The latest iteration of continuing patterns
Why Western armies dominate conventional battlefields, why the purpose of NATO remains relevant and why Russian autocracy persists with a strategy of conquest-and-domination that keeps failing.
Military situation as of 1 August 2022: Wikimedia commons.
At the time of posting, it is the 159th day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That means that the invasion has already lasted half again as long as the 105-day Finno-Soviet Winter War of 30 November 1939 to 13 March 1940.
The disastrous failure of the Russian attack on Kyiv, and the successful Ukrainian defence of Kharkiv, were reminiscent of the initial failures of the Soviet attack on Finland. Though Russian forces did successfully break out of Crimea and establish a land connection to Crimea that extended past Kherson as well as seize the most Eastern border lands of Ukraine.
The second stage of the invasion was the Battle of Luhansk from 18 April until the announced “operational pause” of 7 July. Using its massive artillery superiority, the Russian army ground forward very slowly to complete its conquest of the Luhansk oblast.
This 80-day battle was territorially underwhelming in its consequences. At no stage were Ukrainian forces cut off. On the contrary, they retreated in good order without any significant encirclements being achieved. Moreover, 80-days is a longish battle by modern standards.
The Battle of the Bulge, the last German offensive on the Western Front in World War II, took 40 days from German attack to completion of the Allied counterattack. Operation Bagration, the destruction of German Army Group Centre in 1944, took 58 days.
Furthermore, the experience of the Eastern Front in the Second World War was that shattering opposing forces required smashing through lines and encircling entire formations. The grinding Russian advance against field fortifications in the Battle of Luhansk has been more reminiscent of the First World War.
The Brusilov Offensive, the biggest Russian victory of that war, took 109 days. Fought across what is now Ukraine, it shattered the Austro-Hungarian army but at great cost. The Ukrainian army has clearly not been shattered by the Battle of Luhansk.
The take-away of the invasion so far, is that when Ukraine can deploy Western-style fluid manoeuvre tactics, it wins. When Russia can use its artillery superiority in situations where Ukrainian forces cannot use fluid manoeuvre, Russian forces can advance even against determined resistance.
The effort that the United Kingdom in particular has put since 2015 in training Ukrainian officers and NCOs has clearly been successful. Whether that can continue to be instilled in the mobilised Ukrainian reserves in a way that will permit effective Ukrainian counterattacks we may be about to find out, now that US HiMARS and similar long-range mobile artillery is permitting the Ukrainians to target ammunition depots, bridges and command centres. Simply forcing ammunition to be trucked up from further away reduces the Russian ability to mobilise its artillery advantage.
Russian advances have been reminiscent of the Iraqi advances in the latter part of the Iran-Iraq War and the Iraqi army’s 207 day battle to retake Mosul from the Islamic State. The basic pattern being prepare, pound, advance, stop: then repeat. It is how to use artillery superiority with a very “top-down” command-and-control structure.
To contrast battle styles: in Western armies it is typically the case that senior NCOs can call in air and other support that takes a colonel in Arab armies. It is why Western armies trounce Arab armies in conventional warfare. For the Western way of warfare is essentially to create fluidity on the battlefield, creating and utilising much quicker observe–orient–decide–act (OODA) loops. (An advantage that Western armies do not have over insurgent forces.)
To put it another way, there is nothing special about the Israeli Defence Force: they are just a Western army that gets more practice. In the 1991 Gulf War, Western troops with little or no battlefield experience, but lots of training, were able to trounce Iraqi forces that had garnered years of battlefield experience in the 1980-8 Iran-Iraq War.
Revealing though these operational comparisons may be, it is the strategic persistences that are the most striking feature of the Russian invasion.
Lord Ismay (1887-1965), the first Secretary-General of NATO, articulated the purpose of NATO as keep the Americans in, the Germans down and the Russians out. It turns out, the end of the Cold War did not change any of that: it just expanded the number of countries willing to invest in keeping the Russians out. The grotesque failure of “Mutti” Merkel’s ridiculous energy, military and migration policies demonstrates that the Germans remain prone to being in thrall to extraordinarily bad ideas. While, for all the manifold problems of the American Republic, the US remains the only Power able to strategically coordinate Europe (despite French pretensions).
The most striking strategic persistence, however, has been Putin utilising yet another round of the basic Russian strategic pattern of attempting to achieve territorial defence through expansion via conquest and domination; including the elimination of buffer states. A strategy practised across centuries and which has been a striking and persistent failure. So much so, that when Putin became President of the Russian Federation, its borders were in some areas further east than the borders of the Russian empire were when Peter the Great (r.1682-1725) died.
In a short essay published on Helen Dale’s Substack, I go through this “one-trick pony” record, why Russian autocracy has been one-trick pony and why the one-trick keeps failing.
ADDENDA For revealing details on the strengths and limitations of Arab armies, read Kenneth Pollack’s 1996 PhD thesis.
ADDENDA SECUNDUS: On the matter of the Muscovite state being a Christian farming polity that adopted some institutional patterns from pastoralist empires, the use of the pastoralist Cossacks as bodyguards, shock troops and order-enforcers increases the congruence.