The Russian way of war

What an authoritarian system gets you on the battlefield

Ukrainians persevere after Russian destruction

A Pentagon official said yesterday that the Russian army has lost about 20 percent of its fighting force since the war began, including at least 1,000 tanks.  To give you some idea of how bad that is, if within three months of its invasion of Iraq the United States Army had lost 20 percent of its force, 30,000 American soldiers would have perished.  That is the exact number of Russian dead claimed by the Ukrainian military:  30,000 soldiers.  Forbes magazine, which since the beginning of the war has kept a fair and reliable count of Russian losses, puts the number of Russian KIAs at 15,000.  Any way you look at the Russian numbers, they aren’t good.  As the Defense Ministry of Great Britain pointed out, Russia has lost more soldiers in three months in Ukraine than it did in nine years of fighting in Afghanistan.

As for tanks, in the first Gulf war, which involved the largest deployment of U.S. armor since World War II, our forces lost zero tanks due to enemy fire.  The U.S. destroyed over 3,000 Iraqi tanks and about 2,000 armored personnel carriers and other combat vehicles. Ukraine claims to have destroyed 1,300 Russian tanks and more than 3,000 armored personnel carriers.

Even though the news recently has been full of reports of Russian advances in the Luhansk region of the Donbas, the Pentagon official told the New York Times that Russia’s “’plodding and incremental’ pace was wearing them down.”  American officials are comparing Russia’s moves in the Donbas to its early successes in the war during its assault on Kyiv.  Russia was able to take a few villages and suburbs of Kyiv and hold them, but only for about a month before the damage done to their supply lines by Ukrainian attacks sent Russia’s army in full retreat back across the Belarus and Russian border.

Russia’s efforts in Ukraine have not “proceeded particularly differently in the east than in the west because they haven’t been able to change the character of the Russian army,” Fredrick W. Kagan told the Times yesterday.  Kagan is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and has been quoted extensively in the press since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

I agree with him, although I would put it a little differently.  Russia hasn’t been able to learn from its early mistakes in Ukraine because its army is the product of a totalitarian top-down system that prizes political position over military efficacy, initiative and speed.  Putin was running the war out of Moscow in March when his forces were sent into retreat from Kyiv, and he's still running the war as his forces were driven recently out of Kharkiv and sent packing back across the Russian border.  Even though Russian supply lines are shorter in the east than they were during the attempt to take Kyiv, the Russian army is having the same problems now that they had then. 

I can tell you what you get when you’ve got an authoritarian system in charge of an army and a war.  You get demoralized troops.  Some Russian soldiers have been at war continually for more than three months.  Those who were forced to retreat from Kyiv back into Russia and Belarus got a brief respite but were put back into action almost immediately.  The Russian soldiers on the front line know how the war is going.  They know how many of their buddies have been killed.  Hell, they know their names. 

The Times reported last week that in some cases, it is Ukrainians who are taking care of Russia’s war dead.  A Times reporter and a photographer were present when Ukrainians picked up 62 dead Russian soldiers who were left behind when their army retreated from Kharkiv recently.  They put the bodies into body bags and loaded them into refrigerated train cars after taking DNA swabs to use in identifying them. 

Here is something you can count on:  the Russian soldiers in their units knew those bodies were left behind.  Hell, they knew their names.  And now they know that Ukrainians are caring for their dead, too.  This doesn’t make for a happy army, I can assure you.

The way the Russian army is fighting this war is to blame, at least in part, for the problems they’re having.  The Russians are laying waste to one city and town after another, and by doing so, they are removing huge swaths of Ukraine that they could live on.  Every time you see a photograph of Ukrainian houses in rural areas that have been blown to bits, what you’re not seeing are photographs of dead cows, sheep, and pigs, because most if not all of them have been moved away from the front by Ukrainians to deny them to the Russian army.  Russia is blowing up infrastructure, and they’re not leaving anything for themselves.  They can’t live off the land because they’re not leaving anything behind.  I have seen some stories about Russian troops looting Ukrainian homes, but what they’re getting is a little jewelry that got left behind.  They’re not getting food or stuff they can use.  The Ukrainians are seeing to that.

The contrast between what I’ve seen watching the war in Ukraine on television and what I saw in and around Mosul in Iraq when I was there is extraordinary.  When the 101st Airborne Division took Mosul in May of 2003, they didn’t level the city or suburbs with artillery.  The city was intact.  So were villages to the north, east, south, and west.  Stores were open, and so were vegetable and meat markets and even boutiques in downtown Mosul.

The American military seized Iraqi infrastructure – the headquarters of the 101st was in a Saddam palace and two brigade headquarters were at Iraqi airfields.  I stayed with an infantry company in Mosul in an Iraqi social security office they had taken over. But they didn’t lay waste to Mosul.

Years later I turned on the TV and watched as ISIS invaders leveled whole stretches of Mosul and its suburbs.  And of course Russian air power and weapons were used in Syria as Aleppo and other towns like it were completely destroyed.

You could say Iraq was a different kind of war, or even that we were after its oil, so we did as little damage as possible.  All of that would be true to one degree or another.  But the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a different thing altogether.  It’s more akin to the Nazi invasion of Russia and Ukraine (which was then part of the USSR).  Bomb it and shell it and kill them all was the Nazi theory of war in 1941, and it appears to be Russia’s theory in 2022.  The mass killings of civilians in Bucha and elsewhere are certainly reminiscent of Nazi slaughter in 1941. Even today, there are memorials all over Ukraine to civilians and soldiers lost to Nazi executions during World War II.

It looks as if there will be more memorials when this war is over.  The people of Ukraine have never forgotten what Nazi Germany did to their cities and towns and to their people during World War II, and they will never forget what the Russians have done this year. 

And that brings up one last comparison between our invasion of Iraq and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  I will never forget the faces of Iraqi citizens when I walked through Mosul with an infantry squad on patrol in November of 2003.  I thought what I would see on their faces would be hate, but it wasn’t there.  In its place was a kind of calm certainty that this too would pass, that the soldiers from America would one day be gone and the streets of Mosul would again be theirs.  They had to go through several diminishing years of American occupation, and then occupation by ISIS, but Mosul once again belongs to its people, and armed soldiers in body armor and helmets no longer walk its streets.

I don’t know what’s on the faces of Ukrainians right now, especially in the destroyed cities of Mariupol and Kharkiv and Kherson and other places Russia has laid waste to.  I would guess it’s a mixture of fear, hate, anger and determination, especially if the Russians are still there, as they are in several towns in the south.  But I’ll bet even those Ukrainians exchange looks privately with each other that say this too will pass, that the Russians will one day be gone. 

If Russia keeps fighting this war the way they have fought it so far, those Ukrainians will be right.