Quotulatiousness

March 18, 2022

Best SMG of World War Two: The Beretta M38A

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Italy, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 15 Nov 2021

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The Beretta Model 38A was one of the very best submachine guns of World War Two. Designed by veteran Beretta engineer Tullio Marengoni (who designed most of Beretta’s pistols as well as the Beretta M1918 SMG and 1918/30 carbine), it was the first Italian weapon to use a cartridge equivalent to 9x19mm Parabellum instead of 9mm Glisenti. Development began in 1935, and the final version entered production in January 1938.

The change from the Model 38 to 38A is unclear, but seem most likely to be the change from the top ejection of the prototypes to the left-side ejection of the production model. The 38A was formally adopted by the Italian Army in July 1938, but issue was delayed until 1940/41 because Beretta first produced a 20,000-unit order for the Romanian military.

By 1941, the basic design had been significantly simplified, and the Model 38/42 would significantly reduce production cost by removing the magazine well cover, barrel shroud, and removable firing pin. Simplified 38/42, 38/43, and 38/44 models would enter production, but original 38As were also manufactured until 1944 (this particular example is dated 1943). The gun was very popular with both Italian and German troops, and production continued under German occupation late in the war. Total numbers are unavailable, but are probably in excess of 500,000. The gun was so popular that Beretta was able to restart production after the war and continue selling them until the early 1960s.

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QotD: Tactics, operations, and strategy

Filed under: History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Military thinking is like ogres are like onions – they have layers. (I am pretty sure this joke dates me worse than basically anything else I have written here, including the repeated 300 references or the fact that I read dead languages and study ancient civilizations.)

We break these layers into tactics, operations and strategy. Put very simply, tactics is the layer of military thinking that concerns how an army fights; […] Operations is the layer of thinking that is concerned with getting the army to the fight – large-scale coordination and logistics live here. Strategy is concerned with bigger picture questions: what wars are worth fighting and for what objectives? Grand strategy extends this thinking to cover not only the military, but also political, cultural and economic institutions.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.

March 17, 2022

The “Three-Block”, “Four-Block”, or “n-Block” war

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Andrew Potter explains the genesis of the original “Three-Block War” idea and how a Canadian general tried to put theory into practice:

During General Rick Hillier’s first visit to Colorado Springs as Chief of Defence Staff, he takes a few minutes to talk with Tech. Sgt. Devin Fisher of NORAD and USNORTHCOM Public Affairs about Canada-U.S. Relations
Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.

In 1999, a US Marine general named Charles Krulak wrote a piece in which he claimed that the future of combat for the Marines would be in urban environments in failed or failing states. In these situations, front line infantry might be doing humanitarian relief in one part of the city, performing peacekeeping duties in another, while doing intense urban combat in a third. He called this the “Three Block War“. Figuring out how to prepare and train for this scenario would be the central military challenge of the 21st century.

While the Three Block War was picked up and booted around as an interesting idea, it was never formalized into Marine doctrine. But one person who did take it seriously was Rick Hillier, the former head of the Canadian military who brought it into the Canadian forces when he took over as chief of the land staff in 2003, arguing that the Three Block War in failed and failing states was the future of warfare. He wanted a CAF that was trained and kitted out for this reality. When he became Chief of the Defence Staff in 2005, Hillier kept pushing this idea on Paul Martin and the Liberals, who loved his “vision” and firm sense of priority-setting.

In Hillier’s hands, the Three Block War concept was a disaster. Some American analysts blamed the strategy for Canada’s elevated casualty rates in Kandahar. The concept also came under considerable scrutiny from Canadian military analysts. In a highly critical paper, Walter Dorn and Michael Varey described the three block war idea as “fatally flawed“. While the Three Block War concept might have served as a useful description of a certain type of tactical reality (amplified maybe by a few too many viewings of Black Hawk Down), as a strategic concept it had a number of problems. For example, it wasn’t clear how it would apply to other armed services, or to theatres other than urban centres. It seemed to threaten the specificity of mandate and mission that is crucial to military operations. It clearly ran the risk of “block inflation” — why not throw governance, economic development, general nation building, and anything else you think you can get the military to do into the hopper? Indeed, in 2005 General James Mathis co-authored a piece proposing the concept of the four block war, which added psychological and information operations to the mix.

Ultimately, Dorn and Varey were concerned that crucial distinctions central to warfare were being elided. As they put it, the whole point of doctrine is to make a clear delineation between things that are “war” and things that are “not war”, and the Three Block War threatens to make everything into a type of war.

Two decades later the verdict is in, and it looks like everyone was right. When it comes to the tactical environment, people like Krulak, Hillier, and Mathis were more prescient than they might ever have imagined, at least if Ukraine is any template for how modern warfare is evolving. Yet at the same time, everything the critics of the Three Block War concept worried about has also come to pass: the confusion of mission and mandates, the endless proliferation of “blocks”, and most seriously, the assimilation of everything, and everyone, into “war”.

In his original article, Krulak argued that the reality of the Three Block War meant that any local engagement or interaction could have repercussions on the mission as a whole. For example, if a squad of Marines based in a “peacekeeping” block of the city gets jumpy and opens fire on a civilian truck carrying humanitarian aid (and not a truck bomb), that could have serious impacts for the entire strategic effort. And so he coined the notion of the “strategic corporal”, a front line soldier who would have the training, judgement, and moral fibre to do his or her job in a way that would always support strategic objectives.

March 15, 2022

In The Highest Tradition — Episode 5

Filed under: Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

British Army Documentaries
Published 4 Nov 2021

The fifth in the series, this episode features stories about the Grenadier Guards, the favourite tipple of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment, and how the King’s Own Scottish Borderers made porridge palatable.

© 1989

This production is for viewing purposes only and should not be reproduced without prior consent.

This film is part of a comprehensive collection of contemporary Military Training programmes and supporting documentation including scripts, storyboards and cue sheets.

All material is stored and archived. World War II and post-war material along with all original film material are held by the Imperial War Museum Film and Video Archive.

For military procurement blunders, “no nation has mastered the ability to step on every bloody rake quite as well as Canada”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Germany has announced that they will be purchasing US F-35 stealth fighters as part of their re-armament program. My favourite headline on this was over at Blazing Cat Fur: “Germany To Buy 35 Lockheed F-35 Fighter Jets From U.S. Amid Ukraine Crisis … Canada Will Buy Cool ‘Fighter Jet Stickers’ With Eco-Friendly Adhesive”

On a more serious tone — but with sadly the same basic message — Mitch Heimpel looks at the multi-generational rolling catastrophe that is Canadian military procurement since the unification of the forces in 1968:

Browning High Power 9mm, the standard side-arm of the Canadian army since WW2. When I was in the reserves, we were told this was due for replacement in a few years. I was in the reserves from 1976-1980. It still hasn’t been replaced.

To say we have a checkered history with military procurement, fails to capture exactly how bad it is. Our political leadership has failed us continually over the course of half a century. No party has done it well. Some have done it better than others. But no one can claim any kind of bragging rights.

Fighter jet procurement in this country is so fraught it once caused the birth of a new political party. Trying to buy helicopters helped bring down a government. We only successfully bought those helicopters after they [the old helicopters] became a greater danger to the personnel manning them than they were to any potential adversary. We have been running a procurement for the next generation of fighter jets for an entire generation. Even Yes, Minister writers would have given up on something that absurd.

Our submarine fleet seems to be almost permanently in dry dock. Our most recent ship procurement resulted in the absolutely monstrous prosecution of one of the country’s most accomplished military leaders.

And we just issued a revised bid to finally replace our Second World War-era pistols … last week.

Just cataloguing that level of incompetence is exhausting. No leader or party looks good. The civil service, as the one constant through all these cartoonish blunders, surely has to wear some of this, too. The fact that we seem to repeat the same mistakes can, at least in part, be attributed to a significant institutional memory failure on the part of the people trusted with having the institutional memory.

Now, it is worth noting in fairness that no nation has an easy time with large scale military procurement. Ask the Americans about the development of the V-22 sometime. But, still, no nation has mastered the ability to step on every bloody rake quite as well as Canada.

I’m not a hardware expert. I can’t tell you which pistol we should buy. There’s also genuine policy questions here that need to be settled — I don’t know whether we should focus on the navy because we’re an Arctic nation, or the air force because it allows us to participate more readily in allied force projection exercises — like, say, no-fly zones? The necessary mix for Canada is no doubt some of both, and it’s fine to have disagreements between parties on what the right mix is.

But setting that aside, I want to talk about what it would take politically, to get us to start taking procurement seriously — just a few basic rules that any government would need to follow to procure anything that they chose was important for Canada to have.

FN FNC: The Belgian 5.56mm NATO Carbine

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 12 Nov 2021

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The FNC (Fabrique Nationale Carabine) was FN’s followup to the unsuccessful CAL rifle. Chambered for the newly-adopted 5.56mm NATO cartridge, the FNC uses a long stroke gas piston system very reminiscent of the AK, combined with a stamped upper and milled aluminum lower. After about 5 years of development, the FNC was put on the market in 1980, and was quickly purchased by Indonesia, along with a license for domestic production as the Pindad SS-1. It would also be adopted by Sweden as the AK-5 (minus the 3-round burst functionality) and Belgium. About 6,000 semiautomatic sporting models were imported into the US. A number of those, including this one, were legally registered as transferrable machine guns before 1986.

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March 13, 2022

Rommel Leaves Africa – WW2 – 185 – March 12, 1943

Filed under: Africa, Germany, History, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 12 Mar 2022

Erwin Rommel loses his command and leaves Tunisia, while change in American command there puts George Patton in charge. On the ground the Axis lose the Battle of Medenine, but in the Soviet Union, Axis forces are on the move and heading for Kharkov.
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QotD: The Kaiser’s army and their Auftragstaktik innovations

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Auftragstaktik is German for “mission-type tactics” or “mission-oriented tactics”, and it’s the main non-genetic reason they were so fearsome in battle back in the 20th century. Basically the idea is to delegate command authority to the lowest possible level, because the guys who are actually in the shit have a much better sense of the tactical realities than the guys back at headquarters. So long as the guys at the front are adequately briefed about command’s strategic objectives, they can, and should, make the tactical decisions in their areas of responsibility.

They started developing it before WWI, but proof of concept was in the trenches, and it succeeded spectacularly. It’s hard to exaggerate just how outmanned and outgunned the Germans were in that conflict, and I don’t have the exact numbers to hand, but one especially fearsome measure was “artillery density”. On the German side, the preparatory barrage before an attack averaged, at best, something like 1 shell per square foot (this is from memory, so doubtless incorrect, but you get the idea). The Allies achieved something like one shell per square inch, and there you have it …

… or there you should’ve had it, if the Allies had anything close to German-level command-and-control. But they didn’t. British WW1 memoirs, especially, are full of the kinds of ludicrous fuckups that Joseph Heller wouldn’t dare put in his novels. Robert Graves (yeah, I know, not the world’s most trustworthy source) had an especially funny scene where his company got this elaborate set of orders to move to such-and-such coordinates, build an elaborate strongpoint (laid out in minute detail), then move on to some other coordinates and do something else, again spelled out to the nth degree.

Those coordinates were, of course, a mile and a half behind enemy lines.

Or consider that silly movie 1917. If you haven’t seen it, don’t. If you have, and you know a little bit about WWI, you’ll remember how ludicrous the premise was. You don’t need to send a squad, Saving Private Ryan-style, to get a message to a distant dugout where they’re waiting to jump off for an attack. For one thing, there’s this little gadget called a “radio”, and by 1917 they were portable enough to get there. But even if not, there’s this other gadget called a “telephone”, and any C-and-C bunker anywhere along the line would have one, no matter how fast the advance was moving. Finally, even if they didn’t have either of those, the supporting artillery park sure as hell would’ve — just ring them up and call off the preparatory barrage, and I promise you, none of those troops would’ve moved an inch, even if it meant shooting Colonel Sherlock Holmes right in his prissy, pencil-mustached mug.

If you know a bit more about WWI, that kind of ludicrous, plot-ruining stupidity seems like the most accurate thing in the movie, because that kind of bullshit happened all the time. Telephone wires were always getting cut by shellfire, for instance, and since none of the red tabs [staff officers] back at the base would dream of seeing the situation for themselves, field soldiers were always getting scads of contradictory orders, sent at bewildering times. More than one advance was held up by frontline troops having to send runners back to check the orders of other runners, which had been countermanded by yet other runners, coming up with telephone messages …

The guys in the opposing trenches, meanwhile, were just getting on with it. Graves again (and again, I know), quoting from memory, wondered what the High Command would’ve done had they known that for the better part of a year, the entire sector opposite the Royal Welch Fusiliers had been held by no one higher than a corporal.

Severian, “Auftragstaktik: Logic and Anti-Logic”, Founding Questions, 2021-11-18.

March 12, 2022

So much for all that “end of history” hopefulness

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Russia — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:40

I admit I never bothered to read Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, because I strongly disagreed with the notion — whether advanced by the author or imputed by critics and reviewers — that there ever could be an “end” to history, as long as there are still human beings around. Russia’s latest invasion of Ukraine seems to have also broken the spell for many other westerners, as Jen Gerson points out:

Screen capture of a 1990 CBC report on the first McDonald’s in Moscow.

[After recounting the tale of the very first McDonald’s to open in Moscow in 1990] by all accounts, Russians went wild for McDonald’s — as did much of the world — and hundreds have since opened, including one within walking distance of the Red Square. Nothing could better symbolize the end of the bad, old Soviet era than this. A Russia that is peaceful, prosperous and at least a little open to the West was one in which a worker from the Kremlin could grab an American hamburger at lunch.

At least, they once could.

McDonald’s this week was one of several Western companies to announce that it was temporarily halting operations in Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine. Coca-Cola, Starbucks, KFC, Pizza Hut, Ikea, Shell, BP, Exxon, credit card companies, accounting firms, even airline companies are cutting Russia off, to greater or lesser extents.

I pick on McDonald’s because that chain became so ubiquitous that it has served as a kind of foreign policy truism: For a generation, it was said that no two countries that possessed a McDonald’s had ever gone to war. And so, it was assumed, this would likely remain the case. We’re not talking about skirmishes or civil wars, or local incursions or proxy wars, mind you. But the general theory largely held: as economies globalized and became more interdependent, the costs of one country truly going to war with another would grow so insurmountable that it would soon be unthinkable. Shared prosperity would reduce the need for wars of resources; meanwhile, the more economically interdependent nations became, the more self-defeating and even suicidal the prospect would grow. Economic liberalization and globalization would therefore undoubtedly bolster the long peace. For a generation this has, mostly, held true.

It is this same logic that has underpinned Europe’s growing dependence on Russia’s oil market, for example. After all, no one would risk — well — what Russia is now risking. It is certainly not in that country’s best interest to retreat into a hermit kingdom, to suffer incredible privations, and to revert to a quality of life akin to what its people knew in the ’50s. And for what? Glory? Honour? Territorial expansion? What, does Russia need more land?

This is why the war in Ukraine has caught Westerners off guard, and shook countries that once existed in the Soviet sphere of influence.

History was supposed to be over, when the Western democracies reached their ideal end-state of civilizational evolution. War — true, grand, civilizational war — was far too costly to seriously contemplate. So we allowed our military capacity to atrophy and our strategic dependencies on hostile nations grew.

With hindsight we can see the glaring flaw in the logic adopted by some of the world’s most powerful people. Those wingnuts and lunatics who warned about the danger of making ourselves more dependent on Putin proved correct. Note how quickly Canada’s safe, reliable, democratic oil supply is enjoying a rebrand. Shared prosperity is no panacea to war.

Napoleon’s Grand European Army Marches Against Russia

Filed under: Europe, France, History, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Real Time History
Published 11 Mar 2022

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When Napoleon marched his Grande Armée into Russia in 1812, he had assembled the biggest army in modern European history. Only half of his troops came from territories of the expanded French Empire. Tens of thousands of troops also came from Poland, Prussia, Austria, and the German States as well as Southern Europe.

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» SOURCES
Boudon, Jacques-Olivier. Napoléon et la campagne de Russie en 1812. 2021.
Brun, Jean-François. “Le cheval dans la Grande Armée“, Revue historique des armées (249), 2007.
Del Negro, Piero. “Les Italiens dans la Grande Armée. La campagne de Russie et le patriotisme italien“, Revue historique des armées (250), 2008.
Elting, John. Swords Around a Throne: Napoleon’s Grande Armée. 1997.
Lieven, Dominic. Russia Against Napoleon. 2010.
Nieuwazny, Andrzej. “Les Polonais de la Grande Armée“, in Rey, Marie-Pierre and Thierry Lentz, eds. 1812, la campagne de Russie. 2012.
Rey, Marie-Pierre. L’effroyable tragédie: une nouvelle histoire de la campagne de Russie. 2012.
Zamoyski, Adam. 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow. 2005.

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Portuguese Army Lugers: From Manuel II to World War Two

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 10 Nov 2021

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Portugal first tested the Luger pistol in 1901, and its commission on self-loading pistols recommended the design for adoption in 1904. No money was available at the time, but a second commission again recommended the Luger in 1907, and it was formally adopted and purchased in 1908. The initial batch was 5,000 pistols chambered for the 7.65mm Parabellum cartridge with 120mm (4.75″) barrels and “M2” crests for then-king Manuel II. They were designated m/908, and numbered from 1 to 5000.

These pistol would satisfy Portuguese Army needs until 1935, then the Guarda National Republicana ordered another 564 pistols in the same configuration. These came from Mauser at this point, and had “GNR” crests. These were taken from Mauser commercial production, and have serial numbers between 1900v and 2500v.

The final purchase of Portuguese Army Lugers came in 1943, another 4,578 guns from Mauser. Of course, Germany was deep into the Second World War by this time, and there was no option for Portugal to order its specific configuration. Instead, the Portuguese m/943 pattern was identical to the German standard P08, with the Portuguese guns coming right off the same production line — Waffenamt markings and all. They are numbered between 150m and 5330m.

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March 11, 2022

A Life Between Shells and Shelter – On the Homefront 015

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 10 Mar 2022

Right from the start of World War Two, there has been little distinction between combatant and civilian. While bombs keep falling, people in Great Britain and in Germany are sitting in bunkers, basements and underground tunnels. We are taking a look at life inside those shelters.
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Anti-Tank Chats #3 | Boys Anti Tank Rifle | The Tank Museum

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published 26 Nov 2021

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Join Archive and Supporting Collections Manager Stuart Wheeler with his next instalment of Anti-Tank Chats on the “Boys Anti-tank Rifle”. It was a British anti-tank rifle in use during the Second World War.

0:00 – Intro
0:23 – Creation of the Boys Anti-Tank Rifle
4:43 – Features of the Rifle
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QotD: In 1939, Stalin never imagined Finland would refuse his demands

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Quotations, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The one thing Stalin had not reckoned on was that any of these neighbors might object. Certainly he did not expect resistance from the Baltic states. As early as September 24th, 1939, three days before Warsaw surrendered to Germany, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov had advised the Estonian foreign minister, Karl Selter, to “yield to the wishes of the Soviet Union in order to avoid something worse.” Latvia was next in line. When Lithuania’s foreign minister, Juozas Urbšys, objected that Soviet occupation would “reduce Lithuania to a vassal state,” Stalin replied brutally, “You talk too much.”

[…]

When Molotov summoned a Finnish delegation to the Kremlin on October 12th, 1939, Stalin made a personal appearance to heighten the intimidation factor, and he handed the Finns a brutal ultimatum demanding, among other things, “that the frontier between Russia and Finland in the Karelian Isthmus region be moved westward to a point only 20 miles east of Viipuri, and that all existing fortifications on the Karelian Isthmus be destroyed.” Stalin made it clear that this was the price that Finland had to pay to avoid the fate of Poland.

Aggressive and insulting as the Soviet demands on Finland were, Stalin and Molotov fully expected them to be accepted. As the Ukrainian party boss and future general secretary Nikita Khrushchev later recalled, the mood in the Politburo at the time was that “all we had to do was raise our voice a little bit and the Finns would obey. If that didn’t work, we could fire one shot and the Finns would put up their hands and surrender.” Stalin ruled, after all, a heavily armed empire of more than 170 million that had been in a state of near-constant mobilization since early September. The Red Army had already deployed 21,000 modern tanks, while the tiny Finnish Army did not possess an anti-tank gun. The Finnish Air Force had maybe a dozen fighter planes, facing a Red Air armada of 15,000, with 10,362 brand-new warplanes built in 1939 alone. Finnish Army reserves still mostly drilled with wooden rifles dating to the 19th century. By contrast, the Red Army was, in late 1939, the largest in the world, the most mechanized, the most heavily armored, and the most lavishly armed, even if surely not — because of Stalin’s purges — the best led.

One can imagine, therefore, Stalin’s shock when the Finns said no. Stunned by this unexpected resistance, Stalin and Molotov did not, at first, know quite what to do. With his highly placed spies in London, Stalin must have known that the mood in foreign capitals was becoming agitated by Soviet moves in the Baltic region. On October 31st, 1939, the British war cabinet took up the question of “Soviet Aggression Against Finland or Other Scandinavian Countries”. And earlier in the month, FDR had written to Moscow, demanding clarification of the Soviet posture on Finland. At this point, the Finnish cause seemed to have the potential to transform the so-far desultory and hypocritical British-French resistance to Hitler alone into a principled war against armed aggression by both totalitarian regimes.

On November 3rd, after yet another encounter in the Kremlin had gone sour with the Finns, Molotov warned the delegates that “we civilians can’t seem to do any more. Now it seems to be up to the soldiers. Now it is their turn to speak.” However, the truth was that, in November 1939, neither side was ready to wage war. Having expected the Finns to come around, Stalin had issued no orders to begin invasion preparations until after talks had finally broken down.

Sean McMeekin, “Stopped Cold: Remembering Russia’s Catastrophic 1939 Campaign Against Finland”, Quillette, 2021-04-20.

March 10, 2022

“Putin’s War”

Filed under: Military, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In his latest post on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, Stephen Green suggests we will end up calling it “Putin’s War”:

Putin apparently believed his top general — “who has never been a professional soldier” — that the Russian Army was up to the task of quickly defeating Ukraine.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was supposed to flee or be killed/captured — not lead a heroic resistance. Ukraine’s kleptocratic government was supposed to collapse. Putin seems not to have had a Plan B, aside from the old Russian habit of firing artillery and rockets at stuff until even the rubble stops bouncing.

Putin failed to heed the lesson of Grozny: That even a besieged city, cut off from all reinforcement, can hold out for weeks. Kyiv is neither completely under siege nor cut off from reinforcement.

Putin also seems to have badly underestimated the West’s willingness to put the screws to the Russian economy, even though we’re putting the screws to ourselves, too.

If the war continues going badly for Russia, it ought to be remembered not as the Ukraine War or even the Russo-Ukraine War.

It ought to be called Putin’s War.

But at the rate Joe Biden is going, the Ukraine War might end up being known as the Putin-Biden War, and we all get to pay for it.

I posted a couple of comments on MeWe about his article:

I was commenting on another thread a bit earlier about how the fall of the Soviet Union revealed just how much of their military power was smoke and mirrors … a whole country of military Potemkin Villages. From what we can tell is happening in Ukraine, things haven’t improved much for the successor Russian military. On the other hand, thanks to progressive control of pretty much everything in the west, we’re starting to realize a lot of western military strength is a bit Potemkin-y. And the progressive warhawks now want to start WWIII? Let’s all hope they don’t get their wish!

Near the end of the column, you suggest calling it “Putin’s War”, which I think is a good idea. I’m starting to see Putin and the apparent state of the Russian military as being quite analogous to Mussolini and the Italian military. Il Duce had carefully excluded from his advisors and military leadership anyone who might tell him the truth about the state of Italy’s war-making capabilities and was clearly drinking his own ink on the propaganda side. Italy was forced into a war they were not equipped to fight because Il Duce believed the newsreel and parade-ground might he saw was real. Sound like something Putin may have done as well?

In The Critic, Peter Caddick-Adams catches us up on the war news to date:

It was during the Winter War of 1939-40, when plucky little Finland stood up to the might of Soviet Russia, that the Finns prepared a nasty surprise for their attackers. They made millions of petrol bombs and named them after the Russian Foreign Minister, Mr Molotov. Today, it is Ukraine that has borrowed the Finnish recipe book to greet a new generation of Russian invaders with petrol and fire.

How has the current war against another Russian neighbour, Ukraine, progressed? After months of tensions and intense diplomacy, including assurances to the UK’s Defence Minister by his Russian counterpart that there were “no plans to invade”, Mr Putin’s forces crossed the threshold early on 24 February. This had been preceded by long-announced military “manoeuvres” in neighbouring Belarus, which saw the assembly of over 100,000 combat-ready troops with all their vehicles and equipment. We now know this was a long-planned distraction to cover the concentration and preparation of their forces for war.

They came from 4 directions: Belarus in the north, from out of the rebel-held Donbas in the east, from Crimea in the south, and via amphibious assaults around the port of Mariupol. This tactic was designed to distract and divide the defenders and cause them to dilute their numbers. However, defying a basic military principle of war, the plan also inflicted the same disadvantage on the Russians. None of the four attacking thrusts possessed sufficient force to defeat their opponents and knife their way through to their objectives.

The first strikes in the early hours were a surprise only in their time and location, for Ukraine’s President Zelensky had long feared the worst, and other nations had quietly assessed an invasion was likely, rather than probable. Accompanied by the air raid sirens of Ukraine’s civil protection service, explosions from Russian cruise missile strikes were heard across the country. Some 600 have been fired since. Their airborne forces landed at civilian airports and military airbases. These elite paratroops were deployed to enable endless planeloads of follow-on forces to drive on the principal cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv before Ukraine woke up to what was happening.

The Russian tactical goal remains to control Ukraine by separating its pro-Western government from the population, hence the importance of the cities. President Zelensky declared martial law, ordered mobilization of all men between 18 and 60 and appealed to the wider world for help. Thousands started making Molotov cocktails, so deadly to attacking tanks more than 80 years ago. In some ways this war is anachronistic, with a Russian armoured train being filmed moving supplies forward. Expect railway sabotage with shades of Lawrence of Arabia. On 1 March, Belarus predictably entered the war on Russia’s side with such timing, that it is assumed President Lukashenko was merely following a script Vladimir Putin had written months earlier.

In The Line, Matt Gurney wonders what will happen if Russia actually loses the war:

Military historians and security experts are going to be studying the first two weeks of this invasion for years. Entire careers will be made of this, whole PhD theses written. Armies have always marched on their stomachs, but a modern army also needs massive quantities of fuel and lubricants, ammunition for hungry weapons systems, spare parts for weapons and vehicles, medical supplies and, yes, food for the troops, and also the ability to move wounded troops and prisoners backward down the supply line. This all takes an enormous amount of planning and specialized equipment and knowledge. Sustaining an army on the move means having the necessary supplies and items in abundant supply, but also having a sophisticated enough logistics system to get them to where they’re needed in a timely way. This involves everything from having good warehouse inventory control systems to the vehicles required to ferry the supplies to where they’re needed, plus a trained pool of manpower to run the whole operation. And the logistics system itself needs to be sustained — what good is a fleet of trucks to deliver supplies to the front if you can’t fuel those trucks?

We knew Russian logistics were well below Western standards. Logistics units never get the attention they deserve compared to the more exciting frontline units, and in a cash-strapped, corruption-riddled military like Russia’s, that means major problems in times of war — in an already poorly off military, the units that get even less TLC than most are going to be in rough shape indeed. Still, the Russians are underperforming what many Western analysts expected. We knew they’d be bad at this, but this is really bad.

There are reports of Russian troops running out of fuel and food, and abandoning their vehicles in place. There are other reports of long-expired Russian combat rations. In what was perhaps the nerdiest but most fascinating Twitter analysis thread of the war thus far, a retired American Department of Defence employee looked closely at photos from the battlefields in Ukraine and concluded that the tires on Russian vehicles were failing prodigiously, suggesting that the vehicles were not properly cared for when in storage. Again, given the known funding and corruption problems in the Russian military, that’s extremely plausible.

I mentioned this in an earlier Ukraine post, that the Soviet doctrine was much more oriented to the attack, and units and formations that hit heavier resistance than they could overcome were to be left behind to struggle, rather than be reinforced as most western military doctrine would prefer. Units were expected to fight until they were no longer combat-effective (or longer) and “expended” more like ammunition, in ways no western army could possibly support. As a result, Soviet and Soviet-aligned armies tended to be proportionally much more heavily armed, but very modestly supplied and logistics was very much a backwater where unpopular or inefficient officers could be sent to rot, professionally. I think most western analysts had assumed the successor Russian forces had moved away from those ideas, but the fighting to date in Ukraine seems to show that to be mistaken.

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