Russian TOS-1A Thermobaric Rocket Attack on Ukrainian Trench Lines
Preface
This article originally appeared
in the Marine Corps Gazette August 2022 issue. Authored by an apparently frequent anonymous
contributor ("Marinus") to the Gazette, it has since raised quite a ruckus among the
United States military community in various online debates.
There has been much speculation –
by no means definitively confirmed – that “Marinus” is none other that USMC Lt.
Gen. (ret) Paul K. Van Riper, a long-revered champion of many Marines, and a prominent proponent
of the so-called “Maneuverists” – a school of military thought strongly
influenced by the work of the incomparable military strategist John R. Boyd.
Van Riper was also the iconoclastic
Red team commander for the infamous 2002 Millennium Challenge war games, during which his forces (patterned after Iranian capabilities
of the time) sunk the entire US naval fleet in the Persian Gulf by employing
methods and capabilities the war game planners failed to consider in their rigid
calculations. (I wrote about the Millennium Challenge 2002 debacle here: Lessons Never Learned.)
Whether Marinus is Van Riper,
or a collaboration of Van Riper with his son (as some have conjectured, given
that General Van Riper is now 84-years-old), or simply some other insightful
former Marine officer is, in the final analysis, probably not all that
important. What is important is that his observations and perceptions of
the ongoing conflict in Ukraine are lucid, enlightening, and unsullied by the
rampant anti-Russian prejudice that has blinded most in the west to both the
underlying causes and now the prosecution of the war in Ukraine.
I highly recommend it, partly because it so strongly parallels my own analysis as originally posted in a Twitter
thread on July 3, 2022, and subsequently expanded upon in a formal blog post on
July 8, 2022: Destroying the Mother of All Proxy Armies in Ukraine.
I freely confess that I am posting
the Gazette article without permission, and therefore it may not remain
long if one of their representatives requests me to take it down. After all,
they have it behind a paywall, and it only appears here because I just spent
most of this morning carefully transcribing it in its entirety from a series of
images widely circulating online.
In any case, I am strongly
persuaded that the observations of Marinus contained therein ought to be shared
far and wide. They serve the public interest in this unprecedented era of
oppressive state-controlled social media and imperial propaganda.
If the anonymous author(s) or
representatives of the Gazette desire to request that I take it down, I
encourage them to contact me via my Twitter account: @imetatronink
- William Schryver, August 18,
2022
The
Russian Invasion of Ukraine
Maneuverist
Paper No. 22:
Part II:
The mental and moral realms
by Marinus
When considered as purely
physical phenomena, the operations conducted by Russian ground forces in
Ukraine in 2022 present a puzzling picture. In the north of Ukraine, Russian
battalion tactical groups overran a great deal of territory but made no
attempts to convert temporary occupation into permanent possession. Indeed,
after spending five weeks in that region, they left as rapidly as they had
arrived. In the south, the similarly rapid entry of Russian ground forces led
to the establishment of Russian garrisons and the planting of Russian
political, economic, and cultural institutions. In the third theater of the war,
rapid movements of the type that characterized Russian operations on the
northern and southern fronts rarely occurred. Instead, Russian formations in
eastern Ukraine conducted artillery-intensive assaults to capture relatively
small pieces of ground.
One way to shed a little light
upon this conundrum is to treat Russian operations on each of the three major
fronts of the war as a distinct campaign. Further illumination is provided by
the realization that each of these campaigns followed a model that had been
part of the Russian operational repertoire for a very long time. Such a scheme,
however, fails to explain why the Russian leadership applied particular models
to particular sets of operations. Resolving that question requires an
examination of the mental and moral purposes served by each of these three
campaigns.
Raids in the North
American Marines have long used the term “raid” to describe an
enterprise in which a small force moves swiftly to a particular location, completes
a discrete mission, and withdraws as quickly as it can. [1] To Russian soldiers, however, the linguistic
cousin of that word (reyd) carries a somewhat different meaning. Where
the travel performed by the team conducting a raid is nothing more than a means
of reaching particular points on the map, the movement of the frequently larger
forces conducting a reyd creates significant operational effects. That
is, in the course of moving along various highways and byways, they confuse enemy
commanders, disrupt enemy logistics, and deprive enemy governments of the legitimacy
that comes from uncontested control of their own territory. Similarly, where
each phase of a present-day American raid necessarily follows a detailed
script, a reyd is a more open-ended enterprise that can be adjusted to
exploit new opportunities, avoid new dangers, or serve new purposes.
The term reyd found its way into the Russian military
lexicon in the late 19th century by theorists who noted the similarities
between the independent cavalry operations of the American Civil War and the
already well-established Russian practice of sending mobile columns, often
composed of Cossacks, on extended excursions through enemy territory. [2] An early example of such excursions is
provided by the exploits of the column led by Alexander Chernyshev during the
Napoleonic Wars. In September of 1813, this force of some 2,300 horsemen and
two light field guns made a 400-mile circuit through enemy territory. At the
middle point of this bold enterprise, this column occupied, for two days, the
city of Kassel, then serving as the capital of one of the satellite states of
the French Empire. Fear of a repetition of this embarrassment convinced
Napoleon to detail two army corps to garrison Dresden, then the seat of
government of another one of his dependencies. [3] As a result, when Napoleon encountered the
combined forces of his enemies at the Battle of Leipzig,
his already outnumbered Grande Armée was much smaller than it would
otherwise have been.
In 2022, the many battalion tactical groups that moved deeply
into northern Ukraine during the first few days of the Russian invasion made no
attempt to re-enact the occupation of Leipzig. Rather, they bypassed all of the
larger cities in their path and, on the rare occasions when they found
themselves in a smaller city, occupation rarely lasted for more than a few
hours. Nonetheless, the fast-moving Russian columns created, on a much a larger
scale, an effect similar to the one that resulted from Chernyshev’s raid of
1813. That is, they convinced the Ukrainians to weaken their main field army,
then fighting in the Donbass region, to bolster the defenses of distant cities.
Rapid Occupation in the South
In terms of speed and distance traveled, Russian operations in
the area between the southern seacoast of Ukraine and the Dnipro River
resembled the raids conducted in the north. They differed, however, in the
handling of cities. Where Russian columns on either side of Kyiv avoided large
urban areas whenever they could, their counterparts in the south took permanent
possession of comparable cities. In some instances, such as the
ship-to-objective maneuver that began in the Sea of Azov and ended in Melitopol,
the conquest of cities took place during the first few days of the Russian
invasion. In others, such as the town of Skadovsk, the Russians waited several
weeks before seizing areas and engaging local defense forces they had ignored
during their initial advance.
In the immediate aftermath of their arrival, the Russian
commanders who took charge of urban areas in the south followed the same policy
as their counterparts in the north. That is, they allowed the local representatives
of the Ukrainian state to perform their duties and, in many instances, to
continue to fly the flag of their country on public buildings. [4] It was not long, however, before Russian civil
servants took control of the local government, replaced the flags on buildings,
and set in motion the replacement of Ukrainian institutions, whether banks or
cell phone companies, with Russian ones. [5]
Like the model of the reyd, the paradigm of campaigns
that combined rapid military occupation with thoroughgoing political
transformation, had been part of the Russian military culture for quite some
time. Thus, when explaining the concept for operations on the southern front,
Russian commanders were able to point to any one of a number of similar enterprises
conducted by the Soviet state in the four decades that followed Soviet
occupation of eastern Poland in 1939. (These included the conquest of the
countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in 1940; the suppression of
reformist governments in Hungary and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War, and
the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.) [6]
While some Russian formations in the south consolidated
control over conquered territory, others conducted raids in the vicinity of the
city of Mykolaiv. Like their larger counter-parts on the northern front, these
encouraged the Ukrainian leadership to devote to the defense of cities forces
that might otherwise have been used in the fight for the Donbass region. (In
this instance, the cities in question included the ports of Mykolaiv and
Odessa.) At the same time, the raids in the northern portion of the southern
front created a broad “no man’s land” between areas that had been occupied by
Russian forces and those entirely under the control of the Ukrainian
government.
Stalingrad in the East
Russian operations in the north and south of Ukraine made very
little use of field artillery. This was partially a matter of logistics.
(Whether raiding in the north or rapidly occupying in the south, the Russian
columns lacked the means to bring up large numbers of shells and rockets.) The
absence of cannonades in those campaigns, however, had more to do with ends
than means. In the north, Russian reluctance to conduct bombardments stemmed
from a desire to avoid antagonizing the local people, nearly all of whom, for reasons
of language and ethnicity, tended to support the Ukrainian state. In the south,
the Russian policy of avoiding the use of field artillery served a similarly
political purpose of preserving the lives and property of communities in which
many people identified as “Russian” and many more spoke Russian as their native
language.
In the east, however, the Russians conducted bombardments
that, in terms of both duration and intensity, rivaled those of the great
artillery contests of the world wars of the twentieth century. Made possible by
short, secure, and extraordinarily redundant supply lines, these bombardments
served three purposes. First, they confined Ukrainian troops into their fortifications,
depriving them of the ability to do anything other than remain in place.
Second, they inflicted a large number of casualties, whether physical or caused
by the psychological effects of imprisonment, impotence, and proximity to large
numbers of earth-shaking explosions. Third, when conducted for a sufficient
period of time, which was often measured in weeks, the bombardment of a given
fortification invariably resulted in either the withdrawal of its defenders or
their surrender.
We can glean some sense of the scale of the Russian bombardments
in the east of Ukraine by comparing the struggle for the town of Popasna (18
March – 7 May 2022) with the battle of Iwo Jima (19 February – 26 March 1945.)
At Iwo Jima, American Marines fought for five weeks to annihilate the defenders
of eight square miles of skillfully fortified ground. At Popasna, Russian
gunners bombarded trench systems built into the ridges and ravines of a comparable
area for eight weeks before the Ukrainian leadership decided to withdraw its
forces from the town.
The capture of real estate by artillery, in turn, contributed
to the creation of the encirclements that Russians call “cauldrons” (kotly).
Like so much in Russian military theory, this concept builds upon an idea
borrowed from the German tradition of maneuver warfare: the “battle cauldron” (Schlachtkessel).
However, where the Germans sought to create and exploit their cauldrons as quickly
as possible, Russian cauldrons could be either rapid and surprising or slow and
seemingly inevitable. Indeed, the successful Soviet offensives of the Second
World War, such as the one that resulted in the destruction of the German Sixth
Army at Stalingrad, made extensive use of cauldrons of both types.
Freedom from the desire to create cauldrons as quickly as
possible relieved the Russians fighting in eastern Ukraine from the need to
hold any particular piece of ground. Thus, when faced with a determined
Ukrainian attack, the Russians often withdrew their tank and infantry units
from the contested terrain. In this way, they both reduced danger to their own
troops and created situations, however brief, in which the Ukrainian attackers
faced Russian shells and rockets without the benefit of shelter. To put things
another way, the Russians viewed such “encore bombardments” not merely as an
acceptable use of ordnance but also as opportunities to inflict additional
casualties while engaging in “conspicuous consumption” of artillery ammunition.
In the spring of 1917, German forces on the Western Front used
comparable tactics to create situations in which French troops advancing down
the rear slopes of recently captured ridges were caught in the open by the fire
of field artillery and machine guns. The effect of this experience on French
morale was such that infantrymen in fifty French divisions engaged in acts of “collective
indiscipline,” the motto for which was, “we will hold, but we refuse to attack.”
[7] (In May of 2022, several videos
appeared on the internet in which people claiming to be Ukrainian soldiers
fighting in the Donbass region explained that, while they were willing to
defend their positions, they had resolved to disobey any orders that called for
them to advance.)
Resolving the Paradox
In the early days of the maneuver warfare debate, maneuverists
often presented their preferred philosophy as the logical opposite of “firepower/attrition
warfare.” Indeed, as late as 2013, the anonymous authors of the “Attritionist
Letters” used this dichotomy as a framework for their critique of practices at
odds with the spirit of maneuver warfare. In the Russian campaigns in Ukraine,
however, a set of operations made mostly of movement complemented one composed
chiefly of cannonades.
One way to resolve this apparent paradox is to characterize
the raids of the first five weeks of the war as a grand deception that, while
working little in the way of direct destruction, made possible the subsequent
attrition of the Ukrainian armed forces. In particular, the threat posed by the
raids delayed the movement of Ukrainian forces in the main theater of the war
until the Russians had deployed the artillery units, secured the transporting
network, and accumulated the stocks of ammunition needed to conduct a long series
of big bombardments. This delay also ensured that, when the Ukrainians did deploy
additional formations to the Donbass region, the movement of such forces, and
the supplies needed to sustain them, had been rendered much more difficult by
the ruin wrought upon the Ukrainian rail network by long-range guided missiles.
In other words, the Russians conducted a brief campaign of maneuver in the
north in order to set the stage for a longer, and, ultimately, more important
campaign of attrition in the east.
The stark contrast between the types of warfare waged by
Russian forces in different parts of Ukraine reinforced the message at the heart
of Russian information operations. From the start, Russian propaganda insisted
that the “special military operation” in Ukraine served three purposes: the
protection of the two pro-Russian proto-states, “demilitarization,” and “denazification.”
All three of these goals required the infliction of heavy losses upon Ukrainian
formations fighting in the Donbass. None, however, depended upon the occupation
of parts of Ukraine where the vast majority of people spoke the Ukrainian language,
embraced a Ukrainian ethnic identity, and supported the Ukrainian state.
Indeed, the sustained occupation of such places by Russian forces would have
supported the proposition that Russia was trying to conquer all of Ukraine.
The Russian campaign in the south served direct political
aims. That is, it served to incorporate territories inhabited by a large number
of ethnic Russians into the “Russian World.” At the same time, the rapid
occupation of cities like Kherson and Melitopol enhanced the deceptive power of
operations conducted in the north by suggesting the possibility that the
columns on either side of Kyiv might attempt to do the same to cities like
Chernihiv and Zhytomyr. Similarly, the raids conducted north of Kherson raised
the possibility that the Russians might attempt the occupation of additional
cities, the most important of which was Odessa. [8]
Guided Missiles
The Russian program of guided missile strikes, conducted in
parallel to the three ground campaigns, created a number of moral effects
favorable to the Russian war effort. The most important of these resulted from
the avoidance of collateral damage that resulted, not only from the extraordinary
precision of the weapons used, but also from the judicious choice of targets.
Thus, Russia’s enemies found it hard to characterize strikes against fuel and
ammunition depots, which were necessarily located at some distance from places
where civilians lived and worked, as anything other than attacks on military
installations.
Likewise, the Russian effort to disrupt traffic on the
Ukrainian rail system could have included attacks against the power generating
stations that provide electricity to both civilian communities and trains. Such
attacks, however, would have resulted in much loss of life among the people
working in those plants as well as a great deal of suffering in places deprived
of power. Instead, the Russians chose to direct their missiles at traction
substations, the remotely located transformers that converted electricity from
the general grid into forms used to move trains. [9]
There were times, however, when missile strikes against “dual
use” facilities gave the impression that the Russians had, in fact, targeted
purely civilian facilities. The most egregious example of such a mistake was
the attack, carried out on 1 March 2022, upon the main television tower in
Kyiv. Whether or not there was any truth in the Russian claim that the tower
had been used for military purposes, the attack on an iconic structure that had
long been associated with a purely civilian purpose did much to reduce the
advantages achieved by the overall Russian policy of limiting missile strikes
to obvious military targets.
The Challenge
The three ground campaigns conducted by the Russians in
Ukraine in 2022 owed much to traditional models. At the same time, the program
of missile strikes exploited a capability that was nothing short of
revolutionary. Whether new or old, however, these component efforts were conducted
in a way that demonstrated profound appreciation of all three realms in which
wars are waged. That is, the Russians rarely forgot that, in addition to being
a physical struggle, war is both a mental contest and a moral argument.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine may mark the start of a new
cold war, a “long twilight struggle” comparable to the one that ended with the
collapse of the Soviet Empire more than three decades ago. If that is the case,
then we will face an adversary who, while drawing much of value from the Soviet
military tradition, has been liberated from both the brutality inherent in the
legacy of Lenin and the blinders imposed by Marxism. What would be even worse,
we may find ourselves fighting disciples of John R. Boyd.
Notes
[1] Headquarters Marine Corps, MCWP 3-43.1, Raid Operations
(Washington, DC: 1993).
[2] For the adoption of the concept of the “raid” by the
Russian Army of the late nineteenth century, see Karl Kraft von
Hohenlobe-Ingelfingem (Neville Lloyd Walford, translator), Letters on
Cavalry, (London: E. Stanford, 1893); and Frederick Chenevix Trench, Cavalry
in Modern Wars, (London: Keegan, Paul, Trench, and Company, 1884).
[3] For a brief account of the reyd, which was led by
Alexander Chernyshev, see Michael Adams, Napoleon and Russia, (London:
Bloomsbury, 2006).
[4] John Reed and Polina Ivanova, “Residents of Ukraine’s Fallen
Cities Regroup under Russian Occupation,” The Financial Times, (March
2022), available at https://www.ft.com.
[5] David M. Glantz, “Excerpts on Soviet 1938-40 Operations
from The History of Warfare, Military Art, and Military Science, a 1977
Textbook of the Military Academy of the General Staff of the USSR Armed Forces,”
The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, (Milton Park: Routledge, March
1993).
[6] The classic work on the French mutinies of 1917 is Richard
M. Watt, Dare Call It Treason, (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1963).
[7] Michael Schwirtz, “Anxiety Grows in Odessa as Russians
Advance in Southern Ukraine,” The New York Times, (March 2022), available
at https://www.nytimes.com.
[8] Staff, “Russia Bombs Five Railway Stations in Central and
Western Ukraine,” The Guardian, (April 2022), available at https://www.the-guardian.com.
[9] For an example of the many stories that characterized the
1 March 2022 television tower strike as an attack on civilian infrastructure,
see Abraham Mashie, ”US Air Force Discusses Tactics with Ukrainian Air Force as
Russian Advance Stalls,” Air Force Magazine, (March 2022), available at https://www.airforcemag.com.
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