Ukraine is fighting a war against Russian aggression with one hand tied behind its back

The great military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, who wrote “On War,” the classic 19^th Century tome on the philosophy and practice -- what they called at West Point the “art” — of war wouldn’t have put it this way, but one of most important rules of warfare is, you don’t want to do stuff on the battlefield that isn’t decisive.  A battlefield action is decisive when it accomplishes the goal it set out to accomplish.  When an army is on the offensive, that usually means the army must accomplish the goal of taking and holding land that is held by the enemy.  When an army is on the defensive, decisive means holding land you’re occupying against an attacking force that wants to take it from you.

One of the reasons the wars fought by the United States most recently in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were not won in any conventional sense of the word is because nothing our military did was, or even could be, decisive.  When the enemy you’re fighting is essentially the population of the country, in uniform or out, it’s impossible to do something decisive.  Take the city of Mosul, for example.  Iraq’s second largest city, with a population of about two million at the time the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, was not defended from U.S. forces in any sort of conventional way.  When the 101^st Airborne Division moved on Mosul and “took” the city militarily in May of 2003, they did not encounter a defense of the city by tanks and artillery and anti-aircraft batteries and all the rest of the military hardware backed up and operated by a conventional army.  No, what the 101^st encountered was a city full of civilians, some of whom had been in Saddam’s army which had been stupidly disbanded on the orders of Paul Bremer, the U.S. civilian head of what was called the Coalition Provisional Authority, the CPA. 

The civilians defending Mosul fought back with IED’s – roadside bombs, remotely detonated explosive devices such as mines, and other makeshift weapons that took a steady toll on U.S. forces who had great difficulty finding and identifying the Iraqis who planted the IED’s and detonated them.  Nothing the 101^st did against this guerrilla army defending Mosul was decisive.  Therefore, Mosul ended up not being “taken” by U.S. forces in any sense at all.  In fact, what the 101^st did within and around Mosul was dig in and establish heavily-defended small bases from which they could defend themselves against the unseen army occupying Mosul.

I’m going into our failures in these recent wars we fought overseas in order to contrast what happened over there with what is happening right now in Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.  In that war, Russia is equivalent to the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan and Vietnam.  Ukraine is defending its own soil from an invading army, which is exactly what we were in the countries we invaded.  We lost those three wars because nothing we could do militarily was decisive.  How do you occupy a city of two million people like Mosul?  The 101^st Airborne Division had about 30,000 soldiers.  You can look at those two figures, two million and 30,000, and see how nothing the U.S. did there could work, could be decisive militarily, and not only because they were fighting an enemy they couldn’t see, but because the numbers were ridiculously stacked against the U.S. military.

Ukraine is defending its land with a conventional army, not with the out-of-uniform guerrilla forces employed by Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan.  Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022 with conventional forces.  Ukraine’s army was not well equipped, nor was it well trained, but they fought back effectively enough to hold onto their nation’s capital, Kyiv, and about three-fourth’s of Ukraine’s total landmass.  Russia was able to expand the land they already controlled in Ukraine’s east and take a swath of the country in the east and south of Ukraine, most of which they have been able to hold onto since shortly after the main invasion. 

They have done this by ruthlessly destroying nearly everything they took.  Mariupol, the port city in the south, is a shell of its former self.  Bakhmut, a city of 70,000 before the war, complete with a downtown and suburbs and industries, doesn’t exist anymore.  Ukraine fought back in the north to the east of Kharkiv – Ukraine’s equivalent of Mosul – last September, and in the south retaking Kherson on the Dnipro River in November.  But by last winter, the war had settled into a 600 mile static front with Ukraine on one side and Russian forces holding Ukrainian land on the other.  It’s been that way pretty much ever since.  Nothing either side has done has been militarily decisive, including the long nine month battle Russia fought to take Bakhmut, during which Russia took an estimated 100,000 casualties.  Just look at that number and compare it to the population of Bakhmut, 70,000, and you get the definition of a battlefield operation that was not decisive.

One of the major reasons neither side has been able to do much on the battlefield that could be called decisive is because neither side has been able to use airpower to any great effect.  Ukraine has a small air force, 10 to 15 times as small as Russia’s by some estimates.  But Ukraine, right from the beginning of the war, had very good ground-based air defenses.  In the beginning, they were all former Russian weapons like SAM and BUK mobile systems.  Reports from British intelligence say that Ukraine has shot down about 70 Russian air force combat aircraft.  Russia has about 700 fighters in its air force, so that’s 10 percent.  Ukraine has lost about 60 of its fighters, a much greater percentage.  But losses of very expensive combat aircraft has caused both sides to severely limit their use in combat operations.  Russia no longer flies its aircraft over Ukrainian land it does not occupy, they are so frightened of being shot down.  Ukraine with its much smaller air force is reluctant to use their aircraft in offensive operations against Russian forces for the same reason.

So, neither side has achieved what the military calls air superiority, a state where one side can use its powerful air forces with impunity.  The British Defense Ministry is saying that Russia has been fairly effective in using its helicopters against the recent Ukrainian offensive to knock out tanks and ground forces, but it has become less effective as the Ukrainian offensive has ground on, probably because Ukraine has become better at shooting down Russian helicopters.

Right now Ukraine is engaged in a huge offensive against well-defended Russian forces along the 600 mile front lines of the war.  Russia has had nearly a year to dig in and establish defenses against Ukraine, because other than the battle for Bakhmut, that’s pretty much all they’ve done.  The defenses consist of three rows of trenches along the front lines, with anti-tank barriers, mine fields, and pre-targeted artillery defenses, which means, the artillery is ready to fire on precise target areas along its lines of defense.  This is old-style warfare that Russia is good at.  Most of the work to build the lines of defense was done when Russian engineers digging the trenches and laying the minefields were not under fire. 

Now all Russia has to do is sit back and wait for Ukraine to try to breach their defenses.  It happens like this:  Ukraine is engaged in a major campaign of joint operations, combing infantry, artillery, armor units, and engineers to attack Russian defenses.  Ukraine moves forward having laid down artillery barrages to “soften” Russian resistance, but then they hit the first row of trenches and mine fields and are immediately slowed down, so they become easier targets to hit.  Some Ukrainian armor, supplied by the U.S. and other NATO nations, are destroyed by mines.  Ukraine has lost some of its important armored bridging vehicles that are necessary to cross the deep trenches Russia has dug.  The bridges are laid down by armored tracked vehicles that carry clam-shell-style bridges that unfold from the tops of the vehicles and are left on the ground for tanks and armored personnel carriers and infantry to cross when the bridging vehicle has pulled back.  They look like this:

But while they’re laying the bridges, they are stopped and vulnerable to attack by infantry firing anti-tank weapons and artillery fired from behind Russian lines.  Without the bridges, the armored part of the joint operation can’t advance.  If the armored part can’t move forward, neither can the infantry which usually moves behind them.  The horrible thing about the Russian defenses is they are so complete and so effective.  That’s why the Ukrainian offensive has been so slow.

There was a report recently that Ukraine has taken such losses in these western-style joint combat maneuvers they were trained for in Germany and have attempted recently that they have fallen back on tactics they are more familiar with.  I don’t know what those tactics would be, other than small unit nighttime operations by infantry against Russian defenders to kill them in their trenches by sneaking up on them and using the element of surprise.  But even those tactics are difficult against the Russian defenders.  Ukrainian small units still have to cross mine fields and get through rows of razor wire and all the other conventional defenses Russia has established.

There have been some small Ukrainian victories in the offensive.  They have taken a few villages in the Zaporizhzhia Region in southern Ukraine to the east of Kherson.  There are reports that a Russian helicopter destroyed a Ukrainian armor unit that was concealed in a forested area of Zaporizhzhia.  Other reports have Ukrainian units shooting down Russian helicopters.

Meanwhile, Ukraine has been taking the fight to Russia with attacks on Moscow using armed drones and a recent attack on a Russian ship in Crimea using a naval drone, a small hard-to-see floating bomb that is directed to its target remotely.  The one thing Ukraine has not been able to do is launch missile attacks on Russian forces held in reserve on Russian territory or far behind the front lines in Eastern Ukraine, because the U.S. has not supplied Ukraine with long-range missiles.  The HIMARS multiple rocket launchers we have given Ukraine fire missiles with a range of about 35 miles.  U.S. ATACMS rockets, which can be fired from the same platform, have a range of about 190 miles.  Germany has supplied some long-range rockets, as has Great Britain, but we haven’t.  Such rockets if supplied in sufficient numbers could be a game-changer in Ukraine’s offensive campaign.

This is the one-hand-tied-behind-your-back aspect of Ukraine’s war against Russian aggression.  We didn’t even supply them with long-range 155 mm Howitzers until the war had been underway for nearly six months, and we waited longer than that to send HIMARS.  Both of those weapons have enabled Ukraine to stop Russia’s initial advance into its territory, but there things stand.  I’m not even going to bother to print the kind of maps from the Institute for the Study of War that I have done before, because all they show is the static front lines, with tiny movements of Ukraine into Russian-held territory, and tiny counter-moves by Russia such as are now taking place in the northern Luhansk Region. 

Russia too is fighting with one hand tied behind its back because it is unable to use its superior air force against Ukraine.  But that’s because Ukraine has been so effective at shooting Russian jets out of the sky with ground-based anti-aircraft systems that now include U.S. Patriot missile batteries capable of shooting down Russian cruise and ground-to-ground missiles being used to attack Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities.  Russia has attacked Ukrainian cities with the sole object of killing civilians since the war began.  Yesterday, a Russian missile strike killed two civilians in Zaporizhzhia City in the south.  The front lines are miles away from that city, so there was no military objective in the attack. This is typical of Putin’s strategy of wearing down Ukraine by destroying its cities and killing civilians. 

This has been a hugely lop-sided war from the very beginning.  That Ukraine has been able to hold onto the great majority of its land is a credit to its courage and spirit as a nation.  But Ukraine isn’t going to have any sort of decisive offensive victories against Russian invaders until the U.S. and NATO nations get more aggressive in the weapons they supply to Ukraine.  F-16’s are said to be approved for supply by NATO nations to Ukraine, and in coming months, they will begin to see action against the Russians.  But F-16’s date back to the 1970’s.  They don’t have the latest stealth technology that would enable them to avoid Russian air defenses and avoid Russian combat aircraft in the air.  Once again, the West has waited too long and is just now coming up with too little to supply Ukraine with the weapons it needs to act decisively against Russian aggression. 

Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan fought back against U.S. invaders with small arms and mines and IED’s and wore us down and eventually drove us out of their nations.  It took 10 years in Vietnam, 12 years in Afghanistan, and 8 or so years in Iraq, but we’re out of all three countries we invaded.

Ukraine isn’t Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan, and I don’t think they have the time to wear down Russia the way those three countries wore us down.  They have to fight a more conventional war against a more conventional army, and in order to win, they must be able to launch offensive operations that are decisive against the Russian enemy.

They can’t do it with one hand tied behind their back.