“War is organized chaos,” observed one of General Dwight Eisenhower’s deputy commanders after the Normandy landings in 1944. Now the battlefield in Ukraine is an example of this.
One of the most striking features of the current war is how poorly prepared the Russian military is when things don’t go according to plan. The other is how slow it is to adjust.
This is according to an analysis published by the Royal Joint Services Institute, a leading British defense think tank. RUSI analysts cooperate with the General Staff of Ukraine in the preparation of operational analyzes for the Ukrainians and therefore are privy to details, some of which are still classified.
The authors note that from the very beginning of the war, the Russians brought disaster upon themselves with their belief in a quick victory.
Perhaps misled by his own intelligence and by Moscow-funded pro-Russian activists in Ukraine, such as oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to have believed that Ukrainians would welcome his army and that only a minority of them supported the Kiev government.
This tragically wrong prediction reflects Russia’s lack of corrective power. Russian intelligence chiefs are trying to please the president by presenting him with data that confirms the same expectations and views as he does, just as the Soviet-era KGB too often told Soviet leaders only what they wanted to hear.
Russia is losing the war in Ukraine, what will Putin do?
The initial plan for the “special military operation” in Ukraine was “formulated primarily by the Russian special services and a core of the presidential administration, supported by senior Defense Department officials.”
The plan involved a blitzkrieg offensive and the use of deceptive maneuvering to keep the main Ukrainian forces away from Kiev while the Russian army occupied the capital of Ukraine and ousted the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
The deception largely worked, as most of the Ukrainian military was concentrated in the Donbass and near Kharkiv, the second largest city in Ukraine.
Russia captured two villages near Bakhmut
Zelensky himself commented the day before the invasion that even if Russia does invade, it will be a limited operation in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions.
As a result, the Russians gained a 12:1 odds ratio advantage over the Ukrainians north of Kiev. But this proved to be insufficient.
The failure began with the failure of the Russian special forces to take control of the Gostomel airfield, located on the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital. It was supposed to provide quick access to Kiev. However, after a hard-fought battle, the Russian landing force, supported by fighter planes and attack helicopters, was driven back and the runway destroyed by Ukrainian artillery.
Even then, the main flaw of the Russian army became apparent – the lack of coordination between various types of troops. At the top level, everyone is accountable to Putin, but further down the hierarchy everyone acts for themselves in a general climate of distrust.
Explosions in military airports in Russia, dead and injured
Not only were the Ukrainians deceived, but the officers and soldiers of the Russian Ground Forces also remained in the dark.
“Orders were given less than 24 hours before the attack to most of the units. As a result, the Russian troops lacked ammunition, fuel, food, maps, properly established communications and, most importantly, a clear understanding of the tactical level of how their actions fit into the overall plan,” RUSI said.
In many Russian units, all but the highest commanding officers believed they were conducting exercises over the territories of Russia and Belarus, not an invasion of Ukraine. As a result, individual military units lacked the tactical capability to react when things went wrong.
The Russian military was completely unprepared for mass Ukrainian resistance.
According to RUSI, at this initial stage of the invasion, the Ukrainians’ counter options were too limited, but the same determination to resist surprised the Russians:
“Their greatest weakness is the lack of contingency plans. As a result, when the rapid offensive failed to produce the desired results, Russian forces saw their positions permanently deteriorate as Ukraine mobilized.”
Russia from establishing air superiority.
Thus, although the initial wave of Russian guided missile attacks hit 75% of static defense sites in the first 48 hours after the invasion began, most of the Ukrainian fighters survived.
The “special operation” has evolved from a blitzkrieg to one requiring large initial supplies and significant additional military capability. A development for which Russia is not prepared.
Early on, the Russians had an almost 2 to 1 artillery superiority over the Ukrainians. 2,433 barrel artillery systems against 1,176 and 3,547 rocket launchers against 1,680 Ukraine reached artillery parity in the first month and a half and then began to run out of ammunition.
However, thanks to modern weapons supplied by the West, the effectiveness of Ukrainian attacks has increased significantly.
In recent months, Russia has launched nearly 10 times as many missiles and shells at the front, but with far less effectiveness.
“The Russian military currently operates under a unified hierarchy of combined forces where the ground forces have priority and the military as a whole is subordinated to the special services. This model is deeply flawed. It assumes a unified combined force but lacks commanders level, to tie the entire structure into one, thus forcing a culture of failure enforcement unless orders are changed at higher levels,” reports RUSI
Furthermore, since all intelligence and tactical information is collected and processed centrally, it is relatively easy for the adversary to deceive the Russian armed forces at the front.
Individual officials often compete for the approval of their superiors because they are completely dependent on them and they twist the information in their reports to gain advantage. This competition also increases the chance of “friendly” fire.
Furthermore, procedures for identifying friend and foe and establishing control measures are inadequate.
There are a number of instances where the Russian army continued to advance after taking a tactical loss, paying with heavy losses because there was no order to change tactics and regroup.
Any surprise action by the Ukrainians effectively leaves the Russian military paralyzed, waiting for information to be processed, for a plan to be made, and then for an order to act.
In reality, the way the command structure works has changed little since the days of the USSR and even WWII.
Logistics is also a big deal. The Russian military is often unable to carry out large-scale logistics operations in a dynamic environment. Supply lines reach the terminal’s rail depots, but then there’s supply chaos at the front.
Logistics is also made extremely difficult by the culture of corruption that thrives on lack of public finance control.
Steal at all levels. Often scrapped or disassembled equipment is considered functional. The numbers of equipment, uniforms, weapons, food and medical packages are also noted. This allows officers not only to misappropriate funds, but also to report better-than-actual results to their commanders, with the effect of fraud multiplying up the chain of command.
However, this culture also operates at the highest level. You won’t see Armata tanks, PAK FA stealth fighters or Okhotnik drones on the front in Ukraine, because Russia really doesn’t have any capable of fighting.
When Putin announced a partial military mobilization in September, it quickly became clear that the 1.5 million new uniforms that were supposed to be available in military warehouses existed only on paper.
Mobilized Russian soldiers are forced to buy their own uniforms, shoes, underwear and even assault rifles. In Russia, numerous campaigns are underway on social networks to raise funds for the equipment of the military sent to Ukraine.
Although Russia had more than 10,000 tanks on paper at the start of the invasion, around 3,000 were actually serviceable, most of them obsolete T-72s. The situation was similar with aircraft, and this was one of the main reasons why the Russian military failed to achieve air superiority over Ukraine.
The other is that Russian pilot training is limited and the main goal is usually to demonstrate readiness to the high command. The average flight hours of fighter pilots in Russia are five times lower than those of their counterparts in the United States and Western Europe.
In practice, the Russian GLONASS satellite navigation system does not work, which is why pilots usually use civilian GPS devices or even cell phones. This can be seen in a series of videos officially released by the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Paradoxically, until the war in Ukraine, this state of the Russian army fit into Putin’s concept.
“We have no intention of going to war with anyone, our goal is to create a perception of strength so that nobody goes to war with us,” the Russian president said in an interview before the invasion.
