It’s hard to rebuild when every city in the world is a smoking pile of radioactive rubble.
What is the one, swift blow you are envisioning? Does it involve crossing the Russia/Ukraine border with either troops or planes? I can (just) imagine Putin putting up with US/NATO forces engaging within Ukraine, but that probably doesn’t stop anything.
IMHO, a lot of airstrikes, especially of the close-air-support variety, would make a decisive difference. No ground troops involved, nor anything beyond Ukraine’s borders.
The Ukrainians are already doing 90% of the stuff needed to get a decisive win over Russia. They just need someone to chip in with the remaining 10% of the gap.
And I guess in your fantasy scenario Putin just goes “oh well, guess I lost” and the whole thing is over?
And before they do that, they’ll need to take out the air defense systems based in Russia. And engage with the Russian air force.
How’s that going to work out when NATO bombs are falling on Russian territory?
Putin is killing civilians in order to provoke just this NATO response. This is what he wants. To use the very good analogy in one of these threads, Putin is getting very embarrassed by getting his ass whooped by a one-armed man. What he wants is a bike gang to step in and beat him up so he can say “See! They are all against me and I never had a chance!”
Just one swift blow, and the troops will be home by Christmas…
It is both sides losing but ends up with Russia more likely wanting to find a way to staunch its blood loss. For Ukraine this is an existential fight. They lose and they no longer exist. Russia withdraws or stays and their circumstance is not much different. The first has some loss of face but can be successfully sold to his people as “mission accomplished” and few in country will argue. The second continues a war that continues to weaken Russia further and further with little gain to be seen on any horizon.
Memorial Day…
I am the very model of a Russian Major-General,
I’ve information vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I know the Party Leaders, and I quote the fights historical,
From Poltava to Stalingrad, in order categorical.
I’m very well acquainted, too, with matters Communistical,
I understand all slogans, both old Lenin’s and Marxistical.
About the FSB I’m teeming with a lot of news…
With many cheerful facts about the Novichok in teacup brews!
I can toady up to Putin, and then back-stab all my enemies,
I siphon off arms profits, and I sell off all my MREs,
I excel in money laundering, and dabble in the stock market,
With cheerful charm and caviar, promotion is a certain bet!
In fact, when I know what is meant by ‘Kinzhal’ and by ‘TB2’
When I can tell at sight a Stinger missile from an NLAW too,
When such affairs as sorties and surprises I’m more wary at,
And when I know precisely what is meant by ‘commissariat’…
When I have learnt what progress has been made in modern gunnery,
When I know more of tactics than a novice in a nunnery,
In short, when I’ve a smattering of elemental strategy…
You’ll say a better Major-General has never sat a gee!
For my military knowledge, though I’m plucky and adventury
Has only been brought down until the middle of last century,
But still, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I am the very model of a Russian Major-General!
March an army from Warsaw to Moscow. Granted that strategy hasn’t always worked but neither Napoleon nor Hitler was American.
< golf clap >
That was amazing.
In theory this is a terrific idea against an outnumbered enemy in open, flat terrain.
In practice if your plan and logistics are a tire fire, no strategy will work.
It also divides the defender’s forces, and makes them defend on multiple fronts simultaneously. If you’ve got massive superiority in numbers, that’s a solid strategy. Especially because there’s usually a limit to how wide your battle front is going to be. If the nature of the terrain you’re fighting on means you can’t really commit more than 50 tanks to battle at once, and you’ve got 500 tanks in reserve, why not open a second front? Otherwise, those other 450 tanks aren’t going to be doing much for you.
In the current conflict, the most obvious example of this problem would be the Russian convoy that stalled outside of Kiev. The main road in was completely blocked by Russian hardware, they couldn’t maneuver around because of the mud, and they were still trying to get more troops into Ukraine. Do they just keep piling more and more vehicles on the back of that enormous traffic jam? Or do they move them to a different front where they’ve got more mobility, and can get into the country to fight faster?
Yea, the initial plan seems to have been perfectly sound - in theory. Russia had a solid numerical advantage, an overwhelming air superiority and had seen Ukraine do quite badly in their earlier dust-up in the Donbas. Just seize the main Kyiv airport with airborne troops in a lightning assault to potentially allow steady reinforcements from the air, while an armored column sprints down from the north to relieve them and take the city. Very Market Garden.
Meanwhile break out from the east to overwhelm western Donetsk, Luhansk and the city and oblast of Kharkiv with support from the local Donbas rebel paramilitary. Push up from the south to cut the Dnieper, sweeping up large cities like Dnipro, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
It all looked nice and tidy - cut off the administrative head of the government with the capital, isolate the industrialized east of the country with most of its larger cities, dictate terms. A puppet rump state in the west based on Lviv or even an exposed Kyiv could be safely tolerated as window dressing. Why Ukraine will probably crumple like a balled up piece of paper.
The best laid plans…
…don’t work very well when your logistics are shit, your air force timid, too many of your troops are under-trained and most of all the enemy refuses to cooperate by promptly collapsing like you assumed would happen. Russia might still grind out some version of a “win” where they keep the Donbas region and get recognition of their annexation of Crimea. But they didn’t seem to plan this out that far.
The pentagon have said that the preassembled combat power of the Russians is now at just below 90%.
I loved that book and still have my father’s dog eared copy. My favorite cartoon was one showing Joe and Willie looking at bombed out house that had a nine pane window. Eight of the glass panes had been broken out, except one in the middle remained somehow miraculously unbroken. The caption read “Go ahead and do it, otherwise you’ll be dreaming about it all night.”
But airpower is at 60%.
From @JackDetsch:
NEW: Russia has launched more than 300 sorties into Ukraine the last 24 hours: senior U.S. defense official.
Russian sorties are not “venturing very far and very long” into Ukraine airspace, the official said. Russia still has more than 60 percent of fixed wing and rotary wing capability.
And cruise missiles at 50%.
Russia has fired more than 1,100 missiles into Ukraine in nearly a month of war, but still has more than 1/2 of air launched cruise missiles avail.
The evidence that Ukraine is winning this war is abundant, if one only looks closely at the available data. The absence of Russian progress on the front lines is just half the picture, obscured though it is by maps showing big red blobs, which reflect not what the Russians control but the areas through which they have driven. The failure of almost all of Russia’s airborne assaults, its inability to destroy the Ukrainian air force and air-defense system, and the weeks-long paralysis of the 40-mile supply column north of Kyiv are suggestive. Russian losses are staggering—between 7,000 and 14,000 soldiers dead, depending on your source, which implies (using a low-end rule of thumb about the ratios of such things) a minimum of nearly 30,000 taken off the battlefield by wounds, capture, or disappearance. Such a total would represent at least 15 percent of the entire invading force, enough to render most units combat ineffective. And there is no reason to think that the rate of loss is abating—in fact, Western intelligence agencies are briefing unsustainable Russian casualty rates of a thousand a day.
Yeah, just shoot the gun outta the badguy’s hand. Easy-peasey.