Ukraine - implications for Russian military going forward
 

After 6 weeks it is fair to say that

1. The Russian Army has not done well on any measure
2. The Airforce is only partly engaged
3. The Navy is peripheral

Whatever happens I think we can assume that a major revamp of the Army will be necessary - they need a complete change in tactics, organisation, doctrine and a lot of different kit. This will be forthcoming - it has to be for a country that has so much land

I'd expect that the other two branches will probably suffer - funding for new aircraft and new ships will be diverted to the army rebuild for quite a while - possibly 10 years

An interesting civilian viewpoint for the Russian Federation to consider.

Jack

Well I doubt anyone in the Russian Military will be boasting about performance to date in 12 months time

I sincerely hope the Russians follow every piece of your expert military advice. They'll be f****d for decades.

Perhaps, but they simply won't have the money. Gas and oil sales will bring in much less money from India and China, they may have to pay reparations and they will have lost a significant percentage of their most intelligent, creative people overseas.

The probability of a major restructuring, re-equipment and doctrinal change is ZERO.

Mercifully, the RF is still hampered by Soviet-era thinking and leadership. Finance will be further restrained by sanctions. And the population, despite propaganda, doesn't give a sh1t.

”Lessons Learned” only works if someone is listening. And Vlad won’t be listening, just casting blame in all directions, as Stalin and Hitler did.

Also the senior officers with battlefield experience that would be necessary to effectively reset the Russian Armed Forces are also dying at a unbelievably high rate on the front lines in Ukraine. The REMF's left behind are going too be disproportionally toades and yes men

Is not the performance or lack thereof mostly a consequence of the mistaken assumptions made by the leadership, on the basis of clearly invalid intelligence?
The army was deployed, but not prepared for a fight. There was a post somewhere that the soldiers had their dress uniforms in their kit, presumably for the victory parade in Kiev.
The multifront assault with an inferior force exemplified by the Antonov airport attack has to be a clear indication that no serious fight was expected.
Why this was accepted by the planners, despite the evidence to the contrary given daily by the bitter fighting in the Donbas, is a mystery.
It does suggest that the planning was done in a bubble where dissent was not welcome.
At this point though, I believe that wishful thinking is no more, Russia is consolidating its forces in the eastern part of the country, presumably in preparation for annexation.
Whether the Ukraine army that has been tied down in that area can withdraw before it gets surrounded a la Stalingrad is not clear. Given that the evacuation of civilians from the area has not gone at all smoothly, any retreat will be fraught.

REMFs?

Most 'teeth arm' (or wannabe teeth arm) folks disparagingly refer to Logistics types as "REMFs" don't they?

Perhaps if Russian Logistics specialists are among those left over their military might be better prepared and organised in the future than they have been.

Infantry win battles, logistics wins wars...

Ukraine - implications for Russian military going forward


Would "going backwards" not be more appropriate?

Putting stuff on shelves or on a pallet is not logistics, it is just moving stuff as ordered. Logistics takes place much higher up the tree and is the planning.

It does seem that way. It would be an interesting scenario if Ukraine made a move to annex a bit of Russia on their northern border to make up for it, although that is somewhat unlikely.

ISTR that Wellington was particularly strong on ensuring Logistics, even though he wasn’t a Loggie.

Every component has its place in the ORBAT, and many military commanders have failed in the objectives due to a lack of focus on Logistics. And Admin and Medical, come to that, albeit to a lesser extent.

Salute!

Somehow I read the rule about politics and religion on these forums versus basic aero and weapon loadout and sales to countries and such.

The conflict discussion should move, IMHO.

I trained against, got shot at and hit by "x" country weapons and am not an armchair expert. But tactics, strategy and military philosophy should have its own forum.

Gums sends....

Smart soldiers never refer to support personnel that are actually supplying effective support as "REMF's" because they fully understand they only go as far and are only as effective as the logistics chain. "REMF's as a descriptor is usually saved for those lazy, clueless, bureaucratic, often thieving, no value added rear echelon ass-hats that just get in the way. Good armies are usually pretty effective at eliminating or sideling "REMF's" . Putin's army, I would suggest has incentivized the kinds of behavior that diminishes combat effectiveness. The senior officers KIA have learned the hard way the price for being complicit in that....

It isn't so much that a change in tactics, weaponry or organization is the major problem. It's the whole rotting fish that stinks, from the head down. As long as the nation is run by an authoritarian without any checks of power, and enabled by a kleptocracy, I can't imagine any subordinate in the chain can effect real change. Add a declining population and potentially a weaning off fossil fuels, and it looks like this may be the last conventional arms attempt at territorial subjugation this regime under the Russian flag attempts.

You could have said that after WW2, after Afghanistan.. the list goes on and they use the same sh*t time after time.


A book I read on their WW2 tactics, they would work out the German firepower, how many rounds per minute they could fire, how many minutes to cover the ground, that would give them a number of soldiers that they would need, then they would add to that so regardless of if they killed with each shot they would still be overrun.

We have not been without our issues ourselves over the years. Go back in history and you will find the scandal of the Sherman tank (or Tommy Cooker as it was known). It had a rubbish 75mm peashooter main gun, poor armour and would go on fire in an instant due its petrol engine. I remember seeing a Germany officer being interviewed after the war who had been in charge on an 88mm anti-tank battery. I think he said his unit took out 18 Shermans, but had to retreat in the end because another 6 kept coming when he had run out of ammunition! In that one event you had the wonders of American industrial power on display - they had the wrong tank, but in the right quantities to overwhelm the opposition. The Russians have some of the right equipment but seem completely unable to run a campaign. Russian losses historically have been eye-watering, but as a nation they do not seem to flinch. In the space of a month they have lost the same number of dead as they did in the whole of the Afghanistan conflict and still they do not seem to care. Their Air Force cannot operate and their tanks are either out of fuel, stuck in the mud or being destroyed by the Ukrainians using UK and American anti-tank weapons. They are facing economic collapse, shortages of basic goods and food - not to mention utter humiliation on the battlefield. Yet most of the population are drinking the Kool Aid and believing they are liberating Ukraine for Nazi oppression and that it is the Ukrainians who are destroying their own cities to curry favour with the West. It is simply insane, but that is a mere detail in the eyes of most Russians. Crazy stuff.

To be fair to the Sherman, when it was first fielded, it was a superior tank to the Nazi Mark III and Mark IV tanks - it wasn't until the Mark V (Panther) and Mark VI (Tiger) showed up in quantity that it was totally outclassed. According to a book I read on the subject, the reason for the lousy baseline gun on the Sherman was that US doctrine going into WWII was that you wouldn't fight tanks with tanks - rather tanks were primarily to be used for infantry support. Against tanks, you wanted to use tank destroyers (and the M18 Hellcat and specially the M36 were quite effective at destroying the later model German tanks, although they shared the glass jaw aspects of the Sherman on which they were based).
Everyone raves about the Soviet T34 tanks, but aside from a better gun, it really wasn't that much more effective against the Panther and Tiger tanks than the Sherman. On the eastern front, it was pretty common for T34 tanks losses to be 8-10x what the Germans lost - the difference being the Soviets were producing massive amounts of the T34 (roughly as many T34s were built as the M4 Sherman) and could afford the losses, whereas the German tanks were so difficult, expensive, and time consuming to build, they were only able to produce them in much smaller numbers and were unable to keep up with their losses.

There has been a lot of nazi oppression talk. I find it difficult to believe that the Russians would really care if there was a bunch of nazis in Ukraine oppressing the population. I suppose, they could have some sympathy for fellow Russians if that were the case. But the idea seems more like another case of what I call the russian truth(ie a lie that is so obvious that no reasonable person would ever believe it). The real truth is that much of the Russian population wants the glorious Russian empire back in order to be a world power and they are willing to kill a lot of people in order to do it.

I have every reason to believe that Putin has been eagerly waiting to invade Ukraine since the day the soviet Union fell apart. It is a fallacy that this is being done because of some sort of a threat of invasion of russia by NATO. The only threat from NATO expansion is reducing the number of former soviet republics and warsaw pact nations that Russia can invade. That is why they are upset about NATO expansion. Probably more so now as we can see that any decent sized country can probably hold off the Russian army(although suffer immense damage) based on what we now know about their lack of capability. There is no way they will dare invade a NATO country now. Even Moldova might be reasonably safer now than it appeared a couple of weeks ago(it might have become a western front from Russians in Transdeneistra).

It is apparently the consensus that the Russian Army is poorly led and hugely wasteful in its tactics. There are certainly plenty of early invasion images that would support that thesis, but there are countertrends.
In particular, we should look at the gradual progression of the Russian invasion in the eastern regions, where the insurrection had attracted the Ukrainian Army's focus and where there has been intense fighting even before the invasion..
We hear little about that front, but the French Defense Dept maps indicate that the Russians are advancing there and have cut off parts of the Ukraine forces.
It seems to be a meat grinder type of combat which the Russians are prepared for. The dismissal last Thursday by Zelensky of two of his senior military officers for being 'traitors' may be a reflection of these realities.

Separately, I have to doubt the claim of economic collapse or of food shortages.
Given that Russia was a major exporter of foodstuffs, energy and raw materials, with a large perennial trade surplus, the various sanctions seem to me to do more damage to us, the buyers, than to them, the sellers. Russia will certainly have fewer imported consumer goods and Russian industry will suffer, forced to retreat to older technologies or reinvent workarounds of the embargoed systems, but that is not unusual in Russia.

I'm not the best at this but Stalin and Hitler ruled by fear. Also Stalin eradicating his best generals before the war (the fear of him led to his painful death) also the Russians had the numbers to defeat the germans. General Pattern even halted his advance in France due to logistics shortages. We are mostly getting our information from the Ukranian side so the only accurate information is from the military in what they'd be prepared to release (even then they can bias this). Also we are seeing the determination of the Ukranian people to resist the Russian invasion and their kindness to under equipped and fed Russian troops, so the propoganda fed by Putin was false. We have allot more information sources these days than say the Falklands War (less). Then go further back to Vietnam (less) or WW2 and WW1. How many of these Russian Generals were killed and how? I wonder if perhaps there was some like Von Stauffenberg trying to kill Hitler. We'll probably never know. I just hope this war can end peacefully?

- all intentions and plans are known long before
- all moves can be observed anytime and reacted to by the opponents
- small missiles have become too capable to go on with cold war style traditional tank columns and helicopter operations
- whatever is of value and intended to be occupied gets destroyed before in the process
- there is not enough military knowledge at the top, surprise blitz move led to under equipped troops
- lack of diplomatic preparation and alliances moved conflict and cost to hurt/destroy own economy
- new equipment works not as good as advertised, even huge quantities of hardware and total superiority by size cannot be efficiently used against some guerrilla style warfare
- upcoming public opinion issues with victory day next and returning troops spreading "different" information
- small opponent can win info war

Surely you are talking about the EU, or the IMF, or the WEF (or indeed even our cousins - both north and south of about 49 degrees north - over in the Americas)??

It does appear that Western political leadership enjoys an ostrich like ability to not recognise the strategic dangers of being reliant on supplies from abroad, especially from countries who can turn their coats in a flash. Both Russia and China have demonstrated that they cannot be trusted, while being reliant or dodgy African nations for material such as lithium is likely to be just as dodgy. The opposite argument is that it is economically justified to buy where the material is cheapest, but that can be akin to taking the free heroin and then complaining when it is no longer free... We are seeing the same thing with the world wide semiconductor industry: much of western industry is reliant on the output of TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp) - including some devices for the F35! Yes, you can keep spares, although hopefully e MoD learnt a lesson with Clansman radio ICs when an obsolete line closed, a 'last time buy' made and all the parts put in one warehouse which burned down!

The western strategic reliance on globalisation got scaled back since about 9-11 already. The US is -or has been depending on the shale oil production- even a net oil exporter. Wages in China have become too high for qualified personal together with increased automation and logistics troubles, IP theft and there is no more advantage to move there. Chip factories are already moving back to the US like server farms. Globalisation is slowing down if not turning around from a western perspective.
However there is one big nation that is getting more reliant on other regions and supplies and this is China itself.

Russia relies on raw materials exports for some time to come. It would need to have more hard currency friends instead of less. Military might and threats like against Scandinavia recently might not be the way to go.

"- all intentions and plans are known long before
- all moves can be observed anytime and reacted to by the opponents
- small missiles have become too capable to go on with cold war style traditional tank columns and helicopter operations"

Interesting point as they certainly apply in Europe but not necessarily everywhere (eg Mali) - its the density of communications that seems to be the major factor.

On post war changes I can see a case for more infantry rather than armour TBH - as for the air war the Russians don't seem to be fully engaged compared to say Syria

How is the infantry going to get around without armour? In particular, how are they going to be protected during the advance?

Armor is not helping much even now, as we see in gory detail from the Ukraine videos.
Fast forward another decade, much cheaper sensors and much smaller, yet more capable drones and the individual soldier will be as threatened as the tank is today.
There is an obvious revolution pending in the military, but it is held up by the reluctance of the US to lead the way.
That is quite rational, such a revolution would eliminate the US's current advantage in military power. Resetting the forces for the new era favors new entrants, as Turkey and their Bayraktar have just demonstrated.

Too simplistic. What is to say that effective anti drone technology will not be developed or that armour will not be improved through the use novel materials and redesigned against attack from above. Much as I like air power, how do you occupy and dominate the ground without boots on it? There are limits to what a drone can achieve and it can only stay around for so long.

Several posts in this thread, elsewhere on the forum and in other spheres express opinions gloating about failures on Russia's side.

I venture to say that it is a VAST miscalculation to conclude that after a mere 35 days (April 3 - Feb 28, 2022), Vlad has shot his bolt.

Underestimate him and his people at your peril.

"How is the infantry going to get around without armour? In particular, how are they going to be protected during the advance?"

Over time (or rather history) the weapons mix changes. Invention of the machine gun led, eventually to the tank - but things never stay static. It may be, that in some areas, driving around in a very large, expensive tank is no longer a great idea (think Battleships post 1940). Dispersed infantry are a lot harder to hit with drones etc and the cost of using smart air launched missiles to attack small groups of infantry is prohibitive.

The pendulum will probably swing back once cheap anti-drone defences are available - I don't think tanks and armour will disappear at all - but I think they'll be less important for the next 20-30 years

What would suggest Putin still has in his armoury to counter any apparent underestimation of he and/or the Russian military?

Aside from the nuclear option (which, let's be frank, isn't an option as Putin doesn't get to actually "push the button", just order someone else to order someone else to) what has he got in his toy box that would worry anyone with effective counter air and counter battery assets?

What combat experience has the Russian military had since WW2 to mould their doctrine? Their experience has mainly been either putting down civilian uprisings or asymmetric warfare, in both cases relying upon overwhelming numbers to try and pacify a numerically and technologically inferior enemy.

The tactics they are utilising in Ukraine hark back to WW2 and, other than their 'prowess' at reducing civilian population centres to rubble (never a good way to win hearts and minds), they have been found wanting against an enemy who are benefitting from the technology and advice from countries with far more breadth of combat experience than Russia.

While things change in warfare, there are some constants. Infantry in some form or other has existed for centuries, there is no reason to believe this will change while ground still has to be taken and held. The evolution in is in the speed of manoeuvre. That requires the ability to get from one place to another safely and in a coordinated manner which in turn requires the use of an appropriate vehicle that can deliver forces in sufficient numbers. There will also be a requirement for system to support and protect the infantry, this seems to be another constant going back centuries.

that said, the Ukrainians do seem to have "kept their secrets - secret!"


https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....295c85755b.jpg

I was talking about the Russians.
Never in history the US have publicly shared that much TS information about upcoming military conflicts and detailed moves early on. It feels like the average western newspaper reader for months ahead knew more than the Russian military about what was intended and what would happen in detail.
I did not claim this war would be over soon and that there won't be nasty surprises.

Your perspective may be quite right, but at least currently the technologies for drones (sensors, motors, powerpacks, processors and associated software) are progressing much faster than those for improving armor or for anti drone weapons.
It implies that the battle space will become much more lethal for everyone, as there is no good way to distinguish combatants from civilians. Drones can commit war crimes without anyone being directly at fault.
How that is reconciled with the subsequent effort to occupy the ground or to make peace is very murky.

I see the main problem for negotiations and any peace treaty is that everything written and promised was broken at will. How can the West trust anything signed by Russia ever again? UN, Helsinki, Budapest, recent talks. Will we need to simply fight it out as there is no more credible diplomacy left?

LH that's the problem in any war that doesn't finish with total occupation of the other country. Occasionally you get Regime change (Argentina 40 years ago) that increases your confidence but essentially if it's the same people on the other side all you're doing is stopping the fighting now but with a probability of renewed fighting in 10-20 years.

You start to think France v Germany - 1870, 1914, 1939

I'm finding it hard to think of any conventional capabilities which Russia possesses which couldn't be relatively easily countered by any country with a well trained mil with access to western military tech. Air power? Not much to worry about here, and easily countered by even mid grade (by NATO standards) air defences. Ballistic and cruise missiles? Unlikely to be used in any number to be a major problem, and again potentially negated by air defences. Naval forces? Nothing much to worry about here either, apart from their use as a platform in launching the aforementioned cruise missiles. Tanks/AFVs? Again, nothing here of any note apart from their numbers, easily countered with man portable systems. Artillery? Problematic given the numbers employed and their indiscriminate use, but comparatively limited in range.

As for the prospects of Russia acquiring any peer capabilities across these areas, I can't see them doing it on their own given their shambolic efforts to date, not to mention their economic strictures. The only way they could realistically do it is by working with China, possibly buying their kit with all that could entail.