Text taken from a Live Journal post by BMPD
[ColonelCassad] The Drive, an American web resource, published an interesting article by Howard Altman "A Sobering Analysis Of Ukraine's Counteroffensive From The Front", which contains critical thoughts on the offensive actions of the Ukrainian armed forces, expressed by a senior fellow at the British International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) and the Center for New American Security (CNAS) Franz-Stefan Gadi after his trip with a group of military analysts to the war zones in Ukraine.
A team of military analysts recently visited the front lines in Ukraine to get up close and personal with the most brutal ground war in Europe in generations. After spending time with Ukrainian forces fighting under massive Russian artillery salvos, helicopter and tank attacks, drone strikes and minefields, one of them returned with a sharp assessment of why the Ukrainian counter-offensive is moving more slowly than some expected.
Franz-Stefan Gady, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Strategic Studies and the Center for a New American Security, says it became clear to him after his trip to Ukraine that the country is struggling with how to use its forces. Once in combat, Ukrainian troops sometimes display poor tactics and a lack of coordination between units.
In doing so, they have to contend with still deeply entrenched bureaucracy, strife, and constant reliance on "Soviet-style thinking." And then there are the Russians who “put up tough resistance.”
Conversely, there is no single reason - such as a lack of more Western weapons, including long-range weapons systems and additional mine-clearing equipment - that would be the reason for the "lack of progress," the analyst argues.
“The narrative that Ukraine’s progress so far has been slow only because of a lack of arms supplies and support is one-sided and not shared by the military we spoke to who are actually fighting and in command on the front lines,” Gadi said in an analytical Twitter post he published on July 18 and detailed later in this article .
Let's not forget that the United States and its allies have already provided Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars worth of military aid with promises to keep deliveries.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials have pointed to minefields in particular as a key factor in the pace of advancement, but Ukrainians say they are making slow but steady progress.
Gadi visited Ukraine with a group that included Konrad Muzyka, an independent defense analyst specializing in Russia and Belarus and director of Rochan Consulting; Rob Lee, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Foreign Policy Studies, and Michael Kofman, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment and Chief Fellow at the CNA.
It's one thing to study conflict, Gadi said, but it's priceless to get into a war zone and talk to those who fight there.
“We have formed an informal research group to get a better understanding of the war based on field research,” Gadi told The War Zone on July 19. “We just think it was important to go there to really get a feel for what was going on and talk to people to get a sense of the environment, to get an idea of the people involved in these fights on the Ukrainian side, to see the terrain and so on.”
This allows researchers to "always come back with lots of new ideas that you can't get from afar," Gadi said. “We always come back with more new data that we can use in our analysis to get a better idea of the conflict. So we went to different parts of the front line.”
According to him, during the visits they visited the Zaporozhye region and Donbass, although he declined to provide more specific details.
Gadi shared the group's thoughts in a long 16-part tweet that is as insightful as it is concise.
Here are Gadi's conclusions:
1.) By and large, there is an infantry battle (squad, platoon and company) with artillery support on most of the front line. This has several implications.
First: Progress is measured in yards/meters, not kilometers/miles due to mobility restrictions.
Second: Mechanized formations are rarely introduced into battle due to the lack of means to ensure their maneuver. This includes an insufficient number of demining equipment, air defense equipment, anti-tank systems, etc.
2.) Ukrainian forces have not yet mastered combined arms combat on a scale. Their actions are more sequential than synchronized. This creates various problems on the offensive and, in my opinion, is the main reason for the slow progress.
3.) Ukrainian forces defaulted to a strategy of attrition, relying on sequential fire rather than maneuver. This is why cluster munitions are critical to maintaining the current intensity of the fire: it weakens the Russian defenses to a degree that allows for maneuver.
4.) As most observers know, minefields are a problem. They limit the room for maneuver and slow down the advance. But much more than the minefields themselves, Ukraine's ability to break through Russian defenses is affected by Ukraine's inability to conduct complex combined arms operations at scale. The lack of a large-scale integrated combined-arms approach makes Ukrainian forces more vulnerable to Russian ATGMs, artillery, etc. on the offensive. So it's not just about weapons. I simply did not observe any systematic destruction of the Russian defensive system.
5.) The nature of this offensive is likely to change only if there is a more systematic approach to breaking through the Russian defenses, perhaps combined with a severe degradation of Russian morale, which could lead to a sudden or gradual collapse of the Russian defenses. I suspect that in the absence of a sudden collapse of the Russian defenses, this will remain a bloody struggle of attrition, with the gradual introduction of reserves in the coming weeks and months.
6.) There is limited evidence of systematic deep attacks [meaning long-range missile strikes] that methodically destroy Russian C2 [command and control] / [depots] of ammunition.Despite rationing on the Russian side, ammunition is available to them, and the Russians seem to have a pretty good ISR [information, observation, reconnaissance] of the battlefield.
There was also no need for the Russians to deploy operational reserves to repel Ukrainian attacks. There is also evidence of a reduction in the impact of HIMARS strikes due to effective Russian countermeasures (this is important to keep in mind in relation to assessing any potential tactical impact of the delivery of ATACMS missiles).
Russian forces, even if severely weakened and out of ammunition, are likely to be able to delay or repulse Ukrainian platoon or company-level attacks unless these attacks are better coordinated and synchronized across a wider front line.
7.) The quality of Russian troops is different. According to the Ukrainians we spoke with, attrition has hit them hard, but they are defending their positions well. They were quite flexible at the tactical level and generally defended themselves in accordance with the Soviet-Russian doctrine.
8.) Artillery [ammunition] rationing in Russia is real and is happening in reality. Ukraine maintains firepower in barrel artillery, while Russia maintains superiority in MLRS in the south. However, only one local fire superiority in some calibers is not enough to break through the Russian defenses.
9.) The additional influx of weapons systems (e.g. ATACMS, air defense systems, tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, etc.), while important for sustaining the war effort, is unlikely to have a decisive tactical impact without adaptation and better integration.
Ukraine will have to better synchronize and adapt current tactics, without which Western weaponry will not be tactically decisive in the long run. This is happening, but the work is going slowly (most of the NATO-style military would have even more problems with this than the Ukrainians, in my opinion).
10.) The above is also true for actions to overcome mines and obstacles.Additional demining equipment is needed and will be useful (especially portable demining systems), but is not critical without better integration of fire and maneuver at scale.
Again, I can't stress enough how difficult this is to pull off in wartime.
One-sided explanations for failures (eg lack of demining equipment) do not reflect reality. For example, some Ukrainian attacks were stopped by Russian ATGMs before they even entered the first Russian minefield.
11.) There is a shortage of artillery barrels [to replace them] [in the Armed Forces], which is difficult to solve, given the pace of their production and delivery times.
12.) So far, Ukraine's approach to this counter-offensive has consisted primarily of direct attacks on Russian positions, supported by rudimentary deep strikes. And no, these direct attacks are not just reconnaissance attacks.
13.) There is evidence of tactical cyber operations supporting the closure of kinetic chains of destruction. This is cyber intelligence that helps identify and track targets on the battlefield. Starlink remains absolutely key to Ukrainian command and control.
14.) The quality of the Ukrainian officers and non-commissioned officers we met seems to be excellent, and morale remains high. However, there are some problems with the quality of the troops, arising from the recruitment of increasingly less able-bodied and older men.
15.) The narrative that Ukraine’s progress so far has been slow only because of a lack of arms supplies and support is one-sided and not shared by the military we spoke to who actually fight and command on the front lines.
16.) It goes without saying that in a war of attrition, more artillery ammunition and armaments are always needed and must be constantly supplied.Western support for Ukraine must certainly continue, as there is still the prospect that the counter-offensive will succeed. But the front line soldiers we spoke to know only too well that the lack of progress is most often due to the specific use of forces, poor tactics, lack of coordination between units, bureaucratic red tape/strife, Soviet-style thinking, etc... - and the Russians putting up stiff resistance.
We asked Gadi to dig a little deeper into a couple of the comments he made.
On July 18, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States Armed Forces, General Mark Milley, told reporters thatThe US and its allies have trained 17 brigade combat teams — 63,000 Ukrainian troops — in combined arms combat. Other brigades are in the training phase.
But Ukraine is having trouble on the battlefield executing these coordinated large-scale actions because of the tight training timelines when it faces "one of the most powerful armies in the world," Ghadi told us.
Ukraine “probably does a lot of combined arms operations at the small unit level, but I think it needs to scale up,” he said.
The US is “probably expecting some results with all the help and military hardware it has provided,” Gady said. -“The main idea here was to train mechanized brigades equipped with Western weapons in combined arms combat. I think this approach has had some setbacks. I'm not sure it failed across the board. I think it just needs a more concerted effort."
However, Gadi was quick to point out that “no Western armed forces can carry out this kind of combined arms action on a large scale, with the exception of the United States. But even the United States military will find it very difficult to break through these defensive layers, because no Western army in the world currently has the experience of breaking through the defenses in depth that the Russians have built in southern and eastern Ukraine.”
For a long time, since they first arrived on the battlefield in Ukraine, the M142 HIMARS high-mobility missile systems have acquired an almost mythical status for Ukraine. The GMLRS they fired had a longer range (about 50 miles) than the available Ukrainian MLRS or cannon artillery, and had a devastating effect, especially on Russian logistical hubs.
But Russia has found ways to counter the GMLRS, Gadi said when asked to elaborate on what he said in his post.
“Russian electronic warfare seems to be affecting the successful application of GMLRS,” he told us. - "The Russian layered integrated air and missile defense seems to have had an impact too, and it has also been able to shoot down some of those GMLRS."
As a result , "I think it's fair to say that the HIMARS effect from last summer is definitely over," Gady said. “So I think we should keep this in mind when we think about other long-range precision munitions that have been provided to Ukraine. Russia will sooner or later find opposition to them.”
The views put forward by Gadi and his colleagues provide a far more sober picture of the Ukrainian counteroffensive than what emerges from official statements from Kyiv and the Pentagon.
When asked to sum up his assessment, Gadi told us the following.
“This is a hard-fought battle characterized by high rates of attrition, and Ukrainian forces are slowly getting results,” he said. “The potential for Ukrainian military success still exists.”
Gadi said he and his colleagues would provide more information about their trip to Ukraine in the future.