![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Ukraine Notes - twice in as many days!
This is too big to sit on, especially if it comes to fruition soon!
The head of Ukraine's military intelligence, Major General Kyrylo Budanov, in an interview with the international affairs editor for Sky News, says that a coup is in process in Russia to depose Putin. For his bona fides, Budanov correctly predicted when Russia was going to invade. He seems to be a pretty straight-up, no-nonsense guy.
Needless to say, this is big. There is, of course, no telling what this would mean in terms of the invasion. We can hope that the best possible outcome would be a cessation of hostilities and soon a withdrawal of Russian forces, but it's possible that an even bigger nutter could take Putin's place and make things worse. Or that the coup could fail. By their nature, coups introduce a lot of instability in a country and there are frequently follow-on coups as the replacement administration is vulnerable and hasn't fully consolidated their power, so another group of opportunists can take their chance at trying to grab the reins. Why not!
The General goes on to say that Russia is little more than a large group of thugs with guns, and that the tipping point will be in mid August and the war should be over by the end of the year.
Now, could this guy be blowing PR smoke trying to encourage a coup against Putin? Obviously yes. But so far, the Ukrainians seem to have been fairly honest in their war-related announcements.
https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-war-military-intelligence-chief-optimistic-of-russian-defeat-saying-war-will-be-over-by-end-of-year-12612320
https://fortune.com/2022/05/14/does-putin-have-cancer-coup-underway-blood-cancer-ukraine-war/
A few things under the cut. And it's pretty good news, for a change.
The finale for the Eurovision song contest was Saturday, and Ukraine won! President Zelensky, perhaps overambitiously, said that they'll hold the competition in Mariupol next year. Might need an additional year or two for some reconstruction after the fighting ends. Ukraine narrowly edged out the UK's artist in the final vote.
Speaking of Mariupol, before I read the news as I was getting ready for bed about the coup and Eurovision, Russia announced that Mariupol is going to have a referendum to see if they want to join the Russian Federation. Yay? All nice and proper. Rest assured that it will be a completely fair election in which 98% of the residents vote to join Russia. Even though several thousand of the ones that voted have been dispersed throughout Russia. Absentee ballots, marvelous things.
Ukraine has launched a counter-offensive against the Donetsk offensive. You generally don't do that unless you've pretty much stopped your opponent cold and sent them reeling, it's an opportunity to really disrupt them. Since the Russian forces seem to be fairly disorganized to start with, I would think that the Ukrainians have very good chances for success here, not knowing anything about relative unit compositions and such. Just the pure "willingness to fight" between the two sides, and the Ukrainians' "Home Team Advantage" wanting to shoot the shit out of the orcs gives them a great force multiplier when it comes to launching a counter-offensive. There is one thing they have to watch out for, though. It's possible to advance faster than your rear echelon support can, and then you can get into trouble. You can compress your opponents into a tight pack that they can't escape from, and your support is too far behind you - you've stretched your resupply and medevac route thin - and possibly your artillery is too far behind to support! - and you can be in trouble! If your goal is to push out your opponent, you have to manage the advance to give them routes to pull back. Sure, kill as many as you can - they earned it, but let them have escape routes as you advance. And give time for your artillery to advance behind you so they can still support you, along with all of your rear-echelon support elements.
The head of Ukraine's military intelligence, Major General Kyrylo Budanov, in an interview with the international affairs editor for Sky News, says that a coup is in process in Russia to depose Putin. For his bona fides, Budanov correctly predicted when Russia was going to invade. He seems to be a pretty straight-up, no-nonsense guy.
Needless to say, this is big. There is, of course, no telling what this would mean in terms of the invasion. We can hope that the best possible outcome would be a cessation of hostilities and soon a withdrawal of Russian forces, but it's possible that an even bigger nutter could take Putin's place and make things worse. Or that the coup could fail. By their nature, coups introduce a lot of instability in a country and there are frequently follow-on coups as the replacement administration is vulnerable and hasn't fully consolidated their power, so another group of opportunists can take their chance at trying to grab the reins. Why not!
The General goes on to say that Russia is little more than a large group of thugs with guns, and that the tipping point will be in mid August and the war should be over by the end of the year.
Now, could this guy be blowing PR smoke trying to encourage a coup against Putin? Obviously yes. But so far, the Ukrainians seem to have been fairly honest in their war-related announcements.
https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-war-military-intelligence-chief-optimistic-of-russian-defeat-saying-war-will-be-over-by-end-of-year-12612320
https://fortune.com/2022/05/14/does-putin-have-cancer-coup-underway-blood-cancer-ukraine-war/
A few things under the cut. And it's pretty good news, for a change.
The finale for the Eurovision song contest was Saturday, and Ukraine won! President Zelensky, perhaps overambitiously, said that they'll hold the competition in Mariupol next year. Might need an additional year or two for some reconstruction after the fighting ends. Ukraine narrowly edged out the UK's artist in the final vote.
Speaking of Mariupol, before I read the news as I was getting ready for bed about the coup and Eurovision, Russia announced that Mariupol is going to have a referendum to see if they want to join the Russian Federation. Yay? All nice and proper. Rest assured that it will be a completely fair election in which 98% of the residents vote to join Russia. Even though several thousand of the ones that voted have been dispersed throughout Russia. Absentee ballots, marvelous things.
Ukraine has launched a counter-offensive against the Donetsk offensive. You generally don't do that unless you've pretty much stopped your opponent cold and sent them reeling, it's an opportunity to really disrupt them. Since the Russian forces seem to be fairly disorganized to start with, I would think that the Ukrainians have very good chances for success here, not knowing anything about relative unit compositions and such. Just the pure "willingness to fight" between the two sides, and the Ukrainians' "Home Team Advantage" wanting to shoot the shit out of the orcs gives them a great force multiplier when it comes to launching a counter-offensive. There is one thing they have to watch out for, though. It's possible to advance faster than your rear echelon support can, and then you can get into trouble. You can compress your opponents into a tight pack that they can't escape from, and your support is too far behind you - you've stretched your resupply and medevac route thin - and possibly your artillery is too far behind to support! - and you can be in trouble! If your goal is to push out your opponent, you have to manage the advance to give them routes to pull back. Sure, kill as many as you can - they earned it, but let them have escape routes as you advance. And give time for your artillery to advance behind you so they can still support you, along with all of your rear-echelon support elements.
no subject
"If your goal is to push out your opponent, you have to manage the advance to give them routes to pull back." Always a good point in anything, not just a counter-attack or other times in war. To mix metaphors: rats desert a sinking ship, but cornered rats fight.
no subject
Nah.
People misunderstand this advice.
The point is not to have them escape; the point is to manage the transition between "I believe I have an open line of retreat" and "I'm starving and unable to fight" so there's no "fight like cornered rats" intermediate stage.
Defeat happens in the mind of an enemy; it's an emotional state, it's not permanent, and it's not reliable. (Look at the entire genre of defeated-general memoirs! "I didn't really lose" rationalized in more or less the same ways, irrespective of era or conflict.) Destruction sticks. The military objective is always destruction.
no subject
I watched a video today that the M777 howitzer takes 3 minutes to set up after a move and 2-3 minutes to break down after firing. The Ukrainians aren't as disciplined as a trained crew, so it will take them longer. So destruction won't be too difficult to rain down upon them. I'll be posting it later. Very impressive field piece.
no subject
Just saw this about the M777. Some points: - The "how long to set up" doesn't matter, it's findable after it shoots. - The number I read is that counter-battery fire still takes 4 minutes, so they could be away even if takes 2-3 minutes to move - That 2-3 minutes is usually if you do things "properly" like on an exercise. Likely can fire, then haul outa there in 30-60 secs. Longer time window, but same concept when the Iraqis were firing Scuds in Gulf War. US "knew" that doctrinally, would take half-hour to move after launching, for the longest time couldn't figure out why they were never at the launch site when tried to bomb launchers. Finally the Egyptians, who had Scuds also, told US that that half-hour was in exercises, where you cleaned everything and put everything away properly; it practice, you could just throw everything on the truck (including the crew) and be outa there in seconds.
no subject
Sorry but you’ve contradicted yourself: “defeat happens in the mind of an enemy,” vs “the military objective is always destruction.”
Clausewitz said (among his other good points) was an act of violence to control the enemy’s will (italics mine). The violence is the tool, not usually the goal. People focus on the violence, arguing about attrition vs whatever, but total destruction rarely happens. Total destruction would be the death of every single enemy soldier, if not the entire population. Enemy runs away is not total destruction, enemy surrenders is not total destruction. I would argue that even if he commits suicide en mass (e.g. Japanese army in Okinawa WWII), you have controlled his will. The Japanese would have argued that they controlled their own fate and therefore their own will, but in fact, the US forces had driven them to the point of mass suicide, thereby conveniently taking them off the battlefield without the effort - and risk - of having to fight them further. Taking them off the battlefield by whatever mean is equally good, which is why it makes sense for the Ukraines to leave them a line of retreat. Ukraine is not, despite Russian propaganda, actually a threat to Russia, and most certainly not interested in invading a country many times its size. True, Russian forces could retreat, regroup, and re-attack, which is a consideration. (However, that is not the same as a defeated general/leader years later claiming “we never really lost.”) That does lead to the question of allowing them to surrender, although that would require figuring out how to care for 1000’s (10,000’s? 100,000’s?) prisoners. That may be “destruction” in the sense of no longer being a fighting formation, but not “destruction” in the sense of killing everyone.
no subject
Ukraine is an existential threat to Russia; they had a revolution in 2014 (with people having medieval armored battles in the public square!) and are busily decorrupting. It's got a long way to go, but they're already obviously more prosperous and obviously more democratic; their public institutions are strengthening, they're having a national ethnogenesis moment in this war that pushes hard for the rule of law.
Having that next door is an existential threat for the current Russian metropole elites that have been running the Russian empire these last several centuries. It's so obviously a better place to live and full of fellow Rus, it has to be possible here...
(Sure, Putin's motivation is venal -- he believes these people owe him revenues -- but his analysis is not, from inside his perspective, wrong.)
"total destruction" = unrecoverable loss of the systems that enable you to fight. It's different at nation scale (army scale, battalion scale, squad scale) than it is as individual scale, but 19th century military philosophy like Clausewitz is how you get catastrophic failures like the Schlieffen Plan or the Battle of Verdun. (Or Barbarossa, in a lot of respects.) "Attack the will" is not current thinking; current thinking is "attack the mechanism of capability".
In the case of Japan, they were starving and unable to keep industry running; one of the things the Emperor asked about directly prior to the surrender decision was the supply of concrete. (Insufficient to the planned defenses.) That was the military objective; destroy the Empire of Japan's ability to wage war. On that scale, individual island campaigns are tactics. (Rather as fighting individual battle groups is tactics on the scale of "Ukraine versus Russia".)
Destruction is not always achieved, absolutely, and it doesn't mean "you have to specifically kill every single soldier", but it does mean you don't want troops or equipment or knowledge escaping; you want to deny the contribution of those things to the enemy's warfighting capability. (ESPECIALLY since Ukraine is fundamentally constrained from attacking Russian industrial capability directly.) Which means you don't want any retreats in good order among the enemy. You want logistical strangulation and systematic destruction, in several senses.
no subject
Not an existential threat to Russia itself, but might be to its rulers, which admittedly in their minds is the same thing. That having been said, dictatorships have existed physically side-by-side with democracies without necessarily invading them.
So you don’t equate destruction with total destruction. Okay. However, cannot say it is geared to destroying the materiel means to carry on a war. Guerrilla Warfare, and Terrorism have no such aim, they are aimed at the will of the enemy. “Attack the mechanism of capability” only applies to what we egotistically called “Conventional” War. (As an aside, I hate that term, and also the term “regular forces,” because both imply that that is the important stuff, and everything else is unimportant, a side show, the ‘extra credit chapter at the back of the book,’ which why we’re so awful it. That having been said, I don’t have a better term.) The Schlieffen Plan, as originally conceived, likely would have worked, it was Von Molkte’s watering down that was the fatal flaw. The Japanese were planning on total warfare, at the level of training HS students to attack in waves with spears, when 2 cities got nuked and convinced them otherwise (admittedly that one can, and will be, argued for all eternity).
Agree you don’t want retreat in good order. You want a panic-stricken, head-long flight, being bombed and blasted, with further destruction of men and materiel (and morale), but nonetheless, you want ‘em heading home, not standing and fighting.
no subject
"When they attack, retreat; when they retreat, attack" is an attack on legitimacy against an incumbent power; it has less to do with will than it does with the constructions of legitimacy that cause people to listen to building inspectors and not interfere with the mail. Asymmetric warfare accepts the necessity of attacking less tangible capabilities -- legitimacy, morale -- as a tradeoff for reduced capability; if you're going to fight, you have to attack what you can harm.
The principles are consistent.
no subject
The people with jet fighters forget that all warfare is asymmetrical if you can manage it. Having the jet fighters when they other guy doesn't is still asymmetrical. Yes, I know that is not what they ppl with the jet fighters mean by the term, but it is literally asymmetrical.
Other than that, I'm not sure what point you are making. You've gone from the goal of war is destruction to sometimes the goal of war is delegitimization and attacking morale. Morale would be another name for will to fight.
The full quote is "when the enemy advances, we retreat; when the enemy retreats, we advance; when the enemy tires, we attack." Although can be extended to any aspect of "the enemy," Mao was specifically talking about the enemy's army, not his "legitimacy."
no subject
Exactly! When I was in elementary/high school, I always walked away from a fight. But when I was cornered, I proverbially tore the other kid apart. And that was the only fight I was in. And I maintain that attitude: let me go, or you're in a lot of trouble because I know a lot of nasty strikes and will not hesitate to use them if I have to.
no subject