Ukrainian trenches
Michael Peck – Business Insider Apr 14, 2024
- The days of rapid tank and infantry advances deep into an enemy’s territory may be over.
- The US Army must be prepared more for fights that resemble WWI, an Army veteran argues.
- Any advancing force must move with a defensive bubble against enemy firepower, he argued.
Modern weapons have become so accurate and lethal that soon armies will not be able to maneuver rapidly on the battlefield.
Instead, they will trudge forward under the protection of defensive “bubbles” designed to stop drones and missiles. According to this vision, swift battlefield maneuvers will be replaced by grinding wars of attrition where victory goes to the side that has the most firepower as well as the most resources to replace losses.
It’s a grim vision of warfare that has more in common with the slaughter of the First World War than the mechanized blitzkriegs of World War II and Desert Storm, where infantry and armor backed by airpower seized vast territory. But it’s a future the West must prepare for, warns Alex Vershinin, a retired US Army lieutenant colonel, in an essay for Britain’s Royal United Services Institute think tank.
The Ukraine war has demonstrated that — at least for now — firepower dominates maneuver. Russian and Ukrainian have painfully learned that with surveillance and attack drones constantly overhead, emerging from cover is dangerous and slow. Long-range guided missiles and shells can decimate armored columns that dare to thrust through minefields and layered defenses covered by artillery and airpower. Instead of sweeping offensives, the Ukraine war has become a largely static conflict where immense preparations are made for attacks that might gain an obscure village or a few square miles of territory before the attacker halts to dig in and regroup.
“It is easier to mass fires than forces,” Vershinin said in the RUSI analysis. “Deep maneuver, 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.”
“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,” said Vershinin.
This moving shield would consist of layers of defense systems, including air defense against drones and missiles, as well as electronic warfare to jam those drones and missiles by flooding their control frequencies with electronic noise. But this protection comes at the cost of rapid maneuver. That bubble must be carefully set up to provide interlocking coverage against multiple types of threats, and move in lockstep with the column.
“Moving numerous interdependent systems is highly complicated and unlikely to be successful,” Vershinin said.
Coordinating all these different weapons and jammers also requires skilled staff work that even advanced armies may lack. “Integration of these overlapping assets requires centralized planning and exceptionally well-trained staff officers, capable of integrating multiple capabilities on the fly,” said Vershinin. “It takes years to train such officers, and even combat experience does not generate such skills in a short time.”
As an example, Vershinin cites a hypothetical advance by a platoon of 30 soldiers. This would require multiple jammers to disrupt enemy drones, guided rockets, and communication systems. Engineers will have to clear a path through any minefields, and the infantry will have to coordinate with friendly artillery and drones. Failure to do this could be catastrophic: Russia is now firing 10,000 artillery shells per day, and this year it has already dropped 3,500 big GPS-guided glide bombs that have devastated Ukrainian positions.
“All these systems need to work as an integrated team just to support 30 men in several vehicles attacking another 30 men or less,” Vershinin said. The preparations needed for a brigade- or division-sized attack — the kind that are needed to achieve decisive victories on the battlefield — can only be imagined.
All of this raises a deeper problem, especially for the West. Without maneuver, war becomes a battle of attrition, like the First World War, or siege warfare as with the Union and Confederate armies in front of Richmond in 1864. These kinds of wars are fought over years and cause slaughter on a massive scale.
“The West is not prepared for this kind of war,” Vershinin said. “To most Western experts, attritional strategy is counterintuitive. Historically, the West preferred the short ‘winner takes all’ clash of professional armies.”
To some extent, all wars are attritional: what ultimately destroyed the Third Reich wasn’t a few defeats like Stalingrad and Normandy, but the cumulative losses from six years of relentless fighting. However, sustaining a war of attrition requires an emphasis on production, mobilizing resources for the long haul, and the ability to continuously replace losses. Victory goes to the side that can wear down the enemy while maintaining its own strength.
“The military conduct of war is driven by overall political strategic objectives, military realities and economic limitations,” said Vershinin. “Combat operations are shallow and focus on destroying enemy resources, not on gaining terrain.”
One question is whether the Western public will tolerate this mode of warfare. Vladimir Putin and his generals may not lose any sleep over suffering nearly 500,000 casualties in two years. But the average American or European may feel differently.
Comment – Apr 14, 2024
Although this website is run by a former Special Forces soldier with extensive combat experience, he doesn’t profess to be a military “expert”. However, he would take issues with claims in the above article that Russia has sustained “nearly 500,00 casualties”.
Of course Russia has sustained losses but probably only a fraction of the half-million claimed. There has simply been no need for Russia to wantonly sacrifice so many men.
This may also explain the Russian Army’s slow progress, it is proceeding cautiously so as not to take unnecessary casualties. Unlike the Ukrainian Army, which is now fighting desperately with poorly trained and inadequately supplied troops.
The claim that Russia had sustained 500,000 casualties comes from an official Ukrainian website that also appeals for money to fight Russia. That should tell you all you need to know about how objective those casualty figures are.
One of the genuine authorities on this war, former Trump advisor Col. Douglas Macgregor put Ukrainian losses at 400,000 by Aug 2023. It could well be over half-a-million now.
At a guess, I would say that the writer of the above had been instructed to emphasise Russian losses. Possibly using Ukrainian casualties to muddy the waters. Ed.
Hi Rixon. I agree with your comments. An in-depth accounting of Russian casualties by a group called MediaZona, working in conjunction with the BBC, puts Russian casualties at about one-tenth of that claimed by the Ukrainians. Neither MediaZona nor the BBC are even remotely pro-Russian but their methodology and conclusions are generally accepted by even pro-Russian analysts.
Business Insider, tut!
Michael Peck is rather late to the party. In the Dombas, the Nazis had 8yrs to dig in, bunkers 70ft deep, ect. So the Russians have used the right tactics in the Dombas, but not elsewhere. No initial shock and awe, because weak Putin wanted a legal humanitarian war, and to preserve the lives of Russian soldiers and Russian speaking civilians, so it’s been slow, for reasons.
The last time Nazi Amerika fought a proper ground war, was Vietnam, and even then, the enemy used countless tunnels to move supplies and launch surprise attacks, and the US lost, partly down to lack of political will.
Douglas MacGregor and others have said the US doesn’t have the ability to do a Desert Storm, even though this was just a show war against a phantom enemy. But logistically, the US can’t do it. Even though pundits have been saying this over the last two years, its not like the US lost this ability in 2021, or something. No, this decline is decades old. These supply flights into Israel are only happening, because the various local factions aren’t attacking the bases where they land.
You could also argue, these supplies aren’t just for Gaza, but also for Iran. The US might not get involved directly, but they could refuel Israeli planes, or give them planes to do this, with contracted US pilots.
Where Israel needs the help, is refueling. They don’t need US planes, and this isn’t going to be a boots war, apart from those boots already on the ground.
The US knows that any sizable deployment of US boots in Israel is a recipe for disaster.
The only reason for the WW1 style war in UKraine, is the 8yr preparations by the Nazis. We keep hearing top Nazis in Amerika and the UK, such as Lordy David Pecker Pigs Head Cameron, say ‘funding UKraine is a great deal, because we’ve not lost any men’, the UKrainian Nazis are dying for us.
Not only do the Nazis not have the capacity to fight long dug in ground wars, their thicko sheeple aren’t interested.
I am sure there are think tanks working very hard at ways to make the thicko sheeple fight. It could be very ugly, and even a revolution, depending on the tactics used by the Nazi elites. There’s no need for mobilisation in Russia, when 30,000 turn up at the recruitment offices every month, their free choice, because the Russian sheeple understand what the Nazis are trying to do to Russia.
America. Tried to do war on the cheap by inventing wonder weapons, then got so greedy they wouldn’t make enough of them. Now they just impede. Started off a gunslinger ended up a shit-flicker.
Tricky is probably broadly correct about the disproportionate Ukraine casualties but it has to be difficult to gauge exactly how high the bill is for them or for the Communists.
What is clear is the Ukrainian desperation for more soldiers and manpower which tells the story.
Tricky Rixon has been proved right with his emphasis on the moving international situation as opposed to doing what so many websites do which is to put the emphasis the other way round by keeping more of a focus on domestic events. As every day goes by it is looking more and more like WW3 is here.
Gee Wizz… honestly!
Everybody read George Orwell but didn’t get it?
“The war is meant to be permanent, not to be won.”
The US “Defense” establishment is a money machine but it only works if the wars go on and on. Do I have to tell you that after Vietnam there was a massive recession… it was really Great Depression 2.0 but it has been effectively buried.
So WWI “Permanent Trench” warfare would be perfect for the current OWNERS of the war machine. Soldiers and sailors don’t count. Bankers do.
The war will last till the country has no assets left to leach. Then the machine will go simeplace else,
White America was an effective slave of the Jews, but is going out of existence
“Without maneuver, war becomes a battle of attrition,…These kinds of wars are fought over years and cause slaughter on a massive scale.” … And there it is! “Slaughter on a massive scale” is, was, and always will be the goal of the satanic Jew and their “globalist” cucks until they are exterminated, confined to a remote island, or launched into the f*cking sun.
The illuminati planners planned these wars and psyops many years ago, for example 911, the start date for the building of the WTC was 1968 and the end date 2001 in other words 33 years= a 33 degree freemason. The war in Ukraine was
in actual fact planned as a psyop in order to put fear into the masses and of course to enrich the coffers of the Rothschild central bankers and their wealthy corporate affiliates. The masses are very gullible as nobody seems to have worked out that the idea that the Ukrainians attacked and damaged the Russian Nordstream is totally fake and of course the puppet leadership in Ukraine wants people to believe the lie. I noticed that the footage of the supposed methane gas bubbling up from the sea is pretty bad CGI . Of course because of the fake climate change lie they have demonized methane gas ho ho that is really laughable as every little pile of leaves and compost heaps give off methane gas and I can assure you that methane is not hazardous, of course they say that this is also caused by animals defecating because they want to create meat from stem cells, the truth is they see the farmers as dangerous because they are self sufficient . If the Ukrainians had damaged the Nordstream the Russians would have anihialated them proto.
This reverting back to trench warfare almost qualifies as a Monty Python skit/s. like ” How Not To Be Seen ”
Unless adopted…the status quo is more dead Goyim…which may actually be the overall objective.