Musing
"How to win the unwinnable war?
A few days ago, I wrote about how we lack the combat power to win the war, and that the war will be won by Russia collapsing, or through a Russian coup. Nick said to me that this was a depressing viewpoint, but it is honestly true, or at least partially so.
Let me explain, even with the increased inflow of consumables and arms, and the slow degradation of Russian combat power, it will take at least another year to shift the balance of power enough to produce decisive battle victories setting the foundation for a military victory.
It might even take longer than that but let us say that two years is the upper spectrum of winning that way.
What I meant to say is that I do not believe that Russia will last that long in its current form. There are things afoot in Russia pointing towards things shifting about, and when that happens things will go quickly.
I have also pointed out that the current campaign in Kursk have different goals that need to be achieved. One that has been romanticised a lot is to use the gained territory as a bargaining chip in the upcoming peace negotiations.
Yes, peace negotiations are one route to achieving peace, but if that peace is not a victory gaining back all Ukrainian territory, then it means that Ukraine has lost. And the small speck of Russia that we are currently holding is not much of a bargaining chip.
No, we would need to hold at least 3 full Oblasts to even state that we have bargaining chips enough to negotiate Russia out of Ukraine. And let me be very clear here, we lack the combat power to gain that much in a short enough timespan to make a real difference on the “bargainometer”.
In fact, that would take 1 to 2 years to achieve. Same as it would take to push Russia out of Ukraine. However we twist and turn, the reality is that we will still have to fight the war for another year or two before we can even think about achieving a combat victory in this war.
Now I can hear Nick groaning again, after all I was supposed to explain how things can be won that is unwinnable. To do that I need to talk about what would be a victory, and how it can be achieved.
Russia vs Ukraine
So far during the war we have been fighting inside Ukraine, and that has come at a horrendous civilian cost. And liberating Ukraine 1 square kilometre at a time can only be done by crushing our way forward destroying everything.
The cost of rebuilding Ukraine would be quite simply staggering, and very few Ukrainians would remain in the areas liberated. The cost both in lives and money is just prohibitive.
The other option is to spend two years grinding Russia in situ, and hope that the cost would be low enough when we start moving ahead. But there’s no guarantees that there would be few enough Russians left to make this possible.
Instead, it is probable that we would need to hammer the Russians out in every single village by heavy shelling and by using powerful drones and air bombardment.
Defeating the Russian army in Ukraine is just to costly, however we turn and twist things around. Thankfully there’s another way to go about mauling the Russian army.
This is obviously to move the war into Russia instead of fighting it inside Ukraine. This was the option that nobody planned for, neither Russia, nor our own allies. And still the Punderati has not caught on to the advantages of doing this.
We are instead mauling the Russian army inside of Russia, this is obviously a big boon since it saves Ukraine itself from being mauled, and conversely, we can be less “nice” since it is not out civilians.
Obviously, we are as nice as we can be with the civilians left behind. We evacuate them as need and take care of their needs in regards of food and medications. But we will not have to pay for rebuilding the houses and infrastructure that is destroyed, that will fall upon Russia, or whatever now remains of it after the war.
And if these Oblasts break away and form individual republics it will either be up to them to rebuild, or EU will pick up the bill.
There is on top of that an obvious other advantage from a military standpoint.
Bait & Switch
In the beginning we just did not know how Russia would react. Would they continue inside Ukraine? Would they try to cordon off the area via construction of large defence lines? Would they try to boot us out?
If they left us alone fighting minimal forces, we would in the end have gained some rather impressive amounts of “bargaining chips”. We would have been happy with this option, because sooner or later we would have taken some rather pricy parts of Russia. This did though not happen, even though it initially seemed to be the case.
The second option was our least preferred option. That would have given us an unsatisfactory amount of Russian units holed up in some sort of Surovikin-line that we would need to try to break through to gain more bargaining chips.
It would have been costly. For quite some time this seemed like what Russia was attempting to do as they started to dig like moles on cocaine North and East of us. In the end Russia did not opt for this.
Instead, they started to move out large powerful “elite” units and some quite impressive numbers of equipment. The reason behind this is political, Russia did not want to do this, but the average Ivan was less than impressed with what was happening and started to grumble about the leadership being idiots.
On top of that, the prospect of having millions of Russians as internal refugees was also not palatable to the political leadership. So, at the end they went for the “pushing out” option.
As we are speaking 1/5th of the total Russian Army that was in Ukraine is in Russia again, either in Kursk battling, or spread out to contain further incursions into Russia. But numbers are not everything, with them came ¼ of the equipment that used to be in Ukraine. Pushing requires some serious oomph.
The most overlooked part is though what Russia has been forced to send to Ukraine. Now 1/3rd of their “elite” units are back in Russia where they belong. And those come from areas of the frontline that are the most hotly contested.
Artillery has been moved from Pokrovsk, Chasiv Yar, Kreminna and Kupyansk. And storm troops, VDV, Marines, etcetera have also been moved out. This have stopped Russian progress in all of those places, and even stopped them from even attempting advances in a couple of cases.
In Chasiv Yar and Kreminna the effect is so big that Ukraine is now performing small offensives there as holes emerge.
The only big trouble spot is Vuhledar, it was so close to being taken that we believe that Russia left that alone in an attempt to get some final gain inside of Ukraine to brag about back home, personally I think that as soon as it is completely fallen Russia will start to move out units from that direction too.
There is though a huge difference in quality between the Ukrainian units and the Russian units. This is important to remember as I go further in my explanation.
For every two Brigades that Russia sends, we send one Brigade to reinforce our offensive. It is still enough for us to continue pushing onwards. Take the 21st and 95th Brigades, aka. “The Swedish Brigades”, those used to mainly hold in Kreminna, and when the 21st showed up at other spots it was only parts of it, now the entirety is sitting here molesting Russia together with the entire 95th.
It is telling that we could move Ukraine’s two heaviest units holding a huge area away from the Kreminna front section, and still go on the offensive in Kreminna.
And this is the beauty of it all, we are able to continue being a huge pain in the **** of Russia inside of Russia, and reinforcing, and still our relative strength visavi the Russian forces is increasing inside of Ukraine.
How’s that for a plot-twist? Inside of Ukraine we are improving our numerical ratio and improving our numerical quality ratio.
If we are a bit lucky, we will be able to get enough troops out of Ukraine to do a more concerted effort to start pushing them backwards, while doing the real grinding of the Russians inside Russia. It is a balancing act, but for now it is working out.
In other words, we are planning to move the entire war if we can into Russia, and if they wish to continue, we can achieve the defeat of their army there over the next couple of years, while having a free and liberated Ukraine behind us.
I call that a Victory, even though we will not have peace.
And finally, we have the not so small problem that having running battles inside of Russia causes all sorts of anxiety and civil unrest inside of Russia. In turn this causes more and more Russians to doubt the wisdom of their leadership, and more and more voices grumbling about the need for a change in their leadership.
Right now, these are just grumbles, albeit grumbles even voiced on national TV by none other than Solovyov. As the war inside Russia continues those grumbles will move to things being spoken outright, and then screamed in the streets of Moscow.
As long as the war is inside of Ukraine the average Ivan will tighten his belt and sit quietly in his cold and dark apartment, dreaming about the Eternal Russia’s slowly but inexorably moving forward to their Grand Victory and Conquest of The Entire World.
Suffering now is mitigated by the splendid, promised future of world domination and eternal conquest. If Ivan instead is starving in his cold and dark apartment while the fighting is slowly creeping towards him, that instead smells of failure and the end of Russia, and that is far more likely to get him sober enough to go out on the street protesting against Putin and his cronies.
The further and longer we can push, and the more spots we molest in the derriere of Russia, the more likely these protests become. Remember that there’s not enough food in Russia now, and that large parts of the energy infrastructure have been boofed, and what is not already boofed will start to break down as it is contending with the increased load during winter.
This is how Russia will start to either go for a coup, civil war, or breakup.
General Flavours
The Generals in Ukraine come in all sorts of training and backgrounds, ranging from the Russian style ones like General Sodol (former), via Zyrskyi, to Tank Girl and me.
General Sodol sounds like a supervillain in an evil Galactic Empire, he could as well have been named Darth Sodol for all points and purposes. He believed in doing mass assaults against the enemy in meatwaves, and he didn’t give a single **** about loss rates. If he had been on the Russian side, he would have gotten medals and another star, here he was thankfully sacked. Way to late in my opinion, but still sacked.
Zyrskyi believes in static defence, methodical grinding, and then lightning offensives out of the blue. He is meticulous and careful, until he is not. Nobody on this planet can set up as stubborn donkey of a defence as he can.
He is though not a master of carefully planned combined arms offensives and manoeuvre warfare, point in question is hist mad dash from Kharkiv into Luhansk. It was very effective, but to costly in resources and manpower in my opinion, it could have been done cheaper.
Something that was showcased as Alexander the Poet liberated Kherson. He did not utilise Combined Arms manoeuvre warfare, but he was very methodical in his approach.
Returning to Zyrskyi, he is careful with his soldiers and is not throwing them away in stupid frontal assaults, but if he can push in an advantage, he is bloodier than needs be.
In all of Ukraine there’s currently only 3 generals able to perform Combined Arms Warfare. Brigadier Plucky in Chasiv Yar is one of them, he is though a bit more like Zyrskyi in regards of willing to take losses compared to me and Tank Girl.
It can easily be spotted that She is my former student, she has in most respects surpassed me when it comes to offensive warfare. It is though still interesting to study how we differ in flavour and style of how we go about doing the same things.
We both love Combat Manoeuvre Warfare utilising rapid multipronged attacks all over the place, and to rapidly replan and reorganise our attacks as we find weak spots, or enemy strong positions.
We both are fluid in using all forms of arms at our disposal, be it infantry, armour, artillery, drones, or air force, thusly creating multi-level attacks in 3D-space.
As I came here, I had to on the fly take over Tank Girl's carefully laid out masterplan, but not being her I rapidly had to start doing things my way in regards of flavour and style. And, due to the duration of her being gone, and the fluid nature of Combat Manoeuvre Warfare, the plan changed more and more in my image.
I still generally achieved the same things, but in part I went about it in different ways, closer to my nature.
We talked about this extensively as she started to ease her scrawny butt into the big chair. And yes, it is even scrawnier now, she has lost 6kg in two weeks. I was not joking about her needing to fatten back up again.
In general, she was happy with what I had achieved, and with the decisions I had made, but she often commented about how she would have gone about it. It was a great learning experience for both of us.
She definitely has a brutalist streak in her, using massed artillery attacks to pound her way through any obstacle, while I tend to be more like a python constricting my pray to conserve troops at all cost.
I am sort of colder and more patient as I go about it. Both ways are obviously effective, it is though a bit telling that even two Generals that have worked this intimately over such a long time, making all those plans together, and studying together, still end up retaining such differences.
I have previously described Tank Girl’s style so much that you probably know it by heart now, and on top of that you have watched her handiwork well enough here in Kursk where she got her first big offensive command, so I wanted to describe “me” for a bit.
But alas, in a twist of fate she found that someone else had done a better job of describing that than I could muster, and in video-form with easy to interpret graphics no less. The producer of these videos gets info with a 24-to-72-hour delay, the only one with such access. The reason we did that is that the ****** is so good at figuring stuff out that we had to make a deal with him and his team, because he was figuring stuff out to fast to contain Opsec.
On top of that he and his team is delaying things a bit further, so he is generally 3 to 5 days late with the news, but it is always extremely accurate and factual, well unless we kindly ask him to “plant” stuff. It is through a rarely used option.
Anyway, Tank Girl was bored and looked at one of his episodes and came in laughing about him having cleverly sussed out how I operate and think and darn… he had. Also, he is Ukrainian, so the pronunciations are correct. "
The video referred to here is the Reporting Ukraine one that I posted last night.
It should be noted that, although you get stuff here faster by and large, here is an Opsec delay in much of what I post.
Update. Tank Girl has fired General Swede and sent him home to do her laundry.
relevant and urgent.
www.lbc.co.uk
