Thank you for these - myself and the rest of the department of the bird people appreciate knowing what the heck you guys are always so busy doing down there...
Given the oft-demonstrated failure of the Russian military to understand much less successfully adopt and execute a combined arms battle doctrine during the Ukraine War, it's highly probable that you know a lot more about modern warfare - both from a tactical and strategic perspective - than do the Russian generals.
Hopefully, the Kremlin is not subscribed to your Substack.
Hopefully, the Pentagon is subscribed to your Substack.
They're basically using WWII tactics still... Massed Troops and throw bodies at them till you overwhelm them or they run out of ammo... The Russian Military has little use for individuals...
They assume if you manage to survive you must be good and get promoted...
Skimming through my my daily dose of breakdown content, low and behold the picture of the 4 AVLM's firing 4 inert MICLIC's was my unit back in 2018. We were qualifying for a live fire event for NTC following year. It was fun being a part of that achievement converting the AVLB into the AVLM and showing that the M60 chassis can still produce results. ESSAYONS! The brush fire that it created was not as enjoyable to say the least.
Since I’m going to guess that 90% of your audience are not army ground combat veterans, it would suuuuure be nice if you could provide a key for all those cool symbols you use in your charts. For example, first, suddenly two clouds of blue dots appear in the slides in the central russian trench area, but you use blue to indicate Ukrainian troops. How did they all get in there? Second, all those nifty little coded graphic boxes with flags and such not… would it be a lot of effort to describe what they are and what they mean in English actually IN the graphic? I know you have a lot of work in preparing these, but communication is king, jargon is not. It’s a barrier to entry and understanding for your “hors de combat civilians” Cheers.
To explain what's specific to the symbols used by Ryan's post are:
Shape and color indicate the allegiance of a unit:
- Rectangles/blue are friendly
- Diamonds/red (squares rotated 45*) are hostile
Symbols in the middle and above a unit indicate its type and size:
- The 'X' inside a square or rectangle indicates infantry (think bandoliers of ammo)
- The 'v' is a new entry, indicating a drone or UAV.
- The rotated 'E' is an engineering element, think of a engineer building a bridge.
- CSS = combat support services
- Size is indicated by use of Os; one O = a squad, while OOO = a platoon sized formation. There's other symbols for larger formations but that's not relevant to these slides.
- The little flag on top of the Russian/red infantry element indicates an HQ element of some kind.
I know it's been awhile, but I just wanted to thank you for posting the breakdown of the symbols as I wasn't sure what all of them meant either. I have no idea why the other guy was so rude about it...
It’s not up to the audience to decode a presenters graphics. It is up to the presenter to communicate clearly. While I appreciate your trying to intercede it’s irrelevant. What’s interesting is that I am not the only Commenter who ask for the same explanation. But we didn’t ask for it from you.
In the Iraq war there was the technique of using B-52 to drop precise ripple matching soil natural frequency to create liquifaction. I saw a test clip with sand coming out of a corrugated steel support edge like a geyser, trench filled in seconds. I think massive numbers of enemy drowned in sand. I wonder if the wet soil of Ukraine is also susceptible?
Great breakdown of a modern trench attack. I had not given it much thought. I recall that the WW1 Allies had just figured out a "walking barrage" that would land just in front of the advancing friendly troops was considered state of the art.
For the life of me, I cannot understand why they aren't considering the use of balloons to drop JDAMs. (My idea was called "retarded" but I believe the Chinese spy balloon has demonstrated to even the most recalcitrant idiot that balloons are not so easy to shoot down). More importantly, why aren't they using drones that can carry a real payload. They need to hit the lines with 100, 250, and 500 lbs bombs. Not this chicken-little grenade nonsense. This drone, for example, could really do some damage. https://www.jouav.com/blog/heavy-lift-drone.html#:~:text=GRIFF%20Aviation%20300%20%2D%20Extra%20large,31%20minutes%20of%20flight%20time.
The balloon trajectory models are getting quite capable, and if you sent it in the general direction of a target rich environment, you could program the system to launch based on which targets it happened to approach---i.e. you include multiple "plans" in its memory.
These guys, using stuff they could obtain on their own, managed almost to produce a camera guided missile that was placed into the stratosphere using readily available weather balloons. And while these are well educated guys with real NASA experience, they aren't nation state actors.
And for the people who think a balloon could be easily hit by a verba, verba missiles go up to 15,000 feet. A 30 foot balloon could carry a 500 lbs payload up to 25K which would require a SAM to hit.
My thought had been to go old school: Use hydrogen. No reason to play it safe. Yes, using hydrogen is risky. It also makes it much easier and cheaper.
Hot air balloons---which I admit are more expensive---could work as long as they get up high enough to avoid Verba missile ranges. It would be relatively easy to make the balloon autonomous. A SAM is going to be more expensive than a balloon that can reach 25,000 feet.
There is a kind of balloon that combines gas with hot air, a Rozière balloon, which might also bring down the costs (obviously, in this case, you would not be using hydrogen). When I run the costs of using a SAM or a fighter jet to take out various designs, I still get a positive return for Ukraine.
I can happily send over some designs and proposals with cost estimates. At the beginning of the war, I sent a long email to the Ukrainian embassy explaining how Ammonium Nitrate could be used as a hidden, and easily explained, explosive to take out the Kerch Strait Bridge. The proposals for the balloons were in there as well.
I am definitely not saying no to the GLSDB. But the balloons have a very long range. It could allow Ukraine to hit supply depots in Crimea prior to their attack that would otherwise be inaccessible.
Ukraine could, if the west ever pulls its support, use balloons with incendiary devices to try to set Russia's wilderness ablaze (this may, of course, require using agents or launching from sea). This would, in turn, necessitate a redirection of Russian manpower in Ukraine as men and material are redirected towards fighting the blaze. It would require much smaller payloads to do this: Napalm and some phosphorous and that is about it. (I admit this idea is similar to the Japanese use of balloons in WWII, but chemistry has advanced since then).
encouraging ecoterrorism -setting wildfire - is a poor idea. there are unintended consequences. gas, for example, can blowback into your own trenches. The United States had a big problem with it when Japan tried it during WWII and that DOES NOT make it permissible. Setting wildfires for war. About as reasonable as proposing the idea of nuclear weapons in Ukraine right now, even though we used them ourselves twice.
You have proposed no ideas of your own that could be helpful to the Ukrainian war effort. Perhaps you have none, but given your career I would think you should be able to do more than come up with banal, moralistic criticisms of other's ideas. Maybe that is all you have to offer. However, what I cannot stand is that you mischaracterized what I proposed. You either did not read what I wrote carefully enough, or you were hoping that people reading your remarks would not notice your little lies. Your tone towards me was impolite, and you distorted what I said, so I am going to be quite blunt in the remarks that follow. You should actually take the time to read people's remarks before responding to them.
1) I suggested setting these fires inside Russia, so the "blowback into your own trenches" piece is wrong. Unless you are a Z-patriot who considers Putin's annexations valid, you would realize that this war is being fought on Ukrainian territory. I specifically said "Russia's wilderness." That means Russia's wilderness, not Ukraine's. For the fires to affect Ukrainian lines, they would have to be set in Ukraine's wilderness. Any normal person reading what I wrote would know I was not talking about setting the fires near Ukraine's own lines where it could interfere with their own operations. You either did not read what I wrote, or you lied. 2) To call my proposal ecoterrorism is absurd. First, terrorism by its nature requires harming civilians and I never proposed setting these in populated areas---again, notice how I mentioned the word wilderness. Moreover, the strategic logic involves diverting manpower away from Putin's attack, just as I said in the original post: It is an act of self-defense. Terrorism involves instilling fear in the civilian population---I even said the reason was to divert manpower. To call my suggestion terrorism is just another lie on your part. There is no logical reason for Russia's population to be terrified by forest fires set far away from their population centers. 3) If Ukraine were clever about it, they could make it look natural. So, it has deniability if done well. This means it is naturally less escalatory than using a nuke. To even compare the suggestion to using a nuke on a civilian population is ridiculous as mine. By your logic, someone who sets a forest fire on purpose is guilty of smuggling a nuke into a civilian population. Obviously, even if setting a forest fire is a serious crime, it is much less serious than setting off a nuke. It is absurd to argue as you are arguing. 4) It would divert manpower from the front. 5) Wildfires would never allow Russia to use nukes, so it is quite a bit more reasonable and less escalatory. In fact, Ukraine could blame it on Russian partisans. If Ukraine used a nuke, which it does not have, it could not plausibly do that. Again, your even bringing up nukes in the same light as setting some fires makes me doubt your claim to be a defense analyst.
Despite what Ryan argues, it is very clear that Russia blew the dam intentionally. So the idea that you are going to tell Ukraine not to consider "ecoterrorism" when Russia just carried out the largest ecoterrorist attack in history is laughable. Maybe you don't get it, but we have ever reason to think Russia will take genocidal reprisals against Ukraine if Ukraine loses. This is an existential war, not one of your little Middle Eastern misadventures. Ukraine is facing a genocide if they lose: Hundreds of thousands will be put into reeducation camps, murdered, and the ones Putin spares will lose their cultural identity forever. Genocide.
"Let's wait some more to see"? Men are dying. This idea that we are going to "wait and see" because we don't like setting some forest fires and thinking outside the box is absurd. Russia will be carrying out ecoterrorism whenever it fits Russia's purposes. If you want to reduce ecoterrorism in aggregate, you need Ukraine to win this war ASAP.
In short, I don't think much of your response to my remarks. I think you are, at best, a careless reader and, more likely, a dishonest debater who strawmans his opponents in order to win.
Great article Ryan. Does Ukraine have an equivalent to the LCAC hovercraft? Could we see an amphibious landing anywhere, even as a secondary offensive to tie down Russian troops?
I'm honored you addressed my question! Or perhaps it was chance that I asked it and you were writing an article on it. Either way, I'm going to stick with honored, thanks Ryan!
1) didn't know you could just clear the trench with a bulldozer heavily supported
2) woah, didn't know you could spread mines via artillery on the flanks!
3) this seems relatively foolproof?! I'm not sure how a force spread as thin as Russia's could repel this. I'm going to have to rethink my position on how things will play out.
one thing also is that I don't think anyone thought drones would be such a big part of any way before Ukraine. I think back to the US Civil War, where balloons were used to try to see what was happening on the other side. Thinking of movies, the assumption was that spy satellites could real time any position on Earth. You would SEE the combatants moving about. Simpler is better. Also answer the question about why I can't purchase a small to mid size good truck in the US, and is it really tied to some law about not allowing them in the US as they are sold to extremist groups? I just want a truck that isn't so heavy it's suspension isn't up to the weight. I need to know who to blame!
Thank you. Great summary. If you take this summary add it to Thomas Theiner over on Twitter you start to get a clear picture of how this will go. Of course, Russia gets a vote. But their "poll numbers" don't suggest much turn out for that "vote".
Thank you for these - myself and the rest of the department of the bird people appreciate knowing what the heck you guys are always so busy doing down there...
Very interesting analysis.
Given the oft-demonstrated failure of the Russian military to understand much less successfully adopt and execute a combined arms battle doctrine during the Ukraine War, it's highly probable that you know a lot more about modern warfare - both from a tactical and strategic perspective - than do the Russian generals.
Hopefully, the Kremlin is not subscribed to your Substack.
Hopefully, the Pentagon is subscribed to your Substack.
Molon labe!
They're basically using WWII tactics still... Massed Troops and throw bodies at them till you overwhelm them or they run out of ammo... The Russian Military has little use for individuals...
They assume if you manage to survive you must be good and get promoted...
Skimming through my my daily dose of breakdown content, low and behold the picture of the 4 AVLM's firing 4 inert MICLIC's was my unit back in 2018. We were qualifying for a live fire event for NTC following year. It was fun being a part of that achievement converting the AVLB into the AVLM and showing that the M60 chassis can still produce results. ESSAYONS! The brush fire that it created was not as enjoyable to say the least.
Since I’m going to guess that 90% of your audience are not army ground combat veterans, it would suuuuure be nice if you could provide a key for all those cool symbols you use in your charts. For example, first, suddenly two clouds of blue dots appear in the slides in the central russian trench area, but you use blue to indicate Ukrainian troops. How did they all get in there? Second, all those nifty little coded graphic boxes with flags and such not… would it be a lot of effort to describe what they are and what they mean in English actually IN the graphic? I know you have a lot of work in preparing these, but communication is king, jargon is not. It’s a barrier to entry and understanding for your “hors de combat civilians” Cheers.
NATO joint military symbology standards are laid out here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_Joint_Military_Symbology
To explain what's specific to the symbols used by Ryan's post are:
Shape and color indicate the allegiance of a unit:
- Rectangles/blue are friendly
- Diamonds/red (squares rotated 45*) are hostile
Symbols in the middle and above a unit indicate its type and size:
- The 'X' inside a square or rectangle indicates infantry (think bandoliers of ammo)
- The 'v' is a new entry, indicating a drone or UAV.
- The rotated 'E' is an engineering element, think of a engineer building a bridge.
- CSS = combat support services
- Size is indicated by use of Os; one O = a squad, while OOO = a platoon sized formation. There's other symbols for larger formations but that's not relevant to these slides.
- The little flag on top of the Russian/red infantry element indicates an HQ element of some kind.
Hope that helps! :)
I know it's been awhile, but I just wanted to thank you for posting the breakdown of the symbols as I wasn't sure what all of them meant either. I have no idea why the other guy was so rude about it...
It’s not up to the audience to decode a presenters graphics. It is up to the presenter to communicate clearly. While I appreciate your trying to intercede it’s irrelevant. What’s interesting is that I am not the only Commenter who ask for the same explanation. But we didn’t ask for it from you.
Take a "Chill Pill", Dr Heintz. BTW, why do you use Steven Spielberg's picture?
Agree!
"Service them with artillery." 👍
In the Iraq war there was the technique of using B-52 to drop precise ripple matching soil natural frequency to create liquifaction. I saw a test clip with sand coming out of a corrugated steel support edge like a geyser, trench filled in seconds. I think massive numbers of enemy drowned in sand. I wonder if the wet soil of Ukraine is also susceptible?
Great breakdown of a modern trench attack. I had not given it much thought. I recall that the WW1 Allies had just figured out a "walking barrage" that would land just in front of the advancing friendly troops was considered state of the art.
For the life of me, I cannot understand why they aren't considering the use of balloons to drop JDAMs. (My idea was called "retarded" but I believe the Chinese spy balloon has demonstrated to even the most recalcitrant idiot that balloons are not so easy to shoot down). More importantly, why aren't they using drones that can carry a real payload. They need to hit the lines with 100, 250, and 500 lbs bombs. Not this chicken-little grenade nonsense. This drone, for example, could really do some damage. https://www.jouav.com/blog/heavy-lift-drone.html#:~:text=GRIFF%20Aviation%20300%20%2D%20Extra%20large,31%20minutes%20of%20flight%20time.
The balloon trajectory models are getting quite capable, and if you sent it in the general direction of a target rich environment, you could program the system to launch based on which targets it happened to approach---i.e. you include multiple "plans" in its memory.
These guys, using stuff they could obtain on their own, managed almost to produce a camera guided missile that was placed into the stratosphere using readily available weather balloons. And while these are well educated guys with real NASA experience, they aren't nation state actors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYVZh5kqaFg&ab_channel=MarkRober
And for the people who think a balloon could be easily hit by a verba, verba missiles go up to 15,000 feet. A 30 foot balloon could carry a 500 lbs payload up to 25K which would require a SAM to hit.
Helium is pretty expensive.. Would be cheaper to use a rocket, which is basically the HIMARS GLSDB.
Fair point about the price of helium.
My thought had been to go old school: Use hydrogen. No reason to play it safe. Yes, using hydrogen is risky. It also makes it much easier and cheaper.
Hot air balloons---which I admit are more expensive---could work as long as they get up high enough to avoid Verba missile ranges. It would be relatively easy to make the balloon autonomous. A SAM is going to be more expensive than a balloon that can reach 25,000 feet.
There is a kind of balloon that combines gas with hot air, a Rozière balloon, which might also bring down the costs (obviously, in this case, you would not be using hydrogen). When I run the costs of using a SAM or a fighter jet to take out various designs, I still get a positive return for Ukraine.
I can happily send over some designs and proposals with cost estimates. At the beginning of the war, I sent a long email to the Ukrainian embassy explaining how Ammonium Nitrate could be used as a hidden, and easily explained, explosive to take out the Kerch Strait Bridge. The proposals for the balloons were in there as well.
I am definitely not saying no to the GLSDB. But the balloons have a very long range. It could allow Ukraine to hit supply depots in Crimea prior to their attack that would otherwise be inaccessible.
Ukraine could, if the west ever pulls its support, use balloons with incendiary devices to try to set Russia's wilderness ablaze (this may, of course, require using agents or launching from sea). This would, in turn, necessitate a redirection of Russian manpower in Ukraine as men and material are redirected towards fighting the blaze. It would require much smaller payloads to do this: Napalm and some phosphorous and that is about it. (I admit this idea is similar to the Japanese use of balloons in WWII, but chemistry has advanced since then).
encouraging ecoterrorism -setting wildfire - is a poor idea. there are unintended consequences. gas, for example, can blowback into your own trenches. The United States had a big problem with it when Japan tried it during WWII and that DOES NOT make it permissible. Setting wildfires for war. About as reasonable as proposing the idea of nuclear weapons in Ukraine right now, even though we used them ourselves twice.
Ukraine might win - let's wait some more to see.
So, Russia can blow the dam but Ukraine can't set some fires. Thanks for your great insight.
You have proposed no ideas of your own that could be helpful to the Ukrainian war effort. Perhaps you have none, but given your career I would think you should be able to do more than come up with banal, moralistic criticisms of other's ideas. Maybe that is all you have to offer. However, what I cannot stand is that you mischaracterized what I proposed. You either did not read what I wrote carefully enough, or you were hoping that people reading your remarks would not notice your little lies. Your tone towards me was impolite, and you distorted what I said, so I am going to be quite blunt in the remarks that follow. You should actually take the time to read people's remarks before responding to them.
1) I suggested setting these fires inside Russia, so the "blowback into your own trenches" piece is wrong. Unless you are a Z-patriot who considers Putin's annexations valid, you would realize that this war is being fought on Ukrainian territory. I specifically said "Russia's wilderness." That means Russia's wilderness, not Ukraine's. For the fires to affect Ukrainian lines, they would have to be set in Ukraine's wilderness. Any normal person reading what I wrote would know I was not talking about setting the fires near Ukraine's own lines where it could interfere with their own operations. You either did not read what I wrote, or you lied. 2) To call my proposal ecoterrorism is absurd. First, terrorism by its nature requires harming civilians and I never proposed setting these in populated areas---again, notice how I mentioned the word wilderness. Moreover, the strategic logic involves diverting manpower away from Putin's attack, just as I said in the original post: It is an act of self-defense. Terrorism involves instilling fear in the civilian population---I even said the reason was to divert manpower. To call my suggestion terrorism is just another lie on your part. There is no logical reason for Russia's population to be terrified by forest fires set far away from their population centers. 3) If Ukraine were clever about it, they could make it look natural. So, it has deniability if done well. This means it is naturally less escalatory than using a nuke. To even compare the suggestion to using a nuke on a civilian population is ridiculous as mine. By your logic, someone who sets a forest fire on purpose is guilty of smuggling a nuke into a civilian population. Obviously, even if setting a forest fire is a serious crime, it is much less serious than setting off a nuke. It is absurd to argue as you are arguing. 4) It would divert manpower from the front. 5) Wildfires would never allow Russia to use nukes, so it is quite a bit more reasonable and less escalatory. In fact, Ukraine could blame it on Russian partisans. If Ukraine used a nuke, which it does not have, it could not plausibly do that. Again, your even bringing up nukes in the same light as setting some fires makes me doubt your claim to be a defense analyst.
Despite what Ryan argues, it is very clear that Russia blew the dam intentionally. So the idea that you are going to tell Ukraine not to consider "ecoterrorism" when Russia just carried out the largest ecoterrorist attack in history is laughable. Maybe you don't get it, but we have ever reason to think Russia will take genocidal reprisals against Ukraine if Ukraine loses. This is an existential war, not one of your little Middle Eastern misadventures. Ukraine is facing a genocide if they lose: Hundreds of thousands will be put into reeducation camps, murdered, and the ones Putin spares will lose their cultural identity forever. Genocide.
"Let's wait some more to see"? Men are dying. This idea that we are going to "wait and see" because we don't like setting some forest fires and thinking outside the box is absurd. Russia will be carrying out ecoterrorism whenever it fits Russia's purposes. If you want to reduce ecoterrorism in aggregate, you need Ukraine to win this war ASAP.
In short, I don't think much of your response to my remarks. I think you are, at best, a careless reader and, more likely, a dishonest debater who strawmans his opponents in order to win.
Great article Ryan. Does Ukraine have an equivalent to the LCAC hovercraft? Could we see an amphibious landing anywhere, even as a secondary offensive to tie down Russian troops?
I'm honored you addressed my question! Or perhaps it was chance that I asked it and you were writing an article on it. Either way, I'm going to stick with honored, thanks Ryan!
1) didn't know you could just clear the trench with a bulldozer heavily supported
2) woah, didn't know you could spread mines via artillery on the flanks!
3) this seems relatively foolproof?! I'm not sure how a force spread as thin as Russia's could repel this. I'm going to have to rethink my position on how things will play out.
one thing also is that I don't think anyone thought drones would be such a big part of any way before Ukraine. I think back to the US Civil War, where balloons were used to try to see what was happening on the other side. Thinking of movies, the assumption was that spy satellites could real time any position on Earth. You would SEE the combatants moving about. Simpler is better. Also answer the question about why I can't purchase a small to mid size good truck in the US, and is it really tied to some law about not allowing them in the US as they are sold to extremist groups? I just want a truck that isn't so heavy it's suspension isn't up to the weight. I need to know who to blame!
I appreciate the tactical level of detail provided. It really fills in the gaps.
Thank you. Great summary. If you take this summary add it to Thomas Theiner over on Twitter you start to get a clear picture of how this will go. Of course, Russia gets a vote. But their "poll numbers" don't suggest much turn out for that "vote".
https://twitter.com/noclador/status/1634644361643261953
Wow great share, so informative, thank you. Hopefully the US goverment listened.
Trench warfare is war distilled to its pure terrifying and desperate constituents. Fuck me...
Great article!
I'm curious about how they dig their trenches.
Are they using construction excavators?
Or do they have to dig them by hand?