Putin's army can't figure out how to use tanks, and the battlefield in Ukraine is littered with burnt wrecks
Jake Epstein
Sat, March 4, 2023
The Ukrainian army fires a captured Russian tank T-80 at the Russian position in Donetsk region, Ukraine, Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2022.
Russia's tank force — once seen as formidable — is being ripped apart by the Ukrainian military.
Western officials say Russia has likely lost up to half of its tanks on the battlefield, if not more.
Military experts told Insider that this is because Russia doesn't know how to use them properly.
Russia's tanks were once seen as fearsome, formidable threats, but the war in Ukraine shows it doesn't know how to use them.
The Russian tank force has taken a beating. US officials have said on more than one occasion that Russia has likely lost as many as half its main battle tanks while fighting in Ukraine, if not more. According to an open-source intelligence analysis by Oryx, more than 1,780 Russian tanks have been destroyed, damaged, captured, or abandoned since Moscow launched its invasion in February 2022.
Russia's staggering tank losses — which include the T-72, T-64, T-80, and T-90 tanks — can be attributed to its failure to provide adequate fire support in combat, military experts told Insider. The Russian tank force has also shown extremely little adaptability and common sense.
These problems were underscored during a recent tank battle near the eastern Ukrainian town of Vuhledar, where Russia lost scores of tanks and armored vehicles. Moscow repeated detrimental mistakes it made during its assault on Kyiv in the early days of the war: it sent columns of tanks straight into Ukrainian ambushes.
This image provided by the Ukrainian Armed Forces and taken in February 2023 shows damaged Russian tanks in a field after an attack on Vuhledar, Ukraine
Just like like last spring — where the long columns were assaulted by the defending Ukrainians — this tactic proved unsuccessful for the Russians in Vuhledar, where it lost over 100 armored vehicles. Moscow's troops appear to have botched the use of their tanks on the battlefield in other instances as well.
Russian tanks have fallen prey to Ukrainian soldiers using anti-tank Javelin missiles because they're hanging out aimless in open fields, with little to no support or protection. At the same time, they've been seen driving straight through minefields and exploding. Due to the design of many of Russia's tanks, a hit can cause the ammunition to detonate, killing the crew as the overpressure blows the top off.
Russia can't seem to integrate its tanks
One serious misstep by Russia's military has been its failure to protect its tanks with a combined-arms approach that provides additional support and integrate its armor with other units.
"There's the structural problem of not having enough dismounted infantry to provide security for tanks," Jeffrey Edmonds, a Russia expert at the Center for Naval Analyses and former US Army armor officer, told Insider. "I'm just not seeing units do what you expect military units to do."
Russia is mostly relying on artillery but would likely benefit from having more air superiority so it can avoid carrying out complicated maneuvers on the battlefield, Marina Miron, a postdoctoral researcher at King's College London's Department of War Studies, told Insider. And it's "questionable" how well Russia's tanks are integrated into its overall operations.
Ukrainian troops fire a Javelin anti-tank missile during drills in Ukraine, February 2022.Ukrainian military/Handout via REUTERS
"I think that they are kind of fighting a war that they were not prepared for, in tactical and operational terms," Miron said. "They have lost a lot of tanks. A lot of them — probably most of them — just because of negligence. And the tanks they are using are in no way superior to what the Ukrainians are using."
Russia and Ukraine have often squared off against each other using the same Soviet-era military equipment, encompassing everything from tanks and infantry fighting vehicles to aircraft. Ukraine has lost less than 500 tanks throughout the conflict, according to an Oryx tally. Russia started off with a larger tank force and thus had more to lose.
A destroyed Russian tank covered by snow stands in the village of Kamyanka, Kharkiv region, Ukraine, Saturday, Jan. 14, 2023.
At the moment, Ukraine is waiting for a wave of advanced Western tanks, including German-made Leopards and British Challenger 2 tanks. These modern systems are better equipped than those that have largely dominated the battlefield so far.
'It seems like they just don't care'
Even without these advanced systems, Kyiv's military has still been able to inflict significant damage on some of Russia's elite tank forces. One prestigious unit, the 1st Guards Tank Army, has suffered heavy losses on multiple occasions while battling against Ukrainian troops.
"The Russians are not very good at using the tanks, and they're not very good at integrating the tanks," Miron said. "They could have used mechanized infantry to protect tanks, but it seems like they just don't care."
Another issue plaguing Russia's tank force has been its lack of creativity or maneuverability. For example, Edmonds explained, Russia has a problem with minefields, as was seen recently in Vuhledar.
Ukrainian servicemen of the 3rd Separate Tank Iron Brigade take part in a drill, not far from the frontlines, in the Kharkiv area, Ukraine, Thursday, Feb. 23, 2023.
Clearing a minefield is a slow, complicated, and deliberate process that involves several steps, but Russian tanks appear to drive right through them. Some of the tanks blow up, some retreat, and some are hit with anti-tank guided missiles like the Javelin, and the process just repeats itself when the Ukrainians lay more mines.
"It's just dumb," Edmonds said. "And you just see them do this over and over again."
"I'm not seeing any tactical-level adaptability," he continued. On one hand, there's no display of basic levels of training, like knowing how to react to contact. Additionally, there's no development or innovation from the Russians, which he attributes in part to Russia's style of warfare — a top-down type of leadership as opposed to something like the ground-level "upwelling" of initiative seen in Western militaries.
"You would think at this point maybe you would see the better application of maneuver and combined arms," Edmonds said of the Russian tactics. "But I'm not seeing it."
Alia Shoaib
Sat, March 4, 2023
An aerial view of Vuhledar, the site of heavy battles with the Russian troops in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, on February 10, 2023
Russian troops keep driving to their death at an infamous crossroads in eastern Ukraine.
Videos show Russian armor being blown up by mines and anti-tank missiles at the intersection.
Russia lost 130 tanks during three weeks of fighting near Vuhledar, per Ukrainian officials.
An infamous crossing point near Vuhledar in Ukraine has become a deadly trap where Russian soldiers keep driving to their death.
The Ukrainian army has planted mines at the intersection, which is just outside of the town of Mykilske in the Donbas region, and Ukrainian forces wait nearby to strike with anti-tank guided missiles, according to Forbes.
Despite more than a dozen tanks and fighting vehicles lying destroyed in the area, Russian forces are apparently continuing to try and drive into it.
Drone footage from Ukraine's military has circulated on social media, appearing to show Russian vehicles being destroyed at the crossing point.
The most recent video claims to show a Russian BMP-2 IFV being destroyed at the crossroads after running over a mine and being hit by an anti-tank-guided missile.
Another video shows a Russian T-72B3 tank and BMP-2 being destroyed by a mine and anti-tank-guided missile.
TIn their bloody winter offensive, the Ukrainian-held mining town of Vuhledar has been a target for Russian forces.
Fighting has raged in the eastern Ukrainian town, and its neighboring villages as Russia has made several failed attempts to capture it.
Ukraine's unexpected use of mines appears to be helping give it the upper hand in fighting in eastern Ukraine.
Along with traditional Soviet mines, Ukraine has also been using US-supplied remote anti-armor mines, which involve firing a shell over an open area that scatters tiny mines widely.
Ukraine's military has claimed that Russia lost at least 130 tanks and armored personnel carriers in a three-week battle in Vuhledar, which Ukrainian officials have described as the biggest tank battle of the war so far. Insider could not independently verify those figures.
J. F. C. Fuller: Heretic, Mystic, and War Scientist
“Fuller is not an easy writer to read or an easy thinker to follow; like all prophets he is often obscure, not seldom inconsequent, too often biased. But what would you? We have only one military prophet; and in as much as the time has not yet come to build his sepulcher, it is perhaps ungracious to cast too many stones at him.”
—Army Quarterly, quoted in Boney Fuller
“In a small way I am trying to do for war what Copernicus did for astronomy, Newton for physics, and Darwin for natural history.”
—J. F. C. Fuller, The Foundations of the Science of War
Crisis is fertile ground for creative thinkers. As the science historian Thomas Kuhn has explained, development of scientific knowledge is characterized by brief moments of explosive questioning, competition of ideas, high levels of collaboration, and a “shift in professional commitments.” These debates are not unique to purely scientific communities; in the early 20th century, a period marked by various military, political, economic, and cultural crises, military thinkers debated the fundamental assumptions of their own craft. John Frederick Charles Fuller stands above the rest in his zeal to change the way war was studied.
Science became authoritative in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, just when Fuller was engaging in the debates. It shouldn’t be surprising that military professionals would look to the language and method of science to guide their study of warfare; soldiers have a long tradition of attempting to impose a systematic approach to their craft. Three things make Fuller somewhat unique, though: a) he set about to making the study of war a scientific endeavor with a tenacity unmatched by anyone before or since; b) his theories have had lasting impact, particularly on the US military; and c) he drew heavily from mystic works. It is the last of these that might surprise students of miltary science.
Mysticism’s incursion into the sciences has been well-chronicled. In second half of the 20th century, scholars began pointing out the parallels between Eastern mystic traditions and modern physics. Drawing on thinkers like Sal Restivo, Sean Lawson has described how that mode of thought found its way into US military doctrine via an influential American soldier and military thinker, John Boyd. Boyd (incidentally a disciple of Fuller), drew on mysticism in his own work.
Theorists, planners, and fighters of war have long appropriated elements of science, including its language, to improve their profession. And although Fuller was largely responsible for that phenomenon among western militaries in the 20th century, his ideas about and prescriptions for modern war, articulated in the second and third decades of the 20th century, were themselves based partly on ideas he enlisted from mystic traditions and the occult.
Mysticism, according to Restivo, is an example of “exploration of states of consciousness.” Those who see a connection between science and mysticism find a liberating mode of thought. Fuller, too viewed science as “liberating” and attempted to employ it in his quest to improve the practice of war. He employed concepts inherent in mystic traditions to answer questions even as he labeled his task a scientific undertaking. Fuller didn’t himself advance the argument that mysticism ought to inform a scientific approach, but there was a creeping influence of mysticism on Fuller’s military thinking, regardless of whether Fuller recognized that influence or not.
Fuller was a prolific writer. Less known among his collected works are three books that summarize his interests in mysticism and the occult: The Star in the West (1907), Yoga (1925), and The Secret Wisdom of the Qabalah (1937). These complement his main treatises on “scientific warfare:” Reformation of War (1923), and The Foundations of the Science of War (1926). Though he wrote many more volumes (Anthony Trythall’s bibliography lists 45 books; in addition to the reams of journal articles, military tracts, and popular press pieces). In those writings, he laid out his philosophy of idealism, the concept of cycles, creation, and equilibrium, and the imposition of numbers on problems, including a three-fold order to the universe— all ideas borrowed from his mystic influences.
Fuller saw himself as unconventional. Like all would-be reformers, he had a rebellious streak that he somewhat proudly described as heretical, others more condemningly as insubordinate. By his own account, he began thinking about a scientific application to war in 1911, during which time he was commander of a Territorial Army battalion. He soon became an instructor at the Staff College at Camberley and in 1915 was sent to France as a wartime operations officer. During the war he honed his ideas about how to make war more scientific in study and in practice.
His quest was marked by departures from conventional thinking. At the end of 1915, for example, he wrote an article for the Journal of the Royal United Services Institute that criticized the British Field Service Regulations in its opening paragraph. Noting that the FSR referred to “the fundamental principles of war,” he then declared:
…to publish a revised edition of Euclid and forget the definitions, is to be guilty of somewhat serious omissions; nevertheless, throughout the 434 pages of this text-book on the science and the art of war…no further mention is made as to what these principles are.
It was a justified criticism that laid the groundwork for his later, and more complete, elucidations on the scientific method of studying war. Not only did it demonstrate Fuller’s systematic thinking, but the article introduced the notion that Allied victory depended on penetrating the German line. British military strategy had been, whether ideal or designed in the face of sad reality, to wear down the enemy front. To pierce it was heresy.
During the war, Fuller served in a number of positions at home and in France. While on the continent, he became convinced that the tank represented a future of armored warfare, one that was well-suited to application of the principles he was discovering. Despite three books to his name and several military journal articles (in addition to various occult pieces and a book dedicated to Britain’s most famous occultist, Aleister Crowley) his 1923 book, Reformation of War, was the most complete outline of his view that “all forms of warfare are founded on a common science.” He was convinced that “the jar of science has been fished up from out the deep, and its seal has been broken, and no English contempt for others will coax the Jinn back into his bottle.” Fuller analogized war with any other human endeavor, expressing the positivist view that it would improve but never disappear. Reformation became a best seller.
Long after the British Army had returned home and begun preparing for peace, Fuller was still at work articulating the principles of war, which he believed could be studied in a scientific way. In 1926 he published The Foundations of the Science of War, in which he added to and elaborated on the principles outlined in his previous work. Foundations represented a highly systematic approach to war, but Fuller characteristically managed to offend many of his contemporaries and superiors, exposing the “prevailing ignorance” of the British Army.
In response to his critics’ view that war could never be other than an art, Fuller replied, “poetry, painting, and music may be arts, but they are based on the sciences of language, of optics, and of acoustics.” Foundations, which Fuller considered his magnum opus, was a mammoth attempt to classify his principles and derive some universal laws from their application that could serve to guide planners of the next war. “Though the scientific method has never as yet been applied to the history of war, truth always exists either openly or hidden.” Fuller was devoted to revealing that truth.
He found truth in a variety of sources. Yoga, qabalah, and the occult all uncovered mysteries and revealed patterns of thinking that translated into a deeper understanding of the battlefield. In Yoga he identifies the law in force and explains the dual nature of fallen man.
The duality found in Fuller’s mysticism is a key to his scientific study of war. In Reformation, he introduces his idea that man’s becoming an active force is a precondition of his freedom (p. 277). In Foundations, he elaborates on the concept, taking as his “archetypical organization” the human body itself, possessed of a control system to exert forces, which come in a pair. In war, it is up to the commander to employ these forces, an active one to exert pressure, or a stable one to resist it (p. 83). Force was at the heart of his conception of war, which was nothing more than the application of force as a political instrument (1926, p. 78). His willingness to divide force into two types emanates from his mystic persuasion.
Even more obvious to students of Fuller than his application of duality, and probably any other aspect of mysticism for that matter, was his tendency to see things in patterns of three, which often invited ridicule from his contemporaries. In The Star in the West, for instance, he tells his reader of the three great commandments: “Know Thyself, Be Thyself, Honour Thyself,” and he divides all of human understanding into three spheres: mysticism, idealism, and realism.
In his treatments of yoga and qabalah, Fuller frequently refers to trinities, both of spiritual and philosophical things. This proclivity is evident in his war theorizing, as well. In Reformation, he mentions three types of war, and three categories of conquest , but he isn’t wedded to the number three, nor does he attribute anything significant or universal to it.
It was in Foundations that he really found his attraction to trinities for all manner of understanding war, dedicating an entire chapter to it. Chapter 3, “The Threefold Order,” opens thusly:
I can establish a foundation [to the study of war] so universal that it may be considered axiomatic to knowledge in all its forms… I shall be able to bring the study of war into the closest relationship with the study of all other subjects.
Important elements often occured in threes as Fuller saw them. War was fought, for example, on land, in the air, and by sea. Ground forces were organized into infantry, cavalry, and artillery. But Fuller also offered a more esoteric, and thus more foundational, explanation:
A does not exist apart from B, neither does B exist apart from A, nor can their relationships exist apart from either, since all three exist as a trinity in unity, and it is this triunity which enables us to know. Knowledge is, in fact, based on the universal inference of a threefold order — this is my cogito ergo sum.
Fuller also found mystic concepts like the Unknowable and anti-materialism useful in describing war in a scientific way. Among those that have survived are the disorganization as a weapon, and “creative destruction,” popularized among Americans in the 1980s by Boyd.
War was an important part of the creation cycle, according to Fuller, who wrote in Reformation that “the true purpose of war is to create and not to destroy” and described war as “the god of creative destruction, that grim synthetic iconoclast.” It is interesting to note here that one of John Boyd’s most well-known essays is titled, “Destruction and Creation,” and draws on similar mystic concepts.
Fuller lived during a time of remarkable paradigm shift. After his military career he cited the Theory of Relativity as being responsible for an “extraordinary change between the scientific outlook of the present century and that of the last.” In the old order, “the struggle with the rationalist conception of the world was how to find a place for freedom in a world where all things were determined by law.” In the new scientific order, men would “struggle…to find a place for authority and order in a world of pure chance or pure accident.” He saw himself as a scientific pioneer, one who both recognized the shift and was intellectually equipped to find the order lost in the chaos of war.
There can be no doubt that J. F. C. Fuller was an intellectual giant in the realm of military theory. Lawson calls him “the world’s leading theorist of mechanized warfare” and “Britain’s foremost military thinker.” Historians generally agree that Fuller had a profound impact on German doctrine and tactics in World War II , on the tactics displayed in the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, and on US Maneuver Warfare doctrine that emerged as a result of Boyd’s work, which culminated in the 1991 Gulf War. His works and their derivatives are still to be found in the curricula of the major US war colleges. Trythall insists that Fuller “will have a lasting relevance principally because he was above all else a brilliant and critical student of war.”
Fuller earned his reputation as a superb scholar of war because he has been proven right more than wrong. He was unconventional, a self-described heretic, who sought new ways to think about war and execute it. His theories of warfare were forged amid the chaos and calamity of World War I, which caused him and others to “[partake] of strategically black masses and tactical witches’ Sabbaths.” He made it his goal to move beyond alchemy and superstitions to devise a science of war.
Ironically, the preeminent war scientist was deeply committed to Eastern mystic traditions, and its elements crept in to his work on the task. Yet it isn’t entirely contradictory, since, for Fuller, all systems are but roads to one goal, which was a better understanding of the universe. War was merely Fuller’s experience in that universe.
The mystic systems Fuller studied — qabalah, yoga, and early in his career Aleister Crowley’s occult versions of them — influenced him in very apparent ways. They infused his outlook with elements of idealism, including notions of the Unknowable and immaterialism; they shaped his belief in cycles of chaos, and of the power of organization; and they instilled in him a predilection to see things in sets of twos and threes.
Writing of the genealogy of modern law, David Faigman has pointed out, “however reputable science might be today, its roots lie deep in the mystical practices and superstitions of the past.”
How true for war.
J.F.C. Fuller
Hachette Books, 1960 - Biography & Autobiography - 336 pages
1 Review
A brief and meteoric life (356-323 B.C.) Alexander was the greatest of all conquerors in the course of world history. He had a small army--seldom exceeding 40,000 men--but a constellation of bold, revolutionary ideas about the conduct of war and the nature of government. J. F. C. Fuller, one of the foremost military historians of the twentieth-century, was the first to analyze Alexander in terms of his leadership as a general. He has divided his study into two parts. The first, entitled The Record, describes the background of the era, Alexander's character and training, the structure of the Macedonian army, and the geography of the world that determined the strategy of conquest. The second part, The Analysis, takes apart the great battles, from Granicus to Hydaspes, and concludes with two chapters on Alexander's statesmanship. In a style both clear and witty, Fuller imparts the many sides to Alexander's genius and the full extent of his empire, which stretched from India to Egypt.
The Military Papers and Correspondence of Major General J.F.C. Fuller 19-16 -1933, £20.00 to members.
Army Records Society, 394 pp. footnotes, bibliog. index.
ISBN 978 0 7509-8365 5
Professor Alaric Searle
The Army Records Society has been publishing an annual volume for its members every year since 1985 on a wide range of topics from the Napoleonic Wars to events in Kenya 1953 – 1955.
‘Boney’ Fuller’s papers and correspondence is the fourth book on aspects of the Great War published by the since 2014. (Others comprise: Military Intelligence from Germany, 1906 – 1914, The Diary of Corporal Vince Schurliffe 1914 – 1918, and Liaison: General Pierre Vallieres at British Headquarters 1916-1917).
Both in this work and previous biographies, Fuller emerges here as a thinking and questioning soldier and student on military matters. His drive, cocky intemperance, made him a difficult subordinate. What also emerges is that like Henry Wilson and others similarly self-assured he was a gossip.
One cannot fail to recognise the length and breadth of the editor’s research in locating Fuller’s widely, internationally, spread papers. Nor ignore Searle’s insight in the introductions to each chapter. That said, I would have welcomed far greater editorial input into contextualising his correspondence and his thinking and real importance as a thinker and theorist on military matters and science. His ideas, his concepts, frequently spelled out in letters to Liddell Hart, are often complex. The pair shared thinking one with another, in discussion, disagreeing and correcting praising and criticising each other’s work.
Of the two, LH - initially the student military thinker - and Fuller the true professional - finally both emerge from their collaborative correspondence with little credit and as and hugely egotistical.
As their relationship deteriorates, Fuller advises LH that his book on Sherman is “… big. But not so good as his your ‘Scipio’, and “… in my opinion the book wants to be condensed”. He also notes, “I believe anyone can write history if they collect sufficient facts …” Fullers concluding sentence rings perceptive bells; “… take the present official history. Facts are all correct but the atmosphere of reality is completely wanting, as a matter of fact one gets a far better psychological picture of the last war from novels than from Edmunds”
The work of an editor on his subject’s letters and papers is far from easy. However, I judge that, frequently, understanding the thinking Fuller outlined his papers and correspondence demands considerably greater editorial input and contextualisation. Matters of strategy, tactics and forward looking military thinking are complex and this book have benefited from greater editorial input about these areas than is provided by Professor Searle.
Fuller was a man of many parts and, perhaps understandably, the book concludes in 1933, when he left the army. Ahead lay membership of the British Union of Fascists and related bodies, admiration, if not for Hitler, then for his pre-war implementation of Fuller’s concepts. Indeed, he was considered fortunate not to have been interned during World War 2. Unlike Henry Williamson, Fuller seems fortunate to be remembered for his writing and influential thinking, rather than other aspects of his nature and what many, including contemporaries, judged somewhat more than a flirtation with the dark side.
David Filsell
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