Salvation lies in the shell
Let's get straight to the point: the Ukrainian offensive operation, or perhaps now the three separate Ukrainian operations in Orikhiv, Velika Novosilka and Bakhmut, are not conquest operations, of the kind you can follow on the map by seeing the little flags advancing rapidly towards a distant objective. That may come in the future, but for the moment it's not possible. Now, if these are not operations of conquest, they are necessarily operations of attrition, cumulative operations from which we hope one day to see something emerge like the breaking of a dike, to use Guillaume Ancel's expression (here). The major problem with these operations - targeted assassinations, economic sanctions, air campaigns, guerrilla warfare, etc. - is that we never know when this famous emergence will occur and we are often disappointed.
Back in Donbass
Let's take a step back. The war of movement was transformed into a war of position in April 2022 in a classic, if not necessarily obligatory, fashion. This war of positions, which meant that the war, in the sense of war this time, was going to last for a long time, also encouraged actions on the rear (air strikes, sabotage, etc.) or on the Ukrainian "great rear" (us) through a campaign of influence, in the hope that one of these elements would reach the zero level of motivation and therefore nullify the whole war effort. These were cumulative operations.
On the front, the Russians were in a bit more of a hurry and rushed to conquer the whole of the Donbass. The method used was the classic hammering or brick-breaking, to use the expression coined by @escortert on Twitter (here): neutralising the defences by indirect fire and assaulting battalions, repeated hundreds of times around the pocket they hoped to capture, from Severodonetsk to Kramatorsk. The Russians failed a lot, but they sometimes succeeded and even broke the dam once, at Popasna on 9 May 2022 not far from Bakhmut.
This "emergence" was not enough in itself, but it gave them a decisive advantage which, after several more weeks of hammering, enabled them, in addition to Marioupol, to seize the towns of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk at the very beginning of July. Half the work of conquest had been done and then, with another, more unexpected, emerging effect, everything came to a halt.
This was partly because the arrival of Western artillery had helped to balance the debates a little, and partly because of a lack of fighters, because to go on the attack... you need assault troops, and there were hardly any left on the Russian side, while the Ukrainians continued to build brigades. Therein lay the Clausewitzian difference between a small professional army of princes designed for limited wars and an army of a nation in arms engaged in absolute war.
But let's not forget the tactical lesson: the Russian forces were only able to make headway against positions that had been entrenched for years because they launched three times as many projectiles of all kinds as they received on the nose. The principle of 3 to 1 in men to attack doesn't actually make much sense, but the principle of 3 shells to 1 does make a lot of sense in positional warfare. We are not talking about a ratio of forces (RAPFOR), which is always more or less balanced, but a ratio of fire (RAPFEU), which rarely is.
The Russian army had become sterile offensively and we could legitimately wonder what was happening to the Ukrainians who had been on the defensive since April. The September attack on Kharkiv and then the reduction of the Kherson bridgehead until mid-November by the Ukrainians proved this scepticism wrong. All of a sudden, operations, although very different between the provinces of Kharkiv and Kherson, became dynamic again. In the end, however, this was only illusory and temporary.
It was illusory because in the province of Kherson there was an astonishing combination of circumstances, with an incredible weakness and blindness on the part of the Russians in this sector of the front, which provided an opportunity, brilliantly seized by the Ukrainians, to strike a blow. It was the second and only breakthrough on the front so far, after Popasna, and with much greater effect. The battle for the Kherson bridgehead was very different, but also benefited from favourable circumstances, the main one being the fact that they were attacking a bridgehead. Once again, offensive operations came to a halt at the end of November, this time largely due to a significant improvement in Russian defences.
The Russians had taken a further step towards absolute war through a form of partial Stalinisation of society and the number of troops at the front had doubled. Under the leadership of General Surovikin, they shortened the front by evacuating the Kherson bridgehead and relying on the Dnieper obstacle. Then, and finally, they worked, building a "Surovikin line" in the sectors that had been somewhat weak until then. The offensive aspect was mainly the result of rear operations, such as the campaign of strikes on the electricity network, a new cumulative operation that didn't achieve much, and a bit of the attack on Bakhmut entrusted to the Wagner company.
With Gerasimov taking direct command, the Russes tried to get back to breaking bricks, but they only conquered 500km2 in four months, half as much as between April and July 2022. One might even wonder, at 3 or 4 km2 a day, whether there was a real desire to conquer the Donbass as in the past and whether it was not simply a question of improving the defensive position and acquiring a few victories that were more symbolic than anything else in Soledar and Bakhmut. More than 1,000 km2 and three major towns, Mariupol, Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, conquered for Donbass 1 and 500 km2 and Bakhmut for Donbass 2. The fact that the Russians launched around 3-4 million different projectiles into Donbass 1 and only one or two million into Donbass 2 has something to do with it.
In search of the emergent effect
It should be remembered that, strategically, the Russians can make do with a front that is blocked or simply nibbled away by the Ukrainians. They are "leading the score" and if the war ended tomorrow the Kremlin could live with that and declare victory ("we pre-emptively thwarted a major offensive against the Donbass", "we resisted NATO", "we liberated this or that" etc.). Their strategy may simply be to resist at the front and wait for the rear, and especially the rear, to exhaust themselves, even if it means helping them a little. The same obviously does not apply to the Ukrainians, whose objective is to liberate the whole of their territory from any Russian presence, nor to us, who are (no doubt, because nothing is clearly stated) more interested in a rapid, if not complete, Ukrainian victory.
Are the Ukrainians well on the way to achieving this objective, if not completely, then at least a significant part of it before the end of the summer? We can hope so, but in reality there is nothing to suggest so. Let's forget about the idea of breaking through as in the province of Kharkiv, the entire Russian front is now solid. What remains is hammering, or the famous "brick-breaking", and here we are again in a cumulative operation from which we hope to see something emerge before the end of the summer.
Let's talk about the terrain first. According to the Twitter site @War_Mapper, the Ukrainians have liberated 200 km2 in one month, the equivalent of five French cantons, even though they are reclaiming the equivalent of the Occitanie and PACA regions combined. The Ukrainians obviously can't be satisfied with that. They won't win the war with 7 km2 a day, hence the hope that something like the famous dike breaking under the waves or the melting sandcastle will emerge. The problem is that, for the time being, it's all just wishful thinking.
As far as losses are concerned, the balance sheet for combat units is rather slim, with, according to 'Saint Oryx', 455 major items of Russian equipment hit since 7 June 2023, including 233 major combat vehicles (battle tanks and armoured infantry vehicles), i.e. around 7.5 MBVs per day. In the end, this is hardly more than since the beginning of the year. Worse still, the Ukrainian losses identified during the same period were 283 items of equipment and 126 major combat vehicles respectively, i.e. around 4 per day, which is more than since the start of the war. Never since the start of the war has there been such a small gap between the two sides' losses on Oryx.
So it's hard to say that the Ukrainians are bleeding the Russians dry. This daily loss, and there is a good deal of repairable equipment among them and even some recovered from the Ukrainians, corresponds roughly to industrial production. At this rate, by the end of the summer, the Russians' equipment capital will be depleted, but not catastrophically, and the Ukrainians' will be almost as depleted.
So, for the time being at least, we must place our hopes elsewhere. It is usually at this point that we talk about the morale of the Russian troops. It is said to be at an all-time low, as confirmed by numerous filmed complaints and intercepted messages. The problem is that we've been hearing this almost since the end of the first month of the war and we're still not seeing any effects on the ground, apart from a certain offensive apathy. The first thing we notice is that these soldiers never reject the reason for the war but only the conditions in which they are fighting it, demanding better equipment and ammunition (shells in particular, we keep coming back to this).
Nor do we see any images of mass surrenders or groups of deserters living at the rear of the front, in the manner of the German army at the end of 1918. These are the surest signs that something is seriously wrong. Wagner's mutiny cannot be interpreted as a sign of the troop's weakening morale. In short, basing a strategy on the hope that the Russian army will collapse as it did in 1917 is not absurd but simply very uncertain. It's tricky to fight just on the basis of a very uncertain hope.
The essential is invisible to the eye
To sum up, as long as the Ukrainians do not have overwhelming fire superiority, the famous 3 to 1 in projectiles of all kinds, they cannot reasonably hope to achieve success, and to reiterate once again, conquering a village is not a strategic success. A major success would be to go to Melitopol or Berdiansk; a minor success, but a success nonetheless, would be to take Tokmak. To do this, there is no other solution, as there was to break through the El Alamein line, the Mareth line in Tunisia, the Gothic line in Italy, the German lines in Russia at Orel and elsewhere, or the German defences in Normandy, than to advance by paralysing the defences with a sufficiently overwhelming strike force, a FFSE.
The US Chief of Staff, Mark Milley, recently spoke of the two months of fierce fighting that had to be waged in Normandy before the breakthrough at Avranches. He forgot to mention that the Allies launched the equivalent of a tactical nuclear weapon at the Germans four times before breaking through, and that this even served as the basis for the first reflections on the use of ANT in the 1950s. In this respect, I can only recommend reading the impressive Combattre en dictature - 1944 la Wehrmacht face au débarquement by Jean-Luc Leleu to understand what this represented.
Some defence lines could be bypassed, such as that of the British 8th Army at El-Gazala in May 1942 or of course our Maginot Line two years earlier, both of which had the misfortune of being bypassable. As for the rest, there was no way of getting through without a deluge of projectiles, mortar shells, cannon shells, howitzers, rockets, missiles, whatever, and it didn't matter whether the launcher was on the ground, in the air or on the water, as long as it launched something.
The unfortunate thing about the Ukrainian artillery, now the most powerful in Europe, is that it launches half as many shells as it did at the height of the Kherson era in the summer of 2022, and still fewer than the Russian artillery, which has also added some rather effective remote-controlled munitions. Let's turn the problem around: if the Ukrainians launched as many projectiles a day as the Russians did during Donbass 1, the case would very probably be over and they would probably have already reached and perhaps passed the main Tokmak defence line. But they haven't, at least not yet.
Leaving aside the question of the F-16 aircraft, which would be an interesting but not decisive contribution to this FFSE, it is hard to understand why the United States waited so long to deliver cluster munition shells, which have the double merit of being very useful in counter-battery fire and plentiful. Perhaps it was a moral reluctance to deliver a weapon considered "dirty", because there are a certain number of unexploded ordnance (the French Special Forces suffered their heaviest losses in 1991 because of this), but delivered much earlier would have changed things.
The same applies to ATACMS missiles, which are much less numerous, but very effective with a very long range. The venerable A-10 attack aircraft demanded by the Ukrainians could also have been added a long time ago, although they are vulnerable in the modern environment, but they would terrify the Russian front lines, etc. But above all, the lifeblood of the war is the 155 mm shells, hundreds of thousands of which have to be sent to Ukraine, or the 152 mm shells bought from all the countries formerly equipped by the Soviet Union, which will never use them anyway. We also need to explain why, sixteen months after the start of the war, we are still unable to produce more shells. It's a good thing we weren't the ones invaded.
In short, if we really want Ukraine to win, the first thing to do is to send it lots of shells. This will first of all enable them to win the artillery battle that is underway, which is never mentioned because it is not very visible, but which is the essential prerequisite for success. I sometimes even wonder whether the small attacks by the Ukrainian melee battalions are not part of this battle first and foremost, by making the Russian artillery fire a barrage so that it is revealed and hit back. If there is one ultimately encouraging figure for Oryx, it is that of Russian artillery losses. In two months, with around forty guns hit or damaged, the Ukrainians put three times as many Russian guns out of action, the equivalent of French artillery.
Counting the unseen destruction and the wear and tear of the artillery pieces, which was undoubtedly faster in the old Russian artillery than in the Ukrainian, it is perhaps twice as much that was actually lost. Ammunition depots such as Makiivka, surprisingly close to the lines, continued to be hit. By increasing the pace a little, and with an accelerated Western contribution, this battle of fire can perhaps be won at the end of August or the beginning of September.
This is perhaps the only realistic effect that can be seen to emerge from this whole battle and probably also the only one that can unblock this strategic situation that has been frozen for seven months. If this is not achieved by the end of the summer, when stocks and production will be struggling in both cases, we will probably have started on a frozen front and hope of seeing something emerge will be lost.
Let's get straight to the point: the Ukrainian offensive operation, or perhaps now the three separate Ukrainian operations in Orikhiv, Velika Novosilka and Bakhmut, are not conquest operations, of the kind you can follow on the map by seeing the little flags advancing rapidly towards a distant objective. That may come in the future, but for the moment it's not possible. Now, if these are not operations of conquest, they are necessarily operations of attrition, cumulative operations from which we hope one day to see something emerge like the breaking of a dike, to use Guillaume Ancel's expression (here). The major problem with these operations - targeted assassinations, economic sanctions, air campaigns, guerrilla warfare, etc. - is that we never know when this famous emergence will occur and we are often disappointed.
Back in Donbass
Let's take a step back. The war of movement was transformed into a war of position in April 2022 in a classic, if not necessarily obligatory, fashion. This war of positions, which meant that the war, in the sense of war this time, was going to last for a long time, also encouraged actions on the rear (air strikes, sabotage, etc.) or on the Ukrainian "great rear" (us) through a campaign of influence, in the hope that one of these elements would reach the zero level of motivation and therefore nullify the whole war effort. These were cumulative operations.
On the front, the Russians were in a bit more of a hurry and rushed to conquer the whole of the Donbass. The method used was the classic hammering or brick-breaking, to use the expression coined by @escortert on Twitter (here): neutralising the defences by indirect fire and assaulting battalions, repeated hundreds of times around the pocket they hoped to capture, from Severodonetsk to Kramatorsk. The Russians failed a lot, but they sometimes succeeded and even broke the dam once, at Popasna on 9 May 2022 not far from Bakhmut.
This "emergence" was not enough in itself, but it gave them a decisive advantage which, after several more weeks of hammering, enabled them, in addition to Marioupol, to seize the towns of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk at the very beginning of July. Half the work of conquest had been done and then, with another, more unexpected, emerging effect, everything came to a halt.
This was partly because the arrival of Western artillery had helped to balance the debates a little, and partly because of a lack of fighters, because to go on the attack... you need assault troops, and there were hardly any left on the Russian side, while the Ukrainians continued to build brigades. Therein lay the Clausewitzian difference between a small professional army of princes designed for limited wars and an army of a nation in arms engaged in absolute war.
But let's not forget the tactical lesson: the Russian forces were only able to make headway against positions that had been entrenched for years because they launched three times as many projectiles of all kinds as they received on the nose. The principle of 3 to 1 in men to attack doesn't actually make much sense, but the principle of 3 shells to 1 does make a lot of sense in positional warfare. We are not talking about a ratio of forces (RAPFOR), which is always more or less balanced, but a ratio of fire (RAPFEU), which rarely is.
The Russian army had become sterile offensively and we could legitimately wonder what was happening to the Ukrainians who had been on the defensive since April. The September attack on Kharkiv and then the reduction of the Kherson bridgehead until mid-November by the Ukrainians proved this scepticism wrong. All of a sudden, operations, although very different between the provinces of Kharkiv and Kherson, became dynamic again. In the end, however, this was only illusory and temporary.
It was illusory because in the province of Kherson there was an astonishing combination of circumstances, with an incredible weakness and blindness on the part of the Russians in this sector of the front, which provided an opportunity, brilliantly seized by the Ukrainians, to strike a blow. It was the second and only breakthrough on the front so far, after Popasna, and with much greater effect. The battle for the Kherson bridgehead was very different, but also benefited from favourable circumstances, the main one being the fact that they were attacking a bridgehead. Once again, offensive operations came to a halt at the end of November, this time largely due to a significant improvement in Russian defences.
The Russians had taken a further step towards absolute war through a form of partial Stalinisation of society and the number of troops at the front had doubled. Under the leadership of General Surovikin, they shortened the front by evacuating the Kherson bridgehead and relying on the Dnieper obstacle. Then, and finally, they worked, building a "Surovikin line" in the sectors that had been somewhat weak until then. The offensive aspect was mainly the result of rear operations, such as the campaign of strikes on the electricity network, a new cumulative operation that didn't achieve much, and a bit of the attack on Bakhmut entrusted to the Wagner company.
With Gerasimov taking direct command, the Russes tried to get back to breaking bricks, but they only conquered 500km2 in four months, half as much as between April and July 2022. One might even wonder, at 3 or 4 km2 a day, whether there was a real desire to conquer the Donbass as in the past and whether it was not simply a question of improving the defensive position and acquiring a few victories that were more symbolic than anything else in Soledar and Bakhmut. More than 1,000 km2 and three major towns, Mariupol, Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, conquered for Donbass 1 and 500 km2 and Bakhmut for Donbass 2. The fact that the Russians launched around 3-4 million different projectiles into Donbass 1 and only one or two million into Donbass 2 has something to do with it.
In search of the emergent effect
It should be remembered that, strategically, the Russians can make do with a front that is blocked or simply nibbled away by the Ukrainians. They are "leading the score" and if the war ended tomorrow the Kremlin could live with that and declare victory ("we pre-emptively thwarted a major offensive against the Donbass", "we resisted NATO", "we liberated this or that" etc.). Their strategy may simply be to resist at the front and wait for the rear, and especially the rear, to exhaust themselves, even if it means helping them a little. The same obviously does not apply to the Ukrainians, whose objective is to liberate the whole of their territory from any Russian presence, nor to us, who are (no doubt, because nothing is clearly stated) more interested in a rapid, if not complete, Ukrainian victory.
Are the Ukrainians well on the way to achieving this objective, if not completely, then at least a significant part of it before the end of the summer? We can hope so, but in reality there is nothing to suggest so. Let's forget about the idea of breaking through as in the province of Kharkiv, the entire Russian front is now solid. What remains is hammering, or the famous "brick-breaking", and here we are again in a cumulative operation from which we hope to see something emerge before the end of the summer.
Let's talk about the terrain first. According to the Twitter site @War_Mapper, the Ukrainians have liberated 200 km2 in one month, the equivalent of five French cantons, even though they are reclaiming the equivalent of the Occitanie and PACA regions combined. The Ukrainians obviously can't be satisfied with that. They won't win the war with 7 km2 a day, hence the hope that something like the famous dike breaking under the waves or the melting sandcastle will emerge. The problem is that, for the time being, it's all just wishful thinking.
As far as losses are concerned, the balance sheet for combat units is rather slim, with, according to 'Saint Oryx', 455 major items of Russian equipment hit since 7 June 2023, including 233 major combat vehicles (battle tanks and armoured infantry vehicles), i.e. around 7.5 MBVs per day. In the end, this is hardly more than since the beginning of the year. Worse still, the Ukrainian losses identified during the same period were 283 items of equipment and 126 major combat vehicles respectively, i.e. around 4 per day, which is more than since the start of the war. Never since the start of the war has there been such a small gap between the two sides' losses on Oryx.
So it's hard to say that the Ukrainians are bleeding the Russians dry. This daily loss, and there is a good deal of repairable equipment among them and even some recovered from the Ukrainians, corresponds roughly to industrial production. At this rate, by the end of the summer, the Russians' equipment capital will be depleted, but not catastrophically, and the Ukrainians' will be almost as depleted.
So, for the time being at least, we must place our hopes elsewhere. It is usually at this point that we talk about the morale of the Russian troops. It is said to be at an all-time low, as confirmed by numerous filmed complaints and intercepted messages. The problem is that we've been hearing this almost since the end of the first month of the war and we're still not seeing any effects on the ground, apart from a certain offensive apathy. The first thing we notice is that these soldiers never reject the reason for the war but only the conditions in which they are fighting it, demanding better equipment and ammunition (shells in particular, we keep coming back to this).
Nor do we see any images of mass surrenders or groups of deserters living at the rear of the front, in the manner of the German army at the end of 1918. These are the surest signs that something is seriously wrong. Wagner's mutiny cannot be interpreted as a sign of the troop's weakening morale. In short, basing a strategy on the hope that the Russian army will collapse as it did in 1917 is not absurd but simply very uncertain. It's tricky to fight just on the basis of a very uncertain hope.
The essential is invisible to the eye
To sum up, as long as the Ukrainians do not have overwhelming fire superiority, the famous 3 to 1 in projectiles of all kinds, they cannot reasonably hope to achieve success, and to reiterate once again, conquering a village is not a strategic success. A major success would be to go to Melitopol or Berdiansk; a minor success, but a success nonetheless, would be to take Tokmak. To do this, there is no other solution, as there was to break through the El Alamein line, the Mareth line in Tunisia, the Gothic line in Italy, the German lines in Russia at Orel and elsewhere, or the German defences in Normandy, than to advance by paralysing the defences with a sufficiently overwhelming strike force, a FFSE.
The US Chief of Staff, Mark Milley, recently spoke of the two months of fierce fighting that had to be waged in Normandy before the breakthrough at Avranches. He forgot to mention that the Allies launched the equivalent of a tactical nuclear weapon at the Germans four times before breaking through, and that this even served as the basis for the first reflections on the use of ANT in the 1950s. In this respect, I can only recommend reading the impressive Combattre en dictature - 1944 la Wehrmacht face au débarquement by Jean-Luc Leleu to understand what this represented.
Some defence lines could be bypassed, such as that of the British 8th Army at El-Gazala in May 1942 or of course our Maginot Line two years earlier, both of which had the misfortune of being bypassable. As for the rest, there was no way of getting through without a deluge of projectiles, mortar shells, cannon shells, howitzers, rockets, missiles, whatever, and it didn't matter whether the launcher was on the ground, in the air or on the water, as long as it launched something.
The unfortunate thing about the Ukrainian artillery, now the most powerful in Europe, is that it launches half as many shells as it did at the height of the Kherson era in the summer of 2022, and still fewer than the Russian artillery, which has also added some rather effective remote-controlled munitions. Let's turn the problem around: if the Ukrainians launched as many projectiles a day as the Russians did during Donbass 1, the case would very probably be over and they would probably have already reached and perhaps passed the main Tokmak defence line. But they haven't, at least not yet.
Leaving aside the question of the F-16 aircraft, which would be an interesting but not decisive contribution to this FFSE, it is hard to understand why the United States waited so long to deliver cluster munition shells, which have the double merit of being very useful in counter-battery fire and plentiful. Perhaps it was a moral reluctance to deliver a weapon considered "dirty", because there are a certain number of unexploded ordnance (the French Special Forces suffered their heaviest losses in 1991 because of this), but delivered much earlier would have changed things.
The same applies to ATACMS missiles, which are much less numerous, but very effective with a very long range. The venerable A-10 attack aircraft demanded by the Ukrainians could also have been added a long time ago, although they are vulnerable in the modern environment, but they would terrify the Russian front lines, etc. But above all, the lifeblood of the war is the 155 mm shells, hundreds of thousands of which have to be sent to Ukraine, or the 152 mm shells bought from all the countries formerly equipped by the Soviet Union, which will never use them anyway. We also need to explain why, sixteen months after the start of the war, we are still unable to produce more shells. It's a good thing we weren't the ones invaded.
In short, if we really want Ukraine to win, the first thing to do is to send it lots of shells. This will first of all enable them to win the artillery battle that is underway, which is never mentioned because it is not very visible, but which is the essential prerequisite for success. I sometimes even wonder whether the small attacks by the Ukrainian melee battalions are not part of this battle first and foremost, by making the Russian artillery fire a barrage so that it is revealed and hit back. If there is one ultimately encouraging figure for Oryx, it is that of Russian artillery losses. In two months, with around forty guns hit or damaged, the Ukrainians put three times as many Russian guns out of action, the equivalent of French artillery.
Counting the unseen destruction and the wear and tear of the artillery pieces, which was undoubtedly faster in the old Russian artillery than in the Ukrainian, it is perhaps twice as much that was actually lost. Ammunition depots such as Makiivka, surprisingly close to the lines, continued to be hit. By increasing the pace a little, and with an accelerated Western contribution, this battle of fire can perhaps be won at the end of August or the beginning of September.
This is perhaps the only realistic effect that can be seen to emerge from this whole battle and probably also the only one that can unblock this strategic situation that has been frozen for seven months. If this is not achieved by the end of the summer, when stocks and production will be struggling in both cases, we will probably have started on a frozen front and hope of seeing something emerge will be lost.
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