Dec. 13 - Day 1,023b - continued

Reforming the UAF

The endless soap opera of trying to make the UAF a full-on efficient, professional institution with professional leaders and functional processes, saw yet more drama with Wednesday’s appearance of four hours of video comment and criticism of the chain of command by one Valery Markus, whom some of you may remember was the Command Sergeant Major of 47th Mechanized Brigade.

The 47th was the formation in summer 2023 that was equipped with Bradleys and (later) M1A1 tanks got orders to break through Russian lines south of Zaporizhzhia. Those attacks failed, bloodily, at least in part because the Russians were ready and waiting with mines and anti-tank missiles. But even at the time there was chatter that all was not well in the brigade chain of command. Markus was one of the most visible critics of how the 47th went to war.

Markus had and probably has political ambitions and when the 47th was raised he became the face of the brigade, which was being created from scratch in early 2023. The idea at the time was recruit only volunteers, limit recruitment only to skilled soldiers, place them aboard the best combat vehicles, and then train them to razor sharpness and unleash them on the Russian army. It didn’t work, the 47th ran into heavy fortifications and attacking units were pretty much shot to pieces. There were all manner of recriminations, the brigade commander got sacked, and Markus volunteered for demotion because he said, publicly, the 47th chain of command was stupid and unprofessional.

I haven’t (yet) gone through all the videos, but already it’s a lot clearer to me what went wrong when the Ukrainian army attempted to create a mechanized infantry brigade from whole cloth and threw it into Russian defenses that were clearly ready and waiting.

According to Markus, a big part of the problem was lack of time (which we knew), so training was superficial and chances to practice very important things like coordinating artillery fires and clearing minefields at speed were really limited. My sources tell me the training for the 47th staff organized by the Americans in Germany was, if one is honest, pretty primitive and not realistic.

Probably even worse, Markus says that a significant portion of the soldiers that were in the 47th weren’t volunteers, they had been forcibly transferred from 30th brigade. It seems like the UAF command decided the 47th must go to war at a specific date and that deadline was so important the idea about manning the unit only with skilled volunteers was thrown out the window. Anyone with more than a day in the military knows what happens when a unit is told to surrender people to another unit, the worst ones are inevitably sent.

Markus says the time pressure stemmed from very high echelons insisting that the Big Summer Offensive start in June, no matter if the units that were going to do the fighting were ready or not.

I strongly suspect that pressure originated in the White House and specifically with the NSC head Jake Sullivan. This is because Pentagon guys know better than anyone else in the world that handing an army US combat vehicles does not make them combat effective like the US military. It takes training, time and above all professional officers and NCOs. From the Pentagon point of view, it’s absurd that a unit still taking in recruits in April could be expected to fight well against the Russian army in June.

Add in to this that, at the time the 47th was being spun up, UAF leadership (Zaluzhny) was openly hesitant about launching a Big Offensive. So my journo spidey sense tells me the White House and Sullivan pressured the Ukrainians to launch an offensive the Ukrainians knew had little chance of succeeding. But I can’t prove it.

Other videos released by 47th vets tell of limited training and junior officers who had little idea about standard officer stuff like forcing NCOs to teach first aid and drilling down on tactical drills. The picture of a green unit thrown into combat with insufficient preparation — which most of us had suspected for some time — is abundantly clear. At least, our understanding of why some Ukrainian brigades fail in combat is better. Image of Markus attached.

This is Valery Markus, a sergeant in 47th Mechanized Brigade. He has criticized his chain of command and the top levels of the UAF seem to be agreeing with him, but, agreement a problem exists and fixing are two different things.

It is only fair to add that since then the 47th and its new leadership has pulled itself together and now the brigade is one of the UAF’s best. But that of course begs the question why it took General Zaluzhny and later General Syrsky more than a year and probably hundreds of soldiers’ lives to turn the 47th into a decent fighting outfit.

Which leads me, fairly neatly, to the other interesting development in Ukrainian army reform this week. This Thursday the new commander ground forces UAF, General Mykhailo Drapaty, put out his first manifesto of how the UAF is going to change and improve. As some of you will recall, he got bumped up to that job last month in the latest round of UAF top-level musical chairs, and most observers think Drapaty is a new-generation, fully non-Soviet officer whose entire way of military thinking comes from a decade of fighting the Russians, he’s not NATO and he’s not Soviet, he’s home grown Ukrainian. He has an excellent reputation with the troops but, as always, getting promoted is not the same as automatically being able to handle more responsibility.

Drapaty says his key priorities are people, technology and transparent management, and that his goal is to transform the UAF into a modern force that will fight the Russian army on its terms and win.

The reforms — the word he uses is “transformation” — will cover everything: recruiting, training, implementation of new tech, digitalization of everything possible, pushing digital combat movement down to really low levels, and making work with volunteers (and there are millions of them) systematic. That would be good because right now the Ukrainians are fighting a major war and the way it looks to me something like half of the daily food, water, personal equipment and light vehicle transport isn’t the Ukrainian government, it’s volunteers. This is amazing and commendable but I question whether it’s the best way to fight a big conventional war against Russia.

If you’re talking drones on the front line, that figure is probably 70–80 percent. War has never seen anything like this. Drapaty’s take is that the UAF will incorporate drones on an even more massive scale — which would be something, because right now the UAF operates drones with a density and efficiently unlike other army in the world. By this I mean that unless a NATO brigade had absolute air superiority I would expect it to get cut to bits by a Ukrainian brigade of the same size. That’s how effective I think the Ukrainians are with drones. Drapaty obviously sees what works on the battlefield.

Drapaty says that the heart of the reforms is the Ukrainian infantryman who, the vision goes, will be aggressive, well-armed, and the speartip of a lethal organization. All training, both of infantrymen and all the support units, should center on the objective of making it so the Ukrainian infanty can fight and kill, and they know it.

The first areas in the UAF to experience “management changes” will be logistics and military training, he says. Next priorities are digitalization of everything, both what moves and stands still, standardized and transparent recruiting, active social support to soldiers so they can spend their time thinking about how to fight better rather than worrying about their families, and training leaders better to make units more agile and efficient.

All of which is ambitious and it would be hard to find anyone in the UAF that would say Drapaty has the wrong idea. It’s obvious he understand the problems. The solutions he says he will aim at, are common sense.

As always with the UAF, the hard part is going to be the execution, particularly inside an institution which sometimes has done a bad job supporting its soldiers, and whose officer corps is only about 1/3 (my number) really efficient and professional, and the other 2/3, frankly, are resistant to reform because reform means they’re the officers that won’t get promoted, they’re going to stagnate in their careers or get thrown out.

Drapaty claims his reform program is fully supported by Srysky and the national government and his message pretty much warns anyone that doesn’t want to play ball the Drapaty way, at best will soon be looking for a civilian job. Drapaty is a heck of a guy, apparently, but we’ve heard this before, so this army reform story will bear watching.

Which brings me back to Markus, because he went public in detail about what was wrong with 47th Brigade and some of its officers, the same day Drapaty published his manifesto. It’s possible he felt that with Drapaty pushing reform he could get away with four hours of YouTube laying out how sloppy UAF force generation — and again, it could well be the Americans had a hand in this — was in 2023.

LATE UPDATE: Financial Times reported the commander of joint forces East Oleksandr Major General Lutsenko has just been sacked and Brigadier General Oleksandr Tarnavsky — an officer with a background and reputation like Drapaty — was appointed to his position. I haven’t seen confirmation. Word is this is because Syrsky isn’t happy about the situation around Kurahove or, if you’re cynical, Syrsky and Zelensky need someone to blame about Kurakhove.

The Goeben, The Breslau und Black Sea U-Boats

Last review I promised some outside-the-box suggestions that would win the war a lot quicker for the Ukrainians if only Ukraine’s allies would be willing to think smart rather than the next election. This is the first of them.

In August 1914 the First World War was just about to start and the British navy chased two German warships, a battlecruiser called the Goeben and a light cruiser called the Breslau, into Turkish neutral waters and the Straits. Instead of interning the two warships or forcing them back out to sea and into the hands of a powerful British squadron waiting in international waters, the Turks exchanged a bunch of telegrams with Berlin and the Goeben was renamed the Ottoman Navy’s flagship Yavuz Sultan Selim, and the Breslau became the Medilli. In due course the German commander Rear Admiral Wilhelm Souchon resigned from the Imperial German navy to become a Turkish admiral and commander of the Turkish fleet, and the German swabbies joined Turkish service and I hear they were issued with Fez hats.

The Turkish cabinet was split on whether it was better to stay neutral or join the Germans and the Austrians to fight the Ottomans’ traditional enemy, the Russians. The British of course were furious the two warships had escaped and now it was a lot harder to push the neutral Turks around on the high seas, because the Ottomans now had a modern battlecruiser.

In October the pro-war wing of the Ottoman government told Admiral Souchon he might raid Russian shore facilities in the Black Sea in response to Russian provocations (the Turks said) of Turkish borders in the Balkans and Caucasus, to British provocations (this is raising the Arabs and, eventually, Lawrence of Arabia) in Ottoman possessions in the Near East.

Souchon aboard the Selim with Mellili and several Turkish destroyers in tow sailed to Sevastopol and bombarded it. Feodosia also got shelled. The British, now furious, demanded the Turks hand over the two warships to the Royal navy or else. The Turks declared a jihad against Christians. (Unless they were German or Austro-Hungarian). This brought the Ottoman Empire to the Entente side in World War One. For the next four years, the Goeben was by far the most powerful warship on the Black Sea, so she owned its waters. The Ottomans didn’t survive the war but the Goeben/Selim did.

It pains me to say this, but it really seems like there is no one of any consequence, anywhere in NATO, whose education extended to the naval history of World War One and the Goeben and Breslau, or the teachings of Mahan. For them, very much unlike the leadership of Imperial Germany at the time, the Black Sea appears to be a closed space into which they cannot project force, or imagine the projection of force, because NATO isn’t a belligerent.

This disappointment was reinforced for me, and most of the people living in Ukraine this morning, when the Russian fleet (what’s left of it) sortied from is current home base in Novorossisk and, counts varied, fired between 20 and 30 of the 60 or so missiles Russia launched at Ukraine in today’s strikes. It was anything but an Armada, the Black Sea Fleet is pretty tattered and usually the Russians only manage to sortie 1–2 frigates and a few missile boats armed with Kaliber cruise missiles to shoot missiles at Ukraine.

(As many of you recall, Russia’s Black Sea fleet has operated out of Novorossisk since Oct. 2023 because Ukrainian missile strikes sank too many Russian warships in Crimea, for the most part while they were tied up at wharf in Sevastopol.)

How is it, after three years of war, no one in NATO has understood, that Novorossisk is a sitting duck and it would be child’s play for a single submarine? How is it that these missile launch platforms are sailing out into the Black Sea, shooting weapons at Ukrainian homes and businesses, and then sailing back into Novorossisk without interference? Russian anti-submarine warfare capacity is second-rate. Why isn’t this being taken advantage of?

I’m not talking about finding a sub for the Ukrainians that carries ICBMs and nukes. Just a short-range attack boat. A Cold War diesel-electric. It seems like there are lots of candidates. Canada has submarines. Germany has submarines and they make oustanding ones. Greece has submarines and they’re retiring some of them. South Korea makes submarines, also excellent, and South Korean shipbuilding has a long record of looking for ways to make money. The Australians are complaining they can’t find crew for the subs they have. The Dutch I read just took two boats out of service. (I also read they may reverse that, but that doesn’t change my point, Walrus image attached)

Dutch Walrus-class submarine that the Netherlands may or may not be retiring. I contend that one of thse things in the Ukrainian navy’s hands would end the useful existence of Russia’s Black Sea fleet and reduce Russian missile strikes on Ukraine’s power grid and homes and businesses by about 30–40 percent.

The Spanish have a Cold War boat they’re planning to replace. I didn’t research it down to individual fleet units in other navies, but I read that the Norwegians, Poles, Portuguese, and Swedes all have old(ish) submarines that, possibly, might serve those countries’ national security interests better sinking Russian warships in the Black Sea, than sitting around tied up to a pier in Bergen or Dan Helder somewhere and mostly rusting. There’s only one port left on the Black Sea the Russians can operate from. Remember, a submarine wouldn’t have to torpedo Russian ships on the high seas. It could just mine Novorossisk’s approaches.

Yes it would be complicated. A Ukrainian crew would have to be collected and trained. There would be the getting the Turks on board with allowing the submarine through the Straits before it’s turned over to the Ukrainian navy, there would be figuring out a protected sub pen somewhere, there would be work figuring out how to track the Russian anti-submarine aircraft and warships in the Black Sea, which NATO does but I doubt very seriously they ever tell the Ukrainians a word about it.

I have no doubt whatsoever that the reason this suggestion sounds loopy, is that it’s even more difficult than conventional tools of support Ukraine’s allies are attempting to use, and if we are honest not always efficiently and effectively. The present joint effort to support Ukraine with simple solutions is far from running smoothly. Issuing the Ukrainian Navy with a submarine on Mahan principles is complicated.

The proposal becomes more crazy, if we were to start a discussion — which I am not — about maybe putting together a crew of mercenary NATO submariners and throwing them aboard Södermanland class or Walrus class diesel-electric boat, and turning them loose to prowl off the Crimea coast. It would be a great movie though.

My point is, remember the Goeben and Breslau. German diplomats and naval strategists in August 2014 saw a way to strike at their enemy Russia, a land power, using naval power projection creatively. The solution they came up with was far outside the parameters of conventional naval thinking, but, they made it a reality. In about three months.

As a direct result of that German strategic brilliance, Germany obtained a powerful ally without which — probably — German’s main ally, Austria-Hungary, would have collapsed by 1916. It didn’t win the war for Germany but in long-term strategy, the pay off relative to effort was giant. The “secret sauce” (not a fan of that term but it fits) was thought outside the box.

It required creative thinking and an assumption from the get-go that “We never did that and no one does that and besides that would be really complicated” is exactly the wrong way to fight a war.

Three years is a long time for imagination to fail.

German sailors aboard the Imperial German battlecruiser Goeben, probably prior to their on paper transfer to Ottoman Empire service along with their ship. They were witnesses of some very adept German naval strategy moves, but these days we have NATO.