Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics…

 

… and it looks like logistics professionals in the Russian armed forces were conspicuous by their absence when that country invaded Ukraine.  The Wall Street Journal reports:

In Ukraine, Russia began the war by mounting a complex multipronged offensive using land, air and seaborne forces. It quickly lost steam … more than 170,000 Russian troops are estimated to have been committed to Ukraine in about 130 units, known as battalion tactical groups. When the U.S. and its allies invaded Iraq in 2003, similar numbers of U.S. troops were committed in fewer than 50 BTGs. The reason for the difference: the large proportion of the U.S. force being used for logistics and the transportation of fuel, ammunition, water and food.

Phillips O’Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, said military experts may have been deceived by the “lavish logistical system” employed by the U.S. in the past three decades. “What the U.S. has done has made people immune to looking at the reality of logistics and just assuming it will get done,” he said.

He said the complexity of the Russian operation compounded problems of logistics. “What they were actually trying to do was logistically bonkers. They were trying to support five or six different axes of advance in a hugely spread-out arch, all the way from west of Kyiv, all of that bulge of eastern Ukraine, down to Crimea.”

. . .

“They [invaded] profoundly unready for sustained offensive operations,” said Scott Boston, a defense analyst at the Rand Corp. Some units ran out of fuel on day three of the campaign.

The Ukrainian defense also harassed stretched Russian supply lines from the side and rear. Many military analysts suspect this was part of Ukraine’s battle plan and no accident, though some Ukrainian units may have been left behind by Russia’s rapid advance and decided on their own to harass vulnerable supply and fuel trucks. Partisans also got into the act.

Russian forces at home are heavily reliant on rail for moving supplies around. Except in the south where Russian forces secured the city of Kherson, Moscow wasn’t able to secure any other major railheads, leaving it dependent on roads and trucks.

Logistical problems multiplied and were worsened by poor communications. “The more you advance, the more you extend your logistical line, the higher the complexity,” said Yohann Michel, a research analyst at IISS.

With little evidence that Russian forces established their own supply dumps inside Ukraine, resupply trucks had to shuttle long distances back and forth, themselves needing to refuel. Clips on social media also show much of this equipment was poorly maintained, perhaps coming out of yearslong storage.

“If one truck shows up and fuels three or four vehicles and then turns around and goes back, I don’t know how long you think you can do this,” said Mr. Boston.  The farther the journeys, the more challenging the refueling—particularly when supply lines haven’t been secured.

There’s more at the link.

Now that Russia appears to have abandoned its northern thrust on Kyiv and is reorienting its forces to concentrate on the campaign in and around the Donbas region in the east and south, they’ll have a far more concentrated force, easier to resupply and coordinate.  However, it’s probably cost them thousands of casualties in soldiers, vehicles and weapons to learn an expensive logistics lesson.

In “my” war, the Border War in northern Namibia, southern Angola and sundry other points here and there, one of the cardinal rules was that no operation ever went in without great attention being paid to how the troops were to be sustained and resupplied.  We were fighting a thousand miles or more from our industrial base, in a region almost without roads, and with little or no opportunity for airborne resupply.  The design of South African military vehicles such as the Ratel IFV and SAMIL truck range therefore emphasized simplicity, rugged reliability under the worst conditions, and carrying extended supplies of water, food and ammunition for their crews and troops embarked in them.  They offered greater range and offroad capability than contemporary designs in other armed forces.

Operations in that environment were planned to be in-and-out affairs, going in well-supplied and relying on at most one or two major resupply convoys before being withdrawn.  In 1987/88, during extended operations against Angolan and Cuban forces, they had to stay in contact with the enemy, at great distances from their bases, for prolonged periods – months at a time.  In the process, they encountered real problems with logistics, the artillery in particular.  (One operation involved a small team operating well over two thousand miles from South Africa, with no direct logistical resupply whatsoever – everything had to be smuggled in, taking a lot of time and risking a great deal.)  In his excellent book “The War for Africa: Twelve Months that Transformed a Continent“, Fred Bridgland covered the details of the later stages of the Border War in detail.  It’s an indispensable book for any student of military logistics in less developed areas of the world.

(Two other excellent books on military logistics are Martin van Creveld’s “Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton” and Kenneth Privratsky’s “Logistics in the Falklands War: A Case Study in Expeditionary Warfare“.)

In recent decades, the USA solved its logistics problems by throwing vast quantities of money and supplies at the problem.  It’s been estimated that only about one in ten US soldiers actually fight;  the rest provide services, backup, supply, etc. to the fighting spearpoint.  That was certainly the case in Iraq and Afghanistan, where enormous numbers of service personnel existed only to support and resupply those in contact with the enemy or patrolling troubled regions.  It’s a very expensive way to fight a war (witness the literally trillions of dollars spent on US wars over the past couple of decades, not to mention the amount of waste uncovered by multiple inquiries), but it does work, if it’s done right.

The question is whether the former US approach will be sustainable (i.e. affordable) in a high-inflation, financially boondoggled economy.  I venture to doubt it.  Russia’s earlier approach in Ukraine clearly is also not sustainable across a broad battle front;  but it may be made more workable in a limited, geographically restricted campaign.  That remains to be seen.

Peter