The Ukraine September Offensives, an After Action Review

It’s been a crazy month. On 31 August I very cautiously suggested that the Ukrainian attacks are meant to disrupt and destabilize Russian operations. Some readers thought I was nuts for saying this, and let me know in the comments. Looking back, I was right, but also wrong. We need to remember that the battles happening in Ukraine right now are one small piece of the big picture, and not even the most important piece.

In my 9 September post I wrote this:

These Ukrainian offensives are intended to push the Russians off balance and force them to escalate. In turn, Ukrainian offensives are appropriately whitewashed, stripped of context, and casualties downplayed, then spoonfed to western audiences as propaganda. As long as Ukrainians are “winning” and there’s the perception that they’re suffering fewer casualties than the bad Russians, the story is more acceptable.

The “successful” Ukrainian offensive concluded (this is newspeak for “burned out”) around 11 September, and with subsequent attacks in both the North-East and South all ending in failure. From the Russian news site Military Review (machine translated):

On the Posad-Pokrovsky and Aleksandrovsky sectors, the enemy attempted to break through the defenses of the Russian Armed Forces in the area of ​​the village of Pravdino with the forces of three tanks and six infantry fighting vehicles, but ran into a well-organized defense of Russian paratroopers. During the battle, several units of Ukrainian armored vehicles managed to get behind our lines, but the approaching reserves managed to knock out all the IFVs that had broken through and one tank, forcing the nationalists to retreat. However, the losses of the Armed Forces did not end there, the retreating units came under artillery fire and aviation.

There is one question I see repeated over and over on social media, blogs, and commentaries on both sides of the war. Did the Ukrainians achieve surprise in Kharkov? This is a fair question that I’ve put some thought into, and my answer is “yes, they probably did achieve surprise.” In a modern war with satellites, drones, and manned aircraft, this might seem improbable, but really, it’s pretty simple. First, we have to consider the geography and arrangement of forces. The Ukrainians have interior lines, meaning they can very quickly concentrate forces at any one point on the front lines, and do it faster than the Russians. Eastern Ukraine just isn’t that big. Judging from Yandex Maps, a military truck could probably make the drive from Nichalaev to Kharkov in around 12-16 hours. That means repositioning forces and launching the actual offensive could be done in less than a day. That’s not the difficult part to keep secret, as the vast majority of soldiers involved don’t need to know what they’re doing until the last possible moment before they assault the enemy. The part that is difficult is the planning. Units need to be identified, supplies, ammunition, and moved to the appropriate staging areas, and command staffs at the brigade level and higher need adequate time prepare.

In this sense, the Kharkov offensive really played into Ukraine’s strengths. Though it was a deep offensive, pushing 50-70 kilometers into Russian-held territory, it all involved fairly narrow fronts, meaning they could be spearheaded by small units, battalions and smaller. A “battalion” is really the magic number in this war because battalion operations require very little in the way of coordination. An offensive like this can be done by a handful of battalions working independently of each other without coordinated “shoot, move, communicate” that takes larger armies months or years of training and rehearsals to perform adequately.

Combat is a combination of drill and initiative. Drill, AKA, practice, makes a soldier’s combat skills muscle memory. It’s no different in principle to a football player or a chess grandmaster. There are certain maneuvers and principles that can be committed to memory and require no thought. In fact, thought is bad because it slows your reaction time. This is bad for a chess player because if he spends too much time deciding on individual moves, the clock will run out on him. This is bad for a commander for the same reason, if he wastes too much time trying to make a decision, the clock runs out and he’s destroyed.

Initiative is equally important as drill, though it seems and often is a completely contradictory idea. Soldiers need enough creativity, education, and experience to see constantly changing and unpredictable events in front of their eyes, and come up with a solution, with or without waiting for orders.

As far as I can tell, the Ukrainian Armed Forces have adequately trained soldiers and small unit leaders, and they can go toe-to-toe with their Russian counterparts on a 1:1 basis. What they don’t have is the years of extensive war games and massive exercises. Moving 150 soldiers from Point A to Point B is not the same as moving 15 thousand soldiers. People can be taught basic marksmanship and squad tactics in a couple of months. Maybe even a month or less if you don’t mind those people taking much heavier casualties. But a division or corps command staff can not be trained in a couple of months. That takes years and it’s too late now.

But apparently, a solution has been found. Take 15 thousand Ukrainian soldiers and give them small missions that can be accomplished by small unit leaders. Ukraine is receiving communications, intelligence, and God knows what other kinds of assistance from NATO. I can’t really prove this, but there is nothing preventing NATO from micro-managing the entire war effort from behind computer screens in Warsaw. And that’s exactly how NATO has been fighting wars for the last 20+ years, and have gotten exceedingly good at it. They have CPOF (Command Post of the Future) and a host of other compatible systems built around it. As counter-intuitive as this might sound, a decentralized army can be easily micro-managed from afar. If every platoon commander has a tablet in his hands, he can receive encrypted messages telling him what to do. He of course wouldn’t know what the bigger plan is but he doesn’t need to know. Defend this grid coordinate, attack this grid coordinate, stop your adance at this river.

This system works great for coordinating small units of NATO soldiers, drones, and artillery platforms scattered across Afghanistan, and it probably also works great for this war in Ukraine. That said, there are clear limits to outsourcing your command structure, and the Kharkov offensive all but proved it. 15,000 decentralized soldiers being micromanaged through CPOF (or some similar system) successfully chased out two or three thousand Russian allied soldiers and police. But every attack that encountered Russian armor and mechanized formations on a more equal footing was pushed back with heavy losses. Again, like I mentioned in my previous posts linked above, it should be telling that we’ve seen almost no chatter about massed Ukrainian artillery fire. This is an assumption on my part, but I’m confident that’s because massed fire didn’t happen at all.

I’m going to once again bring up my favorite propagandist Tom Cooper. He wrote this drivel claiming that Russia lost 8,000-10,000 troops. I used to think he had an insidious agenda but lately I have become convinced that he actually doesn’t. Tom is literally a complete fucking retard. He loves the Ukrainian targeting app they all seem to have on their personal smart devices, but it has never once occurred to him that handheld devices are two-way communication devices (meaning that with this capability, Ukrainian troops could be controlled from anywhere, even Washington DC). His claim of 8 or 10 thousand killed is even more stupid. That stupendous a loss would mean heavy fighting, and the Ukrainian offensive simply would not have gone as fast. Or they would have at least had to have successfully encircled and trapped large pockets of Russian soldiers, which also didn’t happen. It also means that Ukrainians wouldn’t have had the classic 3:1 ratio typically preferred to defeat an enemy on the defense. The only way the Ukrainian army could have compensated is with superior fire and air power, which they obviously don’t have.

Also, according to western news sources, Russia lost around 125 vehicles and guns in their retreat. Quite obviously this doesn’t even come close to enough for 8 or 10 thousand soldiers. What I do think happened is that the majority of those vehicles were in maintenance shops and parking lots scattered around the attacked area, and there wasn’t enough time to evacuate them. Also add in some that probably broke down or got stuck for whatever reason along the way, and also had to be abandoned.

Over the previous month or so leading up to the offensives, I read a lot of rumors on social media from American soldiers in Europe complaining about their training ammunition, particularly HIMARS, being stripped away from them and sent to Ukraine, and related rumors of new recruits showing up to their units without having even fired a single round. With 20/20 hindsight, it’s possible, I would say likely even, that this was done to give those 12-16 HIMARS and few dozen remaining M777 howitzers adequate stockpiles to support the upcoming offensives. But wait, doesn’t this contradict my previous statement that there’s no evidence of massed artillery fires? Well, no, it doesn’t because I said massed artillery fires. Of course I’m sure there was some artillery support. It’s also possible that they were expecting fiercer Russian resistance, and prepared for it by amassing enough shells and missiles to defeat entrenched Russian units. The Russians didn’t stay in their trenches and retreated instead, so most of those shells were never fired.

Also consider that the Russians went to great lengths to destroy Ukrainian HQ, radar, and drone assets. There was a very small window of opportunity to hit retreating Russian vehicles while they were evacuating, and it’s possible that this window was made nonexistent by shooting down all the tools needed to call in artillery strikes. This is also consistent with my previous statements that NATO is insisting on using HIMARS cautiously, and firing from the hip in a chaotic offensive isn’t cautious. Bear in mind, just because this particular offensive is winding down doesn’t mean there aren’t more planned. If there are more offensives coming, they’ll need artillery stockpiles too.

So, at the end of the day, was the Ukrainian wave of attacks over the past couple of weeks successful or not? Well, my answer is mixed. I do think they achieved surprise and this was an embarrassing setback for the Russian special operation. This was not Shoigu playing 12-dimensional chess.The offensive suddenly started and the Russian forces didn’t have anywhere close to enough assets on hand to adequately deal with it, so they chose giving up territory. The 125ish vehicles lost also seems to confirmed this, since no one deliberately gives away weapons to the enemy. But hey, this isn’t a war that will be won by gaining territory. Interesting how western “supporters” of Russia all agreed on this “territory doesn’t matter” meme until Russia lost territory, then they all had a panic and started demanding Putin declared war. This is why 99% of these western chatterheads aren’t helpful.

But on the other hand, Ukraine/NATO didn’t get what they wanted either, I think that much is clear. The intent here was pretty obviously to do more than cause embarrassment. They intended to catch a few thousand lightly armed militia and policemen unprotected and destroy them. That objective ended in failure.

Nevertheless, western legacy media outlets are having a field day publishing relentless propaganda about Ukrainian superhuman battlefield victories, and Russian atrocities and failure. From RT:

After the publication of a recent story in the New York Times based on allegedly ‘declassified materials’ from US intelligence agencies about Russia’s ‘purchase’ of millions of artillery shells and missiles from North Korea for use in Ukraine, something went awry.

Against the backdrop of statements from representatives of the State Department and the Department of Defense, who did not provide any factual information, John Kirby, the US National Security Council’s coordinator for strategic communications, walked it back. He conceded that there were no indications that the arms purchase had actually occurred yet, or that any North Korean munitions had made it onto the battlefield in Ukraine.

The narrative, however, serves a number of purposes:

• Highlighting the “serious logistical problems” for Russia and its local allies in the context of the military operation in Ukraine;
• Demonstrating the effectiveness of US and EU export control measures, which China also apparently complies with;
• Insinuations about Russia’s ‘forced’ recourse to ‘rogue states’ such as North Korea and Iran for military assistance. Pyongyang is under a strict arms embargo by the UN Security Council, and any supply of arms and materiel from the country would be considered a violation of international sanction;
• Settling scores with Pyongyang for its recognition of the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, and the potential deployment of North Korean workers to the liberated territories to rebuild civilian infrastructure.

A guest commentary also on RT:

After Russia and its local allies liberated Severodonetsk and Lisichansk in early July, the fighting in Ukraine subsided somewhat. It seemed as if Moscow was deliberately letting the conflict settle into something with an air of the routine. Relatively little resources were being spent on it, while the state apparatus was working to overcome the effects of sanctions and to adapt the economy. 

During this time, the military operation was taking place in a kind of ‘standby mode’ against the background of turbulence in the global economy and the deepening energy crisis in Europe.

However, in late summer and early autumn, events on the Ukrainian front called into question the prospects for such a frozen state. As we had anticipated, the operational pause on the part of the Russian army led to the Ukrainian Armed Forces (AFU) seizing the initiative and eventually launching two counter-offensive operations.

It’s far too early to say, but I am going to guess that Russia will, despite all western insistence to the contrary, still not start a mobilization. The special operation in Ukraine, after the conclusion of the Mariupol offensive, has been a holding pattern to keep Ukrainian forces pinned. It’s the big picture that matters. There is an economic war between Russia and the “collective West,” and for the moment Russia clearly has the upper hand, and will have even more of an advantage in the upcoming weeks. The heat for Maria’s apartment complex just turned on today. Can the EU and UK say the same? Is “standing with Ukraine” worth going hungry and freezing? I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

One last point I want to hit on, Ukrainian casualties. Yes, they were heavy. But no, it does not matter. 10 or 20 thousand killed and injured is still a drop in the bucket. Riflemen are just as easy to replace as the rifles they’re holding. The only thing that’s difficult to replace is specialists like tankers, artillerymen, radar operators, etc. But here’s some cold, hard, reality. NATO has an unlimited supply of those specialists, and that’s a clear goal of the current propaganda war. There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of former and current soldiers in NATO countries who are skilled with the vehicles and weapons being sent to Ukraine, and have combat experience. I doubt there’s any danger of that labor pool being depleted any time soon.

Thanks for reading, and special thanks to the people who donated to the site this week, Chris, Des Hanrahan, Someone, Longtrail, Dan Summerhill, and Pkreter. I greatly appreciate you guys!

Featured Image Source: My photo from the 2022 ARMY.

Ian Kummer

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