Russia Invades Ukraine. Again

POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 21:09
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SECOND

Sunday, September 17, 2023 5:40 PM

The government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz has been dragging out a decision to supply German-made Taurus cruise missiles. Scholz has not explained the reasons for his waffling.

The fact that Taurus cruise missiles or ATACMS are unlikely to be game-changers on the battlefield does not mean that they should not be sent. On the contrary: Western support for maintaining Ukraine’s precision-strike capability is an important component of the Ukrainian armed forces’ overall attrition strategy. One way to increase the missiles’ potential effectiveness would be to lift restrictions on their use — for example, by allowing Ukraine to target the Kerch Bridge.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/09/14/ukraine-russia-taurus-germany-ata
cms-weapons-attrition-strategy-deep-battle/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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SIGNYM

Monday, September 18, 2023 8:23 AM

This rather lengthy article is an analysis of USA military shortfalls. It could have been titled "How the United States Military would fare in a modern,large-scale, near-peer war"

Quote:

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What The US Will Learn, and Not Learn, From Its War In Ukraine

The quarterly magazine Parameters by the U.S. Army War College published an interesting paper about U.S. war capabilities:

A Call to Action: Lessons from Ukraine for the Future Force

Its abstract says:

Fifty years ago, the US Army faced a strategic inflection point after a failed counterinsurgency effort in Vietnam. In response to lessons learned from the Yom Kippur War, the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command was created to reorient thinking and doctrine around the conventional Soviet threat. Today’s Army must embrace the Russo-Ukrainian conflict as an opportunity to reorient the force into one as forward-thinking and formidable as the Army that won Operation Desert Storm.

This article suggests changes the Army should make to enable success in multidomain large-scale combat operations at today’s strategic inflection point.

It is normal for a military to analyze ongoing or just finished wars and to draw conclusions from them. Such efforts should then lead to changes in the military structure or its procedures.

The above effort though is unlikely to lead to the changes the authors want to see.

The authors correctly point out that command and control of troops via radio is problematic when the enemy has the means to detect all radio traffic:

The Russia-Ukraine War makes it clear that the electromagnetic signature emitted from the command posts of the past 20 years cannot survive against the pace and precision of an adversary who possesses sensor-based technologies, electronic warfare, and unmanned aerial systems or has access to satellite imagery; this includes nearly every state or nonstate actor the United States might find itself fighting in the near future.

The solution lies the extensive use of Mission Command (in the original German: Auftragstaktik) which allows subordinate leaders to do their own planning and operation within the given context:

When Milley served as Chief of Staff of the Army, he explained mission command through a concept of “disciplined disobedience” in which subordinates are empowered to accomplish a mission to achieve the commander’s intended purpose—even if they must disobey a specific order or task to do so. Without perfect communication, a subordinate officer or soldier must be trusted to make the right judgment call during battle, unencumbered by the need to seek approval for small adjustments. to

To do that is a cultural issues. Mission Command must be lived and experienced from the very first day a civilian becomes a soldier. The U.S. officer corp is more used to direct order and control. The culture of Mission Command is not liked because mistakes of subordinate units still gets blamed on the higher command level.

Mission Command uses way less communication than direct order and control and is more robust when the crap hits the fan. But, unlike the German military, the U.S. army has never really lived up to it. I doubt that is going to change.

The next problem are high casualty numbers:

The Russia-Ukraine War is exposing significant vulnerabilities in the Army’s strategic personnel depth and ability to withstand and replace casualties. Army theater medical planners may anticipate a sustained rate of roughly 3,600 casualties per day, ranging from those killed in action to those wounded in action or suffering disease or other non-battle injuries. With a 25 percent predicted replacement rate, the personnel system will require 800 new personnel each day. For context, the United States sustained about 50,000 casualties in two decades of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. In large-scale combat operations, the United States could experience that same number of casualties in two weeks.

The 25% replacement rate is probably too

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