The War of the Trains
by Carlo Graziani
As war in Ukraine approaches the 7-month mark, those of us who have been watching it through the lens of Adam Silverman’s nightly Ukraine War Updates on Balloon Juice, and discussing each night’s take, have seen the conflict gradually transform itself. The initial clash seemed nearly unintelligible, built as it was from contradictory media and Twitter narratives. But time and better information—together with the opportunity for real-time Jackal education in modern warfare derived from what rapidly became our nightly discussion seminar—wrought a more stable overall picture of the conflict, with definite themes that we can now see to have been threaded through the narrative since the beginning, even though these themes were not perceptible at the outset.
What I propose to do here is describe my own synthesis of this picture. I am indebted to Adam for his tireless work as convener and material seeder of the seminar, and to many Jackals, whose ideas I ruthlessly farmed for this piece1. This synthesis is almost certainly not the same overall scheme that Adam, or any particular Jackal, might choose for the task, and many details are probably still arguable. Nonetheless, I believe that now is a good time to sum up where we’ve been by distilling what we’ve learned from those nightly reports-cum-seminars, because we can see clearly much that was originally obscure, and because a few possible futures are more clearly discernible now as a consequence.
One feature that I find very striking is the importance that logistical considerations have played in the war since its earliest days, and the slight appreciation that these considerations receive compared to the flashier “kaboom-war” stories of drones, tanks, artillery, fighter aircraft, and so on. I think these considerations have shaped the campaign to a very great extent for both combatants, and I’ve therefore chosen them as organizing themes of the narrative. If you were wondering why “trains”, that’s why, although as we’ll see, there’s quite a bit more to the train part of the story. Railways have played an outsized role in this conflict, to an extent that seems almost anachronistic: one must look to WWI, or the European continental wars of the late 19th Century, or the US Civil War, to find comparable examples. And yet, while one occasionally catches a dutiful reference to a “key railway junction” as a battle site in the Ukraine war, this aspect of the conflict has passed largely under silence. I hope to illustrate here what’s been missing from narratives that don’t emphasize rail supply as a key factor in the war.
Prologue: Misleading First Impressions
It’s useful to set things up by looking back at a few things that many people were very sure about that we know now were actually quite wrong. This in not an exercise in “neener-neener”—I was wrong about a few important things myself—but rather is helpful in that it reminds us not only of how much has happened since February, but also of how much our understanding of the war has changed since then.
An Unfair Fight: The original Russian attack on Ukraine on 24 February was a four-theatre assault—Kyiv, Kharkiv, the Donbas, and the Azov/Black Sea coasts—whose scope and ambition must certainly have reminded many in the West of their nightmares about the Cold War Soviet Army when it stood for decades, poised in apparent readiness to sweep down and envelop Western Europe. In those first few weeks, despite the early signs of Russian reverses, it appeared to many that a straightforward accounting of the balance of forces condemned Ukraine to being crushed by sheer mass.
There was much that was wrong about this judgment, some that was obvious at the time, some that would only become clear later. Immediately obvious was the inaptness of the comparison between the modern Russian ground forces and the Cold War Soviet ground forces: the former is tiny compared to the latter (less than one-sixth the size, without even counting the rest of the Warsaw Pact), and organized completely differently. The Russian ground forces started out with about 400,000 of their active personnel signed up as “contract servicemen”, with the remaining 200,000 or so being draftees. The force was designed so that the former were intended as the fighting edge, the latter as service personnel. The intention behind the overall design of the force is that this army was to be used for short high-intensity wars against massively overmatched adversaries along the Russian borders, and certainly not for extended conflicts against NATO member states (such as Turkey) who would certainly invoke Treaty collective defense provisions. The assumption was always that victory would be assured within weeks, a few months at most. A prolonged conflict would expose the expiration date of this army. Clearly, the Russians believed that Ukraine was the type of state that their army could easily victimize in short order.
Somewhat less obvious—although I can claim that I did see this at the time2—is that the Russian army had never trained for an operation of the scope and complexity of the assault on Ukraine, and while they would certainly find 40-year old experience on the conduct of such operations in old documents, field manuals, and in memories of doddering officers, lack of maneuver and logistics practice at scale would certainly be a problem for them.
The subtle error that even experts on force design appear to have made at the time is that almost nobody took the trouble to examine the force structure of the Ukrainian army. This sounds almost too bizarre to write down now, but it’s true. There were fantastic amounts of analysis by world experts on Russia’s military, which gave accounts and estimates of manpower, weapons, tactics, doctrine, strategy, logistical practice, history, politics, and so on, including lively debate, uncertainty bands on quantitative estimates, really an intellectual cornucopia. But on Ukraine, other than some sparse commentary by a few NATO officers who had actually been working to train up Ukrainian Army officers since the Russian 2014 invasion of Crimea, it was extremely difficult to find anything beyond what Wikipedia had to offer. Still, Wikipedia’s entry on the Armed Forces of the Ukraine is instructive: one can find there the interesting fact that Ukraine has had Universal Military Training (UMT), lasting 18 months for each conscript (as opposed to Russia’s 12-month training), and has had UMT continuously since independence, with only a brief interruption. This is significant, because Ukraine also has an inactive reserve, which all draftees enter after completing their 18-month training, and remain in until age 55.
What this means is that throughout the war, Ukraine has had potentially vastly more manpower at its disposal than Russia. Getting that manpower back into uniform, trained back to spec, and deployed usefully as part of an orderly pipeline was always going to be a complex problem. But it was never going to be the kind of issue that Russia is confronting now as it attempts to refill its depleted army ranks by means of manic improvisations intended to take the place of a force design process that would ordinarily require a decade of time and billions of dollars in government budgeting.
An Inadequate Supply Line: There was a great deal of anxiety—“hand-wringing” is too harsh a term for worries expressed by people whose heart is in the right place, but certainly high emotion—over the apparently slow response by the West, and especially by the Biden administration, in supplying needed weapons to the Ukrainian army in those first, desperate weeks. Especially when the Ukrainians themselves, from Zelenskyy (“I need ammunition!”) on down, were asking for everything, and “all” that was showing up seemed to be NATO hand-held infantry anti-tank and anti-air weapons, as well as the entire junkyard of Warsaw Pact hardware still in the armories of Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, the Baltic Republics, etc., there was a lot of public recrimination against a U.S. policy attitude holding that not blowing up the world in a thermonuclear war remained a priority. Critics argued heatedly that this was merely an excuse to slow-walk supplies urgently needed to save Ukraine from the assault.
What we know now is that there was no slow-walk. Instead, there was was a long game, with an orderly logistical plan to transition the Ukrainian armed forces from their Warsaw Pact-era weapons inventory to one composed of NATO-standard weapons, in the middle of a shooting war, without actually disrupting the war effort. If you think about it, this is an incredibly difficult feat to pull off, but if you look at the successive Pentagon drawdown lists of hardware that have been supplied to Ukraine since June, you can see the steadily accelerating progress of that effort, as NATO-standard artillery, aircraft munitions, electronic warfare gear, and other high-end weaponry have gradually pushed the boundary out. Most of these elements come with long logistical tails that include eye-watering spare parts lists, maintenance schedules, tech mechanics training, operator training, tactical training, integration with other systems, and probably more that I don’t even know about. Without some of these items, these weapons systems aren’t that useful. Without others, they stop working in a few days to a week, which is a bad investment of a multi-million dollar weapons system. Operating a HIMARS unit is not too dissimilar from operating a high-performance aircraft—you don’t just drive it around like a pickup truck, occasionally picking up some missile six-packs or gas. It needs all that infrastructure, or you might as well not bother.
That’s what was happening in April and May, while the Warsaw Pact junkyards were getting emptied out: a lot of logistics was getting set up to turn Ukraine into a NATO client state. It wasn’t showy, and the payoff was not going to be apparent for several months. But the Biden administration did not use fear of thermonuclear war as an excuse to do nothing: it used risk of thermonuclear war as a boundary to delineate a space within which it could operate. Inside that space, largely in secret, it began to move in a way to help the Ukrainians create the basis for their eventual victory in the war.
The Rear Areas: The Western attention to Ukrainian supply is only part of the logistical story of the war. From the very beginning of the conflict, in a way that was not evident in the nightly footage of detonations, desperate actions, and depressing outrages, limitations of logistical practice of the Russian armed forces impeded the invasion effort, and became the immediate focus of attention of the Ukrainian Army (abbreviated UA here) general staff. The UA knew the outlines of Russian logistical thinking well from Soviet days, having only really turned to the very different Western logistical practices under NATO tutelage since 2014.
The radical difference between the logistics and supply practice Russia and that of the West is described in this excellent and readable recent academic paper published by the Scandinavian Journal of Military Studies, which is updated with lessons from the war in Ukraine. Another great resource is this well-timed post on the War on the Rocks blog from November 2021. The crucial aspect of Russian practice, and the Achilles heel that the Ukrainian quickly identified, is the reliance on the rail network for all long-haul transportation of military supplies—“long-haul” being distances above about 140 km/90 miles. Russian logisticians therefore establish logistical distribution hubs at railhead served by high-capacity track, then use trains on lower-capacity track (often single or double track) to convey those supplies, which are crated but unpalleted, to trucking hubs within 140 km of the front, where they are unloaded and dispatched by truck to their final addresses.
The map that I’ve assembled above from the excellent personal railroad site of Yuri Popov, a physics instructor at the University of Michigan, shows the rail connections from Russia to Eastern and North-Eastern Ukraine. I’ll be referring to it as we go along. Note one conspicuous feature, however: there actually aren’t that many available connections between Russia and Ukraine.
Necessity driven by political geography and rail connectivity forced the Russians to supply the entire war from two distribution hubs: Belgorod in the north, and Rostov-on-Don in the south. If you look at the map again and focus on the Belgorod lines you can see why the Russians are so pissed off about their failure to take Kharkiv. Had they succeeded there, they might actually have won the war by now, because Kharkiv would have given them easy interior access to the Ukrainian rail network, which the Ukrainians themselves have been using to great effect to exploit their interior lines of communication. The UA would have been forced to tear up those lines to stop the Russians, greatly degrading their own war effort, and they probably would have lost the entire Donbas by May anyway. By holding Kharkiv, the UA kept the Russians moving around the periphery of the rail network, and held the interior for themselves. It was a crucial move in the war, that we can only really see the significance of now.
A feature that resulted from this outcome is the fact that for most of the war, the Russian army eastern forces have been supplied from Belgorod through a rail line terminating at a trucking hub at Kupyansk3. This corresponds on the map above to the line annotated by the middle arrow. The Southern theatre has been largely supplied from the Rostov-on-Don hub, by means of rail lines through Crimea passing over the Kerch Straits bridge, through the rail junction at Dzankhoi (where the UA Special Operations Forces (SOF) arranged for an ammunition warehouse to explode last August. Hmm..)
Intelligence, Deception: One factor that could be suspected, but of course never overtly stated or reported, was that one of the most important forms of Western—principally US—assistance to Ukraine came in the form of growing intelligence cooperation. According to reporting by the Washington Post in August, this cooperation was cautious and circumspect at first, as the Ukrainian government was known to have been penetrated by Russian operatives. Over time, as confidence in Ukrainian security measures grew so did the cooperation, to the point that it seems quite likely that currently, near-real-time US remote sensing data from space and airborne platforms is probably making it to customers in the UA.
Part of the evidence that is on public display of the Ukrainian capability for highly secure operation is, as we will see, the extent to which they have been able to conceal from the Russians and from the public both capabilities and intentions that in retrospect were practically in plain view. The UA and the Ukrainian government have, by necessity, employed a weapon that weaker parties traditionally turn to in wartime: deception. As we will see, they implemented a program of deception that paid dividends to a degree at least matching the spectacular successes that the British, and, later, the Western Allies, achieved in WWII. That is the story to which we turn next, as we take up a chronology of the war.
Tomorrow: The essay’s conclusion, A War In Four Acts.
- I seriously considered compiling a list of nyms of Jackals who helped shape the views that I express here, but I became anxious that this would become an invidious exercise, as I was sure to leave out important contributors. In all good faith, I am grateful to all of you. This nightly discussion is, in a way, an intellectual home for me.
- However, this insight also tripped me up, and led me to get the biggest thing of all wrong: I was so sure that the Russians knew that they were unprepared for an operation of this scope and ambition that they would never actually invade at all. I was, as a consequence, extremely skeptical of the Biden administration’s warnings that the invasion was imminent. That’s how analysis goes sometimes—being right on some things can make you wrong on other, more important things. I try to keep an “OK, I was wrong about that” within easy reach, without my ego getting in the way, because of experiences like that one.
- One frequently reads references to Lyman (south of Kupyansk) as the terminus of that line, by war analysts who like to refer to Lyman using terms such as “important rail junction.” There is in fact little evidence that Lyman has been used by the Russians in a significant logistical role at least since early July, and possibly since May. A June 1 Operational Update by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense notes Russian efforts to repair “…the railway bridge crossing in the area of the settlement of Kupyansk to restore the logistics supply of the railway branch Kupyansk – Lyman.” Presumably UA SOF damaged the bridge, cutting the rail line south of Kupyansk as early as May. In any event, by early July the UA had begun its campaign of HIMARS strikes against logistical and command, control, and communications (C3) targets, and Lyman has always been so close to the front line that putting a trucking hub there would have been suicidally stupid, even for the Russians. Finally just look at Lyman and at Kupyansk on Google Maps: Kupyansk is a bona fide road hub, and a natural site for a trucking logistic hub; Lyman is not. I have no idea how the notion of Lyman as a crucial logistical link in the Russian supply network gained such currency, but it may have been one of those “truths” that asserted more than once provided its own confirmation, then began gaining adherents like a snowball rolling downhill until it became a consensus view, irrespective of what maps and logic say.
Another Scott
I’ve just started to read this. It looks great Carlo!
But first a nit-picky editorial thing (it wouldn’t be Balloon-Juice if we didn’t have our red pens handy, would it??) – It looks like your footnote links and “return” links point to something in Outlook rather than points in the page here. It would be awesome if you could get them to work here.
Thanks very much.
[ Back to reading… ]
Cheers,
Scott.
dmsilev
A very interesting read, thank you. It’s always good to take a step back from the day-by-day every once in a while and look at the broader strokes.
Carlo Graziani
@Another Scott: Unfortunately that’s what happens sometimes when WordPress gobbles up perfectly functional html. What comes out the other end is a crapshoot. WG tried, but when it gets into a resistsnt mood…
WaterGirl
@Carlo Graziani: WaterGirl tried to tell you that they pointed to something on your local machine and that they didn’t work. :-)
Just to clarify, WaterGirl didn’t try to get these to work because I don’t believe that feature is supported by WordPress.
(sorry, I feel like crap after my booster so I am crabby.)
HinTN
It’s been a truism since time immemorial that an army moves on its stomach.
Logistics ain’t sexy but it’s essential.
dmsilev
@HinTN: As the saying/adage/cliche goes, “amateurs discuss tactics. Professionals discuss logistics.”
I guess we’re professional amateurs…
MobiusKlein
@WaterGirl:
The links in question should connect with the footnotes later in the piece. Not sure WP supports it. Best to remove the global file links as they expose the directory structure of the original file.
Fix that now, fix proper tags later.
Another Scott
This is an excellent summary and well done.
Thanks very much.
Looking forward to part 2.
Cheers,
Scott.
WaterGirl
@MobiusKlein: see my comment at #4.
Gin & Tonic
Good essay, Carlo. I look forward to tomorrow’s installment.
However, as Another Scott says, this wouldn’t be B-J if we didn’t find a bone to pick – mine is your term “the Russian 2014 invasion of Crimea.” In 2014, russia invaded/occupied/de-facto annexed chunks of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts as well, which was politically and militarily more significant. In 2014, it was not uncommon to hear Ukrainians say, privately, let them have Crimea. That view has certainly changed now, but as I’ve been saying since early on, Crimea is an economic sink for whoever holds it. I hate “alternate history” musings, but if russia/wagner/little green men had taken over Crimea and left the eastern border of mainland Ukraine intact, I think a lot of things in Ukraine would have developed differently. But taking Donetsk was a bridge too far. Once there was the long-running standoff of the “cyborgs” at the Donetsk airport (foreshadowing the Azovstal defenders) I think things were baked in. Had the russians not moved on the Donbas, I suspect (maybe not with complete confidence) that Poroshenko could have cut some kind of deal.
Mallard Filmore
Speaking of trains, here is a YouTube of a possible (unofficial speculation) nuclear train movement.
link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKGWG_gZHn0
title: ‘Russia’s “Nuclear Train” is Heading North — Not to Ukraine’
North, as in north-northeast from Moscow.
Carlo Graziani
@MobiusKlein: OK, to be clear: there is a misunderstanding. Those were local, in-document links, and perfectly valid html that contained no directory hierarchy references, let alone DNS-resolvables. The originals were produced with markdown and converted to hrml with pandoc. This is, straight up, a “WordPress not liking standard html tags” issue. So, I’ll never use them again.
Origuy
There’s a sentence in the paragraph beginning “The radical difference” that is missing a noun.
“The crucial aspect of Russian practice, and the Achilles heel that the Ukrainian quickly identified, is the reliance on the rail network for all long-haul transportation of military supplies”
The Ukrainian what?
Carlo Graziani
@Gin & Tonic: I’d never heard that perspective. It makes a great deal of sense, though.
zhena gogolia
@Gin & Tonic: That sounds right.
Another Scott
@Carlo Graziani: Yeah, it looks like FYWP converted them into links that point to a temporary directory on your machine:
file:///private/var/folders/ yadayadayada.html#fn1Thanks for trying. :-)
Cheers,
Scott.
edited to add a space because that broke the margins on phones.
MobiusKlein
@Carlo Graziani:
From an InfoSec point of view, those links expose information about your system, thus should be cleaned up. Not a burn the hard drive issue, but data hygiene.
HinTN
Excellent read for this evening. Thank you and Slava Ukraini.
Gin & Tonic
Oh, to add: since railways are the nominal topic, those of you with Twitter accounts may wish to follow the account of Ukrzaliznytsia (@Ukrzaliznytsia), Ukraine’s national railway operator, or that of its head, Alexander Kamyshin (@AKamyshin). They have been doing absolutely heroic work, as Kamyshin’s Twitter bio says “Running Ukrainian railways on schedule,” despite having lost hundreds of employees in the war. I have taken many train journeys in Ukraine over many years, and while they may not yet be at the level of the Germans or Swiss, they are doing one hell of a job.
Raoul Paste
It’s hard to wrap your mind around the numerous factors at work here. The totality of the planning, the logistics, the communications, the weaponry, the satellites, the coordination…
So much sophistication, contrasted with the brutality of Russia
Carlo Graziani
@Origuy:
“The Ukrainian sloppy essayist.”
…or, probably what I intended there is, “…the Ukrainian miltary”
Robert Sneddon
@dmsilev: They never complete that adage — “winners study economics”.
There’s an Australian Youtuber named Perun who has been doing these weekly hour-long PowerPoint presentations which are RIVETING for geeks like me who hate PP otherwise. He comes at the conflict from an economic standpoint, the flows of wealth and manpower and weapons and intelligence that will ultimately decide the conflict.
Russia apparently built up a literal warchest of wealth for this invasion, about 650 billion dollars worth of fossil fuel sales before the events of February this year kicked everything off. Perun’s estimate is that this will last sanctions-hit Russia until early next year and after that they don’t have the resources to continue the fight. Ukraine, on the other hand has an unlimited credit card backed by the Bank of NATO, at least for the forseeable future. We’ll see if he’s right.
zhena gogolia
Should be Taganrog, not Tagarog.
zhena gogolia
One thing I’ve been wondering (sorry it’s not on the topic of trains, but of intelligence) — the US seemed to have such good intelligence about Russian intentions on the eve of the Feb invasion. I wonder if we have something similar about Putler’s nuclear threats. I hope we do, but I assume we wouldn’t hear anything about it.
First “we” meaning the government, second “we” meaning jackals.
SpaceUnit
Very interesting read, Carlo. Thank you.
Carlo Graziani
@zhena gogolia: Right you are. Giant typo, in giant font, right on the giant map. I’d been busy congratulating myself on my cyrillic-decryption skillz too…
Thanks, I’ll update the map.
Gin & Tonic
Since some also come here for current (as in today’s) events:
zhena gogolia
@Carlo Graziani: Birthplace of Chekhov.
Mr. Bemused Senior
Dear fellow Jackals, Carlo, and Adam:
First, thank you all for sharing your expertise and all this information. Military thinking is not my area and I have had little to say. I am grateful to read all this.
I do have one notion to suggest: I think a bit part of Russia’s problem lies in the way the political system has evolved since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. The seeds were planted long ago but it has really blossomed after the “vild vest” and now with Putin. It has become a completely criminal society. This isn’t my original idea, many others have observed it, and it is well documented (see for example Rachel Maddow’s Blowout, or references in Oliver Bullough’s Moneyland (which includes a lot of background on Ukraine).
In such a society it’s very difficult if not impossible to encourage large-scale teamwork. Russia is not just a gas station with nuclear weapons, it has its entrepreneurs, scientists, intellectuals and so on. Many are top notch. But when you have to constantly look over your shoulder, wondering whether someone you work with is an informer and you will wind up in prison or falling out a window, it’s hard to work together, especially on a large project. No doubt the same problem exists in the army.
What Donald Trump was selling when he identified Putin as a better President than Obama (“for his own people”) is the idea that a strongman dictator creates a better society.
I think we see the refutation of that in Ukraine today.
WaterGirl
@MobiusKlein: Maybe I’m just crabby because I feel so sick today after my booster.
Those 3 little characters didn’t hurt a thing, and it’s disappointing to see all this discussion of 3 little characters that didn’t work. Had I felt better, I would have just deleted them once I discovered they didn’t work.
It’s distracting from the discussion of what I think is really a terrific think piece by Carlo, and I hope we can get back to discussing Ukraine instead of html.
Steeplejack
@Another Scott:
You broke the margin on devices with narrow margins; “folders/” is about where you should have stopped.
Or, pro tip, in text mode use ​ to insert zero-width spaces. They don’t show up but break long text strings without hyphenation when necessary.
zhena gogolia
@Gin & Tonic: Wouldn’t you translate it as “flight” rather than “escape”?
And he says, “We know who’s to blame for it.”
Jay
Thank you Carlos,
something horrible,
something sweet,
CaseyL
Terrific piece. You would think logistics is one of those obvious things a military would devote much time and many resources to, but it’s hard to say if Russia’s failure to do so sprang mostly from hubris (“a 3-day war”) or from the staggering corruption. Obviously both played large roles, just wondering in what proportion.
Jay
@WaterGirl:
In moderation at #33, too many hash tags in linked tweets?
WaterGirl
@Jay: Too many links. I already freed you.
Jay
Carnegie, PA, October 20th.
Another Scott
@zhena gogolia: I have no inside information, but the frequent stories that Milley continues to talk to his Chinese counterpart and that the US is (still) talking with russian generals is an important good sign.
Talking conveys meaning that letters and charts and graphs don’t.
Even simple, obvious, things like we’re not going to attack you need to be said in times of stress.
Another thing I keep in the back of my mind is that there have been many times when the USA and the USSR could have used nuclear weapons on each other, but lower-level commanders decided not to take that step. Even if VVP wants to do something stupid, it’s not clear that it would automatically happen.
Cheers,
Scott.
Carlo Graziani
@zhena gogolia: Intelligence is an interesting, and germane topic.
I have assumed all along — having no better real information than anyone else here — that the supernaturally, clairvoyantly excellent intelligence from which the Biden administration benefited in the run up to the war could be simply explained by three factors: (1) The utterly pervasive corruption of Russian governance, and the example set from the very top that the purpose of civil service is profit at the public’s expense; (2) The very standard and time-honored spycraft practice of inducing cooperation through pecuniary corruption; (3) The essentially infinite budgets and other resources that Western intelligence agencies, and the CIA in particular, have available for this purpose. This combination must have made Russia’s government, military, and security establishments some of the easiest intelligence targets of their types in history. Which is ironic, because their Soviet counterparts were notoriously the hardest that ever existed.
My guess is that the Russians have found and shot a few high-level traitors, and that the whole place is no longer as thoroughly wired for sound and video as it seems to have been back then. But the systemic factors are ineradicable, and anyway some of the most useful information can come from bribing telecom officials, or janitors, rather than colonel-generals.
It seems noteworthy that the Biden administration started issuing warnings about escalation a few days before the Kremlin went on its latest posturing rampage…
Jay
Anonymous At Work
Gin & Tonic
@zhena gogolia: Could go either way, I think. “Flight” has more meanings in English, so may not come as naturally to someone whose English isn’t as strong. But I’m not an expert translator.
Another Scott
@Steeplejack:
Sorry.
Thanks. (And thanks to WG? for fixing it.)
Cheers,
Scott.
CarolPW
@Steeplejack:
Have you (or anyone else) tested if temporarily pieing the person who broke the margin fixes it?
JanieM
@Carlo Graziani:
Wait, are we talking about Mississippi? (See previous thread.)
lowtechcyclist
@Gin & Tonic:
This is one thing that’s impressed me about Ukraine since the early days of the war, not just about the railways, but the country as a whole: even when being massively invaded from multiple directions, and having the shit bombed out of many places that weren’t even close to the front lines, the country’s systems all continued to function. Utilities, postal service, the subway systems (even while being used as bomb shelters), you name it, it all seemed to keep on working, even under the enormous stress of the invasion and bombings.
I started to believe fairly early on that they were going to hold it together, because they were holding it together.
Gin & Tonic
@Anonymous At Work: Not sure why Russian troops would “flee” to Lyman from Kharkiv – that puts them significantly further from Russia.
Jay
Auntie Anne
Thank you, Carlo. I needed this sort of big picture to make better sense of what is happening. I love Adam’s updates and read them nightly, but seeing a larger view truly helps, as do the maps.
Ruckus
@HinTN:
Carlo:
Logistics, logistics, logistics. The bigger the battleground the better the logistics have to be. Try the navy, if you want to understand logistics. A ship can only carry so much of anything and a warship isn’t a freighter. On land you can use trucks, as long as there is an actual road or railroad. But supporting any size of force takes a lot of people and stuff. In the navy we once came pretty damn close to running out of food. Lifers were openly talking of mutiny/discussing plans for armed takeover and until I heard that I wouldn’t have ever thought that might happen. I once had to replace an electronic component that wasn’t stocked on the ship. I got it handed to me the next day after a refueling session in the middle of the Atlantic.
If Ukraine is thinking along the same kinds of resupply concepts that the US military does, that is a major difference in concepts of an efficient military. The US military could have done better 50 yrs ago but they still were beating the pants off Russia back then.
A military travels on it’s stomach. It’s a saying for a very valid reason.
Another Scott
(via TheStudyofWar)
Cheers,
Scott.
Carlo Graziani
@JanieM: There’s an Italian expression: “Tutto il mondo è paese”. It means, roughly, you’ll find the same customs the world over…
cintibud
Thanks Carlo, excellent presentation
Carlo Graziani
@Anonymous At Work: Some discussion of what I know about the state of that Eastern line is in tomorrow’s essay.
kalakal
@Carlo Graziani: Perhaps it was meant to be a plural?
Great post, I do envy the clarity with which you are able to express your train (sorry) of thought in writing.
The hand wringing about lack of materiel supply the US and partners always struck me as slightly odd, Ukraine was being very publicly flooded with high tech weaponry such as Javelins, NLAWS, Stingers etc which was exactly what was needed, one shot weapons requiring minimal training and upkeep which Ukraine could and did put to devastating effect. The heavy stuff took longer for exactly the reasons you state.
I espescially appreciate your information on how limited the Russian rail net is.
Thanks for all the work you put into this
ETA. I think a major reason for the success of the deception operations is that Russian ‘Eyes in the Sky’ assets seem to function about as well as their crash recruitment program does
jonas
Very interesting stuff! Thanks!
@Carlo Graziani:
It must have been a tough call to essentially reveal that we had reliable intelligence about top level Kremlin deliberations about the war as they were taking place, but we needed to signal both the seriousness of the moment for the Ukrainians and also let Putin know that if he fucked around, he would find out.
sdhays
@Carlo Graziani: Considering that the Russian Army literally doesn’t have any encrypted communications (mind boggling as that is), signals intelligence probably tells the NATO intelligence services quite a lot about what’s going on, even without compromising anyone (which, I agree, is probably pretty easy in Russia in recent years).
Another Scott
Cheryl Rofer is a NAFO fella now.
Cheers,
Scott.
Anonymous At Work
@Gin & Tonic: It wasn’t an “orderly withdrawal under fire” but a “I need my Mommy” full-blown retreat, and not all roads that led to Russian territory were safe. We don’t yet know how many prisoners UA forces took in their advance relative to how many RU forces were retreating either.
featheredsprite
Very, very nice. Bravo!!
zhena gogolia
@Gin & Tonic: “running away” is another possibility
frosty
Carlo: Here’s a railway question: At what point does the track gauge change between Russian and European systems? I recall it being a headache for the Germans in WWII. Or was there a changeover so everyone uses the same gauge now?
This was very informative, BTW. Thanks!
sdhays
@Gin & Tonic: My understanding was that Russian commanders wanted to hold Lyman at all costs once Izyum fell, but Russian commanders are clearly idiots, so…
Anonymous At Work
@sdhays: Wait what? Another major counteroffensive against Russian forces potentially resulting in 6-figure killed, wounded or captured as a result of not taking basic encryption protocols? Teutorburg Forest was the major inciting incident for the Soviet Revolution in more than a few ways.
“Those that forget the past are doomed to repeat in ways that make history majors bang their heads against desks.”
BeautifulPlumage
I appreciate this step back, Carlos. It has helped clarify some things and brought up much I hadn’t considered.
I’m curious about the Kerch bridges and why they haven’t been targeted. My ignorance might be showing, but couldn’t a UKR fighter jet reach with air to surface? Are there tactical reasons the Ukrainians want it intact still.
Thanks to all for these nightly info sessions.
Carlo Graziani
OH!!! I meant to say up top, and I forgot!!!
Watergirl did her usual amazing job taking my walls of text and thinking through how to make them digestible and friendly. And Wolvesvalley stepped in to read, and proofread the original text. WV, we haven’t met, but thank you for the careful and thoughtful markup. What came out was a lot better than what went in.
sdhays
@frosty: I’m pretty sure Russia and Ukraine use the same grade (for now, at least). I recall early in the war reading about some logistics challenges at the border with Poland due to the change in grade.
coin operated
@Carlo Graziani:
@Gin & Tonic:
Carlo…Great post.
Gin & Tonic…perspective I’d never heard before. Thank you
Steeplejack
@CarolPW:
I have not. I never use the pie filter. I’ll keep it in mind for next time.
Wapiti
@Another Scott: I was in Panama during our invasion. Rumor was that one of the US generals spent a good bit of time during the invasion talking to various Panamanian generals or colonels to get things done without a lot of blood shed.
Sister Golden Bear
Speaking of force design, back in the early days of the war, one military expert in logistics — I believe it was the guy who pointed out how flat tires on some vehicles indicated huge problems with how Russia stored them — argued that Russia’s force design was for a defense in depth of the Motherland.
Hence its reliance on railroads for long-range logistics — they’re well-suited for that kind of war, and if you’re fighting on your own turf that minimizes the issue of maximum truck transport range (about 90km? IIRC).* I.e. the max distance that realistically a driver can load up, drive, unload, and drive back within a certain time period. Going beyond that can severely limit how frequently fighting forces get resupplied, and as an artillery-first army, Russia forces need lots of large, bulky supplies (i.e. rockets and artillery shells).
I completely agree that Russia’s offensive force design matches your description. They’re really two sides of the same coin. I.e. railroad-centric defensive force design made it difficult to sustain an extended (both time and distance) offensive effort. Consequently the offensive force design was for quick wars of overwhelming force that were over before logistics could become a serious issue. Especially if attacking NATO countries that use a different rail gauge (it’s possible to adjust the train’s trucks to run on a smaller/larger gauge, but it slows things down).
*Assuming a NATO force is headed toward Moscow, the railroads are like spokes radiating out from there. So much of the truck resupply is for “last mile” to the front, and for between the spokes, which don’t see to be huge distances apart.
Tony G
@dmsilev: Comrade Putin’s philosophy is that the Russian Army doesn’t need supplies or equipment. The fighting spirit of the untrained forced conscripts will win the “Special Operation”. Any day now.
sdhays
@Anonymous At Work: You’ve probably seen this, but apparently the Russians are literally using the equivalent of Dollar General walky-talkies for battlefield communication, which is how the Ukrainian military sent the Russian forces in Kherson fake orders and then jammed them from getting confirmation, causing total chaos as Ukraine started the new offensive.
Seriously, walky-talkies. Because they ate the carrier pigeons for lunch.
zhena gogolia
Thanks, Carlo. Looking forward to next part.
sdhays
@Tony G: I haven’t followed it recently, but the @DarthPutin account on Twitter will often note things like this ending with “I remain a master strategist.” My brain now automatically adds that line all the time when reading about Putin’s stupidity.
Sister Golden Bear
@Anonymous At Work: Also for reasons unknown, Vlad told the troops to hold Lyman at whatever cost (reportedly over the objections of his generals). So it’s possible some Western commentators assumed Lyman had strategic significance.
Carlo Graziani
@frosty: I had to look it up for this project, although in the end it had no relevance other than the obvious fact that Ukraine and Russia use the same track gauge. According to Wikipedia, “former Soviet Republics” use the same broad gauge. Finland is very close, enough to accomodate Russian trains. Other European nations use “standard” gauge.
Carlo Graziani
@BeautifulPlumage: Tomorrow, we’ll have occasion to talk about bridges, and what’s involved in dropping one.
YY_Sima Qian
Excellent stuff Carlo!
I think the Soviet logistics doctrine was dependent on rail because the USSR never developed a sophisticated system of expressways, & that the reliability of the late Soviet/Russian mechanized/motorized equipment were never great (& so a higher percentage would breakdown from a forced road march). Its doctrine was that any equipment suffering from mechanical failure would be abandoned by its crew, for the rear echelon forces to collect & repair. We saw plenty of that during the attempted “thunder run” to Kyiv at the outset, only the follow on echelons were tied up on traffic jams along the single road to Kyiv, or were waylaid by Ukrainian resistance.
Regardless of the military, tracked equipment would always be more reliant on rail transport for efficient long distance deployment, unless you have a large number of transport trailers to haul the tracked vehicles on expressways. However, US/NATO & even the Chinese PLA have formed heavy/medium/light combat formations that have different logistics requirements. Heavy formations would have largely tracked vehicles, medium formations largely 8×8 or 6×6 vehicles, & light formations largely 4×4 or heli-born. Each type of formations would be build around common platforms to reduce complexity in maintenance & logistics, see the “Striker” Brigades in the US Army as an example. Incidentally, the Chinese PLA may have gone the farthest in achieving such platform commonality across different types (armor, APC, artillery, AD, EW, command, etc.), where most of the equipment in the heavy combined arms brigades (& subordinate heavy combined battalions, the smallest unit of maneuver in current PLA doctrine) used 3 – 4 MBT/IFV/APC chassis, almost all equipment in medium combined arms brigades (& subordinate medium combined battalions) used the same 8×8 APC chassis, & almost all equipment in light combined arms brigades (& subordinate light combined battalions) used the same 4×4 chassis. This way, in the Ukraine context, at least the medium & light formations would not be dependent upon rail transport for long range deployment/redeployment. The combat elements of the Russian Army’s BTGs, OTOH, seemed to have been thrown together haphazardly from a logistics perspective. Often you would see tracked MBTs fighting w/ 8×8 wheeled APCs, supported by tracked AD & towed artillery. To redeploy from one theater to another, the entire formation would need to ride rail cars, if unit integrity is to be maintained, even though the wheeled APCs & the towed artillery could take the road.
I would disagree that the Ukrainian Army has transitioned to Western logistics concept that is not reliant on rail transport. It is not so evident because the Ukrainian Army is fighting on interior lines over shorter distances, so far. Overall, the Ukrainians also seems to be fighting somewhat “lighter” than the Russian Army even on the offensive, perhaps a consequence of so many MRAP vehicles being sent by NATO countries. We have even seen technicals being used in the breakthrough north of Izyum. Currently, a Ukrainian combat formation is still a hodgepodge of wheeled & tracked vehicles of a bewildering diversity of provenance, the necessary consequence of the losses suffered to date & the diversity of donations. The mainstay of Ukrainian land (& air) forces remains Soviet era designs, whether from pre-war stock or from donations by ex-Warsaw Pact nations. If we reverse the roles of the Ukrainian & Russian Armies, say in a scenario of a major Ukrainian incursion deep into Russia (as a hypothetical), I am not sure the Ukrainian Army as currently constituted would be any less dependent on rail as the Russian Army has been.
What has surprised me from the Ukrainian counteroffensive so far is the operational security & the success in combined arms maneuvers. Based on earlier reporting, I would not have thought the Ukrainian would be able to hide the build up to an offensive to retake Kharkiv Oblast from Russian agents. Maybe the Russians did receive the intel, but refused to believe it, or were stretched too thin to do anything about it. Having not fought or even trained for large formation, combined arms, offensive maneuver warfare, I thought the Ukrainian Army would have a tougher time on the 1st go. Perhaps Russian ineptitude on defense (especially around Izyum & Lyman) has masked any Ukrainian shortcomings on offense. The rapid collapse of Russian defenses north of Izyum seems to have taken the Ukrainians by surprise.
Another Scott
@Wapiti: Thanks for that. Very interesting. And it makes sense (especially since the US has long ties to Panama).
VVP’s russia pretty clearly does not care about such things. “Give us what we want or we’ll flatten your cities and kill 100,000 without batting an eye” is quite different from (roughly) “Li, you know I’ll call you well before we got to the point of going to war”…
Cheers,
Scott.
Gin & Tonic
@sdhays: The Moldova/Ukraine/Belarus border with “western” Europe is the dividing line of railway gauge. Although Ukraine announced a couple of years ago that it was committed to switching; at that time it was supposed to be done by 2025, but I’m suer plans have changed.
Subsole
Fascinating and well-written.
Thank you very much for posting it.
I have to admit it never actually occurred to me just how few rail connections there were until you pointed it out. Mind boggling.
Mike in NC
This war is as if somebody decided to refight WW1 in the trenches but throw in drones, satellites, and social media.
Carlo Graziani
@Sister Golden Bear: Yeah, I really think that Lyman is going to be one of those mysteries that postwar historians are going to have to untangle. It just doesn’t matter, and hasn’t for quite a while.
Why the Russians should take it into their heads that perfectly good (well, OK, adequate) troops need to fort up in there and get taken under siege for no military benefit, while for good measure mili-Twitter watches with bated breath as if some major issue of the war is being settled — well some things just don’t have to make sense, I guess. At least the UA net another bag of POWs.
Lyrebird
Your elegant wording here is hilarious and spot on.
More seriously,
The op sec part… I wonder how much outsiders will ever learn about how the UA kept collaborating with our military through those years of having some US government officials actively undermining them and our own embassy, or how they figured out who had betrayed them in Kherson.
grumbles
So one thing that I still find remarkable and interesting is how it appears the whole world learned about Russian military capabilities at the same time — including Russian leadership.
I imagine there must be plenty of people in the Russian military who realized what a shitshow that column towards Kiev was going to be. But the informational disconnect to leadership was profound and (should be) humiliating.
I’ve read in various places that authoritarian societies tend to develop informational pathologies that lead to this sort of thing – incentives matter and all that. But watching it happen is very different.
phdesmond
@Gin & Tonic:
the word “breakout” is a possibility. too many possible pitfalls (misunderstandings) in “flight,” is my hunch.
azlib
Excellent read. Another facor beyond logistics in the UA success is their mastering of combined arms warfare. We often mistakenly think of the tank as the key element in modern warfare. However, it is the combination of the tank, plus infrantry plus artillery plus air power which complement and support each other in an engagement. In order to make this work you need excellent and secure communications between the various elements.
Fair Economist
Lyman does have strategic importance. It’s largely surrounded by swamps and rivers so it’s a defensible area, especially for the Russians. In addition, it is a potential rail hub, but for the Ukrainians as it lies on a line from Kharkiv to Luhansk.
So basically it was a good place for the Russians to stop a Ukrainian advance – a very defensible spot blocking transport into Southern Luhansk. But now the Ukrainians have it.
Ruckus
@CaseyL:
They support each other. Hubris begets corruption or corruption begets hubris, so it depends on which you start with but with one you soon get the other. It’s worse if you start with both.
YY_Sima Qian
@Carlo Graziani: I think Lyman has been seen as a jump off point toward Slovyansk & Kramatorsk. It’s refusal to face reality after already losing Izyum & Kupiansk.
Also, after the disastrous showing at Izyum & Kupiansk, the Russians needed an example of its forces holding resolute. It’s the Battle of Smolensk, repeated 81 years later, in miniature & as farce.
YY_Sima Qian
@Fair Economist: Lyman is only protected swamps to the south. But the Russian defenses to the north failed to hold.
catclub
@Robert Sneddon:
Sounds like a modern version of Guns Germs and Steel
Timill
@Gin & Tonic: IIRC the east half of Poland is on the 5’0″ gauge, and the west on Standard (4’8.5″).
I expect the variance in quoted gauges (1520/1524mm) is the same as for SG (1432/1435mm) – the narrower is for straight plain track, and the broader for twiddly bits. But it’s now 49 years since I left British Rail Civ Eng department, so I could be misremembering…
Carlo Graziani
@YY_Sima Qian: Hey. Very good info on PLA logistics.
One note: I did not say, or mean to imply, that the UA had transitioned to a Western, and particularly rail-free logistical model. In fact the opposite is true. The UA have held for themselves, and made excellent, effective use of their railway in this war, despite desultory efforts by the Russians to interdict them by cruise missile attacks. This is precisely what I meant, in the introduction about the apparent anachronism of this war: Railways are having an outsize effect on the combat effectiveness of both sides.
The reason may be that this is probably the first large-scale war between two combatants in possession of intact railway networks in about a century, at least in Europe.
As to the evolution of Russian logistics since the Soviet era, I really cannot recommend that journal article from the Scandinavian Academy too highly. There are gems on every page. Want to know what that column of tanks that was stuck north of Kyiv was really about? Page 8…
Gin & Tonic
@YY_Sima Qian: Funny, the word “lyman,” when not a proper noun, means “estuary.”
YY_Sima Qian
@Carlo Graziani: Ah, I misread then. Will definitely check out the paper!
Rail will always be important in long range transport over land of heavy mechanized forces. There is no other more efficient alternative. Same applies in civilian logistics. That won’t change for quite some time.
US/NATO seems to be less focused on rail because its recent wars have been expeditionary, to underdeveloped & hard to access parts of the world. Maneuvers w/in continental Europe has also heavily relied up rail.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mike in NC: Actually, as the UA has shown, they are adept at maneuver warfare, on both offense and defense. von Manstein fought his huge delaying action against the Red Army in Ukraine, and apparently some Ukrainians took notes. They also took note of the successes of Guderian and Zhukov, and we’re seeing that right now in eastern Ukraine.
Carlo, wonderful post as I was sure it would be. Your keen insight into the details of logistics, particularly rail logistics, shines. As YY_Sima Qian indicates, rail is still important, especially to armies that have a lot of heavy equipment. I spent a great deal of time securing tracked vehicles to rail cars in Germany for deployments to training areas, and I was in a mech infantry outfit, not armor or SP artillery.
Villago Delenda Est
@azlib: As I, as a Signal officer, liked to tell my redleg friends, you can talk about us, but you can’t talk without us. Communications are absolutely key, and redlegs (and treadheads, and grunts) know this.
Calouste
@Carlo Graziani: In WWII the Germans still relied heavily on rail, partially because you can run trains on coal, of which they had plenty, but for trucks you need oil, and they didn’t have a lot of that. Rail didn’t play much of a part in the Allied plans after D-Day, because by that time they’d been bombing the heck out of it for two years.
Fake Irishman
Great work Carlo. I appreciate all the insights gleaned through the months from you all as we try to grope forward into some sort of understanding of what’s going on. (sometimes through some very sharp and emotional disagreements) I will be checking out that article you referenced in the Scandinavian journal.
YY_Sima Qian
@Gin & Tonic: There are places in Guangdong Province in China w/ similar names of “harbor” or “outer sea”, that might have been on the coast a thousand years ago, but now is dozens of kms inland.
Lyman, however, isn’t anywhere near any current coastlines. Was the swamp previously a large lake.
kalakal
@Carlo Graziani: The Ukranian assault took the Russians by surprise and their front lines disintigrated. They’re desperate to stabilise the situation and attempting to fall back along lines of communication to a set of positions they can hold. The importance of Lyman at this point is not logistical, it’s tactical. It seemed like a defensible blocking position to buy the Russians time to organize their forces farther East. And the Russians need time, a few 1,000 troops would be a small price to pay had it bought them that time. As a plan it probably looked good on a map, however their command & control is completely shot and as they don’t have effective ncos/ junior officers lower unit initiative is basically non-existent. The speed at which the UA is moving is keeping them off balance, the Russian plan was probably that Lyman would hold for a few days while they organised defences farther to the east at which point the troops in Lyman would make an orderly withdrawal. The thing is you need good intelligence, good troops, luck and and a very good sense of timing to succeed in fighting retreats. The Russians have none of these. Add in that they have delusional bone heads running the show and you get what we’re watching. From the UAs point of view an added bonus to the destruction of Russian forces is that the Russians were attempting to use Izyum/ Lyman as a jumping point to turn the UA positions in the salient to the south. The UA forces there have been doing a grudging slow retreat for weeks, their nightmare was of them being encircled by Russian forces to north & south, which would have been catastrophic for the UA. It’s fair to say that threat no longer exists.
Fake Irishman
@Calouste:
And the Allies paid for it when they outran their supplies in September 1944.
kalakal
@YY_Sima Qian: The largest naval battle of the 100 Years War took place at Sluys in Belgium. These days it’s a load of fields 15 miles inland. It’s a bit weird walking across the site trying to envisage the battle
eversor
I’ve seen a few pictures lately of captured Russian “tanks” and these are decades old messes that could at best be used for scrap or melted down. It’s truly both sad, and really pathetic. If that’s truly what they have this is going to turn into a damn slaughter.
YY_Sima Qian
@kalakal: Funny you mentioned that. The site of the Battle of Yamen (1279), where the Mongol navy annihilated the last remaining Southern Song fleet (including the whole imperial court), is also now on land.
Carlo Graziani
@Calouste: The story here is a bit complicated.
The USAAF, which was already fighting for its independence from the Army, understood military doctrine in completely different terms, and really wanted nothing to do with interdiction of German army transportation AKA the Overlord “Rail Plan”. Spaatz believed that strategic bombing of German industrial resources, principally oil, would defeat Germany by itself, and regarded the Overlord assault as a colossal waste of resources, particularly of resources that could be dedicated to the USAAF’s “Oil Plan.” He had no intention of allowing major diversions of bombers to support preparation for the crossing, let alone for ground support, and fought a strenuous bureaucratic battle to protect “his” forces from such “misuse”.
By early 1944, the pressures were too great—the risks of failure associated with Overlord were so catastrophic to the entire war effort that they did not bear thinking about, and no effort could be spared, irrespective of the bureaucratic barricade to be surmounted. Eisenhower and Marshall simply had Spaatz overruled, and the Oil Plan was temporarily given second priority to the Rail Plan, which was, in effect, an effort to create a “rail desert” in northern France that would prevent prompt reinforcements by the Germans, during those critical few weeks when the Allied lodgements were moving outwards from the beaches, attempting to link up, and still improvising logistical supply while engaging German defenses, and would be at their maximum vulnerability.
Historians still argue about the effectiveness of the Rail Plan. As I recall, at least one SS division was able to move towards the invasion zone by rail in the days after D-Day. But it probably made some difference. And one calculates these risks in advance, after all, not a posteriori.
I’m sure that the reason the Allies outran their supplies after Falaise-Mortain opened the floodgates was not a railway bottleneck, but rather a port bottleneck—Cherbourg and Antwerp were still not open (contradictng pre-invasion assumptions), and a storm had damaged the MULBERRY temporary beach harbors over which the Allies were still forced to resupply.
eversor
bad twitter embed
jonas
@grumbles:
I’m sure a lot of Russian military brass knew that a lot of their units weren’t in the best shape, but their mistake was figuring that the Ukrainians were even worse. And, honestly, had the UA been left to their own devices with the equipment they had, the Russians probably would have rolled them up in a matter of a few weeks or months based on sheer numbers. Part of Putin’s folly was misjudging the US and NATO’s willingness to go to the mat for the Ukrainians. What the Russians were *not* prepared to do was go up against a UA armed with the latest NATO gear, weapons systems, and intelligence.
eversor
https://www.athleticbusiness.com/operations/legal/article/15301048/in-florida-parents-and-doctors-question-sharing-of-athletes-menstrual-histories
YY_Sima Qian
@jonas:
The Russian were not prepared for Ukrainians willing & organized to fight. Even w/o Javelins, NLAWs & Stingers, the Ukrainians would have defeated the “Thunder Run” to Kyiv. They took out plenty of Russian equipment w/ Soviet era weapons, too.
Jay
@eversor:
T62’s and T64’s are fine for how most of the RU forces are using tanks. They are also using modernized T-72’s, T-80’s and have recently started deploying T-90’s from the “parade” units to the front lines.
The Vostok Chickenhawk KKKeyboard Commando’s are demanding Pootie-Poot deploy the Armata’s, of which all of 32 may have been made. including prototypes. The ‘ratnick’s” think Russia has hundreds.
Ixnay
Many thanks. The late night posts from BJ are where I get most of my news about UK. Great job Carlo, looking forward to tomorrow’s post.
Another Scott
@jonas: What should be getting everyone’s attention is that Ukraine is not getting the US’s and NATO’s latest gear. HIMARS is from the late 1990s.
I reposted a Tweet a while ago comparing USAF bombing of an airport in Iraq with what the russians tried to do to an airport in Ukraine. The US bombs hit the runway/ramp intersection targets with amazing accuracy. About 75% of the russian bombs didn’t even hit the runways…
VVP’s military can’t do what the US could do decades ago.
Cheers,
Scott.
Carlo Graziani
@YY_Sima Qian: Yes. I think that possibly the crucial faulty assumption in the Russian plan was not really military, but rather political. They really expected support by a measurable fraction of the population, even in Kyiv. Maybe 20%, even 30% of “silent” aquiescent, perhaps even relieved people, who they could rely on to turn into a new elite. They never expected zero. Their own political intelligence told them what they wanted to hear, because telling them anything else was a career-voiding move.
So they went in expecting a half-hearted resistance followed by a sullen acquiescence, and instead they got universal utter defiance and careful military preparation. The Ukrainians could have been fighting them with molotov cocktails, plastique, and bolt-action rifles, and still probably won in Kyiv.
kalakal
@YY_Sima Qian: I must look that one up, thanks, I didn’t know that. I know of several places that used to be on coasts and are now miles inland/underwater, I find it fascinating as a visible illustration of geographic change. Place names can be a good clue like you said. It can be political too, in England you can get a pretty good idea of how far the Viking conquests got by marking places on a map that end in by eg Grimsby, Weatherby etc. By is Old Norse for village
StringOnAStick
Thanks for that rail map and your assessment, it’s very informative.
I just saw that Bill Browder has another book out, about Putin, Russia and money laundering. The title is Freezing Order and I’m picking it up from the library tomorrow. Red Notice was an eye opener about Russian corruption from several years ago, and I’m sure this will be equally fascinating. The more information presented to the West so we understand that Putin has been waging WW3 for years via the information and financial space, the better.
oldster
Thanks, Carlo!
When the history of this war is written, Joe Biden and his team in Defense and State are going to get a lot of credit. They could not have done anything without Zelensky and his team, of course, but Zelensky would not have lasted long without Biden’s backing.
Russians drew the wrong lesson from their Great Patriotic War. Instead of concluding that they were invincible warriors, they should have realized: the side that gets US Lend-Lease support wins.
Germany, alas, will receive a chapter of shame in the history of this period, first for their willing submission to Russian energy blackmail, and then for their refusal to open up their armory to Ukraine. I am saddened and embarrassed by Scholtz’s failure to meet the moment.
Wapiti
@Another Scott: While there was HIMARS in the late 1990s, my understanding is that those missiles were using inertial guidance, while the current missiles use GPS-aided guidance. There’s been 4-6 generations of missile improvements in the last 20 years.
Jay
@oldster:
https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/09/fact-sheet-on-german-military-aid-to.html
“Contrary to popular perception, Germany has delivered significant amounts of arms and equipment to Ukraine to aid the country in its fight against the Russian military. In fact, the volume of arms deliveries by Berlin exceeds that of every other country safe for the United States and the United Kingdom. Nonetheless, Germany has faced severe criticism and even mockery for its perceived lack of support to Ukraine and its ill-fated attempts to keep its relationship with Moscow intact. While ultimately positioning itself as a reliable partner of Ukraine, it can be argued that Berlin’s communication to affirm its Ukraine stance and explain foreign policy goals has been nothing short of an unmitigated disaster.”
Germany won’t send tanks, (they don’t have many and suddenly realized they might be useful in a war) just like the US won’t sent F-16’s.
Chetan Murthy
@Jay: But Germany also *ALSO* will not allow anybody to whom it’s sold tanks, to send *those* tanks. Even if those other countries aren’t using the tanks (have retired them to cold storage). As is the case with Spain. This latter fact is …. not defensible.
NutmegAgain
Carlo, thank you so much for this core dump (which I mean in the best possible way). It’s so helpful to be working off a good map.
Jay C
Excellent piece, Carlo: looking forward to Part II.
The history of the Russo-Ukrainian War is going to be a fascinating read: (once it’s written, it’s still pretty much “reportage”, not “history” now): as you point out: so much of the “conventional wisdom” and expectations going into the war has been proved wrong (and a lot, usually ignored by US media, proved right). But that rail-related factors- IMO, typically dismissed as anachronisms or irrelevancies by most Americans – would play as large a role in this conflict as they did in, say 1914, is an eye-opener.
YY_Sima Qian
@Wapiti:
@Another Scott:
The difference maker for the HIMARS system is not in the launcher or the rockets, both are mature tech. w/o much room for further advancement. Even the GPS guidance that afford its high accuracy is not that new, having already been heavily used for aerial bombs & cruise missiles. What sets HIMARS apart is the integrated software & C&C that allows it to deploy to a new location, fire its mission accurately, & move on, all in 2 minutes. That is previously unseen level of battlefield survivability, not even allowing time for counter battery fire to take full effect. Based on the videos on internet, I don’t think the Ukrainian Army has yet exploited HIMARS’ full potential in this respect.
HIMARS is also designed for strategic mobility, carried by C-17s to battle, deploy from the transport aircraft & fire its missions, & potentially be taken away by the C-17. I think that is typical of US doctrine that assumes total air dominance, which may be in for rude shock in a near peer conflict scenario, as we have seen in Ukraine. There is a reason the Russian VDV is being used as shock troops on the front lines in their thin skinned vehicles, rather than paradropped or air inserted behind enemy lines per doctrine. 1 Il-76 shot down w/ all paratroopers on board, & that was the end of that.
Russia does have the GLOSNASS positioning system, but it is not as advanced as the GPS & not nearly as well maintained. Russia has also offered all kinds of munitions w/ GLOSNASS guidance for sale, but does not seem to have many available itself. Either because they don’t actually work all that well, or because of lack of funds.
In informationalization & computerization, the Russian military has fallen far behind NATO, even China. It is still a late Cold War/1990s army. Possibly worse, remember the rank & file using unencrypted civilian radios for comms? Quantity still has a quality of its own, but Russia no longer enjoys the quantitative advantage it once had. Losing hundreds of paratroopers when a few transports gets shot down would have been considered cost of doing business in Cold War Soviet doctrine (& Cold War NATO doctrine for that matter), but not a loss Russia can afford now. (Not sure NATO can, either.)
JAFD
Salutations, Mr. Graziani !
Thanks for this great post. ‘Twas great meeting you, and hope to see you again sometime.
Another Scott
@Wapiti: No doubt. But 1990s accuracy (at least for some USAF munitions) was quite impressive.
This is the tweet I was referring to. It was Serbia in 1999, not Iraq. But the point stands – VVP can’t compete with 23+ year old US tech.
Cheers,
Scott.
Chetan Murthy
@Another Scott: The description of the B-2 strike on the Serbian airfield specifies that it was done with JDAMs. Those are (IIRC) GPS-controlled sets of fins that get attacked to gravity bombs. So, GPS-guided. From wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Direct_Attack_Munition#History ) “The first JDAM kits were delivered in 1997, with operational testing conducted in 1998 and 1999” so this raid would have been pretty right at the beginning of their deployment, I guess.
Just noting that this raid was the beginning of the new wave of precision weapons.
InMyRoom
@Mallard Filmore: Possibly Belarus?
oldster
@Jay:
Thanks for the correction and more details.
Yes, part of Germany’s problem is an image/communication problem. They are not getting enough public recognition for what they deliver.
But as Chethan Murthy says, that’s not the whole problem.
The opinion polls in Germany show that a majority wants Scholtz to do more. I hope he’ll listen.
HeartlandLiberal
@WaterGirl:
Wife and I had the new bivalent omicron COVID booster, PLUS the stronger geezer flu vaccine yesterday. Woke between 1 and 2 for bathroom call, and realized I was having chills all over. Better this morning, but both arms sore as hell. As I told the nurse who did the shots: we believe in science.
Geminid
@Carlo Graziani: The Allies’ failure to clear the approaches to Antwerp was a very consequential mistake. The port was captured intact on September 5, 1944, but a short pause by General Dempsey’s command allowed the German army to dig in and deny control of the 25 mile Scheldt channel to thr North Sea (and also save elements of their 15th Army stranded on the west side of the Scheldt). Because of this lapse, cargo was not unloaded in Antwerp until late November.
This failure can be debited to Montgomery, who was informed by the Royal Navy as to how crucial control of the Scheldt was. Eisenhower also bears responsibility. Had he put his foot down when Montgomery presented his wildcat Arnheim adventure, and ordered him to clear the Scheldt first, the war in Western Europe could have been concluded earlier and with many fewer lives lost.
O. Felix Culpa
@Jay: Thank you for this info. I, too, had been gnashing my teeth at Germany’s (Scholz’s) perceived dilatory deliveries. It’s heartening to learn that they have come through for Ukraine after all, even if it’s not with tanks.
@oldster: The Germans I’m in touch with definitely want Scholz to do more. And they’re in his party. His…reticence…is not playing well at home or abroad, as best I can see.
evodevo
@Another Scott: and there’s also the US practice of training foreign military officers in this country for many years..friendships and connections are built up between US and foreign officers that last years, and can certainly be handy on down the line. My son has a lot of friends from his flight training years who are currently flying in other air forces around Europe, etc.
evodevo
@Geminid: And maybe saved my husband’s uncle from starving in a POW camp after the Battle of the Bulge (St. Vith) in Belgium…he never really recovered from that…
lee
Great post and really enjoyed reading it.
” as the Ukrainian government was known to have been penetrated by Russian operatives.”
If I recall correctly early in the conflict there were several high level Ukrainians that were arrested. Then later on a few more. My guess is the US helped Ukraine ferret out the Russian operatives.
Ferreting out those operatives will be a great spy novel/movie in the future.
Geminid
@evodevo: Germany’s Ardennes offensive could not have been made had they not been given the time to man the Siegfried Line with second string troops, and build up the powerful Sixth SS and 5th Panzer Armies in safety. The Arnheim campaign not only delayed bringing Antwerp’s massive port facilities into use, but itself was a costly drain on resources. This was at a time when 90% of American supplies were brought across the Normandy beaches. That remained the case for two more months.
Your husband’s uncle and his comrades did well in their defense of St. Vith. The defenders of Bastogne won more acclaim, but the Americans at St. Vith throttled the German advance in the northern Ardennes long enough to allow more forces to block the German advance to the west.
J R in WV
@Sister Golden Bear:
(it’s possible to adjust the train’s trucks to run on a smaller/larger gauge, but it slows things down)
I think what they actually have to do is lift RR cars and replace one set of trucks with a different (wider or narrower) set of trucks, in a RR yard with both sets of tracks (which is in itself an amazing thing to think of!). This takes place between Russia and China, for example. I believe it was intended to make it difficult for an invader to use the invaded nation’s RR system for logistics.
This is based upon long discussions with Great-Uncles who worked on the RR back in the 1950s when I was very young after dinner at Grandma’s house when brothers were visiting.
Uncle Herb was very proud of his badge which allowed him to travel on any train as a retired conductor. He tried to teach me Morse Code which train men used to communicate back in the day, but that didn’t stick from lack of frequent use. Those were the days!
bbleh
@Ruckus: @HinTN: I’ll third (or fourth or fifth or whatever) this comment, and add thanks for focusing primarily on logistics. The MSM get all lathered up about “strategy” and bang-boom and neglect logistics pretty much entirely (probably because it’s all boring trains and stuff), but it’s just as important a part of the story as the rest of it.
nickdag
Great post! Thanks for putting this together.
btw Kos (of Daily Kos) has been posting a near nightly post about the war as well. He’s been particularly focused on logistics (and logistics of weaponry) from Day 1, and he’s repeatedly brought up Russia’s over-reliance on rail lines. It makes for good reading.
Geminid
@nickdag: Russia’s failure to introduce palletizing is another logistics impediment. I was surprised to read they were so backwards in this area.
way2blue
@Carlo Graziani: Plus if I remember correctly—Russia had seeded the Ukrainian government & industry with moles in key positions who to some extent did manage to sabotage Ukrainian efforts early on.
J R in WV
Nor only Carlo’s article, but the following thread of discussion was fascinating and productive. I should no longer be surprised by the depth of information available on Balloon-juice on scientific issues, historic and political events around the world, etc, etc. But I am still awed by the Jackals education and experience in almost any arena.
Thanks to John Cole and to ALL the B-J jackals for all the sharing of information and background on all of these critical arenas… we are all more informed on so many issues now than we once were.
currawong
Thanks Carlo,
I’m looking forward to reading more.
One point I’ve found interesting in all of the reading I’ve been doing has been the overestimation of Russia’s capabilities by not taking into account that the country is a Kleptocracy. When Putin agreed to invest billions in upgrading the armed forces, he had no idea how much of that money was being syphoned off into foreign bank accounts and superyachts. An example that springs to mind is the quality of tyres (English spelling!) on the logistics trucks. rather than the military grade tyres expected, cheap alternatives were swapped in leading to breakdowns and vehicle abandonment.