Winning without Territory: Russia's Focus on Destroying the Enemy Army

To be honest, Russia knows better than to try and take on NATO. What they seem to want is to regain their previous Soviet Empire.

And they have been doing that by trying to take on one at a time their former client states. And if they can not be forced into an alliance or Finlandized, they will attack and occupy them.

Which is ironic, in that all of the nations they have been attacking were actual allies of theirs, as part of the CIS or CSTO. Which has actually had the end result of causing even more nations to join NATO.

I still laugh that after over 7 decades of trying to sit the fence, Finland has finally thrown out decades of Finlandization and actually joined. Something that never would have happened if Russia had not attacked Ukraine.

And Georgia. And Georgia again. And Georgia yet again. And Maldovia. And Georgia again. And Tajikistan. And Chechnya. And Chechnya again. And Chechnya again. And Georgia again. And Ukraine. And Ukraine yet again.

Every single one of those has caused the neighboring nations that were not in NATO to look more and more favorably at joining. Because Russia does not seem that it will be happy until it has regained all of the old Soviet Empire.

 

Ukraine wins by merely surviving. Russia loses by failing to complete their invasion. Crimea? It now has about 30% of its previous population and even less of its previous economic output per capita. Russia will have to dump it as well. It is relying almost entirely on it's nuclear threat now, and contrary to popular beliefs, that isn't as much as imagined. They can't win a nuclear exchange with France.

Biden isn't sending much, just old stuff. If he had been serious about aiding and supporting Ukraine, the war would have been over a month or so after it started. Biden is dragging his feet.

Putin is in the same boat as Hitler was; he has to expand or die.

 

Russia has more soldiers and a lot more resources at their disposal than Ukraine. In an all out war of attrition, Russia would probably win.
But the U.S. and Western Europe allies are giving the Ukrainians support, making it much more difficult for Russia to invade. The plan seems to be to wear out and exhaust the Russians. Both sides (U.S. and Russia) seem to be aware they do not want to escalate this war too much, so the effort on both sides seems to be about equally matched. If the U.S. sent more support to Ukraine, they know Russia would press harder and send in more forces.

 

But they can only have a percentage involved there at any one time.

Even during the bloodiest fighting in Europe, they still left over 100,000 forces in Siberia to prevent Japan or anybody else from attacking them.

Yes, they have a larger army. But they also have a massive country, and can not pull much more than they already have or risk problems not only at home but in other areas they occupy as well as potential adversaries on their borders.

Plus I doubt they could support many more forces than they already have there now. Both the Soviets and the Russians have always had a fairly bad logistical network. And that seems to have been a major cause as to the many failures they have had in this conflict. And Ukraine is aware of that which is why so much effort from the start has been in hitting their logistics capabilities.

In a "war of attrition", in most cases the odds favor the defender and not the attacker.

 

I think the plan is to wait until Putin dies, or is replaced, hoping that Russia will want to pivot to other priorities- at least long enough until it has rebuilt its own military, and has a new generation of fighting youth, both which is also being effectively decimated. While this lesson plan of NATO'S for Russia may take a long time to learn, it may take even longer to forget!

 

They had a lot more soldiers and resources than Germany in WW I and WW II. They got crushed, then had to be bailed out by first Britain and then the U.S. Even with massive aid, Germany was still inflicting massive losses on their armies with nothing left but old men and 12 year old Hitler Youths. They re even worse off today. They don't have the expendable masses for the human waves they relied on in WW II.

Russia can't win, period. They have nothing left but their nuclear bluff. They have nothing left to send, except a lot of unwilling conscripts extorted from neighboring countries.

As an analyst recently said, we need to crush Putin's regime and do for Russia what we did for Japan and Germany after WW II. It was a mistake to have abandoned them after their collapse at the end of the Cold War and leave them to former KGB thugs turned gangsters. It may not be too late to correct that.

 

Waiting until Putin dies or is replaced also seems like a bad plan since, fundamental to that idea is that Putin is some sort of crazed fanatic and anyone who replaces him will be more "moderate" and be more likely to end this on Ukraine's terms. I'm not sure why people think Putin would be replaced by moderates.

 

Not "moderates", but at least likely somebody that wants to end that war.

Looking back at the last century, we have several examples to look at. One simply needs to look at both world wars to see that in action.

While in WWI the Russian replacement government were unquestionably not "moderates", they did indeed almost immediately end their involvement once the government collapsed and they sent the Tsar on a permanent vacation.

In Austria-Hungary, the union that formed that empire dissolved and it quickly collapsed into it's original parts.

The Kaiser was deposed, and the government that took power immediately worked to end the war.

In Italy during WWII, Mussolini's own party and the King removed him from power, and that ended their involvement in the conflict. Other than the territory that Germany occupied where they created a new Italy in the northern half of the state. In reality from September 1943 until the end of the war Italy was in a civil war, but the vast majority of those still fighting were Germans and not Italians.

Even Germany collapsed in WWII once their leader ate a PPK sandwich. What was left of the leadership of the country could not surrender soon enough, and none considered fighting on any longer.

So yes, they might be "moderates", but they could also be radicals. But simply radicals that are willing to end the war, as nobody can seriously consider the Bolsheviks to have been "moderates".

And even if it collapses into disorder and multiple factions fighting, I can't see Ukraine going any farther than reclaiming their borders as agreed upon when the Soviet Union collapsed. Other than at most a marginal buffer zone in which to set up a DMZ.

 

Think of the examples you are providing. These all happened in the late stage of the war when those powers were facing either defeat and/or occupation. I'm trying to think how that would apply to Russia-Ukraine. I just don't see a situation in which Ukraine pushes into Russia and Ukrainian tanks are at the gates of Moscow.

 

To not do so just repeats the mistakes of WW I and the end of the Cold War. It lets future demagogues claim they were never actually defeated and were 'robbed' afterwards. Nothing replaces foreign troops patrolling your streets as clear evidence you indeed lost the war and need to move on.

Russian culture isn't like Islamic culture, and would respond well to a German style 'Reconstruction' project and modernization has the benefit of focusing attentions on other problems besides robbing your neighbors as a substitute for an economy based on production.

 

OK so you would like to conquer and occupy Russia...

Any realistic way for the Ukrainians to do that without getting NATO involved and instigating WWIII?

 

What 'WW III'? I keep hearing this from the right wingers, who are suddenly running around doing bad Jane Fonda impressions and channeling the '60's. And why not involve NATO? You seriously believe Russia has a giant military and allies all over the world? You really think Red China will rush to defend Putin? Do you care what Iran thinks?

 

Actually, they did not. And here is a good example.



Notice the thick line, that was the front at the time of the Russian Revolution. Yes, they had been pushed back in the Spring Offensive, but the lines had stabilized. The big movement was after the government collapsed and in the vacuum the front pretty much collapsed.

And there were no forces in Germany or the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. In fact, both still occupied large areas of Belgium, France, Italy, Romania, Ukraine, Poland, and several other countries.



So if you are trying to make a case for Germany and the A-H Empire being defeated or being occupied, history is against you. In short, the people of all of those nations in addition to Russia were tired of the war, and in the end each of them overthrew their governments in order to get them out of it. And it is really funny that you say "(t)hese all happen", when it includes both Germany and Russia. Russia was nowhere even close to facing defeat, nor being occupied.

Now some did happen sooner, like the removal of Mussolini while the Allies held only a small part of Italy. However, that also was not a total revolution as the King himself removed il ****** after his own party informed the king they no longer supported him. And the entire government did not collapse, but the King ordered his soldiers to stop fighting the Allies.

The Germans however had no other government, and as Hitler refused to ever surrender that could not happen until he had assumed room temperature. But make no mistakes, if the July 1944 plot had worked that would have seen Germany leave the war also, along the lines of how the nation left WWI.

I admit, I love the fantasy that some seem to have that "Germany was on the brink of collapse" in WWI. That was never the case, the Allies were still fighting just to regain territory they had lost to them. And if you look at the map above, they were still quite a ways from Germany. They quit because there was a revolution and the Kaiser was removed in favor of a pro-peace government. But if that had not happened, most of the "experts" were expecting the war to actually continue until at least 1920 if not later.

And that is also why come WWII, the Allied had agreed to not accepting an armistice. That was how WWI had ended, and this time they wanted to ensure that each of the Axis Powers knew they had been beaten.

 

Woodrow Wilson kept trying to make separate unilateral peace agreements with Germany, and kept getting caught, making the other Allies extremely distrustful of Wilson, so they accepted an early Armistice rather than risk letting Wilson dominate the peace negotiations, since American forces would dominate the occupation. Germany did indeed lose, and was in the process of retreating, and their economy did indeed collapse to the point they could longer support their armies. Their domestic economy was almost at a standstill and its armies in retreat or routing. The Germans' 1918 offensive exhausted their resources and left them unable to even mount a defense against the Allied counterattacks. Their lines crumbled.

The best book on the politics of WW I is Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61532.Cataclysm

From one of the reviews:
....

Also, the various tactical/operational improvements are discussed, especially prior to the Central Powers’ 1918 offensive, which met with early success but eventually drained the German manpower too much to allow them to continue the offensives, or even effectively defend themselves during the renewed Allied attacks. Also discussed is the role of Ludendorff’s mental breakdown in the eventual fall of Germany.

The final part of the book is titled Legacy. Given the grand scope of the war, and its influence to later world history, it’s an apt title. A few different issues are discussed here. First, the Treaty of Versailles, reparations, and the League of Nations are all briefly discussed. The eventual bitterness towards the treaty certainly contributed to the rise of nationalist groups in Germany after the war, so you couldn’t talk about World War I without discussing them. Much of this section, however, is concerned with covering the breakdown of the cohesion of the Allied powers, their reasons for their laxity in enforcing the treaty, and indeed the eventual rise of the Third Reich (although Stevenson makes a point to show that the events of the 1930s and later were not inevitable, but they were more difficult to defuse because of earlier choices). One of the primary reasons mentioned for the breakdown of peace is the lack of American or Russian involvement in post-war security.

Extremely well footnoted. Wilson botched it.

 

You don't need Red China or Iran. Russia still has nukes, and that's why "why not involve NATO." The idea that you want to get NATO involved in a war with Russia sounds insane to me, but I've been seeing this on this forum for a while. I don't have any explanation for this insanity other than some sort of Western suicidal ideation. There is nothing for NATO that's worth that kind of risk. But you and a lot of your fellow travelers seem infatuated with that idea anyway.

 

This is too much for me to get into with only one cup of coffee under my belt, so I'll simply say that your idea of this happening to Russia as a result of the Ukraine war seems very far fetched to me, and we'll eventually see how this ends, so we'll see if the war collapses the Russian state or not.

 

Russia won't let any nukes fly, assuming they have many that even still work. What is insane is to keep letting these crime syndicates use nuclear blackmail to get their way, like invading and plundering their neighbors. That is what is suicidal, and only guarantees more and bigger wars. The fact is that it is not ifany one of these cretin states will use nukes, but WHEN, and crying and channelling Jane Fonda will never change that. It is still far better to take these little dictators out while you're still able to than just hand them the initiative and roll over.

If you're expecting to deal rationally with lunatics and criminally insane sociopaths, you're the one who needs to see a shrink. Russia, like North Korea, has no real checks and balances on its govt. The nature of the world outside of the Burbs hasn't changed just because somebody invented Prozac.

 

So MAD has been replaced with "I dare you to nuke us you *******?"

OK I'm not on board with that. I simply regard your let's get 'em attitude toward the Russians part of the current hysteria that is common to gin up the populous to go to war. Similar to the anti-German hysteria before World War I.

As an aside, I'm not sure what your constant Jane Fonda references have to do with anything. Fonda was actually on the side of North Vietnam. I'm on the side of America, which has become a minority position these days.

 

We all know right wingers are all suddenly channelling Jane Fonda, cuz Biden Syndrome, and of course they like to pretend they're all big taxpayers n stuff in the innernetz and hate those evul warmongers now, at least until a Republican is in office anyway.You're on your own side, like most Republcians, and to j=hell with everybody else, even Americans, so quit pissing on our legs.

 

That was the case of all of the major powers in that war. Every single one of them. The US debt had exploded to $25 billion (it was less than $3 billion prior), the UK was over $10 billion in debt. That is simply another form of attrition, which nations could afford to go into debt the most. The economic collapse was pretty uniform globally, as the war essentially ground trade to a halt. Large nations like the UK could barely even trade with their own outlying territories.

But they did not "lose", they still occupied most of Belgium, and France, etc, etc, etc.

 

Do not confuse my raising a possibility with my saying it will happen. I am not saying that at all.

I am simply laying out similar incidents in the past, and that it is a possibility. Do not confuse that with my believing that is what will happen.

 

even if Russia wins... they lose

 

Your descent from arguing issues to incoherent partisan babbling was pretty rapid. I'm sorry you couldn't have held it together longer, since I would love to have a reasoned discussion on this topic, which I find vitally important. Apparently you're not the one to provide that however.

 

In any sort of warfare, save nukes I suppose, a defender has about a 3:1 advantage from the word go, especially when they have an opportunity to prepare and the 'first move' so-to-speak isn't a complete strategic and tactical surprise.

I'm not at all big on using our money to help non-Americans in general, but when it comes to keeping truly evil men (and countries, and political philosophies) in check and in their place, I'm ready, willing, and able to make an exception. 'Course, we probably should have put an end to it years ago, but lacking a time machine, better late than never.

 

Not really, it all depends upon the situation.

There are so many variables it is hard to even start going through them all. Tactics and doctrine, experience of the unit, if the "defender" is in a fortified prepared position, ordinance and support available, and so much more. It is not even close to what you are trying to describe.

That is why ambushes are normally so effective. The defender can actually greatly outnumber the attackers and still lose (or the reverse as experience counts for a hell of a lot in a combat unit). Or a tactically superior and experienced unit attacking a green and largely untrained unit (or a vastly superior green unit attacking a significantly smaller but highly trained unit). A great many times I have seen "regular infantry" absolutely destroy a superiorly sized unit of REMFs, simply because they are more experienced and know how to work together as a team where as the Air Defense or Medical unit had little clue as to what to do.

And in real life we have seen Battalions used to try and eliminate a Squad or Platoon sized unit of "Special Units" like SEAL, Force Recon and Special Forces and fail to do so.

That is the difference between say USMC BLT 1/2 in the Battle of Nasiriyah (especially Charlie 1/2), and 5-52 ADA (especially the 507th Maintenance Company - now Echo 5-52). One was a Battalion of actual Infantry, the other was Air Defense, which had almost no "combat training" beyond the absolute basics in boot camp. And I have seen the difference over and over again.

But yes, if all things are equal and the defenders are in a dug in prepared position, the general rule of thumb is that the defenders have a 3:1 advantage. That is why say at Iwo Jima the US threw over 110,000 against the 21,000 defenders. And still lost over 27,000, compared to the 18,000 killed in the initial battle.