stratpol | Response to Mr. Myard, on the United States / Russia confrontation in Ukraine.
If a good part of your analysis on the risks of the Ukrainian conflict getting out of hand seems correct to me, I come back to the sentence: “The information provided by the Americans was decisive in countering the Russian advance, of which the army proved incapable. to adapt, due to outdated military concepts.”
Former "Situation-Intelligence-Electronic Warfare" Chief of the Joint Operational Planning Staff, I do not at all share this part of the analysis which is based on an inaccurate "situation assessment" which is, in fact, the conclusion from a biased Atlanticist position, aimed at making the Ukrainians believe that Russia is weak, in order to push Ukraine to resist until the end and let it envisage, with Western help, a victory. Here is my argument:
Until proven otherwise, Russia has not declared a partial and even less general mobilization of its forces to carry out this “special operation”. As part of Operation Z, it has so far used only 12% of its soldiers (professionals or volunteers), 10% of its fighter planes, 7% of its tanks, 5% of its missiles and 4% of its artillery. Everyone will observe that the behavior of the Western ruling elites is, until now, much more feverish and hysterical, than the behavior of the Russian governance, calmer, more placid, more determined, more sure and master of itself, of his action and his speech. These are facts.
Russia has therefore not made use of its immense reserves (reserves which hardly exist any more in the EU). She has more than a week's worth of ammunition as she demonstrates every day in the field. We are not so lucky in the West where the shortage of ammunition, the obsolescence of major equipment, their insufficient maintenance, their low DTO (Technical Operational Availability), the absence of reserves, the lack of training of personnel , the sample nature of modern equipment and many other elements do not allow us to seriously consider, today, a military victory for NATO against Russia. This is the reason why we are content with an “economic” war, hoping to weaken the Russian bear.
Let's come to the quality of the military leadership of the Russian side and compare it to that of the “Western coalition”.
On February 24, the Russians urgently embarked on a pre-emptive “special operation”, preceding by a few days an assault by kyiv forces against the Donbass.
This operation was special because most of the ground operations were going to take place in a sister country and in areas where a large part of the population was not hostile to Russia (Donbass). It was therefore not a classic high-intensity operation against an irreducible enemy, it was an operation in which the technique of the Russian steamroller, crushing the opposing forces, infrastructures and populations by the artillery (as in Germany during the 2nd World War) was impossible to envisage. This operation was special because it was more, in the Donbass, an operation to liberate a friendly population, hostage of the Ukro-Nazi reprisal battalions, and martyred for 8 years ., an operation in which civilian populations and infrastructure were to be spared as much as possible.
This operation was therefore truly special and particularly difficult to conduct, always bearing in mind the contradictory requirements of obtaining victory by advancing and occupying the ground, while sparing the population and the civilian infrastructure and the lives of its own soldiers.
In addition, this operation has been carried out, so far, in numerical inferiority (nearly one against two), while the ratio of forces on the ground required in offensive is 3 against 1, and even 5 against 1 in zone urbanized. The Kievan forces have also perfectly understood the interest of entrenching themselves in the cities and of using the Russian-speaking and Russophile civilian populations as a human shield...
I observe that, on the ground, the Russian forces continue to advance, day after day, slowly but surely against a Ukrainian army which has achieved its general mobilization, which is aided by the West, and which is supposed to fight for his land...
Question the quality of Russian leadership, engaged in a very complex military operation, conducted in numerical inferiority, in which everything must be done to avoid excessive collateral damage. seems to me to be a huge error of assessment. We also all too often lend to the Russians, in the West, war intentions or aims that they never had, just to be able to say that these objectives have not been achieved.
It is true that NATO has never bothered with scruples to crush under the bombs the civilian populations of the countries it attacked (often under false pretexts), to force these countries to ask for mercy. (Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc.). More than a million NATO bombs have been dropped since 1990 on the planet, causing the direct or indirect death of several million individuals in the most total indifference of Western public opinion.
Before coming to the examination of the Western leadership, for comparison with the Russian leadership, let us note that NATO took 78 days of bombardment and 38,000 aerial sorties to force little Serbia to ask for an armistice. Remember that Serbia is 8 times smaller than Ukraine and 6 times less populated, and that it was attacked by NATO, without a UN mandate, in a balance of power of more than ten to one. Has anyone in the West wondered then about the quality of NATO's leadership, which took 78 days to defeat its Serbian adversary with such a balance of power? Has anyone questioned the legality of this action launched under a false pretext (false Racak massacre) and without a UN mandate?
I know well, having measured it myself in the USA for several years, the quality of US leadership, which is also that of NATO and which, let's be honest, is not good, with a few exceptions. In an attempt to assess the quality of their leadership and the chances of victory in a possible conflict, the USA uses two methods:
1 – For High Intensity Warfare, the assessments take place at a large military camp located in Nevada: Fort Irwin.
All the mechanized or armored brigades of the US Army carry out training and control stays in this camp, at regular intervals. I had the privilege of attending many of them. After
three weeks of intensive training in this camp, with all the major
equipment, there is a full-scale exercise to conclude the period, before
the brigade returns to its garrison town. The brigade is opposed to a small regiment equipped with Russian equipment and applying Russian military doctrine. It is called the OPFOR (Opposing Force).
Statistically, according to the admission of the general commanding the camp and director of these high-intensity military exercises, the US brigade loses the game 4 times out of 5 against the Russian OPFOR. Few are the commanders of American brigades who can boast of having prevailed over the “Russian OPFOR” at Fort Irwin.
Asked about this strangeness, the camp commander always told us: “it doesn't matter, the brigade commander learns from his mistakes and will not repeat them in a real situation”. We can always dream…
From my point of view as an outside observer, the failures of US brigade commanders were simply linked to their training, which consists of following patterns and regulations to the letter without ever deviating from them, even if the situation lends itself to the taking. initiatives and/or opportunistic actions, outside the regulations. The “precautionary principle” or “Zero defect philosophy” paralyzes leaders, delays decision-making, cuts momentum, and very often leads to disaster in high-intensity combat.
At Fort Irwin, this disaster is observed in 80% of cases to the detriment of the US brigades. It is a fact.
2 – To train the General Staffs, and try to assess the chances of success in a possible conflict, high-level General Staff exercises (War games) are organized each year. These wargames are also intended, in fact, as rehearsals of military actions which are envisaged. At the end of the chain, there are units from the three Armies to materialize the decisions taken by the US General Staff.
It should be noted that all the wargames envisaged against China have been lost by the US camp, which may explain the caution of the USA in their relations with China.
I myself participated in the spring of 1998 in one of these wargames which was none other than the repetition, before its time, of the Iraq war of 2003.
It should also be noted that wargames against Iran have been lost by the US side and in particular, in 2002, the Millennium Challenge wargame. That year, Marine Corps General Van Riper , who commanded the Iranian OPFOR , sank an entire US aircraft carrier group (19 ships) and 20,000 men in a few hours, before the US leadership realized of what was happening to him.
I won't discuss wargames against Russian forces here because I don't know the results.
If we add to all of the above all the wars lost by the USA from the Vietnam War to the pitiful withdrawal from Afghanistan in October 2021, we can only be very skeptical about the quality of US leadership, so NATO.
In conclusion, I would say that we must be careful before mentioning the shortcomings of Russian leadership. Perhaps it would be appropriate to remove the beam which obstructs the eyes of the Western leadership before evoking the speck which one can find in the eye of the Russian leadership. If the Russian leadership has, in the eyes of some, underestimated the resistance capacity of the Ukrainian Army, the Western leadership has underestimated the Russian resistance capacity to Western economic sanctions and its ability to imagine very effective counter-sanctions which will harm the economies of the EU and weaken them ever more vis-à-vis the USA and in their competition with China.
The Western leadership has also underestimated the support on which Russia could count in the economic war against it (support from the SCO, the BRICS, many countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America and even Gulf countries , gas and oil producers). All of these countries that refuse to sanction Russia are often countries exasperated by the hegemony of the Western unipolar world and by the sanctions that are unilaterally applied to them for the slightest deviation from the rules set by the United States to serve their interests.
On the military level and in view of a nuclear war, Westerners would finally gain by not underestimating the performance of Russian vectors and technologies .
We must be careful before taking at face value and relaying the peremptory declarations and analyzes of Western intelligence services and keeping in mind the superb declaration of Mike Pompeo, former American Secretary of State :
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