OK, this post also refers to someone else who knows more. Frustrating how many of those there are. Willie OAM, on this very April 24, 2024 (15) UA Withdraws As RU Exploits An Opportunity – Can This Be Overcome? – Ukraine War Map Analysis & News – YouTube (at about the six-minute mark) serves us a prompt. It will interest those of you still pondering what we might learn from the Ukraine fiasco in the area of military tactics/operation/strategy. (An aside: A couple of you have told me that you don’t like slash words, that is, compounds made lazily using the / thing. ‘Shut Up!,’ I explain. That / thing is used in URLs because it’s handy, and anyway I’ve never liked the denotative distance American military curricula put between the three.) There exists in our military grammar a supposed difference suggesting ‘maneuver’ is an opposite of ‘guerrilla’. That’s nuts. Fuhgeddaboudit. Willie OAM quoted someone (whose name is not revealed, but who Willie thinks knows his stuff and who has direct knowledge). I quote in relevant part,
“VDV are led by Spetsnaz there in small teams utilizing hit and run tactics along with their joint fires capability and its working well and they’re gaining ground fast, small hard fast teams in and out, something the Ukrainians should be doing and that’s what I would do. The Russians are constantly learning and amending their tactics. The Ukrainian command needs a punch in the head for years of lazy incompetence…”
I would like to make a few points, points to which I hope you will respond. Combat in Ukraine has devolved into a sort of peer-on-peer (technologically-speaking) linear slog with great advantage given by airpower, indirect fires, trenches and anti-vehicular landmines. What seems to be working to move the front? Small hit-and-run maneuverings. Are the Russians the hidebound ones? Not so much. May I use the term strategy of aggregate tactics? I think so. Did the Germans try something like this in WWI and call them stormtroopers? Maybe, but did they hit-and-run in an effort to cause local attrition? I don’t think so.
Discuss
Lets be honest…if militarily lazy and incompetent was the criteria, then Ukraine might be closer to EU and NATO membership than we previously thought.
The US Africa Command posture statement (STATEMENT OF GENERAL MICHAEL E. LANGLEY, UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS COMMANDER, UNITED STATES AFRICA COMMAND BEFORE THE UNITED STATES SENATE COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES) came out about six weeks ago (March 7). The penultimate sentence of the statement reads, “If we fail in Africa, our strategic competitors will move in.” So, what do you think, should we give the major who wrote that sentence a freakin’ medal? Or should someone in Stuttgart be held accountable for failing?