It’s interesting to consider how similar this sounds to the Japanese position pre-Pearl Harbor and Yamato’s famous dictum.
There are lots of fights you can win only by getting in the first couple of decisive licks while the other guy is still reeling with surprise. As a small guy in a world of much bigger beefier guys I’ve lived that doctrine most of my life. I’ll lose nearly every fight that lasts more than about 1 minute, and probably more like 45 seconds. The senior Russians who really knew what they were getting into were thinking the same. As was Yamato and those like-minded.
I sincerely doubt anyone explained that clearly and unequivocally to Putin himself.
You really think that the senior Russians perceived themselves as the small guy going up against someone much beefier? That anyone thought that?
Honestly I do not see the failure to win quickly as a horrible failure of intelligence, or even of the information getting to where it needed to be.
It was just poor execution by a surprisingly dysfunctional Russian army filled with confused poorly motivated troops that was poorly led with corruption rife in the command chain, coupled with Ukrainian forces who were highly motivated and very well led from the President down to empowered commanders in the field.
I think a well-informed Russian General realized they did not have a good chance if NATO decided to heavily back Ukraine. Because said general would be aware of how much his forces were a paper tiger.
In general, armies greatly value offensive momentum. If you can make shit start going wrong for the enemy faster than he can react, regroup, and recover, real soon you’re parked in his capital city raising your flag.
That was the Russians’ realistic plan, to the degree any part of the Ministry of Defense had one. IOW blitzkrieg works. Which they intended to achieve mostly by sheer force of numbers.
Conversely, the US’ doctrine for battle at every level is essentially to be more nimble than the opponent so we can observe, decide, & attack and defend at double his pace or better. Soon enough he’s befuddled and ineffectual and you’re now practically unopposed, dealing with a mere armed mob rather than an organized opposition. See OODA loop - Wikipedia
The problem with plans that depend on decisive levels of momentum is that once you bog down, you’re hosed. You probably don’t have a realistic plan B that will work to become un-bogged-down. The Russians became bogged down in the first week and have yet to recover at a strategic level, despite some notable tactical successes in spots.
The Soviet version blitzkrieg doctrine was not an inherently awful operational plan. Bludgeoning can work if you bludgeon both intelligently and hard enough. But it depended on quickly delivering massive amounts of men and material to a front. Something which the Cold War U.S.S.R. was at least theoretically equipped and prepared to deliver. Massively kleptocratic and relatively poorer Russia isn’t remotely the U.S.S.R. and cannot.
I remember an analysis of the Syrian front during the Yom Kippur War. Syria apparently adhered rather slavishly to Soviet offensive doctrine - doctrine they did not have the force levels to support (questions of the Syrian army quality aside). So it quickly sputtered out when the weaker second wave could not maintain the momentum of the first and Israeli defenses stiffened. Things then quickly went south for them.
You have tailor your strategy and tactics to what you have to work with. Aside from being insanely optimistic the initial Russian plan wasn’t fatally flawed so much as it just didn’t work (well enough, obviously some gains were made). Some was luck, an awful lot was Ukrainian resistance, some was Russian fumbles. But where it mostly went sideways was not in the very initial offensive operations, but in trying to sustain a lengthy offensive war after the attempted government decapitation gambit failed. It has become embarrassingly obvious the corrupt and broken Russian system just can’t do that against a serious opponent.
On that note, I’ll just add some more content on the whole “history of antisemitism in Eastern Europe” subject:
Note that my point isn’t to lay blame for antisemitism on the steps of any particular side. In general, the real issue usually seems to tie back to anti-usury policy in Christan religion, which (skipping over the details) made Jewish people creditors to lots of people over the centuries. This made them a common enemy of the populace and a good foil for whoever was in charge. The ruling powers could usually easily switch any anger and fear against the powers in charge towards the Jews, and all the debtors would see (figurative) dollar bills today before their eyes. A little chasing and murder later and their anger towards the government turned into a self-claimed financial windfall.
Or, even shorter, the world was basically really horrible in most ways before ~1970. And that’s pretty universal, not just limited to any one place. You can find a sufficient cause to hate almost anyone if you’re just willing to step over that line.
And the takeaway should be: Learn from the past and let’s make the world continue to not suck. If we screw it up, that’s the world that you’re cosigning your children, grandchildren, and other descendants back to.
Just be good, be honest with yourself, and do right.
Blitzkreig was the Nazi term for their tactical innovation. They were the first military to recognize the essential change in warfare technique that became available once reliable, powerful internal combustion engines made fast-moving equipment possible.
Today the US Army calls fundamentally the same thing “maneuver warfare” and the DoD calls it “combined arms warfare”. The Russians have their own ponderous terms for largely the same ideas.
Punchline: just like with uniforms, the Nazi had a certain panache in their terminology that we all recognize today. “Combined arms warfare” is pretty dry and bureaucratic by comparison. I chose blitzkrieg in my post because you (generic you) would recognize & understand it. Not because the Russians are playing from Rommel’s hymn book as such. At least not any more than all militaries are now (still?) playing from the book of how to employ motorized equipment against fixed & human targets.
That’s still bad intelligence in a sense; maybe not external intelligence gathered by military intelligence or the other intelligence services, but a lack of awareness about the abilities and state of their own forces.
I mean, I can’t imagine that if everyone involved knew that their forces were inept and dysfunctional, that they’d still have greenlighted the invasion. Somewhere there was incomplete information- maybe being fed to Putin, maybe just to the people reporting to him, etc…
But I agree with @LSLGuy- the initial fast moving blitzkrieg is now seeming to show the hallmarks of a hope of overwhelming the Ukrainians before their own shortcomings could be exposed, and before they’d really start to tell in the sense of being able to conduct a protracted war.
And they bogged down, not least due to clever Ukrainian tactics and determination. At that point, it started to become more and more clear that something was awry in Russia.
For me, it was when the VDV (Russian airborne forces) failed to capture the Hostomel airport in the first few days of the war. I suspected something wasn’t right- the VDV were supposed to be the cream of the Russian crop outside of their special operations forces. If anyone’s supposed to be able drop, fight and win on the Russian side, especially against what are supposed to be second-rate Ukrainian forces, it was the VDV. But they failed… hard, and that’s when I started to wonder if something was up with the Russian army.
Any guesses how this all would have progressed had the 2020 US election gone the other way? Seems like the former President was not a big fan of the troublesome Ukraine government.
I don’t think it would have been much different. Trump tried, for example, to pull out off Syria and the military largely ignored him and stayed where they were.
I think between the will of Congress and the distrust of Trump through the top of the military, we would have done pretty much everything that Biden has done. The big difference would be that Trump would vacillate between being angry at being forced to do it (ala dealing with the pandemic) and trying to take credit for anything manly and cool that came out of it, like sticking up to Russia.
I will disagree. I suspect that if Trump had won, presumably because he was more popular / Biden had less enthusiasm would have applied to other elections, most noticeably the two squeakers in the Senate. If he had control of the Senate, and his reign of terror over the Republican party was reinforced rather than weakened, I can absolutely see him purging (since he was safe in his second term) any remaining military and professional members of government for more stooges.
At which point, yeah, he could and would have crippled the US response to Ukraine, maybe not out of a desire to help Putin, but sure as hell to stick it to the Ukraine who had been involved in his earlier humiliation. And I think w/out the US providing generous and steady support, that NATO and the rest of the world would also have been less helpful overall.
Thank god we don’t live in that forked universe though, for many, Many reasons.
There seems to be a bad turning point approaching for Ukraine. Russia is adding more troops and material, ability to add to Ukraine forces is less. Ukraine has done great at getting back more territory. Hopefully they can defend, keep the territory. Fall weather may slow things down. Give Ukraine opportunity to retrench positions in gained territory.
Actually it was a term coined by western journalists after the invasion of Poland, and the germ of the idea in general was devised by von Clausewitz in his seminal work, On War in 1832, long before the NSDAP was a gleam in anbody’s eye. Cite
Like a lot of other pieces of nasty work the Nazis sure refined it, though.
yes, pretty much … the Luftwaffe were the first to practically bear the brunt of an attack war … hence I bolded the FORCE in airFORCE …
they were very much a vital piece in the concept of the Blitzkrieg.
So I think it’s fair to say the Blitzkrieg needed ICE-vehicle and Airforce - to break the WWI paradigm of highly imobilized forces standing in front of each other for years on end.