Thanks again Don. This is basic stuff that even the Red Army had to teach as doctrine. What I don’t get is how much they got this wrong and kept doing it.
Dzhokhar Dudayev told in an interview that the Soviet army deteriorated in 80s because of the nepotism which destroyed both its moral values and efficiency. In 90s it became even worse through the lack of funding, so that corruption (stealing old supplies and tech from storage, kickbacks from contracts or even using conscripts for slave labor) became the only means to survive for officers.
If a sergeant, lieutenant, colonel or any other rank consistently shows poor judgement it is their superior's responsibility to correct the situation, which could include removing the soldier from his position.
When the person at the top of the military organization consistently shows poor judgement, it is the responsibility of the political leader to correct the situation.
When the person at the top of the political organization fails to make the corrections, the only hope is that there is a check and balance in the political organization that can have some influence on the decisions or lack of decisions. In this case, that would be Ukraine's parliament.
If the parliament fails to pressure the leader of the political organization to make the correct decisions, then the last hope, as it always is, is with the people. They have to pressure their leaders into making the correct decisions.
So the worst we hear about command seems to have been true all along. This rot at the top is such a disgrace when brave soldiers' lives are at stake. Zelensky must know all this, which makes him complicit. How depressing.
Yeah, hopefully the political process will be enough. I note that the article suggests lies stopped being the norm in the Russian army around 2024, so some time after the Wagner rebellion. Putin feared for his life and the system reformed. Hopefully it won't take something as dramatic in Ukraine.
Idiots with big egos what a sad story. unfortnately not the first ones nor the last ones. We see many examples those days. Would be funny story if people are not dying
Very nice overview of the problems you and Tom have been going over, for quite some time. Perhaps you need a library of fundamentals you could direct new readers to? This really lays it out well.
One of Ukraine's main problems is racism, which prevents them from learning from the experience of other peoples. Ukrainians truly believe they are the pure Aryans and, at the same time, the Israel of Eastern Europe. I've been reading the Ukrainian press, blogs, and commentaries for about 20 years, and I see their profound belief in their own wisdom. This isn't bad, but it prevents them from embracing the experience of others. They mean the war began in 2014, but they haven't prepared a single city for battles on the streets since then. Everyone who wanted to have long understood how to prepare a high-rise residential area for defense, used the Chechenian experience in front of them. However, Ukrainians find it repugnant to even imagine learning from the Chechens. All these years, instead of learning from experience, they've been busy inventing fakes about Caucasian or Asian soldiers.
(This is a unique feature of the Ukrainian mentality: everyone lies very easily there, and the public doesn't criticize them for it. Any newspaper, blog, or TV channel that's become famous for a stupid fake or a dumb analysis doesn't lose any audience.)
Everyone in Ukraine is convinced that urban warfare inflicts terrible losses on the Russians, yet Ukrainians manage to dodge the bullets. The entire nation watched footage of Russian soldiers being shot by Ukrainian fighter from a window. Not a single shot hits their target, and then the Russians are already climbing the stairs of their apartment building. This happened in Mariupol, then in Bakhmut, then in many cities. It's simply astonishing. They don't blow up the staircases of apartment building entrances, they don't block or mine the entrances to buildings, they don't cut passages through floors, they don't set up firing points in the walls... What kind of genius does it take to shoot from windows and balconies when the enemy has FPV drones, grenade launchers, or even a tank? Time and again, Ukrainians lose three or four soldiers at once to explosions in rooms or stairwells. Sometimes they lose ten fighters to a single winged bomb that destroys five floors in an instant. Anyway they still haven't learned to make shelters in basements by collapsing concrete slabs and then raising them with jacks at the right moment. In fact, they don't have jacks or rope ladders to cross between floors through pre-drilled holes. They don't make such passages, just as they stubbornly refuse to make loopholes in walls and concrete slab.
Chechens have long known that these perfomanses in a window are ineffective and highly dangerous when the enemy has mortars or tanks. Now, in the age of drones, it's become even more dangerous. What's too difficult about punching gun's loopholes in a wall and in a concrete slab between floors? The Chechens prepared small explosive charges in advance, precisely calculated to penetrate a brick wall and a reinforced concrete slab between floors. They knew in advance how many charges were needed to penetrate a machine gun loophole and how many to create a manhole. The Chechens used jacks to lift collapsed concrete slabs. They even dug short tunnels to connect basements.
Ukraine is full of coal mines and underground pipelines, but the Russians use them, while Ukrainians are ashamed to adopt the practices of inferior races? Ukrainians spent a lot of energy mocking Russian tank designs for protection against FPV drones. Everyone got that this is funny, but it works. For a 22-23 years Ukrainians never tired to laugh at that the Russian Empire was forced to borrow ideas from backward Muslim Persia. Now it's not too funny.
At least all of them were offended I didn't go into comparing their situation with that of the I or II Balkan War, or the First World War...
...have sighted, and then decided not to remind them that nobody was running an 'anti-oil campaign' with ballistic- and guided anti-ship at the time - but very much so during the Iran-Iraq War... then recalled that it's pointless to quarrel with racists, and I don't want to even be associated with any.
It's not any racism, it's unprofessional behaviour. Some Ukrainians fought together with the Chechens in the First Chechen War. Sachko Biliy(Сашко Білий) was the most famous person who supported the Chechens. The Ukrainians even ignore their own experience.
How did the Ukrainians come to this situation? Education. In Ukraine, don't teach working on mistakes. For example, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army fought for more than 10 years because it was very flexible.
Thank you for this. You wrote: «They’re running from leadership that they don’t trust or feel is incompetent.» Now that is a damning verdict. (I noticed you put it in bold.)
100% agreement and that is why I now for the first time lose hope that Ukraine will survive. The system Syrsky created is like a malign fast growing tumor and we all know what happens if the tumor spreads too much.
It is so bitter, that everything was avoidable.
Nevertheless whatever will happen, doesn't depend on my conclusions.
«Syrsky is also continuously and actively ceating conditions that encourage lying by giving orders that exceed a unit’s capabilities, such as forbidding withdrawals or counterattacking to regain lost ground, regardless of the situation. Sometimes if a unit fails an impossible order the commanders are removed. If a commander with superior information and judgement objects to an order, they are sometimes relieved. Sometimes they quit» — Or they shoot the commander in the head right at the command post if he refuses to carry out suicidal orders from higher command when the situation created by that same command has become catastrophic. For example... For example, as was the case in Vuhledar with the commander of the 186th Battalion of the 123rd Brigade of the Territorial Defense Forces, Igor Gryb. Since my brother was at his funeral, he heard a lot of interesting things from his colleagues and relatives. For example, that they had been recalled from the Kherson direction, where they were guarding the islands, and quickly transferred to Vuhledar, trying to fill the gap. Two weeks before that, they had all been given leave, and then thrown into hell. Since the poorly equipped territorial defense brigade had neither the resources nor the capabilities to carry out such an order, this order was simply criminal, because everyone would have simply died. There weren't even enough vehicles for evacuation, not to mention heavy weapons. Igor understood that everyone would die if they carried out this insane order after being quickly transferred from Kherson. Many in his unit were acquaintances, or even relatives. Igor did not want to look into the eyes of the relatives of those he could not save. The high command told him directly that they would hold him fully responsible if he did not carry out the order to send men into battle to delay the Russians. Igor let his men go, and he was later found at the command post with a bullet wound to the head. All those from his unit who made a fuss about this were sent to prison. Of course, no one from the high command took any responsibility, no matter how many people they senselessly destroyed with their idiotic orders. And then everyone wonders why the population of Ukraine is demoralized and does not want to follow the orders of these degenerate butchers. I'll tell you more: they will never recruit people into the army again, no matter what these freaks and degenerates promise and no matter how much money they offer. There will only be resistance from the population, because the military and political leadership has completely and utterly discredited itself.
Yup, have covered the sad fate of the 123rd at the time...
After Mr. Gryb's death, the situation became that bad, that the mass of all three battalions of that brigade de-facto defected - to go protesting (together with their families) against their order to deploy to Zaporizhzhya. The GenStab ignored this, had the SBU arrest and jail lots of people, then cobbled together the troops (from three different battalions) that didn't defect and sent them to the frontline...
...once there, the resulting battalion was easily overrun by the Russians, leading to the destruction of the Mechanised Battalion of the 128th Mountain Assault...
So, the idiots in Kyiv destroyed an entire brigade and then a highly-experienced and well-equipped battalion. With a single blow. And because they know better.
...and then ordered the PR-Department to release resulting videos - showing T-72s of the 128th vainly attempting to fight out of the Russian encirclement - as 'demonstration of ZSU's skills and bravery'... :rolleyes:
I appreciate what it means to make decisions and how they appear outside an organisation.
In my line of work, there are competing points of view. We gather our data and make decisions based on our corporate strategy. The public sees these decisions in isolation and publishes endless opinions on why the organisation is "constantly making bad decisions". We always have lessons learned meetings: trust me arm chair generals, this was the least bad option!
Thanks again Don. This is basic stuff that even the Red Army had to teach as doctrine. What I don’t get is how much they got this wrong and kept doing it.
Dzhokhar Dudayev told in an interview that the Soviet army deteriorated in 80s because of the nepotism which destroyed both its moral values and efficiency. In 90s it became even worse through the lack of funding, so that corruption (stealing old supplies and tech from storage, kickbacks from contracts or even using conscripts for slave labor) became the only means to survive for officers.
True. In the ‘90’s conscripts were harvesting cabbage in the Far East.
I read of one case when they were working on their commander's house.
from what I've read, this goes on in today's russian army. Conscripts rented out for harvest, construction work, sometimes sexual slavery.
there must be something else going on behind the scenes we don't know/can't appreciate. I mean, it's surely not just constant bad decision making!?
Constant bad decision making is not unusual in war. Know what SNAFU stands for?
If a sergeant, lieutenant, colonel or any other rank consistently shows poor judgement it is their superior's responsibility to correct the situation, which could include removing the soldier from his position.
When the person at the top of the military organization consistently shows poor judgement, it is the responsibility of the political leader to correct the situation.
When the person at the top of the political organization fails to make the corrections, the only hope is that there is a check and balance in the political organization that can have some influence on the decisions or lack of decisions. In this case, that would be Ukraine's parliament.
If the parliament fails to pressure the leader of the political organization to make the correct decisions, then the last hope, as it always is, is with the people. They have to pressure their leaders into making the correct decisions.
There is some doctrine and politics:
- Zelenski can not allow any retreat or the Ukrainian Army will appear as losing. This could cut the flow of weapons and money.
- Good generals become presidents after the war.
So the worst we hear about command seems to have been true all along. This rot at the top is such a disgrace when brave soldiers' lives are at stake. Zelensky must know all this, which makes him complicit. How depressing.
He either knows, which is bad, or he doesn't know, which is bad.
The Parliament and people need to make their will known. Plenty of Ukrainian officers and enlisted already have.
Yeah, hopefully the political process will be enough. I note that the article suggests lies stopped being the norm in the Russian army around 2024, so some time after the Wagner rebellion. Putin feared for his life and the system reformed. Hopefully it won't take something as dramatic in Ukraine.
The existential issues are already pretty dramatic for Ukraine.
...or he does not want to know - which is worst of all.
Thanks
Idiots with big egos what a sad story. unfortnately not the first ones nor the last ones. We see many examples those days. Would be funny story if people are not dying
Very nice overview of the problems you and Tom have been going over, for quite some time. Perhaps you need a library of fundamentals you could direct new readers to? This really lays it out well.
Meanwhile... well, we're 'working on something of that kind'.
One of the best things that President Lincoln did during the American Civil War was to fire commanding generals until he found good ones.
One of Ukraine's main problems is racism, which prevents them from learning from the experience of other peoples. Ukrainians truly believe they are the pure Aryans and, at the same time, the Israel of Eastern Europe. I've been reading the Ukrainian press, blogs, and commentaries for about 20 years, and I see their profound belief in their own wisdom. This isn't bad, but it prevents them from embracing the experience of others. They mean the war began in 2014, but they haven't prepared a single city for battles on the streets since then. Everyone who wanted to have long understood how to prepare a high-rise residential area for defense, used the Chechenian experience in front of them. However, Ukrainians find it repugnant to even imagine learning from the Chechens. All these years, instead of learning from experience, they've been busy inventing fakes about Caucasian or Asian soldiers.
(This is a unique feature of the Ukrainian mentality: everyone lies very easily there, and the public doesn't criticize them for it. Any newspaper, blog, or TV channel that's become famous for a stupid fake or a dumb analysis doesn't lose any audience.)
Everyone in Ukraine is convinced that urban warfare inflicts terrible losses on the Russians, yet Ukrainians manage to dodge the bullets. The entire nation watched footage of Russian soldiers being shot by Ukrainian fighter from a window. Not a single shot hits their target, and then the Russians are already climbing the stairs of their apartment building. This happened in Mariupol, then in Bakhmut, then in many cities. It's simply astonishing. They don't blow up the staircases of apartment building entrances, they don't block or mine the entrances to buildings, they don't cut passages through floors, they don't set up firing points in the walls... What kind of genius does it take to shoot from windows and balconies when the enemy has FPV drones, grenade launchers, or even a tank? Time and again, Ukrainians lose three or four soldiers at once to explosions in rooms or stairwells. Sometimes they lose ten fighters to a single winged bomb that destroys five floors in an instant. Anyway they still haven't learned to make shelters in basements by collapsing concrete slabs and then raising them with jacks at the right moment. In fact, they don't have jacks or rope ladders to cross between floors through pre-drilled holes. They don't make such passages, just as they stubbornly refuse to make loopholes in walls and concrete slab.
Chechens have long known that these perfomanses in a window are ineffective and highly dangerous when the enemy has mortars or tanks. Now, in the age of drones, it's become even more dangerous. What's too difficult about punching gun's loopholes in a wall and in a concrete slab between floors? The Chechens prepared small explosive charges in advance, precisely calculated to penetrate a brick wall and a reinforced concrete slab between floors. They knew in advance how many charges were needed to penetrate a machine gun loophole and how many to create a manhole. The Chechens used jacks to lift collapsed concrete slabs. They even dug short tunnels to connect basements.
Ukraine is full of coal mines and underground pipelines, but the Russians use them, while Ukrainians are ashamed to adopt the practices of inferior races? Ukrainians spent a lot of energy mocking Russian tank designs for protection against FPV drones. Everyone got that this is funny, but it works. For a 22-23 years Ukrainians never tired to laugh at that the Russian Empire was forced to borrow ideas from backward Muslim Persia. Now it's not too funny.
Well, gauging by responses from few Ukrainians I've received the last week - and then in reaction to the feature Bedtime Story (https://xxtomcooperxx.substack.com/p/bedtime-story-from-the-1370th-night ). that with racism appears to be right.
At least all of them were offended I didn't go into comparing their situation with that of the I or II Balkan War, or the First World War...
...have sighted, and then decided not to remind them that nobody was running an 'anti-oil campaign' with ballistic- and guided anti-ship at the time - but very much so during the Iran-Iraq War... then recalled that it's pointless to quarrel with racists, and I don't want to even be associated with any.
It's not any racism, it's unprofessional behaviour. Some Ukrainians fought together with the Chechens in the First Chechen War. Sachko Biliy(Сашко Білий) was the most famous person who supported the Chechens. The Ukrainians even ignore their own experience.
https://www.volynnews.com/messages/pyat-faktiv-z-jittya-sashka-bilogo/
How did the Ukrainians come to this situation? Education. In Ukraine, don't teach working on mistakes. For example, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army fought for more than 10 years because it was very flexible.
Thank you for this. You wrote: «They’re running from leadership that they don’t trust or feel is incompetent.» Now that is a damning verdict. (I noticed you put it in bold.)
Excellent analysis and an ever better explanation of the background context!
100% agreement and that is why I now for the first time lose hope that Ukraine will survive. The system Syrsky created is like a malign fast growing tumor and we all know what happens if the tumor spreads too much.
It is so bitter, that everything was avoidable.
Nevertheless whatever will happen, doesn't depend on my conclusions.
«Syrsky is also continuously and actively ceating conditions that encourage lying by giving orders that exceed a unit’s capabilities, such as forbidding withdrawals or counterattacking to regain lost ground, regardless of the situation. Sometimes if a unit fails an impossible order the commanders are removed. If a commander with superior information and judgement objects to an order, they are sometimes relieved. Sometimes they quit» — Or they shoot the commander in the head right at the command post if he refuses to carry out suicidal orders from higher command when the situation created by that same command has become catastrophic. For example... For example, as was the case in Vuhledar with the commander of the 186th Battalion of the 123rd Brigade of the Territorial Defense Forces, Igor Gryb. Since my brother was at his funeral, he heard a lot of interesting things from his colleagues and relatives. For example, that they had been recalled from the Kherson direction, where they were guarding the islands, and quickly transferred to Vuhledar, trying to fill the gap. Two weeks before that, they had all been given leave, and then thrown into hell. Since the poorly equipped territorial defense brigade had neither the resources nor the capabilities to carry out such an order, this order was simply criminal, because everyone would have simply died. There weren't even enough vehicles for evacuation, not to mention heavy weapons. Igor understood that everyone would die if they carried out this insane order after being quickly transferred from Kherson. Many in his unit were acquaintances, or even relatives. Igor did not want to look into the eyes of the relatives of those he could not save. The high command told him directly that they would hold him fully responsible if he did not carry out the order to send men into battle to delay the Russians. Igor let his men go, and he was later found at the command post with a bullet wound to the head. All those from his unit who made a fuss about this were sent to prison. Of course, no one from the high command took any responsibility, no matter how many people they senselessly destroyed with their idiotic orders. And then everyone wonders why the population of Ukraine is demoralized and does not want to follow the orders of these degenerate butchers. I'll tell you more: they will never recruit people into the army again, no matter what these freaks and degenerates promise and no matter how much money they offer. There will only be resistance from the population, because the military and political leadership has completely and utterly discredited itself.
Yup, have covered the sad fate of the 123rd at the time...
After Mr. Gryb's death, the situation became that bad, that the mass of all three battalions of that brigade de-facto defected - to go protesting (together with their families) against their order to deploy to Zaporizhzhya. The GenStab ignored this, had the SBU arrest and jail lots of people, then cobbled together the troops (from three different battalions) that didn't defect and sent them to the frontline...
...once there, the resulting battalion was easily overrun by the Russians, leading to the destruction of the Mechanised Battalion of the 128th Mountain Assault...
So, the idiots in Kyiv destroyed an entire brigade and then a highly-experienced and well-equipped battalion. With a single blow. And because they know better.
...and then ordered the PR-Department to release resulting videos - showing T-72s of the 128th vainly attempting to fight out of the Russian encirclement - as 'demonstration of ZSU's skills and bravery'... :rolleyes:
I appreciate what it means to make decisions and how they appear outside an organisation.
In my line of work, there are competing points of view. We gather our data and make decisions based on our corporate strategy. The public sees these decisions in isolation and publishes endless opinions on why the organisation is "constantly making bad decisions". We always have lessons learned meetings: trust me arm chair generals, this was the least bad option!