Do not give your enemy problems. Give them dilemmas.
It’s fast becoming a cliche in the comments section, but it’s a powerful philosophy.
You see, problems have solutions.
Dilemmas, in contrast, present their target with two bad options.
And over the last eight months,
Ukrainian strategists have written a dissertation on the subject,
with the first two chapters written in 2022 east of Kharkiv and in Kherson.
Right now, it appears that we are in the middle of the third chapter,
as shaping operations having wrapped up,
and Ukraine’s counteroffensive…or Ukraine’s something is seemingly underway everywhere.
But while the world’s attention will turn to the day-to-day exchanges of territory,
it is the earlier preparation that will determine whether
Ukraine’s counterattack makes limited progress
or becomes a nightmarish rout for Russia.
On the hot seat: Russian units in the secondary.
Today, let’s take a deeper look into the role of those secondary units,
how Ukraine’s shaping operations targeted them,
why Ukraine has made those actions very public
while simultaneously lobbying for a social media blackout,
the dilemma it created for Russia,
and the nightmare scenario that ought to keep the Kremlin up at night.
But we begin with defense theory and secondary units.
In previous videos, we discussed the very basics of defense strategy
when the opponent can observe your allocations and then choose their vector of attack.
Recall that as the defender, your central goal is to equalize all of your vulnerabilities.
Otherwise, your opponent will
target the weaker point with overwhelming force and render all your defenses elsewhere irrelevant.
To simplify this concept, our earlier conversations intentionally isolated
the decision to place front-line soldiers.
But there is another critical way to allocate manpower: to a mobile secondary.
In practice, you can exchange front line soldiers with groups not dedicated to
one particular place, but rather that can cover multiple locations on short notice.
The defender’s conundrum is to strike the right balance between the two.
It turns out that if the Kremlin literally allocated troops like this,
the war would be over shortly.
That is because, no matter how Russia divides its troops on the front lines,
Ukraine can find a place to achieve a huge numerical superiority.
After all, that is the advantage of being on the offensive: you get to pick where to engage.
And that means that rather than dispersing your troops aimlessly,
you can congregate huge masses of troops along a single vector.
The only direct way to match Ukraine on the front
lines is to congregate a ton of Russian troops in the same place.
But then Ukraine simply goes around because the rest of the “front lines” are unguarded.
That is not a good way to take over the country.
Spreading out resolves that problem. But now wherever Ukraine goes,
the blue and yellow outnumber the invaders.
And remember: even in the places where Russians are numerous, the reason there
are so many there is to counterbalance the area’s natural vulnerabilities.
Now, it is true that defenders have the advantage of fighting from cover,
but that is still not enough to overcome the attacker’s numerical superiority.
Again, not a good way to win a game of capture the flag.
Instead, the defender should split their allocation between
dedicated defenders on the front line and mobile secondary units.
Each has a distinct role. Those on the front lines need to be prepared for a very bad day.
If the attacker chooses to target their specific position,
they must hold tight as they stare down the more concentrated enemy.
This is a matter of stalling. The goal is usually not to use your trenches or
other defensive advantages to win the battle.
Rather, you want to hold the position for long enough
that the mobile secondary units can arrive.
That will even the numbers. And because you are defending,
having roughly even numbers is likely good enough for you to secure a win.
Thus, there is a tradeoff.
The more soldiers you have on the front lines, the less likely the attacker
will be able to achieve an immediate breakthrough. That’s good news for you.
But the more soldiers you place in the mobile secondary, the more likely you
are to win conditional on no breakthrough occurring.
The problem here is that you only have finite resources and you cannot have everything.
Thin out the front lines too much, and you lose immediately.
Thin out the secondary too much, and you lose eventually.
In practice, there are still some subtleties in how you
would actually want to deploy your soldiers.
Centralizing mobile secondaries is helpful because it allows for greater coverage.
But it also means that the fringe areas will take longer to see their
first reinforcements arrive if the opponent aims in those directions.
And it takes even longer for the last groups to show up.
Thus, you might wish to be a little stingier with front line troops in the middle areas,
because the cavalry will arrive sooner and in greater numbers there.
Meanwhile, you may want to buff the front lines on the flanks due to the same logic in reverse.
But the bottom line is that you still need to plan your strategy
to even out the weaknesses along the entire front line.
And while it may be tempting to overload the secondary units to cover your bases,
if you thin out the front line too much,
the secondary will soon find out that there are no bases to cover.
That is the main strategic problem. Now let’s talk
about how Ukraine executed its shaping operations to exploit this framework.
Shaping operations are not the thrust of the attack.
Think of them instead as the preliminary bouts leading up to the main event.
At the risk of condensing six months of activity down to a minute or so,
consider what Ukraine has been up to since the previous counterattacks.
Ukrainian forces stayed in Bakhmut,
convinced Russia to engage in urban combat
and caused enough casualties during the slow retreat to
induce a public spat amongst Russian leadership.
Even after losing the city, Ukraine has pressed around
its outskirts to force Russian troops to flow in
even as Wagner mercenaries withdraw from the area.
By the end of spring, the major news stories had crossed the border into Russian territory.
The clearest phase of this featured repeated attacks
by Russian partisans in the Belgorod region,
first coming from the west of Kharkiv,
then pausing briefly, then coming from the east of Kharkiv.
But it also may also have included drones of uncertain origin flying over the Kremlin,
and then later drone attacks in the posh, Kremlin-aligned Moscow suburbs.
Western intelligence currently indicates that Ukrainian-sponsored partisans,
perhaps like those engaged in the cross-border raids,
may have been responsible for those attacks.
To a lesser extent, general artillery fire and the introduction of
storm shadow to target roads, ports, and infrastructure has had the same shaping effects.
What is interesting about this is how very public Ukraine has been about the activities,
even if the government has been circumspect regarding authorization and responsibility.
This has happened concurrently with an emphasis on operational security
and for social media to not report on the movement of Ukrainian soldiers.
The reason is because it causes a dilemma back in the Kremlin.
All of these are working in some way to exploit
the same political handcuffs that plagued Russia in September of 2022.
The Kremlin is short on warm bodies.
Secrecy is not an issue here. Russia knows exactly what is going on,
but good answers still are not forthcoming.
The problem is, short of a fuller mobilization, Russia cannot do much about it.
The actual dilemma is as follows.
Draining Russian personnel had the obvious effect of reducing
the total resources available to distribute.
Expanding the front lines meant that Russia had to do more but with less.
And perhaps forcing the Kremlin to reassign security personnel
deep inside of Russia to guard against drone attacks made things even worse.
It is a dilemma because Russia cannot just ignore its Belgorod or Moscow problems,
lest Ukraine and its Russian partisan allies pick away forever.
But to do all of this and be effective requires more soldiers.
The question is: where can Russia get those troops from?
The Kremlin does not actually have this many resources to allocate.
And if you do not replenish the front lines,
Ukraine will immediately break through and render whatever secondary group you have irrelevant.
So you disproportionately reduce the secondary group,
and redistribute those that remain to the best of your abilities.
But as Ukraine approaches, there is now a real strategic tension on the battlefield.
Ukraine still needs to keep secret where exactly the offensive is going to go.
Otherwise, what’s left of Russia’s mobile secondary can get a head start.
That is why the silence campaign is so focused on
suppressing information on Ukrainian troop movements.
It is also why the initial thrust of the counterattack seems to be aimed everywhere,
with Ukraine probing to open up soft spots without revealing the true intended target,
and thereby denying the secondary additional time to deploy.
Instead, the secondary has to remain frozen.
But wherever Ukraine ultimately goes,
if the blue and yellow can puncture through the front lines, it is off to the races.
The mobile secondary units only pack their full punch if they can fight from cover.
If Ukraine breaks the front lines before the secondary arrives, then Russia is in trouble.
The secondary either takes heavy losses or has to disengage.
Further, Ukraine can go up and down the front line from flanking positions and
render other defensive fortifications irrelevant.
This is essentially what happened during the September 2022 counteroffensive east of Kharkiv.
The question is how far Ukraine can go before Russia can stabilize.
Call it the Azov Sprint to the Sea, 2023.
This also makes sense of why the “spring” counteroffensive took so long to come to fruition.
While most of the public focus over the
prior six months was about Ukrainian soldiers completing Western training,
Ukraine needs the ground completely dry so it can
fly through the territory and not end up like this.
Of course, Russia also benefits from dry ground to keep its secondary units mobile.
But if Russia has more mobility problems regardless of the season,
perhaps due to bad oversight, shoddy equipment procurement, poor maintenance,
and Ukrainian attacks on supply lines,
then Ukraine may still disproportionately
benefit from the dry weather, making summer the right call.
How does Russia solve this problem? Again, it is a dilemma. There is no simple solution.
Instead, the better title card is “Russia’s unattractive alternatives”.
Following Ukraine’s Kharkiv counteroffensive in September 2022,
Russia eventually stemmed the bleeding by mobilizing some hundreds of thousands of
additional soldiers. It worked, at least for the short term.
But combine the winter grind
and the need to redeploy soldiers to Russian territory,
and those September callups appear to no longer be enough.
The obvious solution for the Kremlin is to just mobilize again.
However, part of Putin’s pre-invasion domestic appeal was an implicit pledge
to not disrupt the average Russian’s everyday life.
The September mobilization strained the tolerance of Russian citizens in that regard.
Going for round two does not guarantee that there will be protests on the streets,
but it also does not come without risks.
The problem for Putin is that mobilizing earlier is better than mobilizing later.
If Ukraine successfully sprints to the Sea of Azov,
Russian troops will be cut in half.
It is a lot easier to stop that from happening than trying to undo the Ukrainian advance.
The problem for the Kremlin is that the time to institute
a preventive mobilization was three months ago.
That ship has sailed.
And now we will see if Russia can hold onto its
front lines for long enough for the secondary coverage to arrive,
or whether Ukraine will zip right through, and then we will see just
how far the counteroffensive can go before it runs out of steam.
To be clear, we do not actually know whether a Russian nightmare will come to fruition.
After all, there is significant disagreement between Russia and
Ukraine over each side’s ability to win this war.
But nonetheless that possibility must nonetheless concern the Kremlin.
The alternative, albeit with a similar outcome,
is that Russia accepts its status in a temporary check and chooses to proactively retreat.
This was essentially Moscow’s strategy back in November 2022 with Kherson.
Like then, the goal here is to preserve Russian
soldiers in the hopes of living to fight under better circumstances.
But still, this is unattractive.
Summer successes from the counterattack will keep Western partners engaged,
and it will raise public expectations that further
military aid will provide a good return on investment.
If Russia’s goal is to fight under better circumstances at a later date,
that will put a significant dent in the plan.
But here is something that you should not save for a later date:
my book that investigates the many possible causes of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Check below for more information on that.
And if you enjoyed this video, please like,
share, and subscribe, and I will see you next time. Take care.
Well, that’s it. I’m out.
This is the final unused photoset I have of Steven Seagal.
And unless he randomly visits the Kremlin again, we won’t be getting it replenished—
though there are rumors that he is filming a movie about the War in Donbas,
so maybe he will be saying hello again to Putin.
Anyway, this is a very weird case of what social scientists call path dependence.
Five months ago, I needed an image of Putin’s inauguration.
It just so happened that Seagal was hanging around on the side.
The comments section went crazy, and it became a meme on this channel.
This comment was the best. Anyway, it’s called path dependence
because one decision a long time ago still affects actions today for no
real reason other than the fact that something happened a long time ago.
It’s just the path that we are on.
Actually, this channel’s main meme is another case of path dependence.
People in the comments started saying “lines on maps” one day, and I ran with it.
With that in mind, my dear fellow worshipers of the line,
I present to you the original lines on maps, circa 1995.
They is not as beautiful in one only dimension,
but that is the illustration that ushered in a new era of academic conflict studies.
And I am pretty sure that the author had no idea at the time that decades
later there would be millions of lines on maps enthusiasts. But here we are.
And good news, everyone! The lines on maps will continue, even as we must retire Seagal.
So Steven, this line on a map is for you.