Ukraine's 2023 Spring Counteroffensive and why it's arguably the greatest military failure of the 21st century, a minor effortpost. Modified from original content, prepared to own some lib. Note that this writeup draws from media sources that don't give libs a tummy ache.
Definition of Failure
For starters, my criteria for failure is not kill/death ratio. No one can tell how many soldiers have died on either side with any reliability. If you read Michael Kofman and Oryx and the brOSINT crowd, then Ukraine is winning 10:1. If you listen to Russian telegram then it's 1:10 the other way around. Maybe in a decade or two there will be more reliable numbers but for now, I consider casualty rates to be not a good way to analyze the conflict. Speculating about casualty rates is a pointless exercise in unfalsifiable propaganda and fog of war.
A better criteria for failure is how much a failure prevents the side from achieving their actual objectives. The point of war isn't to kill a bunch of people, it's to actually achieve something (see Clausewitz's On War). Along the same lines, the stronger the state is, the less is actually at stake during a war, and the less failure actually matters. As such, my criteria for military failure is that such a failure materially changes the course of a war.
Other Contenders for Greatest Failure
A good object lesson on the latter is the fall of Kabul in 2021. The Afghanistan National Army got rinsed by the Taliban in a matter of weeks after the American withdrawal, clearly a real black eye for American prestige. However, the American military industrial complex was ready to move on anyway, the American electorate doesn't really give a shit about foreign policy, and it was the Afghanistan National Army that suffered the actual consequences, not American troops. Biden had a few weeks of bad headlines but no one even remembered this defeat in the midterms, let alone 2024. Afghanistan 2021 is an example of military failure, but outside Afghanistan it didn't affect much. Best case, the ANA would have held out for a year or so before losing to the Taliban. As such, this event is a contender for biggest military failure of the 21st century but I don't think it wins.
Another possible contender is 2006 Israel-Lebanon war as this punctured the myth of Israeli invincibility and Hezbollah walked away with a lot of credibility. However, considering the damage to Lebanon and the relative lack of damage to Israel, I think this is more of a draw.
Another contender is the early part of the Chechen insurgency after Russia fucked up Grozny. The Russians got rinsed for a few years with a number of high profile assassinations of pro-Russian politicians/appointees. However, this was mostly extrajudicial murder, which I consider different from military conflict. While this was ugly and full of awful war crimes, I don't think the Russian failures to achieve objectives in Chechnya fall in the same category as the other military failures.
Strategic Setting of the 2023 Counteroffensive
To appreciate the depth of the failure of the 2023 counteroffensive, it's useful to look at the strategic layer as it was in late 2022 early 2023.
Many factors in the Russia-Ukraine war have incentivized Russia to conduct a war of attrition. This is important because Ukrainian planners had no reason not to understand this.
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Russia is a bigger state with larger population, more materiel, more soldiers. They had/have domestic military capacity that far outstrips that of Ukraine. All else being equal, you'd expect Russia to pursue a war of attrition because they can make more stuff and handle more losses than their opponent.
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By early-mid 2023, the Russian economy hadn't collapsed because of sanctions. There weren't any signs of their economy/productive capacity being on a clock, so they could take their time.
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The Russian withdrawal from Kherson/Kharkiv region in fall 2022 didn't lead to Russia making some peace offer to lock in gains. Rather, they did a partial mobilization in Sept 2022. This indicates intent to do war of attrition.
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In contrast, Ukraine had/has much more limited domestic military production capacity, meaning they were and are very reliant on outside interests (whatever the West gives them). This puts them in a real bind: on the one hand, strategically since Russia is executing a war of attrition, Ukraine should be carefully husbanding their forces. On the other hand, politically Ukrainian politicians needed to show the West that it was worth it to support Ukraine. Fighting a war of attrition "properly" by falling back doesn't look good on the news, especially to the Western electorate which is particularly bird brained on foreign policy and can't understand anything that isn't colours on a map. Note that the political constraint on Ukrainian decision makers is critical to understand and again incentivizes you, the reader, to read Clausewitz.
Another important aspect of Western support is that many Ukrainian troops received training in the West. They weren't just being trained on Western armaments, they were being trained 'NATO style'. During the heady days of 2022-2023, how often did you hear about the difference between Soviet doctrine with its endless hordes of poorly armed conscripts, the centralized command and control military leadership that doesn't let soldiers and brigade commanders think for themselves, versus the nimble, highly trained though fewer in number NATO style forces. This description of doctrinal difference is mostly just chauvinism and racism, but there is actually a salient difference in military doctrine between Russia and NATO/America.
The biggest one is that since Vietnam (and arguably earlier in Korea), America/NATO has strongly relied on air power. Not just air power, but air supremacy (or at worst air superiority). This is a foundational aspect of pretty much all major American/NATO combat operations since the 80s. Desert Storm, Afghanistan/Iraq/Yemen/Libya - all of these were strongly driven by air power. This is reflected in NATO training and trainers. If you're a NATO guy training Ukrainian soldiers, you're going to train what you know, which is air power focused combat. The US has lots of COIN experience (including a lot of failure, but failure is nevertheless a teacher), but literally no experience in peer conflict as what the Ukrainian military is facing with Russia. To be fair, Russia doesn't exactly have peer conflict experience prior to 2022 either, but there appears to be more continuity between the Soviet military doctrine and that of modern Russia than between US/NATO in the 50s and today. The limits of this type of training can be seen in accounts by Ukrainian soldiers as reported in Western/Ukrainian press.
In any case, the key thing here is that the Ukrainian military was being taught to fight using a military doctrine that centers on air supremacy when the Ukrainian military is at best in a state of air parity with Russia, more often air incapability. Zelensky was asking for no fly zones and sweet Western jets from day 1 but he never got that from the West, just old Soviet jets as hand me downs. At no point has Ukraine ever approached the kind of air power required to implement NATO doctrine.
The last strategic thing that is important is that by the end of 2022 it is apparent that both Western and Russian ISR is really, really good. It is extremely hard to hide from either sides satellites. Mass movements of troops and staging of troops make for obvious groupings that get blown the fuck out.
Consider Desert Storm. The Coalition enjoyed a 6-month buildup period during which they were entirely unmolested before they smashed into Iraq. Nothing like that is remotely possible by either side in Ukraine. There are too many missiles, drones, satellites, AI image recognition/pattern recognition, etc. for large amounts of troops and associated logistics to gather unmolested. This was evident after the first month when Russia was driving around Kiev getting their columns bombed, but the same phenomenon persists to this day. It's really hard to do maneuver warfare when everything you do above the company level is spotted.
Strategic Summary
All of the above informs the strategic environment that Ukraine was operating in. They have limited forces against an enemy that has much more, their elite troops have been trained by trainers that don't know what it's like to not just be able to call in airstrikes at will, they are under pressure by politicians to get something done and not just fall back, and they are doubly under political pressure because in autumn of 2022 Russia did fall back from Kherson/Kharkiv, making it look to the uninitiated like Ukraine had turned the tide already.
To anyone paying attention, the battle of Bakhmut was raging all that autumn/winter, but that battle didn't change the colours on a map much so it was easy to say that it was a stalemate or that Ukraine was winning there too.
The Counteroffensive
So, because they were buckling to political pressure, hubris, or taking a calculated risk, Ukraine starts gearing up for The Counteroffensive. I'm capitalizing The Counteroffensive now, because this was a big media event.
All winter, the Western news starts gearing up about how fucking awesome it's going to be when spring arrives and Ukraine launches the Counteroffensive. Everyone is really fucking excited. Every dick in Raytheon Acres in North Virginia was perpetually turgid at minimum.
The minimal aim was of The Counteroffensive was to get to Tokmak, with the maximal aim to cut the land bridge to Crimea and retake the Zaporhizia nuclear power plant. Obviously none of that happened. Not that territory is the be all end all scorecard, but ultimately 2023 ended with Russia taking approximately twice as much territory as Ukraine re-took during that calendar year. But that's getting ahead of the story.
The Counteroffensive starts making the news in December/January, reaching a fever pitch by the spring. My favourite Western propaganda during this time was about how great the Leopards were going to be - there was that awesome meme of leopard animals jumping out of the snow with Leopard tanks. That particular meme article sticks in my head, but it was just one of many in the same vein. While I'm making fun of the hubris of UK nitwit military analysis, even the Ukrainian military/state were doing hype videos about The Counteroffensive.
Telegraphing the Counteroffensive
The Counteroffensive was unbelievably telegraphed. Even appreciating the difficulty of moving large masses of troops and armor to staging areas in secret, the Ukrainian state literally made ads for it. Naturally, the entire fall/winter Russia was building defences in depth: minefields, dragons teeth, trenches, tank traps, etc. None of this was a surprise, obviously. All this kind of shit is visible from space. The following story https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65615184 is from mid May 2023 so presumably actual military intelligence knew about the level of Russian defences earlier. Except we don't have to presume, because documents from February 2023 about how pessimistic the Pentagon was were leaked in April 2023 .
Finally, 4 months after that pessimistic assessment by the Pentagon, Ukraine stops edging and launches The Counteroffensive. Unsurprisingly, it breaks like water on rock. Who would have thought that charging headlong into the most heavily mined area on earth while under massed artillery fire when you have next to no air support would go wrong. Here we see the weakness of Western/NATO military doctrine - effective at COIN/sub-peer conflict, not effective at peer conflict.
The iconic image of the failure was the mass of burning Bradleys/Leopards, clustered together after failing to punch through a mine field. Note the comment about changing strategy to smaller groups with more modest goals, less big arrow offensives and maneuver warfare. If only there had been some way to predict that.
By September there wasn't even bluster about The Counteroffensive actually succeeding in its aims. 90 days into The Counteroffensive, Ukraine's deputy defence minister stated, "There is an offensive in several directions and in certain areas. And in some places, in certain areas, this first line was broken through." In other words, in some places the first (of 3) lines were broken through. Damn.
Outcomes
All told, the Ukrainian military pissed away its 'most elite' units chasing the high of fall 2022 for the benefit of Ukrainian/Western politicians. They did so by attempting a frontal assault against the most fortified, mined and entrenched area on earth with at best air incapability after telegraphing with literal advertisements what exactly they were going to do. They used a military doctrine that was wholly inappropriate to the type of army they had, spurred by the same Western political interests that have consistently underestimated Russia as a country and as a military (orcish gas station with nukes). The massive publicity of this failure helped drive public sentiment for a negotiated ceasefire between russia and ukraine from 57% in favour of ceasfire in fall 2022 to 70% in Feb 2024 to ~90% during spring of 2024.
Overall, despite political constraints on Ukrainian decision makers and pressure for The Counteroffensive and the need to Do Something, the choice to risk and fail at this scale was an unforced own-goal that has since eroded Ukraine's ability to act strategically even further. Since then, Ukraine pissed even further soldiers and materiel into the failed Kursk offensive while the Donetsky front has collapsed. Troops that could have been used to hold a stalemate were wasted on mines and dragon teeth, and Western opinion has turned further against Ukraine. Despite the attempted blitz into Kursk, Ukraine will never retake strategic initiative as they had it for a brief moment in fall/early winter 2022. They ground down their existing forces while degrading their ability to beg for new ones from the West. The abject failure of The Counteroffensive was clear to the general public by late summer 2023, and October 7, 2024 was the nail in the coffin for Ukraine when the bird brained Western electorate turned their skull measurement devices to Palestinians and Arabs.
This concludes my TED talk.
is this Jewishness?
you have to use this emoji for puns like that