Where's the Hype?!

[holley]

I woke up this mornin' and ran down stairs and...Santa did come
Boo no Santa

(This is said in fun, NOT rushin' anyone here)

M.

[CapnDarwin]

Santa should be arriving in about 2 hours. Patience Grasshopper.

[Tom_]

That is the printed manual which is a mash-up of the first three field manuals (FM) we have for documentation of the game. The game will have our PDFs, which will be living documents as the series goes on, and content, bug fixes, and features get added.

On page 76 of the manual it says, 'Air-defence against planes'. The phrase 'planes' isn't used anywhere else and doesn't conform to the mil language in the rest of the document. An alternative would be 'fixed wing aircraft' or 'rotary wing' for helis.

Will you be making a tech thread for bug spotters?

[Erik Rutins]

Strange, not much pre-release info, streams, AAR's on the game. I'll be getting it this weekend and going forth as NATO at first. My PBEM partner and I have been playing the first game in PBEM for the last couple of weeks to warm up.

Other than all the dev logs posted front and center on our site over the last six weeks and spread through social media as well as the various livestreams on our Twitch channel?

We also have a public AAR going up today.

[CapnDarwin]

@Tom, yes once the game launches we will have sub-forums for all sorts of things like that and more.

Thanks for the note above as well. We will have to see if we can update the menu and PDF to say aircraft instead of planes.

[Simulacra53]

Instabuy - but price tsk tsk tsk

[GlassHoppa]

Instabuy - but price tsk tsk tsk

I'm confused. US$60 is a lot of money? A burger + beer + tip is $20 around here at least, so Southern Storm = 3 Burger Runs, about right IMHO. Think how much effort went into this program, and that Matrix still takes a cut (publishing costs + paying back upfront money) from OTS, the creators. Seriously, if you can afford the minimum spec rig to play the game on, you can afford the $60. If not, skip the next 3 burgers and there you are. Even on a retirement income, you can just save up a bit and buy it after Xmas. Sheesh....

[budd]

Strange, not much pre-release info, streams, AAR's on the game. I'll be getting it this weekend and going forth as NATO at first. My PBEM partner and I have been playing the first game in PBEM for the last couple of weeks to warm up.

Other than all the dev logs posted front and center on our site over the last six weeks and spread through social media as well as the various livestreams on our Twitch channel?

We also have a public AAR going up today.

I think Mr. Rutins is busting my balls here Now I mean that in the I'm not remotely offended by that kind of way. Got to explain stuff in this here internet as some things get lost in translation. Reason I even brought it up was I was thinking to myself a week from release "budd, where's all the pub for the game" Capn clued me in on some streams I missed. I was mostly talking about streams as the dev logs were excellent. Might just be because there's no Marco and Tea time pushing the game. All's well now my download is almost complete.
Best of luck on the release "On Target" guys.

[sfbaytf]

This was the first time I beta tested a game like this. It was a pleasant experience and the devs were very courteous, professional dedicated and passionate about their work. I was expecting a Flashpoint Campaigns with a few new bells and whistles. What I saw was a lot of new features and improvements and a very enjoyable and enlightening experience. Even though over the years my interest in the Cold War has diminished, this game/sim re-ignited my interest in the period.

With the current events in Ukraine and the performance of the Russian military has left much to be desired, going back to this period and seeing how things play out and putting it into the context of today's events is interesting. One has to ask, is the current Russian military much different today than it was in the 80's/early 90's, in spite of the modernization that took place before the invasion of Ukraine.

While there are no drones in any of the scenarios or campaigns that I'm aware of, its my understanding you can add them in the editor.

Last night I looked at youtube and there were a couple of user videos posted. This morning I now see more from creators that post videos on this sort of content so take a look and like and subscribe. They will appreciate it. Its a lot of work to do playthroughs and AARs and post on youtube.

[IronMikeGolf]

"With the current events in Ukraine and the performance of the Russian military has left much to be desired, going back to this period and seeing how things play out and putting it into the context of today's events is interesting. One has to ask, is the current Russian military much different today than it was in the 80's/early 90's, in spite of the modernization that took place before the invasion of Ukraine."

This is both a timely topic and an question debated in professional circles. And one we can't really address in a few forum posts. I will offer some food for thought.

1. It might be helpful to consider the Red Army of WW II, the WP Armies of the Cold War, and the Russian Federation Army in the Ukraine. Also, consider joint Army AirForce operations across all three periods.
2. There is no "bad" Russian military thought and I am considering the Interwar period (pre-WW II) to the current day. The various doctrines strike me a sound, given the missions and constraints of each period.
3. A real question has been "can they implement their doctrine?" This is something western intelligence services has had a big miss on forever. I can't say they ever really tried to determine that answer.
4. Part of the problem has been western response to Russian/Soviet mass and platform capability. Post WW II you can make a very good argument that the WP had eventually aggressive intentions. So the West sought offsets. And the offsets largely went into platforms including infantry squads). The Soviets/WP/Russian Federation countered with developing and advertising their own platform capabilities. Neither side really talked much about (to the point of throwing rocks at the other side's claims) whether the people in the units could do the required missions. It was thermal sights, PGMs, ERA, APS, etc.
5. Part and parcel to item 4 above, especially with Russian Federation forces pre-Ukraine invasion, is the per cent of a unit that was what in the West we call "Deployable". In the CW era, all units inf GSFG (Group of Soviet Forces in Germany) were 100% deployable (they were already deployed) and this was in the scale not of battalions but armies. Current times (now going back 10, maybe 15 years)? One battalion of a brigade. They way Russia trained troops changed. The training base is vastly different from the West.
a. Take a combat vehicle driver. In the West, the national equivalent to US IET (Initial Entry Training) delivers a soldier to the tactical unit who can drive and perform operator level maintenance on the vehicle. In the RF, all the technical/tactical task training is done by the tactical unit.
b. Training detractors: significant effort is expended in basic life support sustainment. Meaning growing food level.
c. The result is a Russian Brigade can only field a "competent" battalion.

Current Russian Military doctrine is not bad. What is bad is there are many parts of it I've seen no evidence of them being able to execute. I do think, on average, WP (including satellite members) had a higher capability than current RF units. And I am unsure that WP units of the CW era were as rote and lock step as I was trained back in the day. I say that from reading stuff about Soviets in A-stan. Lots of initiative and innovation, just as in WW II.

[22sec]

The mass of the Soviet military in the 80’s can’t be comprehended by many now. Even if they would have had some of the same struggles, and I think there would be some, the sheer will of the Soviet machine back then would have fed the meat grinder. I think the most interesting thing to consider is could the Soviet’s have really pulled off a maneuver warfare, quick bolt from the blue, and sustained it? That is the topic that I think we should consider when discussing what might have been. That’s where my observations from the war in Ukraine has really influenced my thoughts on the topic. In my opinion, unlike being NATO’s nightmare scenario, it very well maybe the scenario that really would have been best for NATO’s chance of victory.

If I’m playing any Cold War game as the Soviets my preference from now on has become to mass my forces, even if the enemy is doing the same, and then clobber them with artillery. Not much different than what they’ve had success at times doing in the current war.

[Rinco]

There is so much fog of war and one sided analysis / reports about currents events that I find decisively premature any conclusion about this, more so taking seriously statememts like this "the performance of the Russian military has left much to be desired". We dont have really yet the big picture nor the clear strategy and the real intentions from the other side, even less clear numbers of casualties, loss of equipment, after action reports of engaments and so on...this is an ongoing war....moving and fluid fontlines are very dynamic and does not necessarily mean winning or losing. We just dont know yet...and surely it might take years to come in order for us to have a grasp on what happens on the frontline today... we cant cleartly see yet. The current missile incident in Poland just shows how our supposed "good side" can lie at what it takes no matter what the truth is untill there is no way to avoid accepting the reality, this is very damaging...if this happens at an event evident like this, one can imagine about the rest of the situation...this is the same side that is now singing full final victory ahead and proof of the a weaker enemy due to a recent withdrawal...really? Withdrawal, repositioning? Bigger scale strategy? Who knows...I will better wait and see before start singing victory like a parrot and disdaning the enemy...

But, anyway, I promise myself not getting into discusions like this or I get risking myself to be banned. I would just like to say that there are some interesting alternative analysis (military analisis) from sources like Col McGreggor and Scott Ritter, to name some, that I find as well very interesting and shed some light on the military aspect of the conflict on a different perspective.

IronMikeGolf your analysis, as always, is very interesting. I like reading it a lot. Thans for posting it. I have also read somewhere (lost track of the source unfortunately and I lost some parts of it as well...trying to recover it) the below analysis of the current conflict that I would like to share with you. I am not an expert but I find it very interesting as well:

[Rinco]

The Russian Invasion of Ukraine
Maneuverist Paper No. 22:
Part II: The mental and moral realms
by Marinus

When considered as purely physical phenomena, the operations conducted by Russian ground forces in Ukraine in 2022 present a puzzling picture. In the north of Ukraine, Russian battalion tactical groups overran a great deal of territory but made no attempts to convert temporary occupation into permanent possession. Indeed, after spending five weeks in that region, they left as rapidly as they had arrived. In the south, the similarly rapid entry of Russian ground forces led to the establishment of Russian garrisons and the planting of Russian political, economic, and cultural institutions. In the third theater of the war, rapid movements of the type that characterized Russian operations on the northern and southern fronts rarely occurred. Instead, Russian formations in eastern Ukraine conducted artillery-intensive assaults to capture relatively small pieces of ground.

One way to shed a little light upon this conundrum is to treat Russian operations on each of the three major fronts of the war as a distinct campaign. Further illumination is provided by the realization that each of these campaigns followed a model that had been part of the Russian operational repertoire for a very long time. Such a scheme, however, fails to explain why the Russian leadership applied particular models to particular sets of operations. Resolving that question requires an examination of the mental and moral purposes served by each of these three campaigns.

Raids in the North

American Marines have long used the term “raid” to describe an enterprise in which a small force moves swiftly to a particular location, completes a discrete mission, and withdraws as quickly as it can. To Russian soldiers, however, the linguistic cousin of that word (reyd) carries a somewhat different meaning. Where the travel performed by the team conducting a raid is nothing more than a means of reaching particular points on the map, the movement of the frequently larger forces conducting a reyd creates significant operational effects. That is, in the course of moving along various highways and byways, they confuse enemy commanders, disrupt enemy logistics, and deprive enemy governments of the legitimacy that comes from uncontested control of their own territory. Similarly, where each phase of a present-day American raid necessarily follows a detailed script, a reyd is a more open-ended enterprise that can be adjusted to exploit new opportunities, avoid new dangers, or serve new purposes.

The term reyd found its way into the Russian military lexicon in the late 19th century by theorists who noted the similarities between the independent cavalry operations of the American Civil War and the already well-established Russian practice of sending mobile columns, often composed of Cossacks, on extended excursions through enemy territory. An early example of such excursions is provided by the exploits of the column led by Alexander Chernyshev during the Napoleonic Wars. In September of 1813, this force of some 2,300 horsemen and two light field guns made a 400-mile circuit through enemy territory. At the middle point of this bold enterprise, this column occupied, for two days, the city of Kassel, then serving as the capital of one of the satellite states of the French Empire. Fear of a repetition of this embarrassment convinced Napoleon to detail two army corps to garrison Dresden, then the seat of government of another one of his dependencies. [3] As a result, when Napoleon encountered the combined forces of his enemies at the Battle of Leipzig, his already outnumbered Grande Armée was much smaller than it would otherwise have been.

In 2022, the many battalion tactical groups that moved deeply into northern Ukraine during the first few days of the Russian invasion made no attempt to re-enact the occupation of Leipzig. Rather, they bypassed all of the larger cities in their path and, on the rare occasions when they found themselves in a smaller city, occupation rarely lasted for more than a few hours. Nonetheless, the fast-moving Russian columns created, on a much a larger scale, an effect similar to the one that resulted from Chernyshev’s raid of 1813. That is, they convinced the Ukrainians to weaken their main field army, then fighting in the Donbass region, to bolster the defenses of distant cities.

Rapid Occupation in the South

In terms of speed and distance traveled, Russian operations in the area between the southern seacoast of Ukraine and the Dnipro River resembled the raids conducted in the north. They differed, however, in the handling of cities. Where Russian columns on either side of Kyiv avoided large urban areas whenever they could, their counterparts in the south took permanent possession of comparable cities. In some instances, such as the ship-to-objective maneuver that began in the Sea of Azov and ended in Melitopol, the conquest of cities took place during the first few days of the Russian invasion. In others, such as the town of Skadovsk, the Russians waited several weeks before seizing areas and engaging local defense forces they had ignored during their initial advance.

In the immediate aftermath of their arrival, the Russian commanders who took charge of urban areas in the south followed the same policy as their counterparts in the north. That is, they allowed the local representatives of the Ukrainian state to perform their duties and, in many instances, to continue to fly the flag of their country on public buildings. It was not long, however, before Russian civil servants took control of the local government, replaced the flags on buildings, and set in motion the replacement of Ukrainian institutions, whether banks or cell phone companies, with Russian ones.

Like the model of the reyd, the paradigm of campaigns that combined rapid military occupation with thoroughgoing political transformation, had been part of the Russian military culture for quite some time. Thus, when explaining the concept for operations on the southern front, Russian commanders were able to point to any one of a number of similar enterprises conducted by the Soviet state in the four decades that followed Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in 1939. (These included the conquest of the countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in 1940; the suppression of reformist governments in Hungary and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War, and the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

While some Russian formations in the south consolidated control over conquered territory, others conducted raids in the vicinity of the city of Mykolaiv. Like their larger counter-parts on the northern front, these encouraged the Ukrainian leadership to devote to the defense of cities forces that might otherwise have been used in the fight for the Donbass region. (In this instance, the cities in question included the ports of Mykolaiv and Odessa.) At the same time, the raids in the northern portion of the southern front created a broad “no man’s land” between areas that had been occupied by Russian forces and those entirely under the control of the Ukrainian government.

Stalingrad in the East

Russian operations in the north and south of Ukraine made very little use of field artillery. This was partially a matter of logistics. (Whether raiding in the north or rapidly occupying in the south, the Russian columns lacked the means to bring up large numbers of shells and rockets.) The absence of cannonades in those campaigns, however, had more to do with ends than means. In the north, Russian reluctance to conduct bombardments stemmed from a desire to avoid antagonizing the local people, nearly all of whom, for reasons of language and ethnicity, tended to support the Ukrainian state. In the south, the Russian policy of avoiding the use of field artillery served a similarly political purpose of preserving the lives and property of communities in which many people identified as “Russian” and many more spoke Russian as their native language.

In the east, however, the Russians conducted bombardments that, in terms of both duration and intensity, rivaled those of the great artillery contests of the world wars of the twentieth century. Made possible by short, secure, and extraordinarily redundant supply lines, these bombardments served three purposes. First, they confined Ukrainian troops into their fortifications, depriving them of the ability to do anything other than remain in place. Second, they inflicted a large number of casualties, whether physical or caused by the psychological effects of imprisonment, impotence, and proximity to large numbers of earth-shaking explosions. Third, when conducted for a sufficient period of time, which was often measured in weeks, the bombardment of a given fortification invariably resulted in either the withdrawal of its defenders or their surrender.

We can glean some sense of the scale of the Russian bombardments in the east of Ukraine by comparing the struggle for the town of Popasna (18 March – 7 May 2022) with the battle of Iwo Jima (19 February – 26 March 1945.) At Iwo Jima, American Marines fought for five weeks to annihilate the defenders of eight square miles of skillfully fortified ground. At Popasna, Russian gunners bombarded trench systems built into the ridges and ravines of a comparable area for eight weeks before the Ukrainian leadership decided to withdraw its forces from the town.

The capture of real estate by artillery, in turn, contributed to the creation of the encirclements that Russians call “cauldrons” (kotly). Like so much in Russian military theory, this concept builds upon an idea borrowed from the German tradition of maneuver warfare: the “battle cauldron” (Schlachtkessel). However, where the Germans sought to create and exploit their cauldrons as quickly as possible, Russian cauldrons could be either rapid and surprising or slow and seemingly inevitable. Indeed, the successful Soviet offensives of the Second World War, such as the one that resulted in the destruction of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, made extensive use of cauldrons of both types.

Freedom from the desire to create cauldrons as quickly as possible relieved the Russians fighting in eastern Ukraine from the need to hold any particular piece of ground. Thus, when faced with a determined Ukrainian attack, the Russians often withdrew their tank and infantry units from the contested terrain. In this way, they both reduced danger to their own troops and created situations, however brief, in which the Ukrainian attackers faced Russian shells and rockets without the benefit of shelter. To put things another way, the Russians viewed such “encore bombardments” not merely as an acceptable use of ordnance but also as opportunities to inflict additional casualties while engaging in “conspicuous consumption” of artillery ammunition.

In the spring of 1917, German forces on the Western Front used comparable tactics to create situations in which French troops advancing down the rear slopes of recently captured ridges were caught in the open by the fire of field artillery and machine guns. The effect of this experience on French morale was such that infantrymen in fifty French divisions engaged in acts of “collective indiscipline,” the motto for which was, “we will hold, but we refuse to attack.” (In May of 2022, several videos appeared on the internet in which people claiming to be Ukrainian soldiers fighting in the Donbass region explained that, while they were willing to defend their positions, they had resolved to disobey any orders that called for them to advance.)

Resolving the Paradox

In the early days of the maneuver warfare debate, maneuverists often presented their preferred philosophy as the logical opposite of “firepower/attrition warfare.” Indeed, as late as 2013, the anonymous authors of the “Attritionist Letters” used this dichotomy as a framework for their critique of practices at odds with the spirit of maneuver warfare. In the Russian campaigns in Ukraine, however, a set of operations made mostly of movement complemented one composed chiefly of cannonades.

One way to resolve this apparent paradox is to characterize the raids of the first five weeks of the war as a grand deception that, while working little in the way of direct destruction, made possible the subsequent attrition of the Ukrainian armed forces. In particular, the threat posed by the raids delayed the movement of Ukrainian forces in the main theater of the war until the Russians had deployed the artillery units, secured the transporting network, and accumulated the stocks of ammunition needed to conduct a long series of big bombardments. This delay also ensured that, when the Ukrainians did deploy additional formations to the Donbass region, the movement of such forces, and the supplies needed to sustain them, had been rendered much more difficult by the ruin wrought upon the Ukrainian rail network by long-range guided missiles. In other words, the Russians conducted a brief campaign of maneuver in the north in order to set the stage for a longer, and, ultimately, more important campaign of attrition in the east.

The stark contrast between the types of warfare waged by Russian forces in different parts of Ukraine reinforced the message at the heart of Russian information operations. From the start, Russian propaganda insisted that the “special military operation” in Ukraine served three purposes: the protection of the two pro-Russian proto-states,
“demilitarization,” and “denazification.” All three of these goals required the infliction of heavy losses upon Ukrainian formations fighting in the Donbass. None, however, depended upon the occupation of parts of Ukraine where the vast majority of people spoke the Ukrainian language, embraced a Ukrainian ethnic identity, and supported the Ukrainian state. Indeed, the sustained occupation of such places by Russian forces would have supported the proposition that Russia was trying to conquer all of Ukraine.

Guided Missiles

The Russian program of guided missile strikes, conducted in parallel to the three ground campaigns, created a number of moral effects favorable to the Russian war effort. The most important of these resulted from the avoidance of collateral damage that resulted, not only from the extraordinary precision of the weapons used, but also from the judicious choice of targets. Thus, Russia’s enemies found it hard to characterize strikes against fuel and ammunition depots, which were necessarily located at some distance from places where civilians lived and worked, as anything other than attacks on military installations.

Likewise, the Russian effort to disrupt traffic on the Ukrainian rail system could have included attacks against the power generating stations that provide electricity to both civilian communities and trains. Such attacks, however, would have resulted in much loss of life among the people working in those plants as well as a great deal of suffering in places deprived of power. Instead, the Russians chose to direct their missiles at traction substations, the remotely located transformers that converted electricity from the general grid into forms used to move trains.

There were times, however, when missile strikes against “dual use” facilities gave the impression that the Russians had, in fact, targeted purely civilian facilities. The most egregious example of such a mistake was the attack, carried out on 1 March 2022, upon the main television tower in Kyiv. Whether or not there was any truth in the Russian claim that the tower had been used for military purposes, the attack on an iconic structure that had long been associated with a purely civilian purpose did much to reduce the advantages achieved by the overall Russian policy of limiting missile strikes to obvious military targets.

The Challenge

The three ground campaigns conducted by the Russians in Ukraine in 2022 owed much to traditional models. At the same time, the program of missile strikes exploited a capability that was nothing short of revolutionary. Whether new or old, however, these component efforts were conducted in a way that demonstrated profound appreciation of all three realms in which wars are waged. That is, the Russians rarely forgot that, in addition to being a physical struggle, war is both a mental contest and a moral argument.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine may mark the start of a new cold war, a “long twilight struggle” comparable to the one that ended with the collapse of the Soviet Empire more than three decades ago. If that is the case, then we will face an adversary who, while drawing much of value from the Soviet military tradition, has been liberated from both the brutality inherent in the legacy of Lenin and the blinders imposed by Marxism. What would be even worse, we may find ourselves fighting disciples of John R. Boyd."

[IronMikeGolf]

"most interesting thing to consider is could the Soviet’s have really pulled off a maneuver warfare, quick bolt from the blue, and sustained it?"

That bolded word I think is an essential difference in the Soviet way of war and that of the West.

"If I’m playing any Cold War game as the Soviets my preference from now on has become to mass my forces, even if the enemy is doing the same, and then clobber them with artillery. Not much different than what they’ve had success at times doing in the current war."

I think maybe you have that backward, historically and doctrinally. WW II through today, Soviets/RF might enjoy a local large volume of artillery, but they have never succeeded in making it flexible and responsive. So, what do you do if you're a Soviet commander? Preparatory fires in high volume and attack during the resulting disorganization.

[22sec]

I know they weren’t tactically flexible or responsive to evolving situations, but if given time to mass artillery and gather enough information to pound the defenses the mass of Soviet forces that can then be used in the assault should be tough to deal with.

[byzantine1990]

The Russian Invasion of Ukraine
Maneuverist Paper No. 22:
Part II: The mental and moral realms
by Marinus

When considered as purely physical phenomena, the operations conducted by Russian ground forces in Ukraine in 2022 present a puzzling picture. In the north of Ukraine, Russian battalion tactical groups overran a great deal of territory but made no attempts to convert temporary occupation into permanent possession. Indeed, after spending five weeks in that region, they left as rapidly as they had arrived. In the south, the similarly rapid entry of Russian ground forces led to the establishment of Russian garrisons and the planting of Russian political, economic, and cultural institutions. In the third theater of the war, rapid movements of the type that characterized Russian operations on the northern and southern fronts rarely occurred. Instead, Russian formations in eastern Ukraine conducted artillery-intensive assaults to capture relatively small pieces of ground.

One way to shed a little light upon this conundrum is to treat Russian operations on each of the three major fronts of the war as a distinct campaign. Further illumination is provided by the realization that each of these campaigns followed a model that had been part of the Russian operational repertoire for a very long time. Such a scheme, however, fails to explain why the Russian leadership applied particular models to particular sets of operations. Resolving that question requires an examination of the mental and moral purposes served by each of these three campaigns.

Raids in the North

American Marines have long used the term “raid” to describe an enterprise in which a small force moves swiftly to a particular location, completes a discrete mission, and withdraws as quickly as it can. To Russian soldiers, however, the linguistic cousin of that word (reyd) carries a somewhat different meaning. Where the travel performed by the team conducting a raid is nothing more than a means of reaching particular points on the map, the movement of the frequently larger forces conducting a reyd creates significant operational effects. That is, in the course of moving along various highways and byways, they confuse enemy commanders, disrupt enemy logistics, and deprive enemy governments of the legitimacy that comes from uncontested control of their own territory. Similarly, where each phase of a present-day American raid necessarily follows a detailed script, a reyd is a more open-ended enterprise that can be adjusted to exploit new opportunities, avoid new dangers, or serve new purposes.

The term reyd found its way into the Russian military lexicon in the late 19th century by theorists who noted the similarities between the independent cavalry operations of the American Civil War and the already well-established Russian practice of sending mobile columns, often composed of Cossacks, on extended excursions through enemy territory. An early example of such excursions is provided by the exploits of the column led by Alexander Chernyshev during the Napoleonic Wars. In September of 1813, this force of some 2,300 horsemen and two light field guns made a 400-mile circuit through enemy territory. At the middle point of this bold enterprise, this column occupied, for two days, the city of Kassel, then serving as the capital of one of the satellite states of the French Empire. Fear of a repetition of this embarrassment convinced Napoleon to detail two army corps to garrison Dresden, then the seat of government of another one of his dependencies. [3] As a result, when Napoleon encountered the combined forces of his enemies at the Battle of Leipzig, his already outnumbered Grande Armée was much smaller than it would otherwise have been.

In 2022, the many battalion tactical groups that moved deeply into northern Ukraine during the first few days of the Russian invasion made no attempt to re-enact the occupation of Leipzig. Rather, they bypassed all of the larger cities in their path and, on the rare occasions when they found themselves in a smaller city, occupation rarely lasted for more than a few hours. Nonetheless, the fast-moving Russian columns created, on a much a larger scale, an effect similar to the one that resulted from Chernyshev’s raid of 1813. That is, they convinced the Ukrainians to weaken their main field army, then fighting in the Donbass region, to bolster the defenses of distant cities.

Rapid Occupation in the South

In terms of speed and distance traveled, Russian operations in the area between the southern seacoast of Ukraine and the Dnipro River resembled the raids conducted in the north. They differed, however, in the handling of cities. Where Russian columns on either side of Kyiv avoided large urban areas whenever they could, their counterparts in the south took permanent possession of comparable cities. In some instances, such as the ship-to-objective maneuver that began in the Sea of Azov and ended in Melitopol, the conquest of cities took place during the first few days of the Russian invasion. In others, such as the town of Skadovsk, the Russians waited several weeks before seizing areas and engaging local defense forces they had ignored during their initial advance.

In the immediate aftermath of their arrival, the Russian commanders who took charge of urban areas in the south followed the same policy as their counterparts in the north. That is, they allowed the local representatives of the Ukrainian state to perform their duties and, in many instances, to continue to fly the flag of their country on public buildings. It was not long, however, before Russian civil servants took control of the local government, replaced the flags on buildings, and set in motion the replacement of Ukrainian institutions, whether banks or cell phone companies, with Russian ones.

Like the model of the reyd, the paradigm of campaigns that combined rapid military occupation with thoroughgoing political transformation, had been part of the Russian military culture for quite some time. Thus, when explaining the concept for operations on the southern front, Russian commanders were able to point to any one of a number of similar enterprises conducted by the Soviet state in the four decades that followed Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in 1939. (These included the conquest of the countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in 1940; the suppression of reformist governments in Hungary and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War, and the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

While some Russian formations in the south consolidated control over conquered territory, others conducted raids in the vicinity of the city of Mykolaiv. Like their larger counter-parts on the northern front, these encouraged the Ukrainian leadership to devote to the defense of cities forces that might otherwise have been used in the fight for the Donbass region. (In this instance, the cities in question included the ports of Mykolaiv and Odessa.) At the same time, the raids in the northern portion of the southern front created a broad “no man’s land” between areas that had been occupied by Russian forces and those entirely under the control of the Ukrainian government.

Stalingrad in the East

Russian operations in the north and south of Ukraine made very little use of field artillery. This was partially a matter of logistics. (Whether raiding in the north or rapidly occupying in the south, the Russian columns lacked the means to bring up large numbers of shells and rockets.) The absence of cannonades in those campaigns, however, had more to do with ends than means. In the north, Russian reluctance to conduct bombardments stemmed from a desire to avoid antagonizing the local people, nearly all of whom, for reasons of language and ethnicity, tended to support the Ukrainian state. In the south, the Russian policy of avoiding the use of field artillery served a similarly political purpose of preserving the lives and property of communities in which many people identified as “Russian” and many more spoke Russian as their native language.

In the east, however, the Russians conducted bombardments that, in terms of both duration and intensity, rivaled those of the great artillery contests of the world wars of the twentieth century. Made possible by short, secure, and extraordinarily redundant supply lines, these bombardments served three purposes. First, they confined Ukrainian troops into their fortifications, depriving them of the ability to do anything other than remain in place. Second, they inflicted a large number of casualties, whether physical or caused by the psychological effects of imprisonment, impotence, and proximity to large numbers of earth-shaking explosions. Third, when conducted for a sufficient period of time, which was often measured in weeks, the bombardment of a given fortification invariably resulted in either the withdrawal of its defenders or their surrender.

We can glean some sense of the scale of the Russian bombardments in the east of Ukraine by comparing the struggle for the town of Popasna (18 March – 7 May 2022) with the battle of Iwo Jima (19 February – 26 March 1945.) At Iwo Jima, American Marines fought for five weeks to annihilate the defenders of eight square miles of skillfully fortified ground. At Popasna, Russian gunners bombarded trench systems built into the ridges and ravines of a comparable area for eight weeks before the Ukrainian leadership decided to withdraw its forces from the town.

The capture of real estate by artillery, in turn, contributed to the creation of the encirclements that Russians call “cauldrons” (kotly). Like so much in Russian military theory, this concept builds upon an idea borrowed from the German tradition of maneuver warfare: the “battle cauldron” (Schlachtkessel). However, where the Germans sought to create and exploit their cauldrons as quickly as possible, Russian cauldrons could be either rapid and surprising or slow and seemingly inevitable. Indeed, the successful Soviet offensives of the Second World War, such as the one that resulted in the destruction of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, made extensive use of cauldrons of both types.

Freedom from the desire to create cauldrons as quickly as possible relieved the Russians fighting in eastern Ukraine from the need to hold any particular piece of ground. Thus, when faced with a determined Ukrainian attack, the Russians often withdrew their tank and infantry units from the contested terrain. In this way, they both reduced danger to their own troops and created situations, however brief, in which the Ukrainian attackers faced Russian shells and rockets without the benefit of shelter. To put things another way, the Russians viewed such “encore bombardments” not merely as an acceptable use of ordnance but also as opportunities to inflict additional casualties while engaging in “conspicuous consumption” of artillery ammunition.

In the spring of 1917, German forces on the Western Front used comparable tactics to create situations in which French troops advancing down the rear slopes of recently captured ridges were caught in the open by the fire of field artillery and machine guns. The effect of this experience on French morale was such that infantrymen in fifty French divisions engaged in acts of “collective indiscipline,” the motto for which was, “we will hold, but we refuse to attack.” (In May of 2022, several videos appeared on the internet in which people claiming to be Ukrainian soldiers fighting in the Donbass region explained that, while they were willing to defend their positions, they had resolved to disobey any orders that called for them to advance.)

Resolving the Paradox

In the early days of the maneuver warfare debate, maneuverists often presented their preferred philosophy as the logical opposite of “firepower/attrition warfare.” Indeed, as late as 2013, the anonymous authors of the “Attritionist Letters” used this dichotomy as a framework for their critique of practices at odds with the spirit of maneuver warfare. In the Russian campaigns in Ukraine, however, a set of operations made mostly of movement complemented one composed chiefly of cannonades.

One way to resolve this apparent paradox is to characterize the raids of the first five weeks of the war as a grand deception that, while working little in the way of direct destruction, made possible the subsequent attrition of the Ukrainian armed forces. In particular, the threat posed by the raids delayed the movement of Ukrainian forces in the main theater of the war until the Russians had deployed the artillery units, secured the transporting network, and accumulated the stocks of ammunition needed to conduct a long series of big bombardments. This delay also ensured that, when the Ukrainians did deploy additional formations to the Donbass region, the movement of such forces, and the supplies needed to sustain them, had been rendered much more difficult by the ruin wrought upon the Ukrainian rail network by long-range guided missiles. In other words, the Russians conducted a brief campaign of maneuver in the north in order to set the stage for a longer, and, ultimately, more important campaign of attrition in the east.

The stark contrast between the types of warfare waged by Russian forces in different parts of Ukraine reinforced the message at the heart of Russian information operations. From the start, Russian propaganda insisted that the “special military operation” in Ukraine served three purposes: the protection of the two pro-Russian proto-states,
“demilitarization,” and “denazification.” All three of these goals required the infliction of heavy losses upon Ukrainian formations fighting in the Donbass. None, however, depended upon the occupation of parts of Ukraine where the vast majority of people spoke the Ukrainian language, embraced a Ukrainian ethnic identity, and supported the Ukrainian state. Indeed, the sustained occupation of such places by Russian forces would have supported the proposition that Russia was trying to conquer all of Ukraine.

Guided Missiles

The Russian program of guided missile strikes, conducted in parallel to the three ground campaigns, created a number of moral effects favorable to the Russian war effort. The most important of these resulted from the avoidance of collateral damage that resulted, not only from the extraordinary precision of the weapons used, but also from the judicious choice of targets. Thus, Russia’s enemies found it hard to characterize strikes against fuel and ammunition depots, which were necessarily located at some distance from places where civilians lived and worked, as anything other than attacks on military installations.

Likewise, the Russian effort to disrupt traffic on the Ukrainian rail system could have included attacks against the power generating stations that provide electricity to both civilian communities and trains. Such attacks, however, would have resulted in much loss of life among the people working in those plants as well as a great deal of suffering in places deprived of power. Instead, the Russians chose to direct their missiles at traction substations, the remotely located transformers that converted electricity from the general grid into forms used to move trains.

There were times, however, when missile strikes against “dual use” facilities gave the impression that the Russians had, in fact, targeted purely civilian facilities. The most egregious example of such a mistake was the attack, carried out on 1 March 2022, upon the main television tower in Kyiv. Whether or not there was any truth in the Russian claim that the tower had been used for military purposes, the attack on an iconic structure that had long been associated with a purely civilian purpose did much to reduce the advantages achieved by the overall Russian policy of limiting missile strikes to obvious military targets.

The Challenge

The three ground campaigns conducted by the Russians in Ukraine in 2022 owed much to traditional models. At the same time, the program of missile strikes exploited a capability that was nothing short of revolutionary. Whether new or old, however, these component efforts were conducted in a way that demonstrated profound appreciation of all three realms in which wars are waged. That is, the Russians rarely forgot that, in addition to being a physical struggle, war is both a mental contest and a moral argument.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine may mark the start of a new cold war, a “long twilight struggle” comparable to the one that ended with the collapse of the Soviet Empire more than three decades ago. If that is the case, then we will face an adversary who, while drawing much of value from the Soviet military tradition, has been liberated from both the brutality inherent in the legacy of Lenin and the blinders imposed by Marxism. What would be even worse, we may find ourselves fighting disciples of John R. Boyd."

Thank you for sharing. That was a great article.

[Tom_]

Please could you link where this article came from or the author? I can't seem to find it when I google.

I think there are so many things wrong with what it is describing I don't know where to start, including the fact the author doesn't know what 'maneuverer warfare' actually is (BTW its doesn't mean movement!).
One other obvious own goal is the author describes military districts (aligned to their own axis) employing different methods and the northern axis was a feint? I'd argue Russia didn't exercise a central mission command and the different leaders followed different objectives via their own means. This led to very limited collaboration and lack of consistent approach, such as Russification of areas. Only with the appointment of Surovikin have they recognised the need for a central commander of all Russian forces in the war - rather than each military district working independently.

I just want to caution readers that much of what is written (in my opinion) wouldn't stand up too much rigour.

[Rinco]

Tom, thanks. Interesting.

I had a lot of articles from different sources about the conflict that I lost during a recent HD failure that I have been collecting through recently, unfortunately. I normally activelly try to find different sources and perspectives from the topics I find interesting, trying to avoid or minimize the general bias we normally see, specially in the mainstream media.

I was indeed trying to recover this particular one...it has moreover a part I that I couldt recover. The only thing I did managed to recover is another section stating: "This article originally appeared in the Marine Corps Gazette August 2022 issue. Authored by an apparently frequent anonymous contributor ("Marinus") to the Gazette, it has since raised quite a ruckus among the United States military community in various online debates." I think there was a link at the rest of this statement, but the doc recovered is corrupted...if I manage to find the rest of the info I will certaintly shared it here. But anyway, I think it is still bring some interesting insights from a different perspective.

I appreciate your inputs. My only general complaint is that I dont see the same rigour for both sides of the conflict when applying analysis and, specially, conclusions (military or not)...I am not favouring any side. At the bottom of the line, War cannot be justified, but can be explained. This is indeed important if we are really willing to avoid the same disasters for the future. There is a famous sentence: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" or “Those Who Do Not Learn History Are Doomed To Repeat It.”...besides that, more than we normally want to accept or know, "our side" can have as much blood in his hands as the ones we are fighting against...but let me avoid getting into this.

To sum up, in general, my recent sources are from Jacques Baud, John J. Mearsheimer, László Bernát Veszprémy, Col McGreggor, Scott Ritter...some of them more focus on military analysis, some others more focused on the geopolitical aspect of it...very interesting and enlighting in my point of view.

Cheers,

[Rinco]

You wont find anyway much googling information...the google algorithim are just going to throw you back histories like how amateurish and drunk are the russian army, how bad are their equipment, how foolish are they commanders and so on...and at the other hand the incredible ammout of victories from the ukranian side (they are probably around Moscow by now), even worst evidences like an old man condecorated by downing a russian MiG-31 with a Pistol, the ratio of death 30 to 1 in favor of the ukranians, even ukranian bees wrecking havoc in the russian frontline...the Ghost of Kiev that was published over and over again in every western media and so on, much like every other hundreds os ghosts histories published with the least ammout of resposability for a rigour to be applied...and then we start seeing conclusions all over the place about the their equipment performance...

Anyway, just trying to bring some different perspective here and that, at the end, we will have to still wait and see the outcomes...before starting right away downgrading conventently the enemy's equipment...

Cheeers