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Notes -
100 days to victory; or, will the Ukrainian offensive ever culminate?
If the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything will look like a nail, as the old saying goes. As an amateur World War One historian, I've previously mused on this subreddit that the Russian offensive from April through to June was playing out in some ways like the German Spring Offensive of World War One: making some worrying gains on paper and inflicting heavy losses on the enemy, but also eroding some of the attackers' manpower and getting their best troops killed off.
Now that the Ukrainians are on the offensive, I'm starting to see parallels with the Allied 100 Days Offensive of the First World War - lots of offensives up and down the line, attacks behind enemy lines, heavy casualties on both sides, and no obvious culmination point where offensive operations have to cease. I think many of us were expecting the Kherson offensive, when it came, to be a short sharp shock and awe attack - throwing large amounts of resources into a small area of the line with the goal of capturing one specific city. But with the recent attacks at Kharkiv and in the Donbas, and the relatively steady pace of the offensive in Kherson, I'm wondering if the goal is to create a new unrelenting offensive up and down the line.
This would have many goals, most notably keeping the Russians continually on the backfoot. However, if Ukraine is confident in its logistics and supplies, then it might allow them to achieve a kind of "offensive escape velocity", a positive feedback loop where they maintain the initiative, pick their battles, and inflict steady casualties, gradually tipping the war more and more in their favour. This in turn could prevent Russia from regaining the initiative and concentrating new troops for an assault and allow the offensive to gradually sap their resolve and manpower.
Here are some of the indicators that we would expect to see if Ukraine had this strategy in mind and were pursuing it successfully -
Non-culmination. There won't come a distinct day or week where the offensive culminates. Instead, the offensive will be maintained continually, but with increasing emphasis given to one theatre after another.
Taking of prisoners. One distinctive feature of the 100 Days Offensive was that the Allies began to capture increasing numbers of German prisoners. This in turn reflected plunging morale among German troops. If we see the same thing here, it would provide evidence that the war might be coming to a close.
Undoing enemy progress. One painful feature of the 100 Days Offensive for the Germans was that almost all of the gains of the Spring Offensive were undone in fairly rapid order. This in turn further depressed their morale. If Ukraine were to launch successful attacks on Lysychansk and Sievierodonetsk, this could have a similar effect.
Striking seemingly impregnable strongpoints. Another key feature of the 100 Days Offensive was its successful breaching of the Hindenberg Line like the battle of St Quentin Canal. It's not clear what the equivalent would be in this war - perhaps some successful attacks on the northern tip of Crimea proper.
I'm not saying this is likely per se, and it may be mere hopium, but it's a new hypothesis about Ukraine's broader strategy that's come to mind, one that I'll be updating as news comes in.
I haven't seen much of the news since they launched their offensive a few weeks ago, but has Ukraine made much progress? I was expecting more by now but I haven't heard of very much.
This map, which I've relied on as a fairly neutral source for the duration of the war - not just because it's done by Finns, mind, but it helps - shows some Ukrainian advance towards Nova Kakhova, but the team behind it is still careful in their assessments of how much progress has been made. The crucial question is, at this point, how much the Ukrainians are advancing, but what happens when the Russians inevitably try to counterattack.
I was reading a thing (probably from one of the pro-Russian sources, so salt to taste) that both sides have discovered a winning tactic that works well in this war along the lines of "temporarily occupy small village that you don't care about with an unsustainably small force -- when the enemy 'retakes' the village, quickly withdraw and level the village (plus enemy troops) to the ground with artillery".
The Russian source claimed that the russians picked this up in the early days from the Ukrainians -- so it remains to be seen whether they would fall for something like this again.
This isn't exactly a new phenomenon - it was first employed by the Germans in WWI when they abandoned trench warfare in the west in favour of a strongpoint system in late 1916. The idea would be you have a lightly held outpost line that you pre-sight for artillery fire. Troops holding this line offer minimal resistance and then withdraw in the face of an enemy attack. Then you can counterattack an over-extended and disorganized enemy with very accurate artillery and fresh troops. This tactic was also used extensively in WWII and was something the Allies would specifically train against because it was so common.
Hmm. What does the counter-training for this look like?
"Just ignore them and shell the village yourself with your numerically superior artillery" seems to be the Russian approach -- remains to be seen how well this works (and it's certainly not winning any popularity contests), but tends to explain all the news we hear about this or that farm town "changing hands" near a relatively static front.
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The general principle was that once you seized a resistance line, dig your own foxholes and prepare for immediate counter-attacks. Using German trenches/fortifications was risky because they were usually pre-sighted for artillery and booby-trapped. This might seem like an obvious concept but in the exhilaration of battle when the enemy has seemingly broken it was not second nature to soldiers, and the tendency to get caught out by German mortar/artillery fire was common among replacements. What could really blunt the effectiveness of German counterattacks was having forward artillery observers; the firepower that American or Commonwealth troops could call on at the company and platoon level was in another universe entirely from what the Germans had on offer (German soldiers often grumbled that fighting the western Allies was a "rich man's war"), and the western allies had already mapped out range tables for the whole of France before landing in Normandy. This had been recognized as important in late WWI due to the similar need for breaking up German counterattacks.
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