Even as we speak, despite having an army massed for one colossal battle, the Russians still haven’t really changed their basic tactics. Because their army is so wussy, they’re still trying to soften up frontal territory through massive artillery and guided missile attacks.
But that may be about to change, and not by Putin’s choice. It will become a practical material necessity. When Russia originally went into Ukraine, they advanced along three different, disconnected fronts, which was stupid because it diluted their mass strength. In order to soften up resistance, and especially with the slow advance and supply chain problems, they took to using precision missiles to bombard large cities in front of the armies, hoping to panic and dis-spirit the population into submission. It didn’t work.
I wrote a few weeks ago that there were problems in Putin’s Soviet military paradise. A British military intelligence report released about 5 weeks ago, just before the Russians retreated en masse to their own side of the border, showed that since the start of the war, Russia had already burned its way through almost 70% of their precision guided missiles. That stunned me almost as much as the fact that the Russians had burned through 40,000 casualties in their troops in 2 months, numbers not seen since WWII.
Here’s why this is important. Precision guided missiles come dear. These bad boys cost about a million bucks apiece, And they take several months to produce. And they also require raw materials, as well as a shitload of microchip processors, both of which Russia can’t get right now, due to global sanctions over their invasion of Ukraine.
So here’s the thing. Due to their expense and accuracy, a prime target for precision guided missiles should be large masses of enemy troops on a battlefield. You schedule a strike, launch it, your troops back up about a half a click for safety, watch the fireworks, and charge through the human sushi and chase down the survivors.
But the Russians apparently still aren’t doing that! The current theater of operations is the Donbas area. And yet the Russians are still lobbing precision guided missiles into cities like Kyiv, Lviv, and other cities even further from the front in order to try to inspire terror. And a recent report from British intelligence shows that they now estimate that Putin is under 20% of his precision guided missile stockpile, with no replacements coming soon.
When Putin is all done with his smart missiles, he’ll be down to his dumb missiles, ones with no guidance onboard. Think of Saddam Hussein and his infamous SCUD missiles during the Persian Gulf war. I’ll describe it like this. Imagine standing on the tee at a golf driving range. Your ball is on the tee. You line up, look out, and aim for the wooden 200 yard marker in the distance. You take a deep breath, take your best swing, and let it fly! And the damn ball lands wherever it lands, usually nowhere near the goddamn marker. Those are dumb missiles. You set your launcher to a specific height, angle, and direction to aim for a target, and then you let it fly and pray.
I swear, the Russians are being led by tactical troglodytes. They’re wasting one of their best weapons on civilian targets that will have no difference in the outcome. And once they’re gone, they’ll be left with dumb missiles that they dare not use in combat operations, since it’s 50-50 that they’ll hit their own troops instead of the enemy. Even Saddam Hussein never tried using SCUD’s in combat operations.
This is the subtle sea change I’m talking about looking for in the near future. If the Russians don’t change strategy, and change it quickly, they’ll be out of smart missiles. And the shelling of civilian cities will stop, mainly because most dumb missiles have a much shorter range than smart missiles, just to give them any kind of control. They won’t have anything left to missile the battlefield with. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians are getting the very best new technology that the US and NATO can provide. When that happens, you’ll see a change in the tide of the war in Donbas.
I swear, the Russians are being led by tactical troglodytes.
I read on another site a couple of days back that Putin is PERSONALLY directing this war. If so, I wonder whether the orders to waste these munitions has come from the top . . .
Might be what is keeping some of the oligarchs off of his back-they want to make more money by manufacturing whatever putin wants for his military. I keep wondering why one of the oligarchs haven’t yet put a bullet in putin’s head yet: maybe they’re still making money somehow. The military-industrial complex might be as lucrative in Russia as it is in the U.S.
I read recently that there are limits to stinger weapons sent to Ukraine because the pentagon has not ordered any in nearly 2 decades. I hope we have better weapons than more than 30 year old systems.
As for precision guided missiles, remember when trump sent 70 or so into syria to blow up an airfield after warning them that the attack was coming. 70 million dollars to blow up some dirt. He also dropped the MOAB onto afghanistan for no reason. I wonder if putin was using this to get a calculation of us military capabilities.
As for unguided missiles. Let us all pray that they don’t end up in Poland or Bulgaria or any other NATO country.
Putin isn’t a military man. He doesn’t know how to wage a successful war. The United States learned this lesson long ago. Don’t put intelligence agencies in charge of a war. When the CIA tried to run a war, we got the Bay of Pigs. Putin is learning a harsh lesson.
To borrow an old DC Comics supervillain identity, Putin is the KGBeast who has never run anything but “special operations”. And as Kamil Galeev points out, his regime is nothing but a security state cosplaying as a military power. The moment either of these things were confronted with someone or something outside their mythos, their inborn power evaporates.
Actually Bare, as cute as the Galeev quote is, I think an even more appropriate and clear one was either David Rothkopf or Ian Bremmer on Fareed when he (one of them) said “Russia is essentially nothing more than a gas station with nukes”. Clearly this definition is being proven truer every day.
Not only has Putin not run any military campaign before, nor had he ever run an intelligence operation back in his much-vaunted KGB days. He was a clerk, basically, with very limited responsibilities but with a highly developed ambition for advancement up the ladder of political corruption. The results in Putin’s War are obvious: a total failure of Russian intelligence to gather factual knowledge of Ukrainian military power, and now a total failure of the Russian army to subdue a smaller, ostensibly weaker enemy. Butchering civilians does not win wars, but it can sure as hell lose them.
Hey Murf, for Pete’s sake quit giving the ruskies ideas! LOL