10 Feb 2022 - Day 717 - The art of command, U.S. Grant, Young Guns

Hi FB!

The big news for sure is General Zaluzhny getting sacked and General Sysrky replacing him. That along with the US Congress still all knotted up over American assistance to Ukraine, and the “journalist” Tucker Carlson tossing softball questions at Vladimir Putin for two hours, would be stressful enough in normal times, and the war is still there.

Latest reports are the Russians are making incremental progress, bloody infantry attacks, in Avdiivka and dropping really big bombs around Kurahove, a place some readers of this blog will know personally. There has been another wave of rumors about a major Russian attack planned in the Kupyansk section, and if you read only Russian sources the Ukrainian Marine bridgehead opposite Kherson is down to several dozen men and will be wiped out shortly. Those pro-Kremlin sources don’t mention another Ka-52 that got shot down, or yet another armored assault vs. Novomyhailivka that got shot to bits, again by driving out into the open and getting swarmed by attack drones, this was the second time in a week.

On the UAF side I am seeing unit rotations taking place, so for me, frankly, on the operational level the line looks more or less stable to me. But there are still plenty or reports of forward troop shortages and clear evidence that the UAF doesn’t have nearly as many 155mm shells as targets in range.

Which is, from the Ukrainian point of view, not the worst situation in which to shuffle generals and try and sort out at least some of the top-command and administration issues the UAF has been dealing with, well, less than perfectly.

There is a lot to do. This is things like figuring out how to get what looks like 100,000+ service personnel out of the rear areas and closer to the front, making sure pay arrives on the dot no delays, throwing resources at casualty treatment and hospitals so that no wounded soldier, ever, has anything to say about his treatment except that it was fast and efficient, enforcing discipline so that a battalion rotated off the line trains more than send troops to a firing range and practice first aid, systematize and centralize all the Mom&Pop drone units out there, and get army supply at least to the point where if troops want things like thermal sights or chain saws, it won’t be up to public donations, UAF supply chains will handle that in most normal armies.

Everyone thinks Zaluzhny is a great guy, I hear he’s got a wicked sense of humor and a really fast mind, that he has a real talent for getting people to like him and agree with him, and that he thinks about military operations deeply and with great intelligence. He clearly is a rock in a crisis. But the UAF is imperfect, he was the commanding general, so for all of Zaluzhny’s virtues one can’t say the UAF became a perfect organization under his command.

Not trying to read too much into this but if the commanding general sticks a baby Yoda on his battle armor, he’s probably a nice guy

There is a school of thought out there that Zelensky sacked Zaluzhny for political reasons, that Zaluzhny was getting too popular with the general public, but I don’t buy that.

My view, both Zaluzhny and Zelensky are adults, and they understand fully what they do or don’t do goes way beyond politics, this is war like whether the homes of people they know are attacked or the children of those people might die violently sometime soon. So, my starting point for parsing Zaluzhny’s sacking, is that the stakes are so high that I think neither Zelensky nor Zaluzhny would place the risk of defeat by Russia over personal career.

If that assumption is accurate, then clearly, and this is not speculation, Zelensky has two military goals that Zaluzhny thinks can’t be delivered on (1) Long-term attrition campaign conducted by the UAF that will eventually gain ground by inflicting major destruction of Russian fighting capacity and (2) Not letting the fighting line devolve to trenches, pure static warfare and a frozen conflict. This is not tea leaves, both men have made enough public statements to make the split in their views clear.

It is clear that Zaluzhny told Zelensky that to make that happen he needs a half million men to fill out formations, make rotations and large-scale training possible, etc. Which is an entirely credible position for a four-star general laying out conditions and resources necessary to fight a conventional war campaign against a peer opponent.

The thing is, Zelensky’s position is basically that the resources aren’t there to mobilize a half million men, not to arm them, not to pay them, not to command them. Nevertheless, the need for aggressive attrition warfare is there and, according to Zelensky, Zaluzhny or any other senior general saying “It can’t be done” isn’t acceptable.

We know, from the Ukrainain media, that the formal trigger for Zaluzhny’s sacking was that at the start of the year the army needed to submit a strategy plan to the President for 2024. Zaluzhny didn’t. The speculation is wide that that didn’t happen, because Zaluzhny and his staff felt they had not nearly the resources in equipment and manpower they would need, to conduct aggressive, long-term attrition warfare incrementally gaining ground against the Russian army. So they told the civilian leadership “What you want, given the resources we have or can expect, we can’t deliver.”

Although I don’t believe domestic politics has anything more than a marginal influence on how Zelensky weighs possible military strategies, I (and others) am positive international political considerations are absolutely a critical factor, because foreign support to Ukraine depends directly on the credibility of Ukraine’s efforts to defend itself. Were the fighting to stop, and a tacit ceasefire to take place, then the political pressure in Europe — never mind the US — for a negotiated peace lopping off chunks of Ukrainian territory would not only become massive, it would from the point of view of western capitals make sense.

In that sense Zaluzhny’s and his staff’s view taking major initiative in the war wasn’t possible, was dangerous to Ukraine’s war strategy, because without foreign aid, the fighting stops and the Russians stay where they are, until they gain strength and attack again. It is pretty easy to make the argument that continuing, lethal Ukrainian military pressure on Russian forces in Ukraine is a matter of Ukrainian national security. Zelensky certainly has said he thinks so, more than once.

So, the real question to ask, is whether the Ukrainian army can maintain, relentless, destructive pressure on the Russian military long-term, without coming to pieces on its own. The basic, at bottom logic of the Ukrainian strategy, obviously, is that anyone who says Russia has endless troops and resources is an idiot, an army never existed in history, that could take lopsided casualties infinitely.

General Attrition

Which reminds me a lot of that drunk and a failed shopkeeper, Sam Grant. You know, the US general that eventually won the US Civil War. It might be worth keeping him in mind today. He got a second lease on life and eventually got his shot at high, military command, because the political leader of his country — Abraham Lincoln — concluded the general he needed in charge, was a general first and foremost that would fight. Later on some of his soldiers, particularly the ones surviving massed assaults he ordered on Confederate lines, would call Grant a “butcher”. Historians still argue that one back and forth, but, they pretty much all agree one thing: that once the US Federal government adopted a strategy of destructive attrition against the Confederacy, Dixie was done.

U.S. Grant, a West Point graduate who in the early stages of his career looked to be heading nowhere, but that was before his employer, the US Federal government, found itself the world’s first industrialized war and realized that the way to win a war like that was with a top general ready to focus on the killing, and convert superior military resources into large-scale killed and wounded enemy soldiers, and destroyed enemy property and infrastructure.

Oleksandr Syrsky, Zaluzhny’s replacement, is within the UAF well-known as a hard-ass. He works out, he doesn’t sleep much, he doesn’t hand out too many medals, he goes to the front (a lot) and if your brigade is under his command and you’re the brigadier, life is usually is on edge a bit, because either General Syrsky or his staff asked an unpleasant question, or if something isn’t right in your brigade, then the chance is very real he will.

If a unit under Syrsky’s command succeeds the reaction from his headquarters (I was once told) is mostly “Well obviously you succeeded, that’s what you were ordered to to.” I know of units liberating villages during the Kharkiv operation phoning back to HQ, reporting “Hooray for us, we took this place!” and the HQ response (to a national guard unit) was along the lines of “You still have phase lines and a job to do, and BTW you could do better reporting your location.”

During the Battle of Kyiv Syrsky inherited absolute chaos and after a while had assembled a patchwork defense that worked, and during the Battle of Kupyansk he sneakily assembled a mix of conventional and volunteer units, put together a plan, and caught the Russians absolutely flat-footed. All of which is acknowledged in the UAF, but, his reputation in the Ukrainian military is not as the guy that magically pulls big victories out of his hat, but rather that he is a die-hard professional, a driver, and by his behavior seems less focused less on winning battles and more on killing Russians.

You can find criticism of Syrsky among members of some units that were stationed at Bakhmut, the compaint essentially is that the Ukrainian infantry got sent in without much support and eventually was ground to bits trying to stop repeated Russian assaults and overwhelming artillery fire. That that was how the battle played out, it is a matter of public record. Once the war is over I guess the historians will be debating on how much military sense a hard core Ukrainian defense at Bakhmut made.

What I am pretty confident about, right now, is that Zelensky and the national political leadership have decided that the way forward probably all of 2024 (at least) is maximum casualties on the Russian army and maximum damage and destruction behind Russian lines, rather than bold attempts to gain ground, but always keeping an eye out for opportunity. From that perspective, for that strategy package, Syrsky looks like a pretty good match, and if we want proof we can look to Bakhmut.

It’s not a one-man job

This is General Syrsky. The media play up how he won the Battles of Kyiv and Kharkiv, but, ask his soldiers and most of them will say he’s a solid professional, but a hard-ass and if you work for him he’s a demanding boss.

I’ve stuck in a link to a KP article I did about some other officers named by Zelensky as Syrsky was appointed, as new senior leaders in the UAF. The details and bios are in the article.

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/27856

More generally, all but one was younger than 50 and one isn’t even 40. One of them is a standout planner and probably the guy that ran, and is running, the operation that created the Krynki bridgehead. Another, it appears, leads the amphibious operation. Another, it seemed to me literally, was the first brigade commander to employ FPV drones big time, like artillery, in his sector. This guy also stitched back together a brigade shattered at the start of the war and turned it into a solid unit. Another took a pretty good brigade, and turned it into one of the best fire brigade units for the entire UAF, this brigade (93rd) became one of the three or four, that always goes where there is an emergency.

Zelensky didn’t say what jobs these guys are going to get, but, strictly speaking he’s stepping on toes, because deciding who gets promoted in a buddy-buddy old boy organization like a professional military, is one of the most closely-guarded prerogatives in the officer corps, senior officers will fight for control over access to top posts, usually like for their own lives. This is not even discussing the cliques that form in any good-sized army, of which the UAF deffo is one. So the fact that Zelensky is stepping in, is a serious step away from normal civil-military relations. It’s possible this was another point of disagreement between Zaluzhny and Zelensky.

In any case, these guys are exactly the kind of officers front-line troops have been complaining doesn’t get promoted to influential positions, for much of the war. This is, at minimum, proof Zelensky (or his staff) has access to front line troops and listens to them. The young commanders Zelensky is pushing, are exactly the type of commanders the front line troops say need to be in Kyiv so that the rear area people can finally understand what the front needs and how to get it to them.

Of course, skill in tactical battles at the regimental level, does not necessarily qualify one for major, senior responsibility at the top of the armed forces of a nation-state at war. Zelensky’s bet is a bold one but it’s far from sure.

I would say the overwhelming view within the UAF rank and file, is that may be so, but, guys who have fought and learned to do it well were smart enough at least to do that, and that brain level plus front line experience — and willingness to be unpleasant and direct, a la Syrsky — can only help if the goal is fixing everything that isn’t right (yet) with the UAF.