on around you, your high and mighty moral principles aren’t actually going to do you any good; you’re still going to get rounded up, herded into confinement, raped, and slaughtered. Hopefully, in that order. You just have to look at the things the Russian troops did, and understand that the most dangerous thing in the world is an undereducated 18 year-old with a gun in your backyard who’s been told he can do what he likes with you and yours. Most of the Russian forces have been conducting themselves on levels not much removed from that of disorganized street gangs given arms and sponsorship of a nation-state. Letting them into your country is nothing but folly; pay for and monitor what your armed forces are up to, and if they’re not demonstrating at least the competence and capability of Finland, you’d better start the emigration process or fix them. Alternatively, you could just lay there and think of England.
War is an unfortunate thing, but the problem is that it’s also an endemic thing. You can’t wish it away, you can’t stop it other than by opposing it, and you’re not going to solve the problem by rolling over for your self-declared enemies or by rolling over and going back to sleep.
Unpleasant, but true facts. Finland endures because Finland has historically proven itself to be a really tough nut to crack, and they do that through constant readiness. Emulate them, or expect the equivalent of a national-level gang rape such as Ukraine is undergoing. Just because you currently have “nice neighbors” doesn’t mean that is going to last forever.
@ Greg;
Thing is, the current Russian Army has no Zampolits (Communist political officers with a separate reporting chain to Party HQ) now. Such a structure would have made much of the peacetime endemic corruption that we are seeing the results of now vastly more difficult, among other things.
Seems like the Russian Army kept the USSR way of doing things without the well-organized discipline of a vast (and expensive) repressive apparatus that made it kinda work. It has been said that the basic reason the USSR blew up was that Gorbachov’s generation actually believed that Communism could work without terror and repression.
I suspect having the commies there would just result in another layer of graft, as it was in the late Soviet Union.
They actually do have zampolits, only they don’t report to the Party, they report to the FSB, and try to act like unit chaplains.
The Russian Army has gotten really schizoid and bizarre over the Putin years. I’ve been trying to keep track of it all, and I’m here to tell you that I was pretty confident that they’d perform very much along the lines that they have. I’m actually surprised that Putin has been able to keep the farce going as long as he has… I underestimated the Russian appetite for being ass-f*cked by their leadership, it would seem. Drastically.
Still, even the Tsar drove his loyalists to general rebellion. Putin does not have centuries of veneration and the love of his people that the Tsar had, and I think he’s going to be running up against the hard stops of Russian toleration for abuse here once the economy in Russia finally tanks and most of his army lays dead fertilizing sunflowers in Ukraine. Brusilov Offensive, anyone? You can only push the Russian people so far…
Well, so I think. He might be able to push all of them into bonfire before they turn on him, but I like to think there’s at least some capacity for reality recognition left in the Russian people.
Russian troops fight like they’ve trained, but ran into some operational problems; meeting a modern army:
Tanks deployed as hammers to crush defences didn’t work. Javelins, NLAW etc, killed that.
Close Air Support was unavailable as enemy had Manpads.
Tanks supported by infantry, and thus slowed down, was losing to computerized artillery fire.
It’s a delight watching this, after us being bogged down in platoon and company level maneuver warfare so long, in ‘gahni.
@Yngvar,
I dunno. I’m trying to avoid feeling or exhibiting schadenfreude, because I know damn good and well that the way the universe tends to answer that sh*t is by inflicting nemesis on your hubris.
I actually feel kinda sorry for the Russians. Wouldn’t stop me from shooting them were I opposing them, and I would probably laugh at them while I was doing it, but… I do feel a certain pity.
Swear to God, though… As a trainer? The instincts are there to just gather those idjit f*cks up and start yelling at them: “WHAT DID YOU DO? DID THAT WORK? WHY ARE YOU DOING IT AGAIN? ARE YOU STUPID?”
re: Kirk
Both Putin and Xi Jinping have learn the rules for ruler well. They made sure that there aren’t anyone capable of overthrowing them by many rounds of purges. This ensures regardless of how badly things goes, there’s no one to challenge them through the official channel.
@BigFire,
Well, that works pretty well for them. Not so well for the nations they’re leading, because the primary flaw in any of these totalitarian systems comes when they hit something that the ‘supreme leader’ can’t deal with effectively, then there’s no way of correcting for it by replacing them. And, these regimes tend to blunder into such situations with a certain enthusiasm because the supreme leader starts buying into his own bullshit and overextends.
This is why these systems of governance always blow up, eventually. It’s an historical ‘thing’ if you go back and look at it all. The systems where the leadership is easily replaced when it screws up, with no major disruptions? Those tend to last; the totalitarian despot states tend to blow up with great regularity. Sometimes, quite literally; there’s nobody there to tell the Putins and the Xi’s “Hey, this ain’t working… We need to try something else…”
@Kirk
“If the Soviets had fought the way these assclowns are in Ukraine, WWIII would have been very, very short, and ended with us sitting somewhere along the Vistula going “What just happened…?””
Zeihan puts it this way. “Remember the 40 km convoy that stalled, because they ran out of fuel? Then they walked back because they ran out of food? At first our generals were ecstatic: ‘The Russians don’t know how to fight a war! We can totally take them!’ Then after they had a nap and some bourbon, they were terrified. ‘The Russians … don’t know how to fight a war. We can totally take them. And they know that.’ Which means any fight between Russia and NATO will involve nukes. That’s literally Russia’s only option.”
If it’s true, as Zeihan claims, that Putin wants Romania, Poland, and Latvia (etc) after finishing off Ukraine, then … as he put it recently, “We will lose some big cities.”
For his part, Monkey Werx has similar concerns. That Belgorod sub ain’t for making peace with James Cameron’s creatures down in The Abyss.
Your thoughts?
@BigFire
Scott Adams put this way earlier today (paraphrasing). The person Putin is most afraid of is the leader of the Wagner group. You don’t become leader of the Wagner group unless you’re ambitious for power, and have few scruples. That sort of person would replace Putin with themself in a heartbeat if they thought they could.
Therefore – SA said – Putin wants the Wagner group largely decimated, before he’ll agree to a peace deal.
Food for thought.
@Howard,
To answer your first, I don’t think the Soviets would have come West after Stalin died. Too much to lose, too little to gain; playing games on the periphery of it all, and trying to win through subversion? Absolutely. Big-time war? I think the Party and the guys running things were way too realistic about it all to have actually done the run through the Fulda Gap. Of course, that’s looking back at it with what we know now; neither they nor we had any idea how clay-like the feet of the Soviet colossus actually were. I think they’d have had to have had a series of crisis situations arise, and then would have blundered West hoping for a win, throwing the dice. When that didn’t pay off? Nukes.
The problem we have now is that the guy at the top is an FSB creature; intel organizations are great at subversion and espionage, but I don’t think there’s ever been a case of one doing a great job at running much of anything. They’re not the sort of people who build things or who have an eye for the realities of military force. Putin got away with escalating from Chechnya onwards, and thought “Hey, what could go wrong…?” with this deal over the last year. Well, he found out; the yes-men he put in place over the military, the economy, and his own intel organization weren’t telling him the truth. About anything. He got bad information all the way around, mostly because of his proclivity for shooting messengers both figuratively and literally. The guys who would have told him “Hey, those intel reports about Ukrainians really loving Mother Russia? They’re lies…” are all dead. Same with everything else.
The problem with elevating someone like Putin to the top is that he’s too used to playing games; he thinks everything is a ploy, a gambit. Some things just require the clear-eyed effective use of brute force, and you can’t game them. Also, war is a place where you have to know yourself and know your enemy. He obviously doesn’t know either one; the man has been getting high on his own supply for way too long; he’s detached, utterly, from reality. I’d wager that there’s a whole minor industry in the Kremlin devoted to massaging information before it gets to Putin, just like Speer was doing with Hitler.
As an aside… Lotta folks don’t know it, but things like PowerPoint got their start when Speer found that Hitler’s brain function couldn’t handle normal written reports, and he had to set up a graphic arts department to put his briefings for Hitler into these nice, easy to understand charts. After the war, there were a bunch of those guys who got hired by the US Army in Europe, and those graphic presentation techniques migrated into the US government. PowerPoint was an outgrowth of all that…
As to Prigozin? Nope; he’s a useful sycophant, and zero threat to Putin. There’s no way he’d wind up on top of anything; he’s another Beria, a tolerated thug. Until his sponsor dies, and then he’s toast.
The guy to keep an eye on is Lukashenko. I think there’s a reasonable chance that if the Russian Federation collapses, then it might be Belarus that winds up taking in that which was Muscovy and making that the “new Russia” while all the other regions spin off on their own. He’s a canny guy; reminds me a lot of Franco dealing with Hitler, and staying the hell out of Hitler’s adventures while glad-handing him. Unlike, say… Mussolini, who wound up hanging by the heels at a gas station for his trouble. I think if the Russian Federation does cave in, then it’s likely that a bunch of the regions are going to go their own way, or they’re going to wind up as Chinese or Belarussian clients.
Prigozin is a dead man walking, no matter what. I can see no what whatsoever that he winds up in charge of anything, even the prison system. He’s nekulturny, a thug like Beria. I doubt Russians would follow him; wrong vibes entirely. Lukashenko? He’s got a shot at it, I think.
If there is still a Russian Federation as it is today in 2030, you can color me in as surprised.
The former caterer Prigozin is where he’s at because Putin allows him to exist. All of the ‘officers’ of Wagner Group are former Russian special forces. Sure they got a paycheck from Prigozin, but they knew full well who’s their real boss. Wagner Group is a useful tool of deniability, and in this war, also for clearing out of their prisoner for cannon fodders. When Prigozin’s usefulness to Putin comes to an end, expect him to fall off of a 20 story window.
I fully expect that Prigozin will be defenestrated out some basement window of the Lubyanka, TBH. The 20th floor is too good for him.