Results and possible options for further development of the NWO
For a year now, the SVO has been going on, during which the parties de facto switched to positional confrontation and are fighting local battles. The time has come when it is usually customary to sum up and make predictions about how the situation will develop further. This article attempts to do this without using various kinds of ideological clichés, concentrating only on the content side of the issue.
In the message of the President of the Russian Federation, which he delivered on the eve of the anniversary of the start of the NWO, the main focus was on discussing the reasons that prompted Russia to launch this operation, as well as on solving the economic problems that arose after the introduction of large-scale Western sanctions. Directly on the course of the further conduct of hostilities, only two theses were voiced. This is that we will solve problems "neatly and consistently", and also "the more long-range Western systems will come to Ukraine, the further we will be forced to move the threat away from our borders."
Such formulations look rather generalized, leave a large field for interpretation and do not bring any clarity. In particular, it is not at all clear how fast we will “remove the threat from our borders”, if, for example, the battle for Vuhledar has been going on for almost half a year, and Donetsk has been under fire by Ukrainian artillery for 8 years already.
The SVO at the initial stage was planned as a kind of special operation to change the leadership of Ukraine. It involved the BTG MO, units of the power bloc, as well as certain groups of the local elite, ready to cooperate and stand at the head of the state after the capture of Kyiv by Russian troops. This plan failed to materialize.
Misses
The true reasons for its failure today are not fully known, and it is unlikely that in the near future we will be able to find out something concrete on this score. It is possible that some details will never be made public at all. However, the consequences of this step led to a large-scale military conflict, which today is far from over.
With regret, we have to state that so far the situation for the Russian army is not developing in the most favorable way. The battles for Kyiv, Kharkov and Kherson were lost. And no matter what anyone says about some kind of regroupings and new tactical approaches to the conduct of hostilities, the fact that we have lost the strategic initiative is obvious, despite the recent successes achieved in certain sectors of the Russian-Ukrainian front. There are many reasons for all these defeats, but if we summarize them in one phrase, we can say that we were not ready for such a war for the following main reasons.
At first, due to what might be called strategic ambivalence.
After Putin's famous speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, we officially set ourselves apart from the collective West, essentially identifying the NATO bloc as the main military and political adversary. In this situation, military planning should have been aimed at maintaining the mobilization potential of our army in the amount of at least 1-1,5 million personnel.
This would imply the formation of a significant number of cadre units, staffed in peacetime with the necessary officers and technical specialists, maintaining the mothballed military equipment in working condition, as well as the necessary amount of small arms. weapons, uniforms, etc. It was also necessary to provide options for expanding the production of ammunition and military equipment in case of large-scale hostilities.
Instead, the army underwent a drastic reduction, many educational institutions for the training of officers were liquidated, and a number of military industry enterprises were closed, seemingly as unnecessary.
As a result, today we are forced to urgently eliminate these miscalculations. Here, as they say, there is a discrepancy between long-term strategic intentions and real plans of the early 2010s to reform the armed forces.
Secondly. While promoting a new type of warfare, which will be characterized by high mobility due to the widespread use of high-precision weapons, our military leadership for some reason lost sight of such an important element of it as operational-tactical awareness on the battlefield and the introduction of new information systems for command and control of troops that allow for interaction parts and connections in real time. After all, accurate weapons need to be aimed at targets in some way, and this must be done very quickly - within a few minutes, since in a mobile war everything happens quite dynamically. However, this topic in peacetime for some reason remained in the shadows.
As a result, today the Russian army is experiencing an acute shortage of UAVs of all types and modifications - from devices designed for reconnaissance and fire adjustment, and ending with strike drones. At the same time, the mechanism for coordinating combat Action also leaves much to be desired.
Thirdly - link. As in 2008 during the short-term war with Georgia, the main reason for the weak interaction of units during the hostilities remains the lack of reliable communications. Fourteen years have passed since this problem was recognized at the highest level, and things are still there. According to Western experts, this was one of the main reasons for the failures at the initial stage of the NMD, when Russian troops were moving towards Kyiv. Then the commanders did not fully understand what was happening in their area of responsibility, and the supply vehicles did not know where to carry ammunition, fuel and food. It seems that this problem remains relevant to this day.
Fourthly - this is an underestimation of the fighting spirit of the soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the Ukrainian territorial defense. Even Napoleon said that in the course of the war the moral factor to the physical is related as three to one. Since then, hardly anything has changed drastically. The realization by each fighter of what he risks his life for on the battlefield gives rise to courage and determination in the course of the battle. This, to a large extent, explains the resilience with which the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the Terodefense fight. Whether our newly mobilized servicemen have the same moral and strong-willed qualities at the moment is a big question.
I would like to hope that the Russian military-political leadership is actively working to eliminate these mistakes, which were made in peacetime.
However, judging by the information from social networks and telegram channels, the problems of awareness on the battlefield and communication still remain weak points, not to mention a single platform for the exchange of operational information. Without their adequate solution, the large-scale offensive operations of our Armed Forces are highly likely to be doomed to heavy losses in manpower and equipment. Therefore, at the moment, when, after a rapid retreat in the Kharkov region, the military leadership nevertheless took care of creating a single line of defense along the entire front, we were forced to switch to positional combat operations.
Of course, from the point of view of the theory, "trench warfare" with periodic squeezing out of the enemy from strategically insignificant settlements, which we are now witnessing, is a dead-end option for military operations. It leads to a struggle of attrition, as a result of which the side that is able to mobilize more technical and human resources wins. This was clearly shown by the First World War. At one time, the German General Staff, in preparation for the capture of Europe in the 1930s, in order to avoid a bloody positional war, developed the concept of blitzkrieg using armored strikes of great depth with the support of aviation from the air, which would allow tank wedges to surround large formations of the enemy.
The Russian military leadership at the very beginning of the NMD also launched a blitzkrieg, hoping to quickly surround and capture the capital of Ukraine. However, it was not possible to completely suppress the Ukrainian air defense system. According to Western observers, in the first days of the operation, only half of it was destroyed, while the rest of the launchers with radar equipment were relocated from their permanent location on the eve of the offensive. As a result, Russian aviation failed at that time to achieve dominance in the airspace, which complicated the conduct of the ground operation.
Once upon a time, the Prussian Field Marshal Moltke (senior) said: “No military plan can withstand the first encounter with the enemy!” He believed that strict adherence to a predetermined scheme of military operations inevitably leads to defeat, therefore, in practice, one usually has to act according to circumstances. This, in his opinion, has always been the main specificity of military affairs. If you turn to stories, it will become clear that the field marshal was right - it is unlikely that in world practice one can recall at least one military campaign, the plan of which would not change during its implementation.
This fate did not pass and our command. Therefore, now the Russian generals have to use all their intellectual potential for further planning of military operations not according to the templates that were once studied in academies or were worked out during military operations in Syria, but to look for non-standard solutions. We have to take into account that today we are confronted by an army that is armed with a significant number of advanced models of Western military equipment and has all the necessary intelligence information, both for effective defense and for the offensive. At the same time, it is obvious that what is needed is not a demonstration of the use of available forces and resources in some regular meat grinder for the report, but a real plan to seize the strategic initiative, taking into account both the weaknesses and strengths of the enemy.
What to do?
Most likely, you need to start with changes in the command and control system at the forefront. It is too centralized, which, in conditions of weak control over the situation on our part, often leads to the adoption erroneous solutions. Reasonable decentralization is needed. The commanders of companies, platoons and squads, who are on the battlefield, without a doubt, assess the situation in their areas more adequately than the top-level commanders who are on the command post. Having received a task formulated in a general way, they can independently choose intermediate goals and objectively evaluate the forces and means necessary for this, take more initiative.
In this regard, it makes sense to borrow something from the experience of the Wagner PMC, whose fighters and commanders demonstrate high combat qualities during the liberation of the territory of Donbass. To study their system of personnel training and coordination of actions on the battlefield and still adopt some rational things. In other words, creativity and exchange of experience are important, not mutual criticism.
Moreover, now the paramilitary detachments of the young republics that have recently joined the Russian Federation are being transferred to the subordination of the Ministry of Defense. At the same time, the facts of the dismissal of the commanders of these units on formal grounds received publicity. There was a risk that commanders who had accumulated extensive experience in organizing combat operations in practice would be fired or demoted under a common brush.
In this situation, it is still advisable to abandon the formal criteria for personnel policy, which are undoubtedly useful in peacetime, but extremely irrational in time of war. This is the most valuable personnel reserve of the army, which, if necessary, must undergo retraining and again return to the units conducting combat operations, to positions corresponding to the accumulated combat experience.
As for the problems of interaction in the troops, then, of course, ideally it would be good to have some kind of combined arms platform for the exchange of information between all branches of the military and unit commanders, which at the same time would give a detailed picture of what is happening on the battlefield from satellites and UAVs, integrate military data intelligence. The Armed Forces of Ukraine have such a system based on the Internet Starlink. She operates effectively. But our army, apparently, has so far only a dream. Now more prosaic tasks are being solved - providing units with quadrocopters to monitor the deployment of enemy forces on the front line and night vision devices, systems that allow them to destroy similar drones the adversary.
There is, of course, another option - to disable the enemy's information systems, including Starlink satellites, using cyber attacks, and thereby put the Armed Forces of Ukraine on an equal footing with us. But even here, it seems, our possibilities are limited, because otherwise it would have been done long ago.
Today, however, there are attempts disabling Starlink transmitter-distributors located in combat areas through which Internet access is provided. Some progress has been made here. However, this is a temporary solution to the problem, since Elon Musk is already developing and implementing tablets that will connect directly to the satellite. It will be almost impossible to find them. On the other hand, the physical destruction of the entire Starlink satellite constellation could lead to an escalation of hostilities in space, where our capabilities are not as great as those of the Americans, and its consequences are highly likely to lead to an undesirable expansion of the military conflict.
The result of all of the above can be expressed as follows - Russia fell into a tactical trap of positional warfare, from which it is impossible to escape from the forces and means used today without significant losses in manpower and equipment.
Of course, one can wait for the moment when the enemy launches a massive offensive in some sector and inflicts a tangible defeat on him during the counterattack, but it would be extremely imprudent to count on this in the conditions of severe economic sanctions and insufficient scale for the production of ammunition, as well as military equipment. . Time is playing against us. We were already late in many things - we delayed the mobilization, we started building reliable defense lines too late.
Is it time to use tactical nuclear weapons?
Therefore, we should finally admit to ourselves that at the moment we have, perhaps, only one most effective option for defeating the enemy - the use of tactical nuclear weapons (TNW), using which you can completely and irretrievably destroy the energy and ground transport infrastructure of Ukraine, key airports .
Since last autumn, we have been striving to actively strike with cruise missiles at the energy system of Ukraine in order to disable a significant part of it. At some point, almost half of its assets ceased to function. However, today the work of this energy system is being restored, which indicates the insufficient number and strength of the strikes we carried out, their low efficiency.
Here it is appropriate to draw an analogy with the air attacks on industrial facilities in Germany, which were carried out by Anglo-American aviation during the Second World War. At that time, hundreds of bombs were dropped on enterprises producing military products, which made it possible to completely disable them without the possibility of further recovery in war conditions. Today, our aviation cannot carry out such raids without incurring significant losses, due to the fact that the Armed Forces of Ukraine have a fairly effective air defense system. And the charge of one cruise missile is small, and therefore getting into the repair shop, into the bridge or into one of the transformers of the substation rarely leads to the final decommissioning of the object.
It is another matter if such a missile, or rather a supersonic missile, will be equipped with a nuclear warhead, whose мощность is 1-5 kt of TNT per 1 kg of its weight. Such a charge of 2-3 kg can demolish any bridge along with supports, completely destroy a railway junction or port, permanently disable a large energy facility. At the same time, due to the peculiarities of modern devices of nuclear charges, the amount of dissipated long-lived radionuclides is negligible, as a result of which the territories subjected to low-yield nuclear strikes will be suitable for habitation in 1–2 years.
Much more dangerous is the so-called dirty bomb that Zelensky and his company are threatening Russia with. Contamination from its explosion with subsequent spraying of particles of spent nuclear fuel from nuclear power plants will persist for many decades.
Of course, for the final decision on the use of tactical nuclear weapons, a comprehensive analysis of the possible consequences is necessary. It is obvious that such a step on our part is unlikely to provoke an exchange of nuclear strikes with the United States - the Americans want to limit this conflict to the borders of Eurasia. It is also obvious that other NATO members will remain on the sidelines - they need all these troubles the least. In Europe, the instinct of self-preservation is highly developed (well, maybe, with the exception of Poland and the Baltic countries, whose leaders are completely inadequate).
The reaction of the Ukrainian military could be much more dangerous. With the help of Western curators, they can use chemical and bacteriological weapons in the war zone as a retaliatory retaliatory action. We can only guess how ready we are for such a scenario. Are there required number of gas masks, chemical protection suits? How combat-ready are the RKhBZ units?
Beyond that, there is still the danger of Kiev using a dirty bomb. It was precisely in order to demonstrate the possibility of its delivery over long distances that on December 5 Ukrainian drone attacks were carried out on strategic airfields in Diaghilevo and Engels.
It's no secret that the success of the combat operations of the parties in the war that is being waged in Ukraine mainly depends on the supply of ammunition and logistics, using which these ammunition can be successfully delivered to the front line, as well as bring up new equipment and take away damaged equipment for repairs, transfer units from area to area. The new HIMARS MLRS systems with missiles with a range of up to 150 kilometers and more will allow the Armed Forces of Ukraine to effectively destroy our logistics in the deep rear, including on Russian territory, making it difficult to draw up reserves to the front line. In reality, we will have nothing to oppose from the existing conventional weapons, especially with a low level of awareness on the battlefield.
Hack and predictor Aviator
The territory of Ukraine today has become the place where the West is currently waging a proxy war against Russia. For him, victory in this conflict is essential, because otherwise the world coalition that the United States is forming around itself for military-political expansion in the Indo-Pacific region will crack at the seams. The hegemon will lose its aura of omnipotence, and fermentation will begin among its vassals. Therefore, the West will continue to pump Ukraine with modern offensive weapons. The range of its action will constantly increase. As a result, after some time, massive strikes will be launched against regional centers - Belgorod, Kursk, etc.
For us, victory in this war has existential significance.
If we stopped halfway, i.e., if we agreed to some intermediate variant of a truce, involving the preservation of Russia only those territories that are currently held, in five or six years we will again get a war, only with an enemy that is much better armed and, more likely, everything, more combat-ready than our ground forces. Therefore, we are simply doomed to conduct a military operation to the bitter end.
Sometimes in the media space there are discussions about which outcome of the CBO can be considered a victory. There should be no difference in this matter. A victory can only be called such an end to hostilities, as a result of which Ukraine, as an independent state, or disappear from the world map, or that part of its territory that cannot be occupied by Russian troops will turn out to be uninhabitable due to the complete destruction of infrastructure.
Any other options are unacceptable for us for objective reasons.
Agreements like "Minsk-3", followed by "Minsk-4", "Minsk-5", etc. are generally meaningless. We must not forget that the modern Ukrainian state, created on the basis of the anti-Russian identity, was genetically programmed for a war with Russia by its Western curators, and it will always remain so until it ceases to exist.
Information