Ukraine, 4 weeks in, My 2 cents.
The first war I tracked live was the 1973 Yom Kippur war. With no more than a library card to read local news papers, I was enthralled with the details of the battles being fought. Made notes on some items that were mentioned once, and then seem to fade away from the spotlight, only to have crushing results later. Like the trapped Egyptian 3rd Army.
The reason I am bringing this up is that I also noted, with some humor, my first bit of propaganda. At one point, the Egyptians boasted a large number of Israeli aircraft was shot down. A larger number than the entire Israeli Air Force. My thought was, “So Israel is maintaining air superiority with a negative number of aircraft”. A life lesson learned at the age of 15.
Fast forward to the last 4 weeks. It is really clear, no matter what is going on the ground, that Ukraine is winning the propaganda war. Every day has fresh videos of tanks being ambushed, and air craft being shot down. Hooray for the good guys!
Things I have noticed. When you see videos of tanks being destroyed, there always seems to be a lack of supporting infantry. Or, despite the numerical advantage in the air, no Russian air support. Why is that?
One explanation is that columns of tanks properly supported by infantry or aircraft are not getting ambushed. Or such ambushes didn’t go well, and don’t make for good footage. An aberration of observation.
And why is this condition allowed to continue? Despite how they are behaving, Russians are not stupid. They know what is happening and why.
I think part of the problem is their use of BTG’s, or Battalion Tactical Groups. This is a new concept for me, as most of my readings is with WWII and Cold War Soviet Union forces. At first, I thought these were ad-hoc created brigades from parent divisions consisting of something like 2 infantry battalions, a heavy weapons infantry company, supported with a tank company, an artillery company and maybe something else. About 1,500 men assembled on demand for the mission at hand.
But the truth is worse. They are not some ad-hoc brigade sized formations. They are some ad-hoc battalion sized formations. Silly me, it’s even in the name. BTG’s are about 800 men in size. Representing about 500 combat soldiers, with a couple of tank or artillery companies and about 150 command and administration. And on paper, this looks like a tidy little combat package designed to do the warfighting. But the problem still exists, that these formations don’t train like a combined arms group. Each of their parts are just doing their own thing. And if one of these battalions takes a hundred casualties, it’s combat value goes to zero.
So why are they trying to fight this way? These BTG’s all spawn from a parent brigade or division, though mostly brigades at this point. Why not commit the whole brigade to do the job? In the Soviet days they would be committing Corps to do the job they are asking a BDG to do.
The root cause is because they do not have the manpower in the army to fight with divisions and corps anymore. The BTG’s are an attempt to “do more with less”. But they are trying to do it without the training to make it work. The Soviet conscript system has been dismantled, and remantled, but is substantially smaller in both numbers and quality of the conscripts. The Conscripts are now only under arms for a year vice 2 in the Soviet era. There are two waves of conscripts per year. So half the conscripts currently have been in the army for 6 months or less. Most conscripts spend their time doing cleaning, cooking and other house keeping work.
Their second source of troops are “Contract NCOs” These are previous conscripts and that sign up for long term, or civilians interested in an adventure. These are the bulk of the enlisted combat troops. Their combat skill levels are across the board. Their motivation is centered around the fact they are paid fairly well against an economy that has been ailing for more than a century.
Then we have the junior officers. The junior officers are the backbone of the Russian army. They spend 4 years in academy, which is much more geared for war than our own academies, and upon graduation, is assigned to a platoon. His primary job at that point is to train the platoon. This platoon is a maybe a mix of conscripts and contract NCO’s, or just one or the other. What it is not, is a western style platoon of men with common training methods by senior soldiers.
His academy training is geared for this job, but he doesn’t have the experience to back up that training yet, for a job to train, or the experience to lead the men into combat. It is only by virtue that this junior officer is well trained that the system works at all. Because otherwise, it’s a clusterfuck.
So this concept of BTG’s could work. But the soldiers don’t know how to fight as one, and they are built out of parts that are broken.
They are really trying to fight modern warfare like Americans, but ignoring everything that the Americans do to create their army.
And when a BTG stands toe to toe against an under equipped, but highly motivated Ukrainian brigade, it tends to fall apart.
Going into history, this is similar to the American Infantry division in WWII. The division as it was built, was fairly bare bones. 4 regiments, 3 infantry and one artillery, and about 4 supporting battalions. Transport, HQ, Medical and Engineers. It was designed to be loaned independent battalions for specific missions as needed, from the army. Expecting tanks? Here is an AT battalion. Assaulting a position? Have a tank battalion. Facing an entrenched position, have a couple more artillery battalions.
The dirty secret of the American army in WWII was that there was an independent battalion for every divisional battalion. Almost a hundred tank battalions on their own. When the 101st arrived in Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, it came with 4 additional Army artillery battalions, two engineer battalions and a Tank Destroyer battalion.
The problem with this “just add water” design is that the division commander didn’t train to use the extra parts. And there was a mind set to use the ad-hoc assets up, because they were only temporarily assigned. In the end, many independent battalions wound up permanently married to the divisions. By wars end, most infantry divisions had a private tank battalion. Some older divisions, like the Big Red 1, grew to corps size with 3 tank battalions and 4 extra artillery battalions.
This is what the Russians are trying to do, on a smaller scale.
On to another thing.
A couple of days ago, for a short period of time, it seemed like the Russians posted their actual casualty numbers on a web site. About 9,500 dead, 17,000 wounded. It was quickly taken down.
It could be misinformation, but to what end? It’s not a number favorable to Putin’s narrative. It only looks good compared to Ukraine’s claim of up to 16,000 dead. The dead are about in the middle of the range of other casualty estimates I have seen for the Russians. The wounded surprised me somewhat.
A while ago, I was building a database on the American Army WWII. One of my sources had the number of KIA and WIA for each unit. After a while, I realized there was a pattern. About 4-1. For every 5 casualties, 1 died, 4 were wounded.
Fast forward to the Iraq/Afghanistan wars. I noted the ratio WIA-KIA was 10-1. Despite the lethality of the weaponry increasing, the wounded to killed ratio was actually better. I attributed this to better body armor. But with Ukraine, I am going to have to reassess that view.
For the Americans, the better body armor was certainly a factor. And beyond the wires, they always wore it. But it could also be the type of warfare we were involved in. Iraq/Afghanistan was mostly fought “asymmetrically” If we found them, we would surround the position and take them out. But otherwise it was endless patrols, in armored vehicles, punctuated with IED’s. Not a lot of direct fire battles.
Ukraine is a hot war situation, and mostly direct fire battles. And if the Russian casualty numbers of 9,500 killed to 17,000 wounded hold up, that is less than 2 wounded per man killed, this gives an insight on just how deadly modern weapons are on the battle field. Or how poorly the Russians are trained. We don’t have reliable KIA/WIA numbers for the Ukrainians to compare against at this time.
Which segues to the other armor. A lot of destroyed Russian tanks do not seem to have the protective reactive armor I have seen on them over the decades. I see the reactive armor on Russian deployment videos, presumably put out by the Russians, but not on the disabled tanks in the Ukrainian videos. Where did it go? Did they all blow off when the tank was killed? Were they removed oh-so carefully by the Ukrainians? Each reactive armor square is a bomb. It’s something you want to handle very carefully.
Or were they not there to begin with? If so, then why? Compared to Chobham hulls, reactive armor is cheap. More importantly, the Russians know how to make them. So why are they not in use? I am guessing that the deployment videos are show pieces, but the reality is that the Russians did not expect a long war and like their logistics, didn’t feel the need to “armor up.”
I also suspect that reactive armor is a maintenance nightmare. A couple hundred bombs secured to a rattling hull for weeks? Who wants that? It could be that none of the combat MBT’s have them.
Or, it could be that the tanks were never retrofitted with them, and the money to do so was stolen by corrupt officers.
