We Seriously Underestimated Russia; Our Own Propaganda is Killing Us

Remember when American analysts painted a very specific picture of the Russian armed forces, and it was proven completely wrong? The media seems to have memory-holed literally everything we’ve said about Russia for the past eight years, but I remember.

The Russians (according to NATO) before Feb. 24:

-Capable of defensive and limited offensive operations

-Heavily dependent on railways

-Any large-scale offensive would need to be paused after three days due to logistical limitations.

-A hypothetical Russian invasion could be defeated by a combination of air power and guerrilla warfare.

Here’s a segment written by Alex Vershinin for War on the Rocks last November. This is the example I chose, and almost every other NATO analysis I read more or less matches up with this one – they were all based on the same wargames and studies by RAND.

Most of these wargames, such as RAND’s Baltic study, focus on fait accompli, an attack by the Russian government aimed at seizing terrain — then quickly digging in. This creates a dilemma for NATO: launch a costly counter-attack and risk heavy casualties and possibly a nuclear crisis or accept a Russian fait accompli and undermine faith in the credibility of the alliance. Some analysts have argued that these seizures are much more likely to be small in size, limited to one or two towns. [emphasis mine] While that scenario should, of course, be studied, the concern about the feasibility of a fait accompli in the form of a major invasion still stands.

While the Russian army definitely has the combat power to achieve these scenarios, does Russia have the logistics force structure to support these operations? The short answer is not in the timelines envisioned by Western wargames [emphasis mine. In an initial offensive — depending on the fighting involved — Russian forces might reach early objectives, but logistics would impose requirements for operational pauses. As a result, a large land grab is unrealistic as a fait accompli. The Russian army has the combat power to capture the objectives envisioned in a fait accompli scenario, but it does not have the logistic forces to do it in a single push without a logistical pause to reset its sustainment infrastructure. The Russian Aerospace Forces (with a sizable tactical bomber and attack aircraft force) and attack helicopters can also pick up fire support to alleviate artillery ammunition consumption.

NATO planners should develop plans focusing on exploiting Russian logistic challenges rather than trying to address the disparity in combat power. This involves drawing the Russian army deep into NATO territory and stretching Russian supply lines to the maximum while targeting logistics and transportation infrastructure such as trucks, railroad bridges, and pipelines. Committing to a decisive battle at the frontier would play directly into Russian hands, allowing a shorter supply to compensate for their logistic shortfalls.

Railroads and Russian Logistics Capabilities

Russian army logistics forces are not designed for a large-scale ground offensive far from their railroads. Inside maneuver units, Russian sustainment units are a size lower than their Western counterparts. Only brigades have an equivalent logistics capability, but it’s not an exact comparison. Russian formations have only three-quarters the number of combat vehicles as their U.S. counterparts but almost three times as much artillery. On paper (not all brigades have a full number of battalions), Russian brigades have two artillery battalions, a rocket battalion, and two air defense battalions per brigade as opposed to one artillery battalion and an attached air defense company per U.S. brigade. As a result of extra artillery and air defense battalions, the Russian logistics requirements are much larger than their U.S. counterparts.

The reason Russia is unique in having railroad brigades is that logistically, Russian forces are tied to railroad from factory to army depot and to combined arms army and, where possible, to the division/brigade level. No other European nation uses railroads to the extent that the Russian army does. Part of the reason is that Russia is so vast — over 6,000 miles from one end to the other. The rub is that Russian railroads are a wider gauge than the rest of Europe. Only former Soviet nations and Finland still use the Russian standard — this includes the Baltic states. There are several railheads prior to Baltic capitals, but it will still take several days to reach and establish railhead operations. Forward railhead operations are more than just cross-loading cargo from train onto truck. It involves receiving and sorting cargo, repackaging for specific units, and storing excess on the ground. Due to the hazardous nature of military cargo, the ground needs to be prepared so that cargo can be stored in safe, distributed environments. This process can take one to three days. The site also needs to be outside the range of enemy artillery and secured from partisans. A single lucky shell or an rocket propelled grenade can result in a major explosion and have a disproportionate effect on the tempo of an entire division. This is assuming the key bridges, such as one at Narva on the Russian-Estonian border, aren’t destroyed and have to be repaired. Poland only has one wide gauge rail line, which runs from the Krakow region to Ukraine and can’t be used by Russian forces, without capturing Ukraine first. There are no wide gauge lines running from Belarus to Warsaw. Rail traffic moving across borders usually stops to cross-load cargo or uses adjustable railroad carriages and switches engines (which cannot adjust). In times of war, it is highly unlikely that the Russian army would capture enough Western train engines to support their army, forcing them to rely on trucks. This means that Russian army rail sustainment capability ends at the borders of the former Soviet Union. Trying to resupply the Russian army beyond the Russian gauge rail network would force them to rely mostly on their truck force until railroad troops could reconfigure/repair the railroad or build a new one.

Interesting, isn’t it? NATO experts sincerely believed a Russian offensive would be limited to “one or two towns” and would be kept in a small logistical footprint. I believed this too, not because I had done my own analysis of the Russian military, but because I read experts from my own side and trusted that they were competent (clearly a mistake in hindsight!). Vershinin’s article gets even more interesting!

Sustaining Logistics Is the Hard Part

A Scenario in the Baltics

There are serious logistic challenges with large-scale fait accompli operations in the Baltics. Small scale fait accompli operations are feasible with small forces without a logistical challenge but on a large scale are far more challenging. Fait accompli requires Russian forces to overrun Baltic states and eliminate all resistance in less than 96 hours — before NATO’s Very High Readiness Task Force can reinforce the defenders. This force won’t stop a Russian attack, but it commits NATO to a land war, negating the very purpose of fait accompli.

Logistics are the key stumbling block in the fait accompli timeline. The railroad is wide gauge and usable, but the timeline is too short for captured railheads to be put back into operation. A dozen NATO air-launched cruise missiles fired over Germany can destroy key rail bridges at Narva, Pskov, and Velikie Lugi, shutting down rail traffic into the Baltics for days until those bridges are repaired. Logistic planners in Russian Western Command have to plan for a scenario in which Baltic states choose to fight a battle in their capital. Historically, urban combat consumes massive amounts of ammunition and takes months to conclude. During the two most prominent examples, the battles of Grozny in the Chechen wars and the Battle of Mosul in 2016, defenders tied down four to 10 times their numbers for up to four months. At Grozny, Russians were firing up to 4,000 shells a day — that’s 50 trucks a day.

Even with the so-called “fog of war” and disinformation campaign, I can say with reasonable certainty that these analysts weren’t lying. This was the widely held perception of Russia’s military capabilities, and the Ukrainian “Afghanistan” was tailored to these specifications (see my post here). Judging from numbers given by the Russian MoD, roughly half of their casualties (so far) were incurred in the first week of fighting. Indeed, that matches up with what NATO has publicly declared about an expected Russian attack, and their own plans to counter it. This also matches up with that overwhelming tsunami of propaganda.

The key element missing was the NATO airpower. Did western neoliberal oligarchs “abandon” their nazi allies in Ukraine in some act of cowardice or lack of unity? Or is there a bigger reason? Maybe we should consider the most obvious explanation. There was no air attack because an air attack would be impossible. They would be shot down and destroyed.

If direct NATO intervention was going to happen, it would have happened already. Now it’s too late. A Ukrainian counteroffensive would have needed to happen early on in the fight, while they still had command and control (C2), aircraft, tanks, and perhaps most importantly, fuel. A lot of fuel.

Now all of those assets have been vastly reduced or destroyed altogether, the window for direct NATO intervention came and went. A NATO air war would only succeed if there was a Ukrainian ground attack for it to support, and their ability to do that must be near nonexistent by now. The only remaining course of action with even a theoretical chance of changing the outcome of this war would be for NATO to fight and win a ground war, which is probably equally unlikely as winning an air war. (See my post No-Fly Zone is a Euphemism for War)

From Vershinin:

Even in a Baltic scenario, Russian planners have to consider the risk that Poland, which can muster four divisions, will launch an immediate counter-attack, trying to catch the Russian army off-balance. The Russian army would have large forces tied to sieges of Tallinn and Riga while fending off a Polish counter-attack from the south. The ammunition consumption would be massive. During the 2008 Russo-Georgian War, some Russian forces expended an entire basic load of ammunition in 12 hours. Assuming the same rates, the Russians would have to replace substantial amounts of ammunition every 12 to 24 hours.

Like with the Baltic states, Poland poses a threat to Russian operations in Ukraine. So according to everything I’ve read, Poland has forces large enough to theoretically counter attack against the Russians. So why hasn’t that happened?

Perhaps the most truly amazing aspect of all this is how these same experts failed to understand how hilariously wrong they were, and actually said a bunch of even more wrong things based on their previous wrong statements. From Business Insider:

CIA Director Bill Burns told lawmakers last week that Putin’s strategy for the war was centered on “seizing Kyiv within the first two days of the campaign.” US intelligence likewise assessed that the city could fall soon after the invasion.

It has now been roughly three weeks. Instead of quickly conquering Ukraine, the Russian military made strategic mistakes — failing to take out the country’s air defenses; deploying tens of thousands of troops without adequate supply lines — and were met by a steadfast Ukrainian resistance that was underestimated by Washington and Moscow alike.

We based this idea of Russia capturing Kiev in two days on exactly nothing except the idea that we think that’s what they would do, and aren’t capable of a military operation lasting longer than that. To repeat my quote from Vershinin earlier:

The Russian army has the combat power to capture the objectives envisioned in a fait accompli scenario, but it does not have the logistic forces to do it in a single push without a logistical pause to reset its sustainment infrastructure [emphasis mine].

We believed that the Russians would capture Kiev right away because they have no choice due to logistical constraints. That statement was clearly false, they’re a month into the war with no apparent logistical limitations at all. Therefore, this idea that they would have to capture Kiev, or any city, right away, is false. It. Is. False. What kind of brain drain has the West suffered that we can’t understand this concept.

Our military experts severely miscalculated and no amount of propaganda and disinformation can cover that mistake up from anyone who’s been paying attention.

Featured Image Source: Donetsk News Agency

Ian Kummer

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