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.
