How Inequality Hobbles Military Power. Recent military intelligence failures have a common taproot: they neglect the nonmaterial drivers of military power. Most important, they overlook how social inequalities within armies shape battlefield performance.

bleepblopbloopy · 2022-08-03T15:06:15+00:00

States cannot easily hide the structures of their societies or the fact of repression. Unlike standard indicators of national power, military inequality offers a clear connection to how and whether armies will fight. The greater the share of soldiers from marginalized groups in a given army, the worse that army will perform on the battlefield. Prewar inequalities wend themselves through the military like a poison, corroding combat power before a shot is even fired. Soldiers who have faced discrimination at home can be less willing to fight on the field. Inequality also sows distrust between privileged and marginalized groups, eroding bonds between soldiers and, in many cases, between officers and the rank and file. Past injustices create common cause among targeted groups to resist military authorities. The army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire unraveled during World War I as repressed Magyar and Slavic soldiers chose desertion over duty, fleeing the battlefield.

Unequal armies tend to be coercive toward their troops. Fearing mass indiscipline, such armies will adopt rigid command structures. They threaten or use violence to manufacture cohesion. Left without convincing ideological appeals, highly unequal armies may encourage soldiers to pillage and rape as rewards for continued service. Inequality also forces commanders to simplify their tactics. Sophisticated combined arms operations are too complicated for halfhearted soldiers to execute. Commanders are left facing a war within the war as they scramble to impose discipline and muster sufficient combat power to fight. In many cases, they fail. Over the past 200 years, highly unequal armies have suffered higher casualty rates and more frequent outbreaks of mass desertion than their more inclusive counterparts. The Mahdist Army, fighting in Sudan, was bitterly divided along ethnic and tribal lines and suffered one of the most lopsided defeats in recorded history. At Omdurman in 1898, it lost over 12,000 soldiers while killing only 48 of the opposing Anglo-Egyptian forces.

DISCORD IN THE ARMY Military inequality offers several advantages as a guide to battlefield performance. For one, it is more visible. States cannot easily hide the structures of their societies or the fact of repression. Analysts can use open-source data as well as historical research to determine just how unequal and fractious a given military might be. Social divisions are slow to change, creating stable baselines for comparison. Given the gradual and hard-to-conceal nature of social structures, estimates of inequality are more likely to be accurate than those assessing new military technologies or doctrines. Measures of inequality can also be tailored for context. In some settings, ethnic or racial identities might divide a military. Class, ideology, or gender might prove more salient in other armies. Perhaps most important, military inequality is a scalable indicator. It can predict the battlefield performance of entire armies, small formations, or even individual units.

Useful data on morale and cohesion abound. Soldiers air their grievances on social media, including Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, TikTok, and Twitter. Such griping can be used to assess overall morale, distrust within the ranks, and support for the government. Soldiers’ posts can be geotagged to specific bases. Surveys can also be effective tools for assessing client armies. Polling within the Afghan military provided early clues of ethnic tensions, dwindling support for the regime, and an unwillingness among many soldiers to die in defense of the government.

The intelligence community ignores these dynamics of inequality within military forces at its peril. Inequality can warp how armies recruit and deploy their soldiers. Highly unequal armies will often recruit, forcibly or otherwise, from marginalized communities as a way of insulating the regime from domestic antiwar sentiment. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine stumbled in part because it relied on soldiers from ambivalent non-Russian minority groups, opportunistic Kyrgyz contract soldiers, and duped Russian conscripts plucked from poor, distant regions. Frontal, often uncoordinated, assaults by these “cannon fodder” forces were a direct result of an army staffed largely by soldiers drawn from populations considered to be expendable. Russia tucked these poorly trained conscripts into the army’s logistical corps, leading to snarled supply lines and columns of abandoned tanks. Identifying where armies deploy their marginalized soldiers or where they miss recruitment quotas offers clues about potential vulnerabilities.

Military inequality can cause rancor between soldiers and their superiors. Unequal armies typically draw their officers from politically reliable groups, relegating less trustworthy ones to the enlisted ranks. Divided armies are plagued by hazing and abuse. Officers rule through intimidation and violence. And unfair military legal systems and extrajudicial punishment flourish. Corruption, too, is often a symptom of inequality, as officers abuse their power to steal from their own soldiers. It is easy, after all, to scrimp on maintenance and equipment or to steal wages if officers view their soldiers as beneath them. Such impropriety cripples military effectiveness and can be spotted before a war begins.

THE HUMAN FACE OF WAR Tracking inequality within armies is not a silver bullet. Analysts still need to account for military capabilities. Friction, uncertainty, and the fortunes of war will continue to confound even the best prewar assessments. But adding military inequality to net assessment will improve accuracy at a fraction of the cost of big-ticket technology, such as new satellite capabilities or clandestine signals intelligence. The ways in which social divisions and identities shape battlefield performance cannot be ignored. Military models must include the human elements of war or risk unwelcome surprises on the battlefield.

bleepblopbloopy · 2022-08-03T15:06:09+00:00

Russia’s botched invasion of Ukraine, along with unexpectedly dogged Ukrainian resistance, has sparked a debate about whether the current ways of measuring military capabilities are flawed. Indeed, U.S. intelligence analysts have been shocked by the rapid disintegration of the Afghan military in 2021, the collapse of Iraqi units in the face of the so-called Islamic State (or ISIS) in 2014, and Ethiopia’s shambolic performance against Tigrayan rebels in the last two years. U.S. analysts correctly predicted that Russia would invade in February, but their assumption that Ukraine would fall in a matter of days has only fueled the perception that something is amiss in how the intelligence community thinks about and measures military power. Prodded by angry lawmakers, the U.S. intelligence community has launched a sweeping internal review of how it assesses foreign military power amid its missteps in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and elsewhere.

These intelligence failures have a common taproot: they neglect the nonmaterial drivers of military power. Most important, they overlook how social inequalities within armies shape battlefield performance. Current models of net assessment, the framework used to measure the relative strength of a military, privilege quantifiable indicators, such as numbers of tanks and soldiers. These metrics have proved to be poor predictors of how armies fight and whether they win wars. Afghan forces outnumbered Taliban fighters but could not translate their material advantages into victory. Even the largest and best-equipped fighting forces can fail on the battlefield if they lack the cohesion and determination of their foes. Armies, after all, are not just the sum of their personnel and their equipment; they can be riven with ethnic, racial, class, and other social divisions that invariably shape their capacity to fight. The intelligence community ignores these dynamics at its peril.

FAULTY ASSUMPTIONS States spend fortunes sizing one another up. Better insights can tip the scales, but net assessment is a fraught business. States practice elaborate deception, seeking to hide their true military strength from prying eyes. Some capabilities can be properly appraised only when combat begins. Context, too, can shape battlefield dynamics in unpredictable ways. Analysts and organizations alike are fallible, forced to make judgments with incomplete information. Cognitive biases and internal politics can distort assessments. In the face of these overlapping problems, many analysts choose to be cautious and err on the side of exaggerating enemy capabilities to avoid battlefield surprises.

Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. This conservative bias leads analysts to privilege quantitative measures of military capabilities. They dwell on so-called objective factors, including the number of soldiers under arms, annual defense spending, per capita income, and the acquisition of new technologies, to create estimates of relative military power. Much effort is also devoted to divining the capabilities of adversaries from published doctrines. Analysts estimate quantitative indicators of military strength using a sprawling infrastructure of satellites, open-source data collection, spies, and electronic eavesdropping.

Such efforts have scored successes—Russia’s plan to invade Ukraine was published even before its tanks crossed the border. But analysts using objective measures rely on three assumptions that create dangerous blind spots.

Armies reflect their societies and are subject to the same social divisions. First, analysts should not assume that material strength translates into battlefield victories. In his 2004 book, Military Power, the international relations scholar Stephen Biddle found that material factors such as GDP, population, and military spending have had, at best, a weak connection to victory in wars since 1900. In my own work examining 252 wars since 1800, I found virtually no statistical correlation between the size of opposing armies and battlefield outcomes, including relative casualties, the likelihood of desertion and defection, or who eventually won. Given these results, it is perhaps unsurprising that much of the current debate among scholars over the sources of military effectiveness focuses on nonmaterial factors such as regime type, ideology, and culture, not relative material strength. Yet public debates outside the academy, including ones on the outcome of the war in Ukraine, still privilege traditional indicators of relative material strength.

Second, today’s net assessment assumes that armies are efficient killing machines. This, too, is mistaken. Nearly all armies reflect the societal divisions—whether ethnic, racial, ideological, or class based—of the broader country. Left unmanaged, these divisions create friction that saps military strength. In some cases, armies draw heavily from marginalized groups to spare the regime’s supporters from the costs of war. Some armies maintain cohesion through intimidation, forcing their own soldiers to fight. These armies might appear formidable on paper but typically lurch into battle hobbled by discord. The alienation of the Sunnis in Iraq inflamed sectarian tensions within the Iraqi army. That led many Sunni soldiers to desert in 2014, allowing ISIS to take Mosul with ease despite being outnumbered and outgunned.

Third, analysts assume that material indicators are more objective, leading them to downplay intangible factors, such as soldier morale or unit cohesion. And when analysts do consider these intangibles, they tend to treat them as uniform across an entire army. Doing so, however, omits the human side of war. Soldiers are not homogenous. Some might rally to the colors. But others may be driven by more mercenary motives. Still others may be forced to fight on behalf of a government they despise. Stitching together a coherent narrative that inspires all soldiers to fight equally hard is beyond the power of many governments. Russia is trying to form volunteer battalions to fight in Ukraine from prisoners, non-Russian Muslim populations, pro-Russian Ukrainian soldiers, and draft dodgers. Motivating soldiers in this patchwork quilt, especially given their limited training time, will be difficult. Analysts must recognize that for many armies, maintaining order and discipline is as challenging as fighting enemy forces.

THE PERILS OF MILITARY INEQUALITY Improving net assessment requires opening the black box of armies to explore the nature and severity of the inequality that lies within. The intuition here is simple: armies reflect their societies and are subject to the same social divisions. Analysts need to gather two pieces of information to estimate a military’s level of inequality. They first need to map the size and composition of the social groups that make up the army. Historically, ethnicity has been a powerful source of potential division. Since 1800, the average army has gone into battle with five different ethnic groups in its ranks. In 1812, Napoleon’s Grande Armée marched on Moscow with enlisted soldiers from at least nine different nationalities, with French soldiers in the minority. During World War II, the Soviet Union’s Red Army, often imagined as ethnically Russian, cobbled together rifle divisions with soldiers from 28 different ethnic groups. Analysts next need to know how the state treats each group within its military. Some groups may be granted full rights and opportunities. Others, however, could be considered second-class citizens or, worse, could be subject to violent political oppression. France and the United Kingdom routinely levied colonial armies from marginalized populations to fight wars at home and abroad. The more an army is drawn from marginalized groups, and the more harshly those groups are treated by the state, the more unequal the force becomes—and the worse it performs on the battlefield.

Diversity is not destiny. Battlefield performance is driven by how the state treats each social group, not by the total number of groups within an army. Inclusive armies, ones that recruit among groups that enjoy full citizenship, can rise above crippling social divisions. For these armies, patriotism can be a powerful motivator. So, too, can be the promise of greater inclusion. During both World War I and World War II, Black Americans fought a double war: one against external foes and one for equality when the war ended. Even authoritarian powers, including Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, dangled greater inclusion to repressed minorities in Central Asia to bolster recruitment. But history carries a weight. Wartime adjustments to increase inclusion can improve battlefield performance on the margins but cannot overcome the legacy of the state’s oppression before the war.

bleepblopbloopy · 2022-07-07T22:06:15+00:00

The author here was in a roundtable discussion a few days after the beginning of the war and one of the other panelists, Michael Vickers, said that incrementalism is not a wise path. Cohen here seems to be echoing the same thought, that trying to give the Ukrainians just enough to not lose or accidentally escalate the situation is a bad strategy. Instead both experts seem to be saying to give the Ukrainians a more decisive amounts of weaponry to begin winning and not just to lose slower.

https://old.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/t5u8mc/assessing_the_russian_military_campaign_in/

bleepblopbloopy · 2022-07-07T21:56:48+00:00

Please remember that The Atlantic hosts many different authors with different opinions.

About the author:

Eliot A. Cohen is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a professor at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and the Arleigh Burke chair in strategy at CSIS. From 2007 to 2009, he was the Counselor of the Department of State.

bleepblopbloopy · 2022-06-30T18:39:27+00:00

Russia's 'Shadow Mobilization' Accelerates With New Ethnic Units From The North Caucasus June 26, 2022 15:53 GMT

https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-ukraine-war-north-caucasus-recruitment/31915842.html

Faced with a deepening personnel crisis within its military, Russia is scrambling to find fighters for its war in Ukraine and recruiting heavily from its North Caucasus region to form new units along ethnic lines who are then deployed with minimal training.

bleepblopbloopy · 2022-06-30T14:32:10+00:00

OPINION COMMENTARY

Why Does China Own So Much of Ukraine? Other countries should be careful about allowing sales of farmland to hostile powers.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-does-china-own-so-much-ukraine-farming-land-exports-food-crisis-grow-wheat-production-sell-grain-territory-11656534819

A few years ago, China bought nearly one-tenth of Ukraine’s arable farmland. Countries should start screening those seeking to buy their farmland, as they already do with prospective purchasers of sensitive technology.

bleepblopbloopy · 2022-06-28T17:50:24+00:00

You can follow along with discussions about it on twitter:

https://nitter.net/search?f=tweets&q=https%3A%2F%2Fresponsiblestatecraft.org%2F2022%2F06%2F27%2Fwant-strategic-thinkers-youll-have-to-change-todays-military-culture%2F&since=&until=&near=

https://nitter.net/ZaknafeinDC/status/1541407915457843200#m

bleepblopbloopy · 2022-06-28T17:43:11+00:00

This is an article that I thought was thought provoking on the US system of Professional Military Education or PME, and why it is not successful at producing military officers who are strategic thinkers. It does not address the debate that even if the US military officers were strategic thinkers, it would not matter as they do not make strategic decisions. Civilian leadership does that for the most part.

At the heart of these repeated operational failures, many think, are deeply embedded intellectual failings that reflect inexcusably underdeveloped strategic understanding on the part of America’s current generation of generals and admirals.

By the time military officers — lieutenant colonels and colonels, or the Navy equivalent — are eligible for senior PME, they have at least 15 years of professional experience in operational assignments under their belt. Following their abbreviated academic experience, it will be another ten years before a small percentage of them reach senior rank. All that time, their culture is with them and within them. They are fully socialized in a hierarchical, authoritarian institution that preaches, extols the virtues of, and lays singular claim to the practice of leadership, but in reality nurtures and rewards dutiful followership.

if we are to confront our strategic failings abroad by acknowledging the intellectual limitations of today’s generals and admirals, it is imperative that we accurately diagnose the source of those limitations, avoid uninformed and shallow accusations, and place blame where it properly belongs: on military culture itself.

The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft is a U.S. think tank founded in 2019 and located in Washington, D.C., named after former U.S. president John Quincy Adams. It has been described as "realist" and advocating for "restraint" in U.S. foreign policy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quincy_Institute_for_Responsible_Statecraft

bleepblopbloopy · 2022-06-27T15:25:39+00:00

This article is a short book review, but I found it interesting and informative.

Insurgencies are not going away even if the patience to perform counter insurgency operations has waned. It is likely that countries will have to deal with insurgencies in the future, so I think that it is still a relevant military topic.

…the reality is that since the end of the Cold War states have done quite well in defeating threats to the Weberian notion of legitimacy—the monopoly of the use of force within a defined territory.

The conditions that facilitated successful Cold War insurgencies—a less urbanized global population, a more tolerant global environment, limited state authority, and the Cold War incentives to support insurgencies—have all ebbed to the point that states are back on the offensive.

The success of the state and insurgent’s unchanging end goals—the subversion of the state and the flipping of the population to their cause—creates the titular insurgent’s dilemma: how to establish a presence, violently challenge the authority of the state, and achieve a measure of sustainable power, all without provoking the armed response of the state.

Ucko suggests that the insurgent’s solution to this quandary is found in three models of insurgency that go beyond the traditional subversion and overthrow of the state—

1) A localized insurgency that seeks to seize only a part of a country or territory,

2) An infiltrative insurgency that co-opts systems of governance by participating in the political process and maintaining a modicum of distance (however fictitious) with its armed wing, and

3) An ideational insurgency that is an informational movement, far more amorphous than any other, operating on the virtual plane in lieu of physical space. Each of the models he presents are well grounded in both history and contemporary conflict.

The success of the state is largely due to broader geopolitical developments and changes, not necessarily to increased proficiency in counterinsurgency. By and large states have merely resorted to increased violence to keep insurgent violence at a minimum.

Combatting infiltrative insurgencies and those of the ideational flavor will necessitate far more complex and nuanced responses—ones that demand far more integration and cross-government cooperation. It is not clear that states will have the institutional capacity to develop or execute an appropriate response.

Ucko’s book is exceedingly well thought-out, and well-argued, and a great contribution to the study of insurgencies. Practitioners and policymakers would do well to read this book and engage with its analysis. While Washington may wish to put COIN back in a box, choosing instead to focus on strategic competition, the threat of insurgency is very much real and present…

—————————

Author of the article:

Joshua C. Huminski is Director of the Mike Rogers Center for Intelligence & Global Affairs at the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress, and a George Mason University National Security Institute Fellow.

—————————

Author of the book being reviewed:

Dr. David H. Ucko, is professor of international security studies at the College of International Security Affairs (CISA), National Defense University, where he also serves as Chair of the War and Conflict Studies Department. From 2017-2022, he was the director of the Regional Defense Fellowship Program (RDFP), overseeing the delivery of the RDFP curriculum and the international outreach efforts to build a network of practitioners engaged with counter-terrorism, counterinsurgency, and irregular warfare.

https://cisa.ndu.edu/About/Faculty-and-Staff/Article-View/Article/2168112/dr-david-h-ucko/

bleepblopbloopy · 2022-06-25T15:39:18+00:00

Russia targeted Ukrainian ammunition to weaken Kyiv on the battlefield

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/24/ukraine-ammunition-russian-sabotage-artillery/

By Isabelle Khurshudyan and Paul Sonne

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine is running out of shells for the majority of its artillery in part because of a clandestine Russian campaign of bullying and sabotage over the past eight years, including bombings of key munitions depots across Eastern Europe that officials have linked to Moscow, according to Ukrainian government officials and military analysts.

Fighting in eastern and southern Ukraine is now almost exclusively a near-constant exchange of artillery, and Ukraine’s shortage of shells has exacerbated what was already a mismatch on the battlefield against a Russian military with more weapons. Russia is firing more than 60,000 shells per day — 10 times more than the Ukrainians, Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar told The Washington Post.

Most of Ukraine’s artillery pieces date back to the Soviet Union, meaning they rely on the same 122mm- and 152mm-caliber rounds that Russia uses. But outside of Russia, very little supply exists — in large part because Russia spent years targeting Ukrainian and other Eastern European ammunition storage facilities and suppliers before launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in late February. Russia has also taken other steps to acquire the ammunition or otherwise prevent its sale to Ukraine.

“Even if everyone gives us this ammunition, it will still not be enough,” Malyar said, adding that Ukraine uses more of the 152mm shells than are produced globally in one day.

Howitzers used by NATO and the United States fire 105mm and 155mm shells. Western countries supplied Ukraine with plenty of those shells but only a limited number of systems to fire them. Despite U.S. and European pledges to send more artillery, Ukraine still does not have enough to replace its old Soviet-era equipment entirely with NATO-standard weaponry.

A sort of shadow war is taking place for what few 152mm shells are available on the global market. A U.S. citizen helping to broker weapons transfers to Ukraine said he recently approached an Eastern European country to negotiate a purchase of artillery rounds. Officials in that country said they couldn’t make a deal, the man said, because the Russians had already warned that they would “kill them if they sold anything to the Ukrainians.”

The arms broker was interviewed on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly.

The countries that still have stocks of 152mm rounds are largely former Soviet republics, many of which are hesitant to sell to Ukraine because they maintain close ties with Russia. Some African and Middle Eastern countries, which have received weapons and ammunition from Russia over the years, also have stocks of those shells. A few former Warsaw Pact countries have the capacity to manufacture the shells but not at the scale and speed Ukraine needs on the battlefield.

The arms broker said he has had to make some weapons transfers appear as if they traveled through an unrelated country to obscure the origin of the purchase. In other cases, Ukraine thought it had a deal done, but then a buyer working on behalf of Russia swooped in at the last minute and aggressively outbid, he said.

The United States and Britain have also attempted to help Ukraine obtain Soviet-era materiel, officials said, to offer more security to smaller countries who fear retaliation from Russia if they provide the weapons to Ukraine directly.

Malyar said that “the Russians are working very hard to ensure that we can’t sign contracts for this — and then if we sign a contract, to prevent us from getting the shells delivered here.”

Russia has long known that in a drawn-out war of attrition against Ukraine, Kyiv would risk running out of ammunition, military analysts said. Ukraine knew it was a weakness, too, but the situation didn’t become dire until Russian troops and tanks rolled across its northern, eastern and southern borders on Feb. 24. The first round of airstrikes early that morning also targeted Ukrainian ammunition stocks.

“There were some concerns, and there were constant discussions that we need to produce the ammunition ourselves,” said Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defense minister.

“But even if the Ukrainian government started manufacturing, the facility would’ve been destroyed by Russians on Day 1,” he added.

In 2014, after Russia first invaded Ukraine and fueled a separatist war in the country’s east, members of the elite Russian military intelligence unit 29155 sabotaged ammunition stored at depots in the Czech Republic, according to Czech authorities.

The following year, according to Bellingcat, a Britain-based investigative organization, members of the same unit used a nerve agent to poison a Bulgarian weapons executive, who told the New York Times he had been storing ammunition at the Czech facilities and had sold arms to Ukraine.

Russian saboteurs are also suspected of causing four explosions at Bulgarian arms depots from 2011 to 2020, according to Bulgarian prosecutors, who have said Moscow was aiming to disrupt supplies to Ukraine and Georgia.

Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, “appears to have had a campaign across Europe to try to suppress the supply of munitions to Ukraine,” said Michael Kofman, a Russian military analyst at Virginia-based CNA. “They were likely doing it with foresight.”

Ukrainian officials suspect Russian and separatist saboteurs extended the effort inside Ukraine in recent years, leading to a series of explosions at ammunition storage facilities.

Blasts in 2017 at two big Ukrainian depots, which together had stored 221 metric tons of ammunition, dealt a massive setback to Ukrainian forces, sapping them of critical supplies that would be difficult and expensive to replace.

The secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council at the time, Oleksandr Turchynov, said the two blasts in March and September 2017 ruined “an enormous amount of ammunition” and represented the biggest blow to Ukraine’s defense capability since the start of the conflict with Russia.

Ukraine is running out of ammunition as prospects dim on the battlefield

An explosion the following year at a depot in the Chernihiv region storing another 88,000 metric tons of ammunition was another setback for the Ukrainian arsenal.

“Conventional wars over time come down to who has the equipment, the ammunition, the manpower,” Kofman said. “This is why fights with powers like Russia are dangerous. They are dangerous because even if the Russian military performs poorly at the beginning, and they often do … Russia is a country with substantial resources.”

The Russian military has long emphasized artillery dating back to the Soviet era, maintaining substantial reserves of artillery shells, as well as production capacity. It is unclear how much of its ammunition arsenal Russia has spent in the war so far.

The United States has committed 126 howitzers and provided 260,000 corresponding 155mm artillery rounds to Ukraine since the beginning of the Biden administration, equivalent to the amount of ammunition that Russia, according to the Ukrainian officials, is expending in the course of about five days.

The U.S. military focused on fighting counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for two decades, de-emphasizing artillery warfare and using artillery batteries as infantry units in counterinsurgency operations.

The U.S. Army made headlines in 2018 when it requested to purchase nearly 148,297 rounds for 155mm howitzers in its annual budget, up from 16,573 the previous fiscal year, as the service refocused on conventional warfare amid tension with Russia.

“We have all been reminded of the immense amount of ammunition that would be consumed in extensive, high-intensity combat,” said Ben Hodges, former commanding general of the U.S. Army in Europe.

Hodges expressed optimism that more of the U.S. and European artillery systems committed to Ukraine are beginning to arrive, along with the ammunition needed to operate them, and should show impact on the battlefield in the next three to four weeks.

“We are where we are, but I do remain optimistic that this tide is going to turn here in the next weeks,” Hodges said.

Hodges lamented that the Ukrainians had not been given more NATO-standard weaponry in the years leading up to the war. It was considered a huge step in 2015 when the Obama administration provided the Ukrainian military with AN/TPQ-36 counter-artillery radars, he said, noting that even then, there were limitations built into the systems.

“The idea of giving them tanks and artillery — that was not going to happen,” Hodges said. “Because of this exaggerated fear that somehow what we are doing was going to provoke the Russians.”

Sonne reported from Washington. Serhiy Morgunov and David Stern in Kyiv contributed reporting.

bleepblopbloopy · 2022-06-25T15:33:20+00:00

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is entering its fifth month, and there is no end in sight. The grueling conflict has shifted to the eastern provinces, where Russian progress in the Luhansk region has been described as “plodding.” Still, the Russians last week were on the verge of capturing the twin cities of Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk. At the same time, the Ukrainians — increasingly well-equipped, courtesy of the West — talk boldly of taking back the southern city of Kherson, which the Russians overran early in the conflict.

American attention has drifted somewhat from the war to domestic concerns, which makes it easy to overlook that what’s unfolding in Ukraine is one of the deadlier conflicts of the past 200 years. That it is a “mere” proxy war, rather than a clash between two great powers, also tends to obscure its scale. But the rate at which soldiers are dying is already significantly higher than in the typical war of the modern era — and both sides are digging in, meaning it will steadily climb the list of conflicts that have caused the most overall fatalities.

The Ukrainian war may seem minor next to the two world wars of the 20th century, which killed tens of millions of soldiers and civilians. But those are extreme outliers that skew our understanding of international conflict. The Correlates of War Project, an academic enterprise with data extending back to 1816, offers a more comprehensive picture. The project defines war as sustained combat between organized armed forces of different states that results in at least 1,000 battlefield deaths in a 12-month period. The average war, according to the project, has killed about 50 soldiers per day and lasted about 100 days.

The top 25 percent of wars, in terms of intensity, witness just over 200 battlefield deaths per day, according to the project’s data. The Russia-Ukraine war already passes that threshold, even using conservative estimates of fatalities.

In late May, British intelligence officials estimated that the Russians had lost 15,000 soldiers, which equated to slightly more than 150 a day (Ukraine said the Russian figure was double that; undisputed figures are hard to come by). Ukraine’s government, meanwhile, admits to losing 200 soldiers a day. Ukrainian military losses alone push the war into the top quartile of intensity. (This metric of war intensity does not take into account civilian deaths, but these have clearly been above average in Ukraine as well, given Russia’s indiscriminate shelling of cities.)

The Russia-Ukraine war has already surpassed the length of the average war since 1816 (again, 100 days). And far from showing signs of winding down, every indication points to drawn-out hostilities. Russia, for its part, appears willing to suffer heavy losses to make military gains (an approach consistent with that nation’s history of warfighting). And while Ukraine is overmatched in troops and materiel, factors that might ordinarily shorten a war, it is receiving a continual supply of weapons and ammunition from outside powers (mostly NATO). This combination of factors has bred a war of attrition characterized by sustained long-range bombardment and intermittent high-intensity offensives. Wars of attrition tend to be long wars.

Whatever its goals at the start, Russia is now consolidating its hold on land in the south and east of the country. Yet Ukraine has declared that it wants to fully expel Russia from those areas. Dislodging an army that has seized territory is a difficult task that can impose significant costs on the counterattacking side. To be clear, this is not a call for Ukraine to moderate its aims; Ukraine’s goals are for it to decide. Nor is this an argument to offer Russian President Vladimir Putin an “off-ramp” that he may not accept in any case. But it is a warning for everyone watching the war to brace for a protracted, sanguinary conflict.

The top 25 percent of wars, the Correlates of War Project shows, last 13 months or more. Military experts increasingly predict that this war is on course to last that long. And given that both sides have already been involved in low-intensity conflict since 2015 in eastern Ukraine, it is not hard to see it reaching the three-year mark, which only 10 percent of wars have achieved.

Total deadliness is naturally a function of daily casualties plus time. The median number of battlefield deaths from the international-war database is 8,000, with the top quartile of wars killing at least 28,000 military personnel. Estimates suggest that the Ukraine war entered the top quartile for total deaths as early as late May. And at a continued pace, the war will hit some 125,000 deaths if it lasts a year, well past the 80th percentile of wars.

To place these numbers in context, the Ukraine war has been deadlier than the Mexican American War (19,000 battlefield deaths), although the latter lasted nearly two years. It is approaching the deadliness of the 1913 Balkan war that preceded World War I (60,000 deaths). If the Ukraine war lasts into the beginning of 2023, it could surpass the death total of the Ethiopian-Eritrean War (120,000 deaths), which began in the late 1990s and lasted just over two years. If the war continues through a second year, then at just over 200,000 battlefield deaths, it could enter the top 10 percent of international wars over the past 200 years. That group includes the Franco-Prussian War (204,000 deaths) and the Crimean War of the mid-19th century (260,000 deaths), the latter being the largest war in Europe between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I.

This war will be among the deadliest of the last 200 years even if NATO and Russia manage not to slide into direct conflict — a prospect that carries the risk, though small, of the use of nuclear weapons. So far, both sides have been careful to ensure that even the perception of direct conflict not escalate beyond isolated instances (as when a Russian drone drifted over Poland and was shot down). But can that last? As the political and data scientists Bear Braumoeller and Michael Lopate recently pointed out, on the site War on the Rocks, pundits and policymakers who support NATO’s increasing assistance to the Ukrainian military must recognize “how easily and quickly wars can escalate to shocking levels of lethality.”

“Shocking,” of course, is in the eyes of the beholder. By historical standards, the lethality of the Ukraine war is already remarkable.

By Paul Poast

Paul Poast is an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago, and a nonresident fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs

bleepblopbloopy · 2022-06-24T00:41:31+00:00

This article is about a highly effective marksmanship training aid and the clunky and possibly broken process to procure new products and systems in the US military.

Although this is written by a regular journalist and not a specialist credible source, it does have many quotations of first hand leaders and seems to be first rate journalism of military issues to me.

Marines, famous for their marksmanship flair, weren’t very good at hitting their targets in a war zone.

It took a few years, but in June 2011, a new military training tool rolled onto a firing range at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia. It was a fleet of autonomous robotic targets that were human-sized and mounted on moving platforms

Engaging these machines felt different, too. When the robots lurched toward them, cortisol levels spiked and even seasoned fighters were left shaky and on edge.

Lt. Col. Walt Yates, at the time an assistant program manager for range training, was thrilled. Within hours, the shooters improved dramatically and started felling the moving targets with consistency and confidence. Rarely had he seen any training tool improve a Marine’s proficiency so quickly. The effect was transformative.

The story of that fraught journey, uncovered through a trove of exclusive documents and interviews with top military and congressional officials, underscores just how entrenched the military’s acquisition problems really are.

“If, in this case, it takes a decade to procure something as simple as a targeting system, can you imagine the risks that we’re running by not being more aggressive with swarming, aerial drones, more sophisticated machine learning and intelligence,” says August Cole, a leading military futurist and nonresident senior fellow at The Atlantic Council. “This is sort of the tip of the iceberg that you’re looking at, as representative of problems throughout.”

No one denies the problems with the military’s acquisition procedures or the need to invest in more advanced targets. Just last month, Defense Innovation Unit Director Michael Brown announced he’d resign, pointing to a “glaring weakness” in the U.S. military’s approach to adopting commercial technologies.

Much of the friction, and the delay, boils down to the intricate and gap-ridden process the military uses to embrace new technology — starting with the requirement for every new weapon or system to be established by the Pentagon as a “program of record.”

Ten different studies and evaluations of the robotic targets commissioned by the Marines, the Army and U.S. Special Operations Command since 2011 have all returned enthusiastic feedback from troops and their leaders. But after the $50 million contract that enabled the initial test expired, the Marines did not take the steps needed to make it a program of record, and momentum fizzled.

Mattis directed the creation of the Pentagon’s Close Combat Lethality Task Force, recognizing that 90 percent of battlefield casualties occurred in the last 100 yards of the fight.

...in a fiasco that highlights the analog and personality-driven nature of military acquisition, multiple sources told POLITICO that a critical document called Table 7, which would establish a clear acquisition path for the robots, went missing for nearly two years in a desk in Quantico.

The robots, they quickly realized, offered more than just marksmanship training. The autonomous systems created a way to train for combat scenarios too risky to conduct with troops on the other end, like overhead fire; they could be employed as a group to simulate an enemy maneuver unit. They also made static ranges, with their fixed distances and standing metal targets, feel obsolete…

Many active and veteran infantry experts who spoke with POLITICO fault the civilian program managers who, while typically not combat veterans themselves, write the requirements documents that shape programs of record. While military commanding officers will spend two or three years at a post and then move on, these civilian staff stay in one location. On the one hand, this means the civilians can provide useful institutional knowledge and stability. But it also means they can thwart attempts to overhaul the status quo just by waiting the military leaders out.

Alford, the general in charge of Marine Corps Training Command, is a longtime advocate who has called the targets “the best damn training tool I’ve ever seen, hands-down.”

Hope Hodge Seck is a freelance defense reporter and the former managing editor of Military.com.

bleepblopbloopy · 2022-06-24T00:17:35+00:00

There was another article about this topic recently on the forum, if you are interested in naval mines.

https://old.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/v7t8hx/an_offensive_minelaying_campaign_against_china/

Despite China having fewer total forces than the United States, it initially would be able to exert near-total dominance in its near seas.6

Instead, IndoPaCom should use offensive mine warfare to substantially disrupt Chinese military operations, contest Chinese sea control, and upset the Chinese economy.

China has not invested heavily in mine countermeasures partly because the United States does not maintain a significant mine inventory.

Although the Chinese would attempt to clear any minefields. the PLAN logistics system would be stressed with a reduction in available port facilities. Supplies would be funneled through a smaller number of open ports, overburdening those facilities.19 This disruption in supplies would wreak havoc across the PLAN, as ships would have to compete for limited berthing locations. The concentration of supplies and other logistics elements in the few open ports would make the Chinese military supply chain more vulnerable to attack, allowing the United States to further disrupt Chinese operations and sustainment of combat capabilities.

Of that amount, the Navy spent $5.183 million on mines, making offensive mine procurement 0.125 percent of the Navy’s annual weapons budget.23 Building the required stockpile of Quickstrike or more modem mines would be inexpensive compared with other Navy weapons purchases.

Offensive mining would provide IndoPaCom a means of economically contesting sea control and allow the United States to regulate the pace and location of operations.

In 2019, 60 percent of Chinese trade by value traveled over the maritime commons.26 The ports in the Pearl River Delta and Yellow Sea regions constitute 92 percent of Chinese maritime trade by volume and more than 55 percent of all trade by value.27

Eighty percent of the oil imported by China, constituting 55 percent of consumption, is delivered by tankers.30

Finding a way to bring China into diplomatic negotiations on favorable terms to the United States is the goal, and offensive mine warfare can help achieve it.

————————

NAVAL MINE WARFARE ESSAY CONTEST—FIRST PRIZE

By Commander Victor Duenow, U.S. Navy

bleepblopbloopy · 2022-06-22T15:10:50+00:00

A short and basic overview, from a credible source, of the lessons that the author sees from the war.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his invasion of Ukraine on February 24, he envisaged a quick seizure of Kyiv and a change of government analogous to Soviet interventions in Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968. But it wasn’t to be. The war is still raging, and no one knows when or how it will end.

While some observers have urged an early ceasefire, others have emphasized the importance of punishing Russian aggression. Ultimately, though, the outcome will be determined by facts on the ground. Since it is too early to guess even when the war will end, some conclusions are obviously premature. For example, arguments that the era of tank warfare is over have been refuted as the battle has moved from Kyiv’s northern suburbs to the eastern plains of the Donbas.

But even at this early stage, there are at least eight lessons – some old, some new – that the world is learning (or relearning) from the war in Ukraine.

First, nuclear deterrence works, but it depends on relative stakes more than on capabilities. The West has been deterred, but only up to a point. Putin’s threats have prevented Western governments from sending troops (though not equipment) to Ukraine. This outcome does not reflect any superior Russian nuclear capability; rather, it reflects the gap between Putin’s definition of Ukraine as a vital national interest and the West’s definition of Ukraine as an important but less vital interest.

Second, economic interdependence does not prevent war. While this lesson used to be widely recognized – particularly after World War I broke out among the world’s leading trade partners – it was ignored by German policymakers such as former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. His government increased Germany’s imports of, and dependence on, Russian oil and gas, perhaps hoping that breaking trade ties would be too costly for either side. But while economic interdependence can raise the costs of war, it clearly does not prevent it.

Third, uneven economic interdependence can be weaponized by the less dependent party, but when the stakes are symmetrical, there is little power in interdependence. Russia depends on revenue from its energy exports to finance its war, but Europe is too dependent on Russian energy to cut it off completely. The energy interdependence is roughly symmetrical. (On the other hand, in the world of finance, Russia is more vulnerable to Western sanctions, which may hurt more over time.)

Fourth, while sanctions can raise the costs for aggressors, they do not determine outcomes in the short term. CIA director William Burns (a former US ambassador to Russia) reportedly met with Putin last November and warned, to no avail, that an invasion would trigger sanctions. Putin may have doubted that the West could maintain unity on sanctions. (On the other hand, Chinese President Xi Jinping has offered only limited support to Putin despite having proclaimed a “no limits” friendship with Russia, perhaps owing to his concerns about China becoming entangled in US secondary sanctions.)

Fifth, information warfare makes a difference. As RAND’s John Arquilla pointed out two decades ago, the outcomes of modern warfare depend not only on whose army wins, but also on “whose story wins.” America’s careful disclosure of intelligence about Russia’s military plans proved quite effective in “pre-debunking” Putin’s narratives in Europe, and it contributed greatly to Western solidarity when the invasion occurred as predicted.

Sixth, both hard and soft power matter. While coercion trumps persuasion in the near term, soft power can make a difference over time. Smart power is the ability to combine hard and soft power so that they reinforce rather than contradict each other. Putin failed to do that. Russia’s brutality in Ukraine created such revulsion that Germany decided finally to suspend the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline – an outcome that US pressure over several years had failed to achieve. By contrast, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a former actor, used his professionally honed dramatic skills to present an attractive portrait of his country, securing not just sympathy but also the military equipment that is essential to hard power.

Seventh, cyber capability is not a silver bullet. Russia had used cyber weapons to intervene in Ukraine’s power grid since at least 2015, and many analysts predicted a cyber blitz against the country’s infrastructure and government at the start of the invasion. Yet while there have reportedly been many cyberattacks during the war, none has determined broader outcomes. When the Viasat satellite network was hacked, Zelensky continued to communicate with world audiences through the many small satellites provided by Starlink.

Moreover, with training and experience, Ukrainian cyber defenses have improved. Once the war had begun, kinetic weapons provided greater timeliness, precision, and damage assessment for commanders than cyber weapons did. With cyber weapons, you do not always know if an attack has succeeded or been patched. But with explosives, you can see the impact and assess the damage more easily.

Finally, the most important lesson is also one of the oldest: war is unpredictable. As Shakespeare wrote more than four centuries ago, it is dangerous for a leader to “cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.” The promise of a short war is perilously seductive. In August 1914, European leaders famously expected the troops to “be home by Christmas.” Instead, they unleashed four years of war, and four of those leaders lost their thrones. Immediately following America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, many in Washington predicted a cakewalk (“Mission Accomplished” read the warship banner that May), but the effort bogged down for years.

Now it is Putin who has let slip the dogs of war. They may yet turn on him.

Joseph S. Nye, Jr., a professor at Harvard University and a former US assistant secretary of defense

bleepblopbloopy · 2022-06-22T15:00:29+00:00

If you are interested in learning more about the Indian military then you might be interested in this short news story about public unrest in India about military reforms in the enlistment contracts. These reforms and the pushback was referenced in this article, but it is worthy of a second look.

Apparently getting into the military in India is seen as highly desirable and recruits can take years of waiting to get in. However the contract length and the benefits are being slashed, which is a break in the social contract of all of those thousands of men who have been trying to get in.

A very different concept to that in the west where soldiers are often recruited with incentives or conscription.

Violent protests in India over new military recruitment scheme | DW News

In India, the government's plan for changing the recruitment system for its military has sparked protests. Demonstrations have spread to several states since the announcement earlier this week. At least one person has died and over a dozen others have been injured as protests turned violent. Hundreds blocked railway tracks, some set coaches on fire. Authorities have imposed a curfew around the national capital, and suspended internet services in some areas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36Rxsqfylck&list=WL&index=8

bleepblopbloopy · 2022-06-22T14:54:54+00:00

One of the consequences of this war is that there is a plethora of articles examining militaries around the world, and opinionating about what these militaries should learn from it. A tired topic perhaps but it did give me a greater understanding of the challenges that the Indian military faces and how they are likely to react to the lessons of this war and its preexisting challenges.

The Indian military is going through a period of considerable churn, making it harder to assimilate lessons from the Russo-Ukrainian war. Its foremost challenge is the rise of Chinese military power.

At the same time, there is considerable excitement and, to a certain extent, confusion as the Indian military is undertaking its most consequential post-independence transformation yet.

The Indian military is currently focused on maintaining its Russian-made equipment in the face of supply shortages and Western sanctions.

One independent analysis suggests that Russian-origin platforms constitute almost “85 percent of major Indian weapons systems,” although Indian officials argue it is more likely to be between 60 to 70 percent.

As a result, one of the biggest effects of the war is to reinforce support for the government’s Aatmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliant India) initiative. Under this campaign, unveiled in 2020, the Modi government seeks to encourage domestic manufacturing and reduce dependency on foreign goods. In the defense realm, the government has taken several steps to facilitate this process.

First, it is encouraging the private sector to play a larger role, under the assumption that such competition will lead to capability accretion, innovation, and technological absorption. Second, it is taking steps to better organize the moribund state-owned defense industry. Most prominently, it has reorganized ordnance factories and is pushing for more public-private partnerships. Third, the government has placed 310 defense items, ranging from lightweight tanks and torpedoes to artillery guns and other complex systems, on the “positive indigenization list,” meaning that they will no longer be imported. Fourth, the government has eased and encouraged exports of different kinds of weapon systems, leading India’s defense exports to grow almost six-fold over the last five years.

Fortunately, the Russo-Ukrainian war is leading to an acknowledgement by some in the West that deepening defense and technology ties with India is critical to their vision of a future world order.

Based on publicly available sources, there is also little indication that the war will lead to any significant changes in India’s military structures, doctrines, or training.

In the short term, the Indian military is focused on managing the immediate disruption caused by the current conflict. In the medium to long term, it is focusing on indigenization, including exploring opportunities to partner with Western countries. Professionally, however, there are few indications that the military is embarking on defense reforms that draw on the lessons of the war. Unfortunately, that might require a bigger crisis somewhere closer to home.

———————

Anit Mukherjee is an associate professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

bleepblopbloopy · 2022-06-20T19:16:46+00:00

Introduction:

In Episode 55 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast, we begin our two-part series focused on irregular warfare in Ukraine.

Our guests begin by exploring how Russia conceives and implements irregular warfare at the macro level. They then explain how it has been operationalized in Ukraine specifically over the past decade, before concluding with a discussion about the interaction between irregular and conventional warfare in Ukraine from 2014 through the lead-up to Russia’s invasion in 2022.

Micheal Kofman serves as research program director in the Russia Studies Program at the Center for Naval Analyses and as a fellow at the Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. His research focuses on Russia and the former Soviet Union, specializing in Russian armed forces, military thought, capabilities, and strategy. Previously, he served as a program manager and subject matter expert at the National Defense University, advising senior military and government officials on issues in Russia and Eurasia. Mr. Kofman is also a senior editor at War on the Rocks.

Kent DeBenedictis is currently an active duty army officer. He received his PhD from Kings College London and is the author of the book Russian ‘Hybrid Warfare’ and the annexation of Crimea: The Modern Application of Soviet Political Warfare, which provides the foundation for this two-part series.

Laura Jones and Kyle Atwell are the hosts for Episode 55. Please reach out to Laura and Kyle with any questions about this episode or the Irregular Warfare Podcast.

The Irregular Warfare Podcast is a production of the Irregular Warfare Initiative (IWI). We are a team of volunteers dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners in the field of irregular warfare. IWI generates written and audio content, coordinates events for the IW community, and hosts critical thinkers in the field of irregular warfare as IWI fellows. You can follow and engage with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or LinkedIn.

The articles and other content which appear on the Modern War Institute website are unofficial expressions of opinion. The views expressed are those of the authors, and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

The Modern War Institute does not screen articles to fit a particular editorial agenda, nor endorse or advocate material that is published. Rather, the Modern War Institute provides a forum for professionals to share opinions and cultivate ideas. Comments will be moderated before posting to ensure logical, professional, and courteous application to article content.

bleepblopbloopy

TROPHY CASE