Adapting to a paper tiger threat

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I find it remarkable that Russia failed so badly at mobile warfare.

The initial invasion was more akin to the Czechoslovakia occupations than to mobile warfare. This failed in the North due to stern opposition and enhanced rasputitsa (mud season reinforced by intentional flooding of some areas).

There were some -successively less ambitious- two-pronged encirclement attempts in the East. All of them failed to even only breakthrough on both sides.

Ever since that, Russia has gained very little terrain, and only so with massive use of artillery and very slow advances to limited objectives.

There's practically no hints of the mobile warfare competence of the Warsaw Pact armies left that was feared by NATO throughout the Cold War and rested on what the Soviet Union had shown to be capable from late 1942 to autumn 1945, especially Operation Bagration and the Manchurian Operation.

It's going to be most important to understand the reasons for this displayed low capability. To understand the reasons may help us understand how long this ineptitude will last (Can it be reformed away in a few years?) and inform us about indicators that tell us when it gets or got resolved.

My suspicion is that they are too stretched thin to be able to form operational reserves, as even mechanised formations need to hold the front-line. They may also have hoped to break Ukrainian morale through artillery bombardment during the summer.

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Russia is still the main land threat to Europe, as China is far far away. EU and European NATO land warfare capabilities should be very largely oriented against Russian aggression against NATO/U. We can safely cut military expenses to a lower level if we properly understand how weak Russia is and why it is so weak. It makes absolutely no sense for our societies as a whole to go into a military spending frenzy now. Military spending is government consumption. All unnecessary (excessive) government consumption is a bloodletting against our own prosperity.

We can radically change into WHAT land power capabilities we spend our military budgets in order to achieve maximum efficiency when and if we understand the Russian land warfare capabilities. Right now it appears that a few key weapon systems suffice to counter Russian armoured vehicles and to largely degrade the effect of Russian air power over the battlefield.

Infantry is not really an arm of decision; it sweeps, observes and holds, and that's it. Massed infantry attacks seem not only inappropriate, but also plainly inefficient.

This leaves artillery. Russian artillery excels with quantity while being largely devoid of quality. We need to counter this quantity, and better than by just blowing up some munitions depots with GUMLRS missiles as the Ukrainians do. Russia can cope with this by dispersing its munition dumps and improved counterespionage may enable proper hiding of the same.

We know the tools of the trade that counter artillery. Artillery radars, sound ranging and flash spotting (the latter especially by aerial platforms) can be used to detect firing artillery and mortars. Other sensors (mostly airborne ones) can be used to track the artillery or mortar system as it changes position after firing. Precision-guided munitions and up to a certain range also dumb or merely trajectory-corrected artillery fires can engage the tracked artillery or mortar system when it's not on the move any more.

We could also jut detect the position and then immediately send fibre-optic guided missiles out that could engage the firer system even on the move. Nothing came of German and American efforts to make such a missile system ready, but the Serbians have one and the Japanese could offer us theirs for license manufacturing. The Israeli systems of this kind are at most suitable for counter-mortar fires due to short range.

So we could fix some of your shortcomings (spare parts stocks, deficient battlefield air defences, munition stocks), put some emphasis on defeating a quantity-rich Russian artillery and focus on getting the force design most efficient based on what we know. Nothing of this requires a sustained increase on military spending in free Europe.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

*: Russia overran Georgia in 2008, so apparently the Georgians had a spectacularly bad army, below even Arab standards. Well, they were trained by the U.S. armed forces, which was historically a near-100% guarantee to lose the next (and often also the ongoing) war. All Western army training missions were disasters or are disasters-in-waiting. They seem more serve to corrupt the indigenous army with preparations for a Western-controlled coup d'état than to be a real military training mission.