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Ukraine: Russia's "Push" Logistics and our limited visibility as to what is going on. [1]

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Date: 2023-01-31

These soldiers may already be gone.

I recently watched Perun’s Russian Strengths and Capabilities in Ukraine and recommend it to folks. He brings up many good points but there are two specifically I wanted to expand upon. The first is just how limited our information is, and the second is “Push” logistics and how it relates to Russian unit organization.

I was planning a full article on how limited our information is until Perun beat me to it. The basic point is that it is misleading to see a single example of an event and then extrapolate that event to all examples. For instance, take the video from back in November of the unit of presumably hypothermic Russian troops who barely moved after getting a grenade dropped near them. Many, myself included, took this as a sign of the poor quality of clothing and preparedness of the Russian Mobiks. But as Perun correctly points out, that video may just be an outlier and the rest of Russian forces are relatively fine with regards to winter survival. I haven’t seen any follow up videos and while Russian casualties are high, there are many possible causes and I’d be surprised if Ukraine could accurately count Russian hypothermia related deaths. So I jumped to a conclusion, and we have yet to see positive evidence to back up poor winter clothing across all Russian units.

We also get overrepresentation of videos that can lead to false conclusions in the opposite direction. In March of last year, we were inundated with Javelin and NLAW videos destroying Russian tanks and very few of tanks engaging with tanks. People declared the era of the tank as over and MANPATS supreme. However, RUSI reports that in certain sectors there were significant tank battles and many Russian tanks were destroyed by Ukrainian tanks. But with far fewer videos released, we were led astray.

I like to think of information in this war as attempting to get information from a construction site surrounded by fencing. Unless you are invited onto the construction site itself, most of us are trying to see what is happening through small holes and cracks in the fence. A few industrious folks are running around the perimeter of the site looking through every single hole they can find trying to map things out. These people would be the OSINT community. Mark and Kos would be folks who talk with the folks running around trying to sort out what is going on amidst confusing contradicting statements and outright lies. And much of the construction site is not visible at all from the holes in the fence. So we make do the best we can.

I also wanted to talk about “Push” logistics. “Pull” logistics is what most of us tend to think about as it mirrors our day to day lives. Pull logistics is having or anticipating a need and requesting it from the quartermaster. In our day-to-day lives it’s knowing we need a book for a project so we order it online. No one knows to send us that book until we ask for it.

“Push” logistics is the opposite. With push logistics the quartermaster will have been told by a General to send a certain amount and variety of goods to each unit and keep sending until otherwise notified. As Perun points out that while this creates certain inefficiencies, it requires a minimum of communication and in some ways can be unit agnostic. If all Russian Regiments have a large amount of artillery, then sending 152mm shells to every unit is just fine most of the time. It occasionally leads to some of the odd behaviors we’ve seen such as Russian units around Kharkiv back in July hammering on Ukrainian positions for no apparent purpose. But if the supply quartermaster is pushing you artillery shells, firing them on the enemy is a great way to look like your unit is doing something.

It also works well with how Russia has appeared to change its unit organizational structure. In the beginning they had their BTGs and attached units and generally stuck to them. But at some point (I started to notice around the time of Izyum) the Russians has so many broken units that instead of keeping strict organizational structure they appear to have adopted ad hoc unit consolidation. Instead of trying to reconstitute units with each unit waiting for whatever resource they were short on, (infantry, APCs, Tanks, etc...), the local commanders would grab any and all units hanging around and give basic orders as if all the resources were one big unit. This is most clear with their usage of recon by fire mobiks. Any warm body would work and unless they had a useful skill, off they went to see if the artillery cleared out that position.

Because the infantry tactics being used are SO basic, unit cohesion isn’t required. In some ways it is “Push” staffing of units. Recent conscripts are sent to the front line, anywhere, and get plugged into the local system. By concentrating on volume of supply and soldiers rather than attempting to get the right people and things to the right places, they get people and materials to the front. Over a large enough area the supply eventually evens out. With enough people the unit can keep anyone who shows up with a useful skill and send the “surplus” out as cannon-fodder.

It’s a brutal and darwinian approach that any force with a shred of morals could never countenance. But because the Russian military is so depraved to piss away people’s lives, it ends up working for them. The more skilled soldiers live longer as they are constantly shielded by an ever arriving stream of meat shields. The relatively few arrivals with skills can be added to the skilled core.

The best thing Ukraine can do to fight against this dynamic is to continue to target Russians with skills or officers. As Russia puts much less training into their soldiers, eliminating skilled soldiers is far more effective than eliminating meat shields. In addition, a more dynamic front would benefit Ukraine as the Russian system seems to be as much location based as anything else. It’s one thing to slowly grind away at a section of front with little overall movement, it’s entirely different to move ad hoc units in an organized manner which allows them to be combat effective after the movement. Russia does have some better trained and organized units such as the VDV and Naval Infantry. Eliminating those forces is a much bigger deal for Ukraine than random mobiks.

Last winter the mud was a benefit for Ukraine as they were more on the defensive. Now, this mud season assists Russia more. Russia will be slow and plodding regardless of the ground conditions, so mud doesn’t appear to slow them much further than they already are. Ukraine, however, prefers better ground conditions now as maneuver is in their advantage. With better training and organization, if they can get Russia on the move it will help keep Russia off balance. This mud can’t end quickly enough for Ukraine. People call the current state a stalemate. Which in some ways it is, but its a stalemate due to mud, not necessarily due to parity of forces. When things solidify I’m hoping and guessing we will see a return to more dynamic Ukrainian advances.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/31/2150193/-Ukraine-Russia-s-Push-Logistics-and-our-limited-visibility-as-to-what-is-going-on

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