Comments by "William Morris" (@williammorris584) on "'Fierce fighting' as Ukraine advances | Ukraine The Latest | Podcast" video.
-
Assuming Ukraine has raised nine brigades of reserves, two to three have already suffered significant attrition without reaching the MLR of the first of multiple Russian defensive belts. It’s early yet, but it looks a reasonable observation that it’s really really difficult to conduct combined arms ops WITHOUT ONE OF THE ARMS ( ie, fixed wing air) especially when it is into dense mine belts covered by the worlds largest artillery park.
Another problem is a lack of strategic surprise, since everyone knows the locations that would be the goals of the Ukrainian military, since they are political objectives. This means that the Russians will be dug in at and along every approach to these objectives, pretty much ruling out the hope of reducing losses via maneuver operations. The only relative strategic surprise would be the order in which the objectives are attacked. The one thing that would truly surprise me in this war would be to see a meeting engagement in a major theater.
Yet more problems for a longer war are the relative demographic disparity and that Ukraine does not produce any major weapon systems.
Russia is both wrong and bad here, and all decent people would prefer for Ukraine to win. But absent regime change in Russia, or a unexpected collapse of its army’s will to fight, this looks like a war that will be settled by an armistice, not a victory.
And to your armor pal, Creighton Abrams might rightly be considered a patriarch of the US armor force, but not so far in the past for our MBT to be named the “Abraham”.
7
-
1