This is the latest in my roughly bimonthly paid article series. It’s one you do not want to miss as the findings in this report even blew me away for reasons you’ll discover by the end of the piece.
It covers the latest RUSI release about how modern wars should be fought and won, and why the West is light years behind Russia—though the latter point is ever-implicitly made.
It’s another doorstopper in size, at nearly ~6800 words, and I’ve made about the first ~1900 free to the public.
It’s not often that I vaingloriously feather my own cap, but this occasion will count among the rare ones that necessarily must highlight the many accuracies of our previous reporting, whose validation is only now coming to light by the laggardly verifications of Western military pundits.
The following will be a breakdown of one of the latest RUSI reports on lessons learned from the Ukrainian war:
As reminder, RUSI is the Royal United Services Institute, and claims to be “the world’s oldest and the UK’s leading defence and security think tank.” And not to be confused with a prominent Russian politician of the same name serving in the Duma, the article’s author Alex Vershinin’s credentials are listed as follows:
Lt Col (Retd) Alex Vershinin has 10 years of frontline experience in Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan. For the last decade before his retirement, he worked as a modelling and simulations officer in concept development and experimentation for NATO and the US Army.
The very ethos of the arguments they make is stated outright from the beginning:
The entire report revolves around an urgent plea for the West to remold its strategic concept of warfare, which has been badly degraded and fallen out with the times by several decades of lazy misallocation of resources and reorientation toward colonial policing actions.
In the following paragraph, the author defines precisely the difference between ‘maneuver’ wars and classic attritional wars, which is relevant in understanding the rest of the exegesis:
Attritional wars require their own ‘Art of War’ and are fought with a ‘force-centric’ approach, unlike wars of manoeuvre which are ‘terrain-focused’. They are rooted in massive industrial capacity to enable the replacement of losses, geographical depth to absorb a series of defeats, and technological conditions that prevent rapid ground movement. In attritional wars, military operations are shaped by a state’s ability to replace losses and generate new formations, not tactical and operational manoeuvres. The side that accepts the attritional nature of war and focuses on destroying enemy forces rather than gaining terrain is most likely to win.
In particular, re-read the last statement:
The side that accepts the attritional nature of war and focuses on destroying enemy forces rather than gaining terrain is most likely to win.
This appears a major admission of Russia’s strategy. After all, recall how Ukraine’s strategy famously centers on “not one step back”, because even a single lost yard represents unbearable reputational costs for Zelensky’s much-admired ‘international community’. This has led to generals like Syrsky being dubbed “General 200” for his no step back attitude in prosecuting defenses like that of Bakhmut and Avdeevka, among others.
Russia on the other hand has notably used strategic retreat to such a vast extent it has left the military commentariat befuddled, as in the case of the large-scale back-to-back Kherson and Kharkov region withdrawals, not to mention the late March 2022 rerouting action from the entire north of the Kiev, Sumy, and Chernigov regions.
What this amounts to is the bitter admission that Russia has in fact been ahead of the mark all this while. Despite full-throated attempts to disparage Russia’s military choices throughout the course of the war, it has only now in retrospect become obvious to ‘experts’ that Russia has in fact been utilizing the superior common sense strategy all along, while waging the correct war.
What has it amounted to? It’s clear to see: just read the headlines. For Russia, the headlines talk incessantly of an “over abundance” of manpower and materiel. In the case of Ukraine, it’s the total opposite, the dire dearth of men. One side has competently pursued the strategy outlined by RUSI above: “The side that accepts the attritional nature of war and focuses on destroying enemy forces rather than gaining terrain is most likely to win.”
I’ve said since the beginning that most of Russia’s objectives in the war will be reached not by territorial gains but attritional ones. For instance, there’s almost no feasibly realistic way for Russia to “capture” Odessa via kinetic and direct physical assault. Going cross-river is unlikely, and having to come down from the north in Kiev would hypothetically take years. But simply baiting Ukraine to throw in all its blood and treasure into the Donbass killbox and meatgrinder, Russia stands to attrit the AFU both militarily, materially, economically, and morally to the point of exhaustion and collapse, allowing the subsequent capture of required territories via Ukrainian capitulation.
RUSI goes on with another big admission:
The West is not prepared for this kind of war. To most Western experts, attritional strategy is counterintuitive. Historically, the West preferred the short ‘winner takes all’ clash of professional armies. Recent war games such as CSIS’s war over Taiwan covered one month of fighting. The possibility that the war would go on never entered the discussion. This is a reflection of a common Western attitude. Wars of attrition are treated as exceptions, something to be avoided at all costs and generally products of leaders’ ineptitude. Unfortunately, wars between near-peer powers are likely to be attritional, thanks to a large pool of resources available to replace initial losses. The attritional nature of combat, including the erosion of professionalism due to casualties, levels the battlefield no matter which army started with better trained forces. As conflict drags on, the war is won by economies, not armies. States that grasp this and fight such a war via an attritional strategy aimed at exhausting enemy resources while preserving their own are more likely to win. The fastest way to lose a war of attrition is to focus on manoeuvre, expending valuable resources on near-term territorial objectives. Recognising that wars of attrition have their own art is vital to winning them without sustaining crippling losses.
There’s a lot of truth to unpack just in that above statement. But let’s keep it minimal by highlighting the most salient points:
The West continues thinking long attritional wars are an exception rather than the rule in near-peer conflicts.
This appears to indicate that Western military structures are no longer systemically and institutionally capable of approaching war in a manner beyond one ingrained into them in the low-intensity COIN/policing action years of the past few decades. This has been highlighted recently as the realization slowly sets in, for instance from yesterday:
Western mercenaries who visited Ukraine admitted that their combat skills had “atrophied”
This was reported by the Business Insider portal with reference to the American military.
"We've become so accustomed to the idea of fighting guerrilla wars, fighting terrorists and everyone else, that we've forgotten what it's really like to fight a peer war," said one American mercenary.
In the above article, the U.S. mercenary says no U.S. soldier is being trained or prepared properly for a modern war like Ukraine:
He said that he has seen a lot of Western soldiers struggle in Ukraine as "they already have a set idea about how things should be and everything, and it's just not that way out in Ukraine."
Another American veteran in Ukraine told BI this month that he had similar concerns. He said that his friends still in the US Army ask him for tips on how to fight with drones or in trenches, as they aren't getting training that fully reflects what is happening in Ukraine.
He explains the key difference and then echoes my own words:
He said that in many places where he fought in Ukraine, "there is nowhere that is safe," while when he was in Afghanistan and Iraq, if you were half a mile behind the front line, "you could stand outside and have a barbecue, a sandwich, and drink."
Unfortunately for the West, once an action has been repeated for that long, it becomes reflexive and institutionalized to such a deeply embedded level that there appears almost no way to come back out of it.
The reason is, multiple generations of both leaders and servicemen have been inculcated with a particular set of skills, mindsets, and approaches to the point it’s become axiomatic by nature. Furthermore, the ancillary institutional appendages which function as symbiotic conduits to the corpus of the military structure have all likewise atrophied or have simply been rerouted to totally new paradigms of functioning completely antithetical to the ‘total war’ attritional approach.
In simple terms, this obviously means that all the attendant MIC suppliers and manufacturers have built their architectures, production lines, and supply chains around the concepts inherent to the ‘Western’ style of colonial war: low quantity, high precision, high cost systems which excel at individual targeting of terrorist leaders and such, but are too finicky and expensive to maintain in attritional conflicts. This has calcified within their structures to an institutional degree.
I spoke about this at length before:
One of the key overlooked concepts I mentioned above is not simply that Russian systems are cheaper and easier to maintain, but rather that they’re built around an entirely different philosophical paradigm for warfare.
The most important of these is that the systems are built with the express understanding and expectation that they will have to someday be manned by under-trained conscripts, and thus have to be designed around the philosophy of extreme ease of use and intuitiveness. The famous example I used to highlight this is how, from the U.S. Army’s own Fort Benning reports, the Javelin had a less than 19% combat effectiveness, owing mostly to its complicated use and the recruits’ inability to fully internalize its combat parameters, such as minimum engagement distances, locking procedures, etc.:
I shared videos of AFU POWs complaining their ‘fragile’ Javelins either broke before use, or simply were discarded before Ukrainians could figure out their complex use. Russian systems are designed to be picked up and fired. This is the concept of ‘total war’—ingrained into the ethos is the basic assumption that heavy attrition of troops will eventually degrade the quality of conscripts, which will have a snowballing effect on effective usage of “complex” machinery. Ukraine is currently experiencing this, with an already totally eroded manpower resource being teased with offerings like the F-16 and other highly complex systems that would take even a seasoned veteran during peacetime a huge amount of effort to learn.
I further highlighted how Russian systems are made to be interoperable and versatile for precisely this reason: when your human capital is being attritioned, you want systems which can be picked up by anyone, including—if need be—troops from other adjacent combat roles.
To summarize: if we use WWII as an example, the West treats its fighting doctrine as revolving around 1941 as an eternal spring; Russia approaches war with the mindset that it will have to be fighting in 1944 and ‘45: the inherent understanding that materiel will be depleted, armor and vehicles worn down, the human resource attrited and degraded in quality.
Just recall all the recent bombshell revelations we’ve had about Western, and particularly American, equipment. This week it was revealed the F-35 has an unprecedentedly low 29% combat readiness, a fact even Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin refused to dispute:
This was underscored not only by the revelations about the total failure of U.S.’ GLSDBs and JDAM-ERs, but now even the Excaliburs, of which I wrote in my last report:
Today’s news brings us the bombshell that American interceptors likewise totally flopped during the Iranian attacks:
Who can forget the avalanche of validated reports about Western armor failing in Ukraine for a variety of reasons, proving it is simply over-engineered for modern purposes? Abrams, Leopards, Challengers were all created to prioritize safety at the cost of almost every other possible attribute. By creating giant ‘impenetrable’ hulks, they’ve made tanks that cannot be mass produced and are full of so many unnecessary complexities, they cannot be maintained and sustained in a total war of attrition.
The U.S., for example, prides itself on its mass logistical operations capabilities, and proponents will claim that the U.S. has the backend to sustain a full deployment of its most advanced machinery like the Abrams. Sure, they take many man-hours of maintenance and tinkering for every combat hour of deployment, and their filters have to be changed literally after every short march, as Ukrainian operators revealed many times, but the U.S. has the infrastructure to deal with it during low-intensity COIN-style policing actions.
But what would happen in a clash with Russia, for instance? Imagine a few Russian Iskanders taking out the rear maintenance centers which are essential for keeping those Abrams operational, large hubs which can’t be hidden from view or dispersed? What happens then? A NATO force under such disruptive attack would fold quickly, because their machinery is not made for quick on-the-fly sustainment. Russian tanks on the other hand can be quickly tuned up and maintained literally on the front line. Sure, they may be slightly less accurate, slightly less protected, slightly less pretty, but they’re made to endure and be sustained through a long total war of attrition.
RUSI goes on to the economic factor:
High-end weapons have exceptional performance but are difficult to manufacture, especially when needed to arm a rapidly mobilised army subjected to a high rate of attrition. For example, during the Second World War German Panzers were superb tanks, but using approximately the same production resources, the Soviets rolled out eight T-34s for every German Panzer. The difference in performance did not justify the numerical disparity in production. High-end weapons also require high-end troops. These take significant time to train – time which is unavailable in a war with high attrition rates.
The last line in particular reinforces everything I just covered regarding troop quality and training. And again, they hammer home the all-important point, highlighted below:
It is easier and faster to produce large numbers of cheap weapons and munitions, especially if their subcomponents are interchangeable with civilian goods, ensuring mass quantity without the expansion of production lines. New recruits also absorb simpler weapons faster, allowing rapid generation of new formations or the reconstitution of existing ones.
This is why I said it would be my rare occasion to gloat—they are virtually transcribing my above-posted article thought-for-thought, yet we here had it all figured out long ago, and the lagging Western thinktanks are only now starting to nibble at our crumbs. It will take years more for the knowledge to trickle down institutionally, and by then it will likely be too late.
It’s apparently of such critical importance that they go on to belabor the point in the following section as well. Under Force Generation they attempt to differentiate between the two competing world models, the quintessential ‘NATO’ vs. ‘Soviet’ school. In doing so they make some very essential and insightful points regarding the above topic.
At this point they’re just copying my homework. This is why I can confidently say readers here are well ahead of the curve of all Western thinktank and policy institutions by at least 6 months to a year. All the most leading edge, breaking advancements are unveiled and discussed here long before the midwits of the Western commentariat get their hands on our crumbs.
Virtually everything they write about the NCO differences echoes what I’ve already fully outlined not only in the earlier article, but this one as well:
But that’s not the end of the story, they go on siphoning even more droplets from our spigot:
The Soviet Union built its army for large-scale conflict with NATO. It was intended to be able to rapidly expand by calling up massed reserves. Every male in the Soviet Union underwent two years of basic training right out of high school. The constant turnover of enlisted personnel precluded creation of a Western-style NCO corps but generated a massive pool of semi-trained reserves available in times of war. The absence of reliable NCOs created an officer-centric command model, less flexible than NATO’s but more adaptable to the large-scale expansion required by attritional warfare.
However, as a war progresses past a one-year mark, front-line units will gain experience and an improved NCO corps is likely to emerge, giving the Soviet model greater flexibility. By 1943, the Red Army had developed a robust NCO corps, which then disappeared after the Second World War as combat formations were demobilised. A key difference between the models is that NATO doctrine cannot function without high-performing NCOs. The Soviet doctrine was enhanced by experienced NCOs but did not require them.
How’s that for a monster admission?
“NATO cannot function without high-performing NCOs”…which they already said would not exist in an attritional “total war” because they would be slowly attritioned out.
The ‘Soviet school’ on the other hand was ‘enhanced by’ experienced NCOs, but ‘did not require them’.
Look at it this way, NATO treats its NCOs in the same way as its finicky over-engineered machinery. They’re great at the starting block, but once things start grinding down into the attritional months and years of long peer-scale combat, you’re SOL.
Just take a look at this previous report from the U.S. Army War College:
The U.S. Army itself anticipates suffering 3,600 casualties per day in a fight against Russia.
Granted, I’ve never said one system is incomparably superior to the other—if you read the articles I posted, I’ve always taken pains to emphasize that it’s a balancing act and each has their pros and cons. My sometimes aggressive stance toward the NATO system is merely a reaction to the West’s unjustified bluster about the supernal dominance of its own approach.
In fact, in their conclusion, RUSI agrees—which comes as a major shock for such a authoritative Western institution to finally admit that their system is not simply prima facie superior:
The most effective model is a mixture of the two, in which a state maintains a medium-sized professional army, together with a mass of draftees available for mobilisation. This leads directly to a high/low mixture. Professional pre-war forces form the high end of this army, becoming fire brigades – moving from sector to sector in battle to stabilise the situation and conduct decisive attacks. Low-end formations hold the line and gain experience slowly, increasing their quality until they gain the capability to conduct offensive operations. Victory is attained by creating the highest quality low-end formations possible.
Forging new units into combat-capable soldiers instead of civilian mobs is done through training and combat experience. A new formation should train for at least six months, and only if manned by reservists with previous individual training. Conscripts take longer.
Notice what they describe above is literally what Russia has been doing in the SMO down to the word.
Using the experienced contract forces as fire/maneuver brigades while the green mobiks are mostly second echelon trench-warmers? Check.
Training mobiks for around 6 months prior to deployment? Check. Though of course there were some exceptions with many being deployed quicker, but that was often due to their having more urgent experience or training levels. But recall my earliest articles where I breathlessly hammered home the point about why Russia was not going on the expected “big arrow offensive” in early 2023, as I explained it could take upwards of 6-9 months for the troops mobilized in September 2022 to be fully trained, breaking down the training in precise steps; 1-2 months on combat and weapons re-certifications; 1-2 months on small unit acclimatization; then 1-2 months on larger formation/brigade assignment and orientation.
The next section also accords with how Russia treated its mobilization and force management:
These units should also have professional soldiers and NCOs brought in from the pre-war army to add professionalism. Once initial training is complete, they should only be fed into the battle in secondary sectors. No formation should be allowed to fall below 70% strength. Withdrawing formations early allows experience to proliferate among the new replacements as veterans pass on their skills. Otherwise, valuable experience is lost, causing the process to start all over. Another implication is that resources should prioritise replacements over new formations, preserving combat edge in both the pre-war army (high) and newly raised (low) formations. It’s advisable to disband several pre-war (high-end) formations to spread professional soldiers among newly created low-end formations in order to raise initial quality.
Not only do we have confirmation from Western thinktanks and the highest offices of Ukraine itself that Russia abides by strict brigade staffing and restoration policies, rotating troops constantly and never letting brigades get critically depleted in the way the AFU is forced to do, but recall how Russia utilized experienced Wagner vets in precisely the fashion described above. They ‘distributed’ Wagner and other experienced fighting units throughout the entire formation, adding them to both the Akhmat forces, Rosgvardia, and others, even bringing them to train Belarusian troops. For instance, recall this ISW report from earlier this year which grudgingly attested to Russia’s professional staff rotations:
In short, Russia is strictly adhering to the playbook for ideal husbanding of both forces and battlefield knowledge, wisdom, and experience—doing the utmost to make sure the utterly vital knowledge gained by the most experienced warriors is never squandered but always multiplied throughout and utilized to its fullest.
This ‘ethos’ is even reflected at the highest state offices, for instance Putin’s recent decrees that the reins of the entire Russian state should be inherited by the heroes and combat veterans of the SMO:
That is to say, the essential intangibles gained from the SMO are being vested with a hallowed quality in Russia, and this reflects on down through the entire structure of the state and armed forces apparatus.
In the penultimate section, they preface a major upcoming point by first describing the ‘modern battlefield’ as an integrated environment comprised of various types of EW and other electronic systems, repeating the well-known aphorism that it’s “easier to mass fires than forces.”
Deep manoeuvre, which requires the massing of combat power, is no longer possible because any massed force will be destroyed by indirect fires before it can achieve success in depth. Instead, a ground offensive requires a tight protective bubble to ward off enemy strike systems. This bubble is generated through layering friendly counter-fire, air defence and EW assets. Moving numerous interdependent systems is highly complicated and unlikely to be successful. Shallow attacks along the forward line of troops are most likely to be successful at an acceptable cost ratio; attempts at deep penetration will be exposed to massed fires the moment they exit the protection of the defensive bubble.
The above premise is familiar to most of us.
They go on to affirm that the successful integration of all necessary complex systems in order to advance on the modern battlefield takes a lot of work and training:
Integration of these overlapping assets requires centralised planning and exceptionally well-trained staff officers, capable of integrating multiple capabilities on the fly. It takes years to train such officers, and even combat experience does not generate such skills in a short time. Checklists and mandatory procedures can alleviate these deficiencies, but only on a less-complicated, static front. Dynamic offensive operations require fast reaction times, which semi-trained officers are incapable of performing.
The next part accords with something else I’ve emphasized in the past, in articles like this one and others around the time of the Ukrainian counter-offensive when questions arose precisely how should a modern fighting force overcome the key ‘insurmountables’ of the modern battlefield—i.e. mines, drones, omniscient ISR, highly accurate guided weapons, etc.
I explained that there is no one single silver bullet, like many Western or Ukrainian pundits seemed to be chasing—for instance, Zaluzhny with his plans of plasma-firing subterranean robots to bypass minefields.
No, the way to solve the modern quandary is by having a highly trained, highly integrated combined arms force which can simultaneously effect the successful application of all modes of battlefield operations from EW, recon/ISR, combined armor maneuver, special ops assistance, and even psychological diversionary effects.
In essence, this means being able to identify enemy anti-armor nests, batteries, drone units via ISR on the fly while your own armored fist is pushing through. But this takes incredible amounts of coordination, which relies on the absolutely fluid operation of netcentric assets that allow the forward elements to communicate intel—like newly spotted enemy/battery positions—on the fly to rear batteries, drone teams, etc., in order to neutralize them very quickly before they can destroy the advancing friendly armor group. This further extends to friendly EW which can effectively communicate with neighboring drone assets to successfully conduct area denial on enemy assets while not totally nullifying the friendly ones in the process.
All of the above is now remarkably echoed by the RUSI team almost word for word. I say this to emphasize the point that these tactics are in fact now being validated by the West’s top “experts”, belated as it might be.
From their next section:
An example of this complexity is an attack by a platoon of 30 soldiers. This would require EW systems to jam enemy drones; another EW system to jam enemy communications preventing adjustment of enemy fires; and a third EW system to jam space navigation systems denying use of precision guided munitions. In addition, fires require counterbattery radars to defeat enemy artillery. Further complicating planning is the fact that enemy EW will locate and destroy any friendly radar or EW emitter that is emitting for too long. Engineers will have to clear paths through minefields, while friendly drones provide time-sensitive ISR and fire support if needed. (This task requires a great deal of training with the supporting units to avoid dropping munitions on friendly attacking troops.) Finally, artillery needs to provide support both on the objective and enemy rear, targeting reserves and suppressing artillery. All these systems need to work as an integrated team just to support 30 men in several vehicles attacking another 30 men or less. A lack of coordination between these assets will result in failed attacks and horrific losses without ever seeing the enemy. As the size of formation conducting operations increases, so do the number and complexity of assets that need to be integrated.
But the final section is simply minblowing. It’s difficult to imagine the RUSI authors being able to tap their keys without extreme chagrin rouging up their cheeks and dampening their foreheads.
Why, exactly? Because, after explaining how the ideal contemporary combat force can effectively prosecute an offensive under the now-understood intractably thorny modern battlefield, the RUSI team in effect concedes that the Russian armed forces have in fact been applying virtually all of the outlined precepts successfully—which makes them the only fighting force in the world capable of solving the paradox of the modern battlefield thus far.
But before we get to that at the end of the section, they begin with another preface.
Deep fires – further than 100–150 km (the average range of tactical rockets) behind the front line – target an enemy’s ability to generate combat power. This includes production facilities, munitions dumps, repair depots, and energy and transportation infrastructure. Of particular importance are targets that require significant production capabilities and that are difficult to replace/repair, as their destruction will inflict long term damage. As with all aspects of attritional war, such strikes will take significant time to have an effect, with timelines running into years.
Firstly, the highlighted last sentence alone is a big admission. Here they are literally outlining Russia’s strategy, which not only they themselves have criticized before, but so have all their colleagues of the Western press. The going narrative was Russia is “struggling” in a ‘positional stalemate’—but what do we have here? Suddenly, they are admitting that Russia is in fact prosecuting a methodical, textbook degradation of Ukraine’s critical production infrastructure via deep fires as precisely prescribed by their own manual above. It takes upwards of several years, they say, to degrade your opponent’s critical facilities in a true attritional war. This is precisely what Russia is doing—suddenly that “slow moving contact line” is not so deserving of criticism anymore, is it?
They go on with the next, even bigger bombshell, crediting what we just said:
Successful attritional war focuses on the preservation of one’s own combat power. This usually translates into a relatively static front interrupted by limited local attacks to improve positions, using artillery for most of the fighting. Fortification and concealment of all forces including logistics is the key to minimising losses. The long time required to construct fortifications prevents significant ground movement. An attacking force which cannot rapidly entrench will suffer significant losses from enemy artillery fires.
Defensive operations buy time to develop low-end combat formations, allowing newly mobilised troops to gain combat experience without suffering heavy losses in large-scale attacks. Building up experienced low-tier combat formations generates the capability for future offensive operations.
Now this is stunning.
After two years of raking the Russian armed forces through the coals of envy, the most prestigious Western thinktanks now openly admit that Russia is precisely following the rulebook of successfully prosecuted attritional war?
Here they admit such a “successful attritional war” in fact consists of a “relatively static front” interrupted only by “limited attacks” with artillery doing most of the fighting—i.e. killing.
This corroborates what many others have been finally waking up to and saying—for instance, the U.S. army tank commander whose interview I recently covered. If you recall, he likewise admitted that NATO would have to switch to carrying out Russia’s tactic note for note, with small unit sized limited attacks to curb mass casualties.
But what’s more: it’s an implicit admission that Russia is in fact attritioning Ukrainian manpower just in the way we’ve all been saying. Every point they’ve described heretofore is virtually a pinpoint manual of ongoing Russian operations. Russia advances slowly while preserving its own combat power via limited, localized attacks, all the while degrading the enemy’s rear production capacity via deep fires, which RUSI admitted takes years to accomplish.
They have literally penned the manual to winning the modern war, and Russia has neatly checked off each bullet-point on the checklist. It is a remarkable acknowledgment for the West.
The second half of their final segment analogously describes word for word the opening of the Russian SMO, and then makes the final astounding admission which has to be read to be believed. Let’s note each one in turn:
The early stages of attritional war range from initiation of hostilities to the point where mobilised resources are available in large numbers and are ready for combat operations.
Check.
In the case of a surprise attack, a rapid offensive by one side may be possible until the defender can form a solid front. After that, combat solidifies. This period lasts at least a year-and-a-half to two years.
Check.
During this period, major offensive operations should be avoided. Even if large attacks are successful, they will result in significant casualties, often for meaningless territorial gains.
Check. Remember how they slagged Russia for fighting positionally while attritioning the AFU? Now it comes into perspective.
And finally, the motherlode:
An army should never accept a battle on unfavourable terms. In attritional war, any terrain that does not have a vital industrial centre is irrelevant. It is always better to retreat and preserve forces, regardless of the political consequences. Fighting on disadvantageous terrain burns up units, losing experienced soldiers who are key to victory.
Is there a facepalm big enough for the collective West to endure?
After howling jeers for two years that Russia abandoned the disadvantageous positions in Kherson and Kharkov, they now quietly admit in the fusty little bargain-bin basements of their thinktanks that Russia was in fact conducting a textbook withdrawal in attritional warfare, preserving its own key units and combat strength while only taking the fight on favorable terms and terrain.
They even go on to emphasize the point with a historical example:
The German obsession with Stalingrad in 1942 is a prime example of fighting on unfavourable terrain for political reasons. Germany burned up vital units that it could not afford to lose, simply to capture a city bearing Stalin’s name.
Sound familiar? Do Mariupol, Bakhmut, Avdeevka, and others ring a bell?
And the kicker?
When the second phase begins, the offensive should be launched across a broad front, seeking to overwhelm the enemy at multiple points using shallow attacks. The intent is to remain inside the layered bubble of friendly protective systems, while stretching depleted enemy reserves until the front collapses.
Can it get any wilder than this? They are literally describing the ongoing Russian strategy note for note down to the iota, yet pretending to impute it to some wider abstract strategic wisdom as if they were the ones to figure this out, while Gerasimov has been casually belting out these instructions since the outset.
There is a cascading effect in which a crisis in one sector forces the defenders to shift reserves from a second sector, only to generate a crisis there in turn. As forces start falling back and leaving prepared fortifications, morale plummets, with the obvious question: ‘If we can’t hold the mega-fortress, how can we hold these new trenches?’ Retreat then turns into rout. Only then should the offensive extend towards objectives deeper in the enemy rear. The Allies’ Offensive in 1918 is an example. The Allies attacked along a broad front, while the Germans lacked sufficient resources to defend the entire line. Once the German Army began to retreat it proved impossible to stop.
Well, duh. They are now describing the next phase of the Russian operation. The Ukrainian lines are finally verging on a breaking point where the introduction of a new direction and deeper advance could precipitate a snowball effect of collapse, should Ukraine fail to turn the tide by mobilizing vast numbers of new reserves, that is.
Finally, they describe Russian strategy particularly revolving around Ukraine’s 2023 summer offensive. It is why Shoigu—disparaged by many—casually reported the entire year was devoted simply to attritioning the AFU in Zaporozhye, Khrynki-Kherson, etc.
The attritional strategy, centred on defence, is counterintuitive to most Western military officers. Western military thought views the offensive as the only means of achieving the decisive strategic goal of forcing the enemy to come to the negotiating table on unfavourable terms. The strategic patience required to set the conditions for an offensive runs against their combat experience acquired in overseas counterinsurgency operations.
They further top it off by admitting that the West is incapable of conducting warfare in such manner as their officers find the preceding to be counterintuitive to their ‘training’.
In essence, they conclude the West has no clue about modern war and that Russia is not only writing the rulebook, but is schooling the ADHD-stricken truant of the West.
They finish with these final thoughts:
Unfortunately, many in the West have a very cavalier attitude that future conflicts will be short and decisive. This is not true for the very reasons outlined above. Even middling global powers have both the geography and the population and industrial resources needed to conduct an attritional war. The thought that any major power would back down in the case of an initial military defeat is wishful thinking at its best. Any conflict between great powers would be viewed by adversary elites as existential and pursued with the full resources available to the state. The resulting war will become attritional and will favour the state which has the economy, doctrine and military structure that is better suited towards this form of conflict.
If the West is serious about a possible great power conflict, it needs to take a hard look at its industrial capacity, mobilisation doctrine and means of waging a protracted war, rather than conducting wargames covering a single month of conflict and hoping that the war will end afterwards. As the Iraq War taught us, hope is not a method.
The “middling power” clearly refers to countries like Iran and North Korea, which may appear economically weak compared to the financialized and inflated West, but which have vast productive capacities for the most basic and essentials arms, like artillery shells, that can sustain an attritional war indefinitely. This is an obvious warning to the West that Iran is fully capable of prosecuting a war through its proxies in Yemen and elsewhere that would drown the hegemonic powers militarily and economically over generations by turning key global chokepoints into endless, intractable battlefields of attrition.
This RUSI report represents the final epistemological apotheosis, the ‘coming of age’ of all Western actualizations about the true nature of Russia’s military approach—and despite many hiccups, one might even say brilliance—in the Ukraine conflict, and by extension all modern warfare. The biggest question it leaves us with, which they enunciate fully in the final paragraph, is what the West can do to catch up to these axiomatic necessities. Unfortunately for them, all the steps prescribed by RUSI are at odds with the general direction of the West’s development, both economically and societally.
For instance, they focus on mobilization for protracted war—i.e. that the West should institute conscription—on industrial capacity, and the MIC culture; but these are all things too far gone to be corrected. They are precisely the areas where the West has given up the fight. Their human capital is at a historic ebb, with the West’s nascent generation of youth hating government and military service alike, not to mention being altogether mentally and physically unfit for it owing to a culture of decay. Their economies, too, are plummeting, with defense industries hollowed out by a financialized rictus which only serves to feed gluttonous defense firm giants whose portfolios and design philosophies now entirely revolve around merely profit and stock enrichment. Such behaviors calcified over the course of several generations cannot be swiftly undone—it would take a like number of generations to reverse the damage and change course.
Mind you, Russia too has its share of problems and corruption: but it’s combating them far more actively. Not least of the evidence is the recent firestorm surrounding deputy defense minister Timur Ivanov and a host of associated characters who continue to be rounded up for corruption as we speak. Just in the past week there have been several Russian government figures arrested for swindling funds, proving Russia is cracking down hard on corruption, while the West rewards it. Once again, I refer you to the earlier video of Putin, who is clearly laying out his vision of Russian society and governance after the end of his reign. It’s his vision of building a new Russian state based on the pillars of proven loyalty and service to the nation and its people.
Of course, a decaying combined West is still a major threat to Russia no matter what philosophical and strategically-conceptual advantages Russia enjoys; and this is why the situation will remain dangerous for the foreseeable future.
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"Propaganda is used to support military operations, not the other way around."
There's no doubt but that you've been a highly informative, and informed, source of honest and accurate data regarding the SMO/WW3 and inter Russian - USA military affairs, Simplicious.
You've earned the lap of honour. :)
Excellent work from you.