Two former American SPECWARCOM types, who are now in 404 – Country Not Found, training up the khokhol military, wrote an extensive piece in War on the Rocks about the complications associated with training and readiness of the entire Ukrainian Army. It is very obviously a plea for MOAR MOOLAH!!!, as all such things are these days, but it also provides some very useful and interesting insights into the current, parlous, state of the Ukrainian military.
The tl;dr version is: Ukraine’s military suffers from a serious lack of ALL of the things that would make an offensive military action successful. The khokhols lack command flexibility, experienced NCOs, combined-arms warfare training, equipment standardisation, logistics tails and supply chains, adaptability, firepower, and about a half-dozen other attributes.
They close out the article by claiming the Ukrainians have achieved “impressive” things in the past, and they recommend a series of combined-arms operations training courses that, of course, they will deliver, with Western funding.
The whole piece is shot through with errors of logic and fact with respect to what the Ukies are capable of, and gives no credit whatsoever to the Russians, but it is a revealing one nonetheless.
A Collapsing Army
Here are some excerpts from the piece, which help paint the picture.
In our experience, across many units and staffs, the Ukrainian Armed Forces do not promote personal initiative and foster mutual trust or mission command. As Michael Kofman and Rob Lee recently discussed on the Russia Contingency podcast, elements of the Ukrainian Armed Forces have an old Soviet mentality that holds most decision-making at more senior levels. Amongst military leaders at the brigade level and below, our impression is that junior officers fear making mistakes. During our training sessions with field grade officers, we are often asked what the punishment is for failure during missions or making bad decisions. We are also repeatedly asked at each step of planning or operations, “Who is allowed to make this decision?” They are surprised that U.S. battalion battle captains (staff officers who oversee ongoing battalion operations) have the authority to make decisions or give orders on behalf of the battalion commander.
…
Having trained every component of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, we have continually seen a lack of an experienced noncommissioned officer corps. It is common to see field grade officers running around during training counting personnel and coordinating for meals. In the United States, it takes years to develop just a junior noncommissioned officer. Senior noncommissioned officers at the platoon level have at least ten years of experience. In the U.S. military, lieutenants lead platoons, but it is the job of the platoon sergeant to train them, as discussed in Defense News. In Ukraine, it is the job of a platoon commander straight out of their service academy to lead and train their platoon. Without effective noncommissioned officers, mission command at the company level and below is almost impossible to do, and they are directly responsible for the care, mentoring, and training of soldiers.
…
A critical challenge for the Ukrainian Armed Forces is they do not consistently conduct combined arms operations. The lack of combining synchronized operations results in greater losses of life and equipment as well as failed operations. Based on our discussions with Ukrainian company commanders and our own trainers who fought with the Ukrainian Armed Forces, tanks are used more as mobile artillery and not in combined operations with infantry where the armor goes into action just ahead of the infantry. We have seen firsthand the shot-out barrels of tanks (and artillery) from constantly being fired at max range or overused without maintenance or replacement. Michael Kofman has made similar observations. The armor/infantry relationship is supposed to be symbiotic, but it is not. The result is that infantry will conduct frontal assaults or operate in urban areas without the protection and firepower of tanks. Also, artillery fires are not synchronized with maneuver. Most units do not talk directly to supporting artillery, so there is a delay in call for fire missions. We have been told that units will use runners to send fire missions to artillery batteries because of issues with communications.
…
Ukrainian Special Operations Forces (SOF) vary in their abilities, training, and specialties. Unfortunately, many are employed like conventional infantry. This negates the skills that make these units specialized. Due to the high-intensity combat operations and the ongoing Russian counteroffensive, special operations force units are often put in the trenches and not assigned traditional special operations force–type missions of raids, reconnaissance, and ambushes. These piecemeal efforts result in high casualty rates and a lack of special operations force missions involving surprise or stealth that can support and shape battalion and brigade conventional force operations. Traditionally, these types of soldiers receive more training and have less firepower than a conventional unit, so you are wasting a valuable asset that takes time to reconstitute. Ukraine special forces units comprised of international volunteers shop around their services to conventional unit commanders without a mission being tied to a strategic or operational goal. One example of a mission was a conventional brigade commander who had reported to his command that he had occupied a village taken from the Russians. When he realized that the information he had was mistaken and they had stopped short, he asked the international special operations forces unit to go into the occupied village and take a picture of a Ukrainian flag placed on top of a building in the center of the village. Special operations force units are quickly depleted, and replacements lack the training and experience to conduct true special operations force missions.
There are quite a few American and British veterans who read these pages. They have rather more of a right to speak and write on military affairs than I do, by definition.
Does all of that come across to you like an army capable of fighting and winning a war?
You Can’t Buy Fighting Spirit
Here I need to retread some ground I have already covered in the past. As the authors of this piece point out, the Ukrainians have great bravery and fighting spirit. That is absolutely true, and for all that I personally dislike Ukrainians, due to their utterly immoral conduct of the war thus far, I will readily admit that the average Ukrainian soldier, whether trained volunteer or raw conscript, is tough, brave, and willing to fight.
This was the source of a minor and respectful disagreement between myself and none other than Our Beloved and Dreaded Supreme Dark Lord (PBUH) Voxemort the Most Malevolent and Terrible. As I stated in an update to my last piece on the Bakhmut Meatgrinder, I took issue with his characterisation of the Ukrainian forces as approximately as effective and combat-worthy than the Arab militaries in their various wars against Israel – which is to say, not very.
I argued that Ukraine’s military forces are tough, resolute, and difficult foes. He came back obliquely on the subject and said that, in operational and strategic terms, the Ukrainian performance in this war has actually been worse than that of the Arabs.
In this, I agree with him entirely. He is absolutely correct.
There is no comparison between the average Ukrainian soldier today – even the conscripts, who are of extremely low quality – and the Arabs of 1948-1973. The Ukrainian mentality and philosophy is capable of accepting a higher-order entity like “nation” or “country” – the Arab tribal mentality is not. Thus, the average Ukrainian soldier fights a lot harder than the average Arab soldier did back then.
But, as OBADSDL(PBUH) points out, balls don’t buy brains. And Ukrainian tactics have been astonishingly stupid throughout this entire war.
Misreading History
The Ukrainians have shown almost no capacity whatsoever to fight an actual combined-arms war. Their Khreat Khokholite Kharkov Khounteroffensive was supposedly some kind of great success – it assuredly was nothing of the sort. I have seen far wiser and more experienced heads than mine, falling for this particularly loathsome brand of nonsense – to include men who really should know better, like LTC Tony Shaffer and LTC Daniel Davis, both of whom served in the US Army. The latter actually fought in the Battle of 73 Easting, the largest battle of mechanised infantry and armour since WWII.
Both men parrot the meme that Ukraine caught the Russians napping and punched through a weakly defended line of Russian infantry in Kharkov Region late last summer, thereby rolling up the Russians in a classic application of combined-arms manoeuvre warfare.
This is all bilge. Nothing of the sort happened.
In fact, the Russians knew quite well that their lines were thinly defended, and knew that, in the event of a serious Ukrainian push, they would need to pull back. They did not have regular Russian Army troops defending that line – the men in Kharkov at the time were mostly a rough analogue of Russian national guard and heavily-armed SWAT types. (This is an inexact parallel – the duties of the Russian SOBR and OMON groupings, which as far as I know report to the Ministry of the Interior and NOT the Ministry of Defence, are more akin to special forces, but they are not regular Russian military.)
In other words, these were not the best of the Russian tank armies or paratroopers defending the line. The Russians kept them there because, quite simply, there was no good reason to pull them back. The Russian force that went into Kharkov region last summer was far too small to be an army of occupation, and when about 50,000 soldiers ran out their contracts and refused to re-up, the Russians simply had to make the best of a bad situation and plug the gaps in the line with whatever they could.
When they saw the Ukies coming in force, they pulled out their troops and fled – sorry, “advanced toward the rear” – to take up more defensible positions elsewhere.
That is not to say the Russians did not face some seriously hairy moments. They made a stand at Kupyansk, and gave orders to hold that town until the completion of the full evacuation of Russian forces and civilians. If Kupyansk had fallen too quickly, the entire Russian line in Lugansk Region would have been threatened, along with their recently won cities of Severodonetsk and Lisichansk.
A lot of good Russian men died defending that city. They held it far longer than ordered to do so. They bought their comrades enough time to retreat across the Oskol River, where the Russians then froze the line and dug in.
In the process, though, they ended up destroying roughly an entire DIVISION of Ukrainians.
This is the reality of Ukrainian offensive actions throughout this war. Every single time the Ukrainians have attempted to mount an offensive in force against weak Russian lines, the Russians have withdrawn rather than pointlessly sacrifice their men. And every time the Ukrainians have encountered real, serious resistance, they have sacrificed horrific quantities of men and materiel to try to break entrenched Russian lines, and been defeated every time.
The Ukrainian “Way”
Their way of war seems to amount to little better than running straight into the teeth of enemy resistance and impaling their own forces upon Russian fortifications. This does NOT speak well for their training, command and control, and overall prospects.
For some reason, though, Messrs. Kramer and Schneider seem to think that NATO combined-arms warfare training will help them deal with these issues.
Oh, really? What, exactly, does the West know about combined-arms warfare?
All you have to do is to look at the Western record in war for the past 70 years to understand that NATO militaries are in no position to lecture ANYONE about real combined-arms warfare.
When was the last time NATO fought a peer opponent with access to the same kinds of equipment, ammunition, logistics, supply chains, training, C4ISR structures, and so on? Literally never in the last 70 years. It simply has not happened.
Furthermore, for the past 20 years, the combined West has spent TRILLIONS fighting illiterate goathumpers and kiddie-fiddlers in the Rockpile and Sandbox, losing relatively few men and machines in each engagement. Yet the entire might of the whole combined West has been totally incapable of bringing places like Iraq and Afghanistan to heel.
The Banderastan War is a complete and total shift in thought and practice. There is simply no experience since WWII in European or American memory that compares to this.
The people who have actual experience in combined-arms warfare are not the NATO military officers training Ukrainians. They are RUSSIANS.
Russian Innovations
The other point being missed out here, to which nobody seems to pay attention, is the quantitative and qualitative changes in the Russian force structure.
The authors of this piece repeatedly bring up the fact that Ukrainian C2 (command and control) suffers badly from the old Soviet top-down mentality, which discouraged individual initiative and demanded completely scripted methods of war. Quite apart from the fact that this does not reflect the reality of Soviet command styles at the time – the Soviets were remarkably innovative in certain aspects of their way of war – one has to ask why the Russians do not exhibit the same problems.
After all, they came from the same military traditions as the Ukrainians… right?
Actually, the Russians seem to exhibit a remarkable ability to learn, adapt, and change. The original SMO exposed serious problems with their command approach. They had 4 different theatre commanders, all issuing different orders for different priorities, and they lacked a unified command structure. Their Battalion Tactical Group, which they crafted as a way to deal with the substantial decline in the size of their infantry forces after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR, turned out to be great for launching vast amounts of firepower along a narrow section of front, but proved inadequate in terms of infantry for defending the flanks.
They had real problems with integrating drones into their way of war. If you look back at early drone footage from the war, you will see that Russian drone optics were of quite poor quality – very jerky, low resolution, grainy, and generally just not comparable to American equivalents.
The Russians often had problems coordinating their air defence systems and providing sufficient AD cover over their forces at the front, and in organising counter-battery fire to deal with Ukrainian artillery.
They have now addressed every single one of these issues.
There is now one single unified command structure, reporting in to Gen. Sergei Surovikin. The Russian AD blanket has adapted, and is now capable of bringing down HIMARS rockets, Storm Shadow missiles, and even low-hypersonic Grom-2 quasi-ballistic weapons. The surge in their infantry numbers has allowed them to recreate the old Soviet-era divisional structures, greatly improving their ability to defend territory. They have upgraded and systematically updated their armour, integrated new drone technologies, built out enhanced supply lines and logistics centres, and coordinated their missile and drone attacks with manned aircraft strikes.
The Russian military you saw in early-to-mid-2022 was a defensive army struggling badly to adapt to the needs of a war of conquest, and opting instead for an economy-of-force mission designed to do a lot with very little. In the end, they had to do too much, so the Russians made some rather cold-blooded calculations and pulled back their forces to much more defensible lines to train, refit, and rebuild over the winter.
Meanwhile, they sent the Butcher of Bakhmut, Prigozhin himself, and the Wagner ORKestra Stormboyz, in to grind down the Ukrainian forces in northern Donbass.
And, as I have pointed out several times before, the Russians today are NOT the Soviets of the past. They DO have a dedicated and skilled NCO corps – it was one of the hardest lessons the Russians had to learn, and they realised pretty quickly that NCOs are the glue that holds an army together. So they went and built out the NCO corps, at great effort and cost. But it exists now, and it works for them.
Does any of this sound like an incompetent, incapable, or tactically rigid army to you? To me, it sounds like a military that is rapidly and successfully converting itself into an army of conquest.
Seven-Fold Duplication
The other major problem for the Ukies, highlighted by the authors of that piece, is the issue of equipment and training duplication. The Ukrainians have absolutely NO standardised supply chain, NO streamlined logistics. They have to maintain and deal with a complete buffet breakfast of equipment – which is what happens when you have Italian artillery mixed in with French light tanks and British heavy tanks and American mortars and German howitzers. Nothing is standardised, nothing is simple.
This is enough of a headache when managing a civilian global logistics chain, the way Amazon does. It is an absolute nightmare when you realise that military equipment BREAKS all the time.
Military stuff is, almost by definition, overengineered in many cases. It sort of has to be. But there is overengineering, and then there is Western overengineering, and the latter is a very severe philosophical issue which the Russians do not, for the most part, seem to share. Western equipment seems to be designed almost by default to be difficult to maintain.
I’m not going to say this is deliberate on the part of the manufacturers, so they can rip off their customers for fat maintenance contracts… but it sure does seem that way, doesn’t it?
Conclusion – War MAFF
Put all of these factors together. What do you get?
The Ukrainian army has a severe shortage of experienced and capable men – the best of them died “heroically”, or some shit like that, in the fire-bags and cauldrons of the early parts of the SMO, the Khreat Khokholite Kharkov and Kherson Khounteroffensives, the Bakhmut Meatgrinder, and now the ongoing encirclements of Maryinka and Avdeevka. They have lost, no shit, AT LEAST 300,000 DEAD by this point.
They lack a solid and serious NCO corps, which means they are unable to let officers do the leading and NCOs do the training.
They have no standardised logistics or supply lines, thanks to the supposedly well-meaning “help” of so many Western “donors”. In reality, the West is sending its materiel to Banderastan to recycle it, in the greatest example of global grift we have ever witnessed.
They have no understanding of combined-arms warfare – and, worse, are now being “trained” in it by NATO commanders who DO NOT HAVE THE FIRST CLUE what the subject really means. No Western nation has fought a real combined-arms war, against a near-peer opponent, in living memory.
By contrast, the Russians have inherited lessons bought with the blood of, quite literally, 27 MILLION Soviet citizens against the finest mechanised army in the world at that time. They learned them very, very well, and are now busy applying them in the process of dismantling and destroying Ukraine’s ability to fight.
The Ukies have no capacity for using special forces the way they are supposed to be used. Worse, they use them for media and PR stunts – sending highly trained and capable men on literal SUICIDE RUNS. Witness the tomfoolery they committed over Snakes Island, until the Russians finally abandoned it – the Ukies literally sent two dozen men to their deaths to plant a stupid flag on the damn thing, even though it was a strategically insignificant hunk of rock in the middle of the Black Sea. That is not the first example of such stupidity – it will not be the last.
They fight this war as if it is an exercise in PR, not a serious effort at liberating territory and people. That is why they send literally tens of thousands of their men to die horrifically under Russian guns. They exhibit nearly zero tactical or operational skill, and absolutely zero strategic wisdom. All they can do is shell civilians and launch border raids into Belgorod, in the vain hopes of distracting the Russian leadership and General Staff into committing resources to protect Russia’s borders. Instead, what they find is that the Russians have more than enough National Guard troops to stomp their stupid little border raids, while still slaughtering Ukies by the truckload in Donbass.
No matter how you look at it, this war is going to end with a Russian victory, whether Ukraine and the West like it or not. And, as far as I am concerned, the sooner Ukraine disappears from the map, the better off we will all be. This is not a nation led by competent, capable, serious people – and these are the people the Ukrainians, particularly in western Ukraine, elected and chose, repeatedly, to lead them.
I repeat, this is what Ukraine chose for itself. What is happening to it, is entirely the consequence of those choices.
The Ukrainians have lost, no kidding, no joking, THREE ARMIES by now. They lost the first between February 24th and about the end of July last year. They lost the second in the autumn Khokholite Khounteroffensives. They lost the third in Bakhmut. They are about to lose a fourth.
How many more Ukrainians have to die before these people grow some damn sense and stop sending their men, and not a few women, to die horrific deaths under Russian artillery, missiles, bombs, and especially thermobaric rockets?!?
It didn’t have to be this way, at all. When Bellendsky came to power in 2019, he did so on the promise of peace with Russia. He betrayed his own people, particularly the Russian speakers and ethnic Russians of southern and eastern Ukraine – among whom he was born and raised, as a native Russian Jew, in exchange for fancy-pants and lollipops from the West, and in exchange for protecting his own life from the hardcore neo-Nazi elements of his government, almost all of whom hail from the western regions of 404.
I used to like and respect Ukraine. No more. A country that sacrifices its own people by the tens of thousands, to satisfy the perverted desires of the GloboHomoPaedoPharisatanist crowd that leads Clown World and its Feikh & Ghey agenda, is not worthy of respect.
The sooner this war ends with a crushing Russian victory, the better for all of us.
1 Comment
You know that grossly exaggerated daily casualty count the Ukies put out. Soon it will reach 240000 Russian losses…
…about the time the real figure reaches 80k.
Case in point, that 3900 tanks. Let’s take it at face value. (All right, all right! I’ll stop laughing after I finish this comment.) That means 11-12000 Russian casualties, max. Tanks take about 10% of losses and infantry almost all of the remaining 90%. So that would mean – again, max – 100-120k Russian casualties. This would mean the Ukrainians were only lying by a factor of 2, which is, of course, better than their probable lie factor of three.
But then, why should we take at face value the creators of the Ghost of the Videogame of Kiev, the 13 (or 82) Zombies of Snake Island (dead and then undead, you see) the Ffraudulent Ffallen Ffemale Ffighter pilot, and Comrade Ogilvy, the trench-fighint puddy tat?