One thing few seem to appreciate is that what Ukraine has done over the past several days near Kherson and Kharkov does not even come close to what constitutes a "counter-offensive". They've done nothing but launch highly localized severely under-powered probes which, sooner than later, become nothing but cramped kill zones for massed Russian artillery and air strikes.
The leaders of the Armed Forces
of Ukraine now command: effectively zero air power, sparse artillery with acute
ammo shortages, limited UAV capability – and, to add insult to injury, Russian
“battlefield hackers” are now proving able to commandeer many of their precious quadcopter surveillance drones, thereby blinding them completely in the midst of a battle.
Worst of all, the overwhelming
majority of the soldiers are battle-naïve conscripts.
Their tanks are few and far
between; their troop carriers are obsolete and highly vulnerable; many if not
most are compelled to march into battle on foot – and these are not Seal Team 6
physical specimens who do 20k runs on their day off. They’re just the ones not rich
enough, clever enough, or fast enough to elude the conscription gangs.
The AFU’s sole apparent advantage
is that there are substantially more of them that can be brought to bear on a
narrow front than there are Russians defending it.
And yet all of these attacks so
far have been tentative affairs with relatively small concentrations of force
and firepower.
In the lexicon of battle, a “counter-offensive”
is an entirely different animal.
The German Ardennes counter-offensive in December 1944 consisted of:
~400,000 troops
~500 tanks
~700 mobile artillery
~1300 troop carriers
4000+ artillery pieces
1000+ aircraft
THAT was a counter-offensive.
The Tet Offensive in Vietnam
consisted of 300,ooo+ troops attacking more or less simultaneously.
What we are witnessing in Ukraine
is categorically NOT a “counter-offensive”. Ukrainian operations over the past
several days are, to the contrary, strongly indicative of the extremely limited mobility and firepower capacity of a severely depleted army whose
combat-effectiveness is a fraction of the Russian and allied
defenders whom they face on the field.
Oh, to be sure, their numerical superiority
in troops can achieve a temporary advance within a narrow salient, and inflict
some serious harm on isolated groups of Russian defenders in the process. That should come as
no surprise to anyone – particularly the abundant Russian “doomers’ on Telegram
who descend into inexplicable despair whenever the Ukrainians achieve any tactical success, however meagre and strategically meaningless.
However, if you zoom out the map to
reveal the entire front line of this war, you can readily see that we’re
talking about a handful of teeny-weeny pimples protruding into the Russian-held
side: territory in which the Russians have numerous highly mobile operational
reserve units – infantry and artillery – that can be dispatched with relative alacrity
to any quadrant of the battle map, utilizing the always significant advantage
of interior lines of communication.
When faced with one of these
sorts of attacks, an outmanned and outgunned defending force is trained to lay
down some suppressing fire, secure an orderly retreat, and exact a cost on the
attacker in the form of pre-planned ambuscades and pre-registered long-range
artillery fires.
Meanwhile reinforcements will
have already been summoned by the time they arrive at the second line of defense.
Now, make no mistake, even this species
of limited counter-attack can result in extremely heated battles, numerous
casualties on both sides, and the ceding of real estate from the defender to
the attacker.
But in the case of the current
war in Ukraine, the attacker has effectively zero capacity to follow up any
temporary gains with the kind of strength sufficient to counter the
reinforcements and concentrations of artillery and air power the Russians can
swiftly bring to bear against them.
The outcome of these sorts of
attacks, in the context of this battlefield at this stage of this
war is, plain and simple, a mathematical and military certainty.
And the physical vulnerabilities
of the Ukrainian forces consequent to their numerous deficiencies listed above
are such that they, as the exposed attacker, are suffering horrific losses for
every village and town they claim to “liberate” from the Russians.
In the Kherson region, the
casualty ratio has been at least 5 to 1 in favor of the Russians – this according
to interviews with wounded Ukrainian troops in a recent Washington Post report. And there
is mounting evidence suggesting that the butcher’s bill is no less favorable to
the Ukrainians in the Kharkov region.
If the Ukrainians want to go on
the "offensive" – attacking established Russian defensive positions –
Russian commanders will enthusiastically receive them at any point along their
lines.
Nothing will end this war faster
than continuing Ukrainian "counter-offensives" of the type we have seen over the last few days.
