Painful, slow, and deadly

Ukrainian soldiers fire mortar in preparation for a night attack

It really can’t be described how difficult it is even for a highly motivated Ukrainian army to advance against defenses dug in by an enemy army over a period of nearly a year.  There were two words that leapt out from a major New York Times story on Sunday that describes the slow, grinding nature of the Ukrainian offensive in the south that is attempting to break the so-called land bridge Russia has been using to resupply its army from Crimea. 

Those words are “concrete bunkers.”  The Times story explains that the Russians have constructed the bunkers along north-south Route T0158 because the road is paved making it nearly impossible for the Russians to mine, as mines are difficult to hide without asphalt patches in the pavement revealing their location.  That’s how long the Russians have been preparing their defensive positions, long enough to supply themselves with concrete mix, make the concrete, and pour it into molds to form the bottom, sides, and roofs of the bunkers.  Russian defenses of bunkers, trenches and anti-tank barriers were built not only in Ukraine’s south, but all along the 600 mile front lines that run from west of Kherson in the south to the Russian border in the north.  Those defensive lines are why it has taken Ukraine so long to produce results in their spring-summer offensive.  The Times headline describes Ukraine’s struggle to regain land from Russia in just a few words:  house by house, village by village. 

It is slow, bloody going for Ukraine everywhere they are attempting to punch through Russian defenses and reclaim land that was taken by Russia after their initial attack in February of 2022.  Do you want to know whose fault that is?  The Russians, of course, for invading Ukraine in the first place.  But it’s our fault, too, and the fault of NATO, that we were so slow in supplying Ukraine with weapons and armored vehicles like tanks and armored personnel carriers and 155 mm howitzers and ground-to-ground missile systems like the HIMARS.  If Ukraine had not had stocks of Russian anti-aircraft SAM and BUK anti-aircraft batteries before the war, and if they were not so good at concealing the batteries and using them against Russian fighters when Russia first attacked, the war would have probably been over in the week or so Vladimir Putin had been told it would take.

I’m not going to go through a complete recitation of the agonizingly slow supply of western weapons and munitions to Ukraine but suffice to say it amounted to too little and too late.  We didn’t supply Ukraine with 155 mm howitzers, the most prominent and essential weapon used by both sides in this war, until months after Russia invaded.  It took more months before we and other NATO nations supplied them with HIMARS guided missiles and similar systems from Great Britain and other countries.  German Leopard tanks didn’t reach Ukraine until this spring, and American Abrams M-1 tanks have still not reached the battlefield.  F-16 fighters have been promised by several countries including the U.S., but they are not in the fight yet.  And even the F-16’s are old-tech fighters, designed and first built in the 1970’s.

A recent story by Stephen Bryen on his “Weapons and Strategy” Substack pointed out that exactly none of the western tanks being supplied to Ukraine have so-called active defenses attached to their armor cladding.  Bryen reports that Leopard tanks with their old-tech armor have been “crushed” by Russian defenses, and Abrams tanks bound for the battlefield will be old models that lack the reactive armor you’ve probably seen attached to the sides of Russian tanks that have been destroyed by Ukrainian forces.  You can see reactive armor in photographs that show the pattern of rectangular or square boxes affixed to the sides and turrets of newfangled U.S. Abrams tanks, and it has been shown on the sides of some of the Russian T-72 tanks Ukraine has managed to knock out.  If one of the reactive armor boxes is hit by an incoming anti-tank round, the box explodes outward from the side of the tank preventing the anti-tank round with its armor-piercing warhead from penetrating the side of the tank.  Russians have been able to hit and destroy German Leopard tanks and American Bradley armored personnel carriers that don’t have reactive armor.

The defenses the Russians took months to build and fortify are terrifying.  They consist of a series of trenches and minefields, one after the other, arranged in layers defending the Russian front lines.  Once Ukraine breaks through one line of trenches and minefields, they immediately face the second line, and then the third.  The Russians man the trenches with infantry soldiers equipped with machine guns, anti-tank rockets, RPG-7 rocket propelled grenades and mortars.  Further back from the front lines are batteries of their 152 mm howitzers.  Every weapon on the Russian front lines has been arranged so that machine guns and anti-tank rockets have interlocking fields of fire, which fan-out to encompass any possible line of attack the Ukrainian forces might take and overlap the fields of fire of nearby Russian weapons on the left and right. 

Russian 152 mm howitzers are set up with precise locations on the battlefield pre-programmed into their aiming systems, targeting likely places the Ukrainian forces might attempt to attack, such as farmhouses, road intersections, tree lines, and villages.  Even the coordinates of the first line of Russian trenches is programmed into Russian ground-to-ground rockets and artillery aiming centers, so that if Ukrainians manage to overcome the first line of Russian trenches and start using them to defend themselves, the Russians can fire their weapons and artillery at pre-set targets everywhere along that line of trenches.  Even more terrifyingly, the Times reports that the Russians have begun spraying fields with flammable liquids.  When they detect the approach of Ukrainian forces, they launch a drone and drop a grenade on the field, igniting the flammable liquid, setting off anti-personnel mines. 

It's a nightmare, and it explains why Ukraine’s progress south toward Melitopol on the Sea of Azov has been so slow.  The Russians have fought them for control of every village in their path.  When the Ukrainian forces take one village, they must move on to the next.  Ukraine took the village of Robotyne a few days ago.  It’s on the road to Tokmak, a town about halfway from Ukrainian lines to Melitopol on the Sea of Azov.  The Russians know exactly what each village means – another place to cause the Ukrainians to throw soldiers and armored vehicles into the fight and spend precious 155 mm Howitzer rounds.  After the Russians lost the village of Robotyne, a spokesman for Russian forces in the Zaporizhzhia region announced that they had performed a “tactical withdrawal” from the village.  You bet they did.  This is a screen grab from a video released on a Russian Telegram channel on August 23, two weeks before the Russian announcement of their “tactical withdrawal.”  Look at the level of destruction even at that time.

Now Ukraine has begun to move toward Verbove, another farm village that lies about five miles east of Robotyne.  Last Friday, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby announced that Ukraine had moved three miles east of Robotyne, an accomplishment he called “notable progress” in the offensive. 

There is no road between the two villages, just one farm field after another, intersected by a few lines of trees and an occasional creek.  Here is a screenshot of the Google satellite view of Robotyne, shown outlined at the upper left. 

Almost every field is outlined by trees, giving cover and defensive positions to the Russians.  There is a creek running across the lower right of the screenshot.  The land is completely flat.  The Google satellite view doesn’t show the Russian trenches because the satellite photos were taken before Russia had starting digging them.  But imagine trenches dug along tree lines with anti-tank barriers set out in open fields.  Imagine those fields are full of mines.  The Ukrainian forces are moving left to right in this screenshot, towards Verbove.  I counted at least a dozen separate farm fields between the two villages.  Every one of them could be mined.  Trenches could be anywhere.  That’s why Pentagon spokesman Kirby was moved to call the three-mile advance “notable.”

The Sunday Times story reported that the Ukrainian military has begun using small, squad-sized units of 10 to 11 soldiers to penetrate Russian defenses and take land yard by yard.  It is extraordinarily difficult to coordinate the movement of the squads so they won’t fire on each other, and this must be done dozens of times a day across long front lines. The squads move mostly at night to avoid detection by Russian forces.  I can’t recall the exact multiple they taught us at West Point to describe how much more difficult night missions are: was it five times as hard, even ten? Whatever, it was a lot. Ukrainian squads approach a farmhouse slowly and then attacking suddenly, take it from Russians, floor by floor.  Afterwards, they set up their own defenses in the same farmhouse and prepare for the next night’s advance.  That is the definition of what used to be called small unit or hand-to-hand combat, and because Russia had nearly a year to build its defenses, that is what Ukraine is stuck with doing.

Washington Post columnist Max Boot had a column on Monday in which he quoted a retired American general, Mark Arnold, whom he met in Kyiv in May, as blaming the U.S. and NATO countries for the slow progress of Ukraine’s offensive.  Ukraine’s army is marginally equipped and ill-trained, Arnold told Boot.  “If you add all the Bradley Fighting Vehicles, Leopard 2 and Challenger 2 tanks, and other equipment, the Ukrainians could outfit only one brigade. Only six battalions of the 350 battalions in the [Ukrainian] ground forces have been trained in combined arms by NATO.” Arnold reported that Ukraine’s lack of airpower had enabled the Russians to use attack helicopters to target Ukrainian armored units as they have attempted to move forward against Russian defenses, causing large Ukrainian losses. 

Ukraine is further hampered by low ammunition stocks.  It was revealed after the U.S. announced that it was supplying Ukraine with 155 mm howitzer rounds containing cluster munitions that one reason for the new form of ammunition was that the U.S. was running out of regular high-explosive howitzer rounds.  The website Task and Purpose reported in early August that the U.S. is “ramping up” its production of 155 mm howitzer ammunition from its current level of 24,000 rounds a month to as many as 80,000 rounds a month.  But that won’t happen until next year.

There is one final reason that Ukraine’s offensive has been so slow:  The U.S. and NATO were simply not ready for a land war in Europe.  And when I say not ready, I mean in stocks of ammunition and the kinds of weapons the U.S. and NATO have put into production since the fall of the Soviet Union.  We’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars on air force fighters that are virtually useless, the F-35 “Lightning” being just one example.  Bloomberg reported on March 29 that only half of the U.S. F-35 fleet of fighters are “mission capable.”  If you think that sounds bad, listen to this: “mission capable” means the jets are capable of flying only some of their missions.  The number of F-35 fighters that are “full mission capable” is less than 30 percent, Air Force General Michael Schmidt stated to the House Armed Services Committee in written testimony.  Schmidt is the so-called program manager for the F-35.  It’s almost as bad with other U.S. weapons systems.  Popular Mechanics reported in 2022 that of 186 F-22 “Raptor” fighters in the American air arsenal, only 93 of them are ready to fly missions at any given time. That is a fifty percent mission-readiness, hardly adequate for fighting a war. 

If these things are so complicated to maintain, and the parts necessary to keep them in the air are so expensive, then what good are they?  And we’re not talking about maintaining them in a combat situation, which would of course be necessary in a war against…oh, I don’t know, say…Russia.  We’re talking about being able to keep these jets in the air right here in the peaceful U.S.A. for training purposes where nobody is shooting at them.

We have spent hundreds of billions more on new surface ships for the Navy that anti-ship missiles can shoot out of the water at will.  But it is in so-called conventional weapons that NATO and the U.S. are so deficient.  It turns out that then-President Trump was right when he railed against NATO nations’ defense spending.  Only eight of 30 NATO nations are spending the two percent of GDP they pledged to spend on defense several years ago, and only one nation is spending more.  I bet you can’t guess which one:  Poland, with its long border with Ukraine, is now spending four percent of its GDP on defense and just announced that they will be spending $15 billion to buy American Patriot air defense batteries, and $12 billion more on Apache attack helicopters. 

The fact of the matter is that neither the U.S. nor NATO were prepared for a land war in Europe, even one in which they could use Ukraine to do the fighting for them.  Bryen at his Weapons and Strategy Substack reports that “it is obvious that NATO stockpiles are insufficient for Ukraine and totally inadequate for NATO security.  You can't burn up $100 billion in weapons and ammunition and have everything OK.”

An understatement if there ever was one. 

Which raises one final question:  What would have happened to Ukraine if Russia had been better prepared militarily? I guess we can thank Putin for being more of a blowhard and fantasist than a rational leader of one of the nuclear-weapons equipped “superpowers” that we had long thought Russia was.  If Putin’s generals hadn’t been as corrupt as he is, if his government and Russian oligarchs who took over and exploited nationalized industries and drained Russia of its natural resources and wealth, Ukraine, the U.S., and NATO would be in a very different situation than they are today.  Even dribbling weapons and support to Ukraine has kept the Russian bear at bay so far, but it hasn’t been enough to send him back home. 

What of tomorrow?  Are the Pentagon and the U.S. government, not to mention our NATO allies, going to get smart and stop wasting precious resources on crap like the F-35 and F-22, and start doing the simple things right, like producing adequate quantities of 155 mm howitzer ammuntion and HIMARS rockets?

As retired General Mark Arnold observed, taking example from Ukraine’s struggle against the Russian army: “The U.S. military would be hard-pressed to achieve much better results without air dominance and long-range artillery systems.”  

That would be air dominance provided by jets like the 50-percent mission capable F-22 and and the 30-percent capable F-35, along with artillery shells we’re producing at a rate of only 24,000 a month, not even enough for Ukraine’s army, much less ours.