Russia/Ukraine Crisis 2022-3

[Jubal]

As someone whose weapons knowledge somewhat peters out after about 1700 if it even gets beyond the middle ages, how does that work? Do they use drones or planes or something in tandem and rely on these missile systems to confuse the Russian radar and make it harder to hit the actual manned aircraft? Or is there something smarter going on?

[psyanojim]

Basically, it becomes a giant game of cat-and-mouse.

The US expends a massive amount of effort on the 'Wild Weasel' or 'SEAD - Suppression of Enemy Air Defences' doctrine.

When they do it, it involves stealth aircraft, massive amounts of jamming and signals interference, both from their long range AWACs style aircraft and 'escort' jammers flying alongside the bombers. Along with a huge range of anti-missile countermeasures like chaff/flares. But of course, these countermeasures and jamming aren't used until *AFTER* the enemy radar have been provoked into activating and locking on.

And the ground-based defences often have to adapt with their own heavy use of decoys, flicking radar on and off to confuse the HARM missiles etc. To which the US then responds by having secondary stealth squadrons 'sneak up' on the air defences when they are hyper focused on a main threat.

How are the Ukrainians doing it with their far more limited resources and non-stealth Mig-29s? I have no idea. I'm pretty sure they'll be doing it very close to their own territory probably at a range where they have plenty of reaction time. Not like the US who operate these missions deep into the heart of enemy air defences.

And yeah, 'Wild Weasel' pilots are considered to have almost lunatic levels of bravery. Hence the 'YGBSM' motto

[Jubal]

Yes, that does seem like a job that I would rather was done by someone else, all round! Sort of interesting that "power of weapon" is almost superseded by this kind of battlefield information warfare where really trying to scramble and flood their information systems is the primary task and where the arms race is more than in delivering the actual hits.

[psyanojim]

Yep, the information/electronic warfare space is absolutely critical.

"What Air Defence Doing?" has become an internet meme used to taunt Russians about their inability to stop Ukrainian precision strikes behind their lines despite their massive number of anti-air and anti-missile systems.

And the other interesting thing thats emerged in the last few days is the Ukrainian use of wooden decoy HIMARs systems. These things are apparently cruise missile magnets, the Russians are so desperate to destroy them.

It also partially explains how the Russians have so far claimed to have destroyed many more HIMARs systems than Ukraine have been given!

It would also not surprise me one bit if the West was providing extensive targeting assistance for all the high-precision weapons they've supplied.

[dubsartur]

One of the big challenges of mechanized warfare since 1940 is that it has too many 'moving parts.'  When infantry companies started to bristle with machine guns and mortars and rifle grenades and submachine guns by 1917, that was not such a big deal, because commanders could think "we send Bravo company to attack that position" and let the grunts work out the details.  But commanders now have to manage so many systems on land and air, and if they let any one slide a lot of people can get killed and a lot of irreplaceable equipment can be destroyed (General Sir Rupert Smith remembers that when his armoured division was ordered to the Gulf in 1991, a long list of figures in the government and the crown came to him to privately ask "and we are getting them back right?  We can't afford to replace them, you have every working tank engine we could find and Treasury is talking about a peace dividend.")  In the middle ages, just being able to use two types of troops together could win battles.

Its easy to make fun of Russian forces for publishing photos of the wrong thing and getting bombed or missiled, but there was the incident a few years ago where a jogging app was leaking where US servicemembers go for runs (which is often around the perimeter of an installation) and the US commander in Afghanistan famously thought that a shared Gmail account was a good way to communicate with his secret lover.  If NATO forces fought people with air forces and heavy weapons made after 1990, they would probably make some of the same screwups.

I think that flight trackers show massive numbers of NATO sorties along the borders of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia and the data they collect is going somewhere.

[Jubal]

Politico reports that Russia may be facing a severe microchip shortage:
https://www.politico.eu/article/the-chips-are-down-russia-hunts-western-parts-to-run-its-war-machines/

But not clear how much they might be able to circumvent that via intermediaries like China.

[psyanojim]

Also reports that they are replenishing ammo stocks from North Korea.

https://www.reuters.com/world/russia-is-buying-artillery-ammunition-nkorea-report-2022-09-06/

Their main weakness though, and an area where counterintuitively Ukraine actually have a large advantage, is manpower. Ukraine have at best estimates 500,000-750,000 available, the bottleneck for Ukraine is training and equipment.

Russia, on the other hand, still have a large equipment advantage but are struggling to mobilize enough troops.

This also explains a lot about why Ukraine are going for the slow, grinding approach in Kherson. They've created an area North-West of the Dnipro River where they have a huge strategic and logistical advantage, and now their approach seems to be to turn this area into a meat-grinder.

I'm surprised at the number of people who seem to think Ukraine should be pushing Russia out of Kherson faster. If you have established an area where you have such a strong strategic advantage, and your enemy is struggling with troop numbers, then a brutal war of attrition in this area is exactly the right strategy.

[Jubal]

I'm surprised at the number of people who seem to think Ukraine should be pushing Russia out of Kherson faster.

I suspect that as much as anything that's two groups: one, a group of people who have swallowed the most optimistic UKR propaganda and don't understand that the Russian army, battered as it is, is still quite large and not in such meltdown that they will be walked over with ease. And then a second group of people who are thinking about the strategic but not the operational or tactical level of the war, who are thinking about the need for Ukraine to show ROI to its western backers but not necessarily thinking about the battlefiels consequences of pushing too fast.

In a different area of all this that I hadn't known about before, I was reading that Ukraine's government is pushing a lot of labour law deregulation, probably hoping to attract foreign investment, but that's the sort of thing that might slow EU accession down because countries like Austria will probably not want places with very very deregulated working rights fully added to the Single Market given the disparities this would create.

[dubsartur]

I'm surprised at the number of people who seem to think Ukraine should be pushing Russia out of Kherson faster. If you have established an area where you have such a strong strategic advantage, and your enemy is struggling with troop numbers, then a brutal war of attrition in this area is exactly the right strategy.

Social media lends itself to emotions and groupthink.  In fact, its worse than that, because if you don't keep coming out with hot takes you can get dropped by the feeds.  So people who have one or two good insights, like Trent Telenko, get pushed to keep forming and sharing opinions which are not backed by years of study and experience.

I never saw the people who were sure that Ukraine would be defeated in three days, but they may have overcompensated in the other direction.

I think that many people's mental model of war is either a counterinsurgency or a NATO member against a much smaller, poorer state.  They are not prepared for something like the Ethiopian Civil War which goes on for years.


Edit: One reason why I don't like 'armchair quarterbacking' is that its easy to think of alternative approaches when you don't have the lives of thousands of soldiers, tens of thousands of civilians, and one of your country's largest cities depending on them.  Carrying them out is always the hard part.

[psyanojim]

The other thing I found very curious is that Ukraine telegraphed their Kherson offensive weeks in advance, allowing the Russians to reinforce the area.

Why would they do that!?

Well, what if their goal all along was to lure Russians into this meat-grinder of an area NW of the Dnipro River where Ukraine have such an advantage... and then cut off their logistics and bleed their manpower?

Its definitely one of the issues with this 'social media' led analysis, where there has been an obsession with drawing pretty colors on maps. In this sanitized view of war, it seems that the goal of actually killing as many enemy troops as possible has been too easy to forget.

[dubsartur]

Its definitely one of the issues with this 'social media' led analysis, where there has been an obsession with drawing pretty colors on maps. In this sanitized view of war, it seems that the goal of actually killing as many enemy troops as possible has been too easy to forget.

Tracking territory wasn't a bad way of thinking about the war for the first three months or so, until the Russian retreat from Kyiv and the fall of Mariupol.  But then things slowed down and the Ukrainians stopped sharing so many photos and videos because more Russian losses ended up on their side of the lines. 

The old German model of Bewegungskrieg and Stellungskrieg is not perfect but its something which journalists could learn in a weekend if they wanted to.

There are lots of clips of Ukrainian airstrikes, dead people, and destroyed vehicles on social media.  The Ukrainians seem not to like showing dead soldiers, but not everyone is so respectful.

There seem to be two Ukrainian offensives, one west of the Dniepr and another around Izium in the north-east.  Edit: at least this phase of the fighting has moved away from the big cities, so its easier for people to get away when the shells and rockets start to land.

[psyanojim]

There are lots of clips of Ukrainian airstrikes, dead people, and destroyed vehicles on social media.  The Ukrainians seem not to like showing dead soldiers, but not everyone is so respectful.

There seem to be two Ukrainian offensives, one west of the Dniepr and another around Izium in the north-east.  Edit: at least this phase of the fighting has moved away from the big cities, so its easier for people to get away when the shells and rockets start to land.

Neither side likes to talk about their own losses, and estimates of enemy losses are always questionable, but in pure manpower terms (its unpleasant I know), it looks like the Russia is really struggling to replace their losses far more than Ukraine.

And yeah, this is the bit I find fascinating - the Kherson offensive was very highly telegraphed and gave the Russians ample time to react and reinforce, but this new Kharkiv counterattack was kept very quiet and seems to have achieved a high level of surprise. The main supply line from the Russian border via Izium/Kupyansk is now under serious threat.

The small Ozerne attack was also very revealing - it seemed to be a Ukrainian probe that, when they advanced, they met near-zero resistance! This in a place that was supposed to be an area of Russian strength.

So it seems Ukraine have a dual strategy right now - highly telegraphed meat-grinder in Kherson/Dnipro river area, suck in huge numbers of Russian troops into an area of strategic/logistical disadvantage, then take advantage of the depletion of Russian lines elsewhere to launch lightning-fast strikes on defensive gaps and critical supply routes.

Edit: I've just looked at the rail map, and WOW. Kupyansk is pretty much the rail hub for supplying the entire north-eastern Russian frontline, and a decent chunk of the Donbas too. It looks like Russia have been taken totally by surprise here.

[Jubal]

I was seeing a very tragic Twitter thread - don't know how accurate of course - about the story of a Nenets man fighting in the Russian army. It seems like they'd be doing even worse for manpower if it wasn't for the fact that minority groups are so utterly driven into the ground by a mix of corruption and environmental devastation that it's a choice between enlistment and starvation. One might also observe that this doesn't seem a very good way to get particularly motivated troops.

[dubsartur]

I think Kamil Galeev said that the only parts of Russia with growing populations are minority regions in the Caucasus and Siberia.  The ethnic Russian population is shrinking (and many of them live in Peter or Moscow where the government is scared to conscript soldiers because protests in either city would be hard to handle).  Galeev writes like a prophet not a scientist but I am pretty sure he would get basic statistics right.

The Ukrainian Commander in Chief has published an article on the strategic situation and plans for 2023 https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-ato/3566404-prospects-for-running-a-military-campaign-in-2023-ukraines-perspective.html  I used to hope that the Russian invasion would collapse in spring, but it does seem likely that it will take until at least 2023 to force Russia back to the lines of 24 February and maybe longer in Crimea and the Donbas.

[Jubal]

Yes, I'm never totally sure what to think of Galeev's work, though I do read it.

Meanwhile in the story of Ukraine's domestic politics, the UN is pushing it to overhaul its disability support systems to something more humane. Things like that can affect huge numbers of people but one rarely sees or thinks about them outside one's own country.