Dan Carlin has a bit on how long the German convoy was at the start of WWI that moved through Belgium. He said the head of the column would move 29 miles before the back of the column started moving.
“At the sight of the first few regiments of the enemy we were thrilled with interest,” Davis wrote. "After three hours they had passed in one unbroken steel gray column and we were bored.
“But when hour after hour passed and there was no halt, no breathing time, no open spaces in the ranks, the thing became uncanny, inhuman… It held the mystery and menace of fog rolling toward you across the sea… For three days and three nights a column of gray, like a river of steel, cut Brussels in two.” SOURCE
Does the average RusFed conscript have a sniper-quality rifle and the training to use it effectively at long range? (after less than 1 or 2 years on the job?) How close could trained Ukrainian snipers effectively get without too much danger?
The word sniper is overused, especially by those taking well aimed hits. The longest operational sniper shot was about 3,500 meters. That shattered a previous record. Anything even in the 1,000 meter range is going to be by someone highly trained as a special operations soldier who eats and breathes shooting and is properly equipped. I don’t know if they have anyone of that caliber (no pun intended). Someone who is a good shot with a decent rifle with a scope would be effective in the 300-500m range but I wouldn’t trust them last that.
“An army marches on its stomach,” is an idiom attributed to multiple military leaders including Napoleon Bonaparte and Frederick the Great (any they probably cribbed it from generals going back to Hannibal), and is as true today as it has been through history. How much reserve you plan to carry can be pretty much guaranteed to run short, hence why establishing and protecting supply lines is crucial.
It seems like the Russian Army expected to blitzkrieg into Ukraine with little resistance and few maintenance issues without consideration for the Rasputitsa (the Eastern European ‘mud season’) that would make overland travel slow and difficult if roads were blocked. Curiously, I’ve seen little evidence that the Russians brought recovery and bridging equipment, again presumably because they expected little resistance, or maybe because they are just assuming a certain amount of losses that they could continue to bypass despite the fact that they are largely advancing along two lane highways.
Weather is as big of an adversary as your opponent, as the Germans and French both discovered when trying to advance on Moscow. Ironically, now Russia is learning the same lesson.
Right, and that’s why I asked the question. Presumably, if and when the convoy completely runs out of fuel, they’d become much less of a threat. And they’re certainly operating under conditions very different from what they planned for (especially if a lot of the soldiers on the ground thought they were just in for a training exercise, not an invasion). So are they getting close to the point where they’d be running out of fuel?
The two general ways an overland military campaign progresses is either incrementally, establishing bases behind it that provide logistic supply, or by rapid advance (so-called blitzkrieg or “Shock & Awe” in American parlance) punching through enemy ‘lines’, and then either meeting up with another force with supply lines behind it, having supplies air dropped (which is an extremely expensive and incredibly complex logistical problem), or securing an airfield for resupply. (The pre-modern warfare notion of resupply through pillage and rapine is obviously untenable for modern forces.). There is no way for a modern armored force to carry all fuel and ammunition it will need for an extended conflict with it; tanks and other armored vehicles consume fuel at a prodigious rate and can only carry enough ammunition for a few engagements before needing resupply, so an advancing force is always “running out of fuel” if supply lines are strained.
The problem with the Russian incursion seems to be that they adopted the latter tact of fast advance but either overestimated their maintenance, supply, and the rate of progress they could make on fairly narrow roadways, underestimated resistance and ability to maintain air superiority, or more likely both. It’s a perennial problem in land warfare, notwithstanding that US forces were able to advance over the third rate Iraqi military by dint of its overwhelming capability and extensive logistical capability.
The video above suggested that they simply do not have enough trucks. Inside of Russia they have a vast rail network to move things around. But, once at the end of the line they need trucks to move things forward and they simply do not have that.
Also, Putin expected Ukraine to fall quickly (and had some good reason to think so). Once it didn’t his supply problems manifested.
I don’t know that they don’t have enough trucks, but it seems clear that basic maintenance is lacking. Having a few trucks fail isn’t a big deal; offload them and push them off to a ditch, and keep moving. When some significant portion of your supply trucks aren’t moving, it limits the amount of supplies that can be moved to the front, and that limits the progress the entire effort can make.
But was it a sniper? Those getting shot at tend to call anyone who can reasonably hit what they aim at a “sniper.” With a zeroed in scope I could do some damage at 300 meters. I am far from being a sniper. To be a true sniper there is a lot more going on than being a decent shot.
And this is probably the biggest evidence we have that Putin is living in a bubble, Hitler-like, where the information he’s getting to use in his decision making is just completely detached from reality.
We all expected Russia to do better, largely because we didn’t realize how hollow the Russian military has become. We knew it wasn’t up to NATO standards, but we thought it was at least half decent. But Putin, and everyone else in a command position in Russia, should have known the truth. Should have known how poorly trained and motivated most of the soldiers seem to be. Should have known how badly maintenance has been neglected. Should have known how depleted their supplies are.
But apparently they didn’t know any of that. Or, if they did know, were to frightened to speak up about it.
It is also worth noting that the Ukrainian government has told its citizens to attack supply vehicles rather than military vehicles. Apparently it was successful enough that the Russians have tried to disguise their fuel trucks (which the Ukrainians have figured out).
I wonder if Putin followed the same dictator playbook that the likes of Stalin and Hussein did. Their biggest threat is from someone in the military launching a coup so they make it a point to kill/imprison/fire talented and popular generals. When it comes time to fight they find they have a bunch of no-talent sycophants running things and it shows as their military performs very badly.
In the famed Battle of the Bulge, the Germans didn’t have enough fuel so part of their plan involved capturing Allied supplies. That didn’t work out so well.
I think you are spot on … there was a lot of info in the twitter-shpere where even the closest staff in the kremlin were completely taken by surprise from the decision to invade. It is fairly certain that the military had no prior knowledge either (beyond being in maneuvers to rattle sables) …
Even top brass - which seems to be indicative of a nonfunctional relation between Mr. P. and the military…
GREAT way to start an attack-war … and from the on things went pear-shaped
