The Sword of Damocles - the Russian Army's force buildup through mid-2023 and what it means for the war going forward.
One of the biggest - and certainly the most consequential - question marks in the world right now is the current status of the Russian Army. Some particularly dim Western commentators and even senior officials have claimed recently that the Russians have lost half or more of their combat power from the date of their initial invasion in February 2022 and are now weaker than the Ukrainians overall. These claims have so many problems they're barely worth discussing and should simply be dismissed out of hand. Let's work through a real analysis instead.
Claims the Russians had a "million-man army" prewar are simply false - that was the total number of people in the entire Russian Armed Forces. The Russian "Army" (between the Army proper, the Naval Infantry, and the VDV) was only some 350,000 personnel, of whom approximately 100,000 were connoscripts. This manning level supported some 183 combined-arms battalion task forces under the now-deprecated Battalion Tactical Group organizational scheme, meaning that for every 1900 soldiers in the overall force the Russians would get one maneuver battalion with appropriate supporting arms.
This can be immediately sanity-checked by comparison to the United States Army. In 2018 the active-duty US Army had 31 Brigade Combat Teams, each of which had four maneuver* battalions for a total of 124 appropriately-supported battalions on an end strength of 483,500. When accounting for the fact that Russian units are about 2/3 the size of their Western counterparts (31 versus 44 tanks in a battalion, for instance), this means that the two armies had close to exactly the same number of battalion task forces available and the Russians are about 30% more efficient at converting end strength to combat power. This is to be expected given Russia's relative lack of logistical overhead without global commitments.
* I am including the BCT's organic cavalry squadron as a maneuver battalion because it is frequently tasked as such operationally and has the capability to perform maneuver tasks.
Now to the war. The Russians began recruiting volunteers quite early in the war, but more significant in the early stages of the war was industrial mobilization. As early as March 2022 Russian military industry began hiring huge numbers of personnel and ramping up production of war materiel across the board. Part of this was to replace equipment lost in combat but much of it was, I now have reason to believe, the leading edge of a deliberate plan to build out the Russian Army in the coming months. Mobilization of personnel was to come later, first with small-scale recruitment of volunteers over the Spring and Summer of 2022 and then with formal mobilization in Fall 2022.
Russian mobilization came in two waves. First there was an announced increase in the Russian military's end strength of 137,000 in August 2022, exactly the number of connoscripts then in service. This suggests strongly that the 2021-2022 connoscript class was simply retained in service for the duration. The second wave was the "partial mobilization" of 300,000 in September 2022, which was subsequently converted into another increase in the Russian Army's authorized strength. This gives us a current strength of the Russian Army as some 750,000 soldiers, more than double its strength in February 2022 and - highly significantly - with 650,000 instead of 250,000 soldiers deployable as either "contract" or "mobilized" soldiers.
One of the biggest - and certainly the most consequential - question marks in the world right now is the current status of the Russian Army. Some particularly dim Western commentators and even senior officials have claimed recently that the Russians have lost half or more of their combat power from the date of their initial invasion in February 2022 and are now weaker than the Ukrainians overall. These claims have so many problems they're barely worth discussing and should simply be dismissed out of hand. Let's work through a real analysis instead.
Claims the Russians had a "million-man army" prewar are simply false - that was the total number of people in the entire Russian Armed Forces. The Russian "Army" (between the Army proper, the Naval Infantry, and the VDV) was only some 350,000 personnel, of whom approximately 100,000 were connoscripts. This manning level supported some 183 combined-arms battalion task forces under the now-deprecated Battalion Tactical Group organizational scheme, meaning that for every 1900 soldiers in the overall force the Russians would get one maneuver battalion with appropriate supporting arms.
This can be immediately sanity-checked by comparison to the United States Army. In 2018 the active-duty US Army had 31 Brigade Combat Teams, each of which had four maneuver* battalions for a total of 124 appropriately-supported battalions on an end strength of 483,500. When accounting for the fact that Russian units are about 2/3 the size of their Western counterparts (31 versus 44 tanks in a battalion, for instance), this means that the two armies had close to exactly the same number of battalion task forces available and the Russians are about 30% more efficient at converting end strength to combat power. This is to be expected given Russia's relative lack of logistical overhead without global commitments.
* I am including the BCT's organic cavalry squadron as a maneuver battalion because it is frequently tasked as such operationally and has the capability to perform maneuver tasks.
Now to the war. The Russians began recruiting volunteers quite early in the war, but more significant in the early stages of the war was industrial mobilization. As early as March 2022 Russian military industry began hiring huge numbers of personnel and ramping up production of war materiel across the board. Part of this was to replace equipment lost in combat but much of it was, I now have reason to believe, the leading edge of a deliberate plan to build out the Russian Army in the coming months. Mobilization of personnel was to come later, first with small-scale recruitment of volunteers over the Spring and Summer of 2022 and then with formal mobilization in Fall 2022.
Russian mobilization came in two waves. First there was an announced increase in the Russian military's end strength of 137,000 in August 2022, exactly the number of connoscripts then in service. This suggests strongly that the 2021-2022 connoscript class was simply retained in service for the duration. The second wave was the "partial mobilization" of 300,000 in September 2022, which was subsequently converted into another increase in the Russian Army's authorized strength. This gives us a current strength of the Russian Army as some 750,000 soldiers, more than double its strength in February 2022 and - highly significantly - with 650,000 instead of 250,000 soldiers deployable as either "contract" or "mobilized" soldiers.
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Applying our ratio from earlier (1900 troops to generate one battalion task force) we get a post-mobilization Russian force of some 395 maneuver battalions with enablers. This is an enormous force that could easily secure Russia's borders (particularly its now very-hostile western borders) while simultaneously overwhelming the battered Ukrainian military. Should NATO intervene directly, this force would be able to quickly overrun the Baltic States and defeat any expeditionary force that could realistically be sent into Ukraine.
But Armchair "Vampire Six" Warlord, you say, the Russians are running out of troops and tanks - all the Twitter blue checks are telling me this! What evidence do you have? Well, I have a few data points in support of my theory.
1. Russia recently withdrew from the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe. The CFE treaty, originally signed in 1990 and adapted in 1999 to post-Cold War realities, sought to place national ceilings on conventional arms stationed in Europe and at first served to place a cap on the amount of hardware the Warsaw Pact could flood across the North German Plain on short notice. Serious Russia observers have long noted that, far from his characterization in the West as an unhinged autocrat, Vladimir Putin is a boring neoliberal with a highly legalistic approach to governance. Although the Russians suspended their participation in the treaty in 2007, their recent denunciation is, I believe, highly significant.
Under the treaty the Russian Federation was allowed to station some 6,350 tanks, 11,280 APCs (including 7,030 IFVs) and 6,315 artillery pieces west of the Urals. A force of some 350 BTG-equivalents deployed west would consist of approximately 4,000 tanks and some 10,000 infantry carriers as well as 6,300 artillery pieces. This strongly suggests to me that the Russians denounced the treaty because some dimension of their force build, likely either artillery pieces or infantry carriers, violated its limitations.
This is, by the way, an enormous army and explains the "all of the above" approach the Russians have taken to procuring war materiel lately. They wouldn't be simultaneously rolling large numbers of T-90Ms and T-80BVMs off the assembly lines while also doing deep modernizations of their T-62 fleet for use as frontline tanks unless they had a real need for a genuinely enormous tank fleet in the near term. Same story with APCs and artillery.
2. Contrary to what certain pro-Western analysts and officials have asserted, the Russian side of the northeastern Ukrainian border (the "non-active" front line on the prewar border) is packed with troops. What immediately struck me during the abortive Ukrainian raids on Belgorod Oblast earlier this year was the size, speed and ferocity of the Russian counterattack, with multiple Russian battalions quickly mobilizing to throw back the attackers. Russian forces responding to the attacks were often apparently from different brigades or even divisions, with different equipment sets and distinct tactical signs, and they arrived and deployed for combat in large, intact units with fresh equipment.
This same region would be the simplest area for the Russians to concentrate forces in without disturbing logistical efforts for the "active" front line to the east and south, and a large offensive from this direction would quickly carve through the thin screen of Territorial Defense units covering the border, turn the main Ukrainian army deployed in the Donbass, and lead to a rapid collapse of the Ukrainian position east of the Dniper.
But Armchair "Vampire Six" Warlord, you say, the Russians are running out of troops and tanks - all the Twitter blue checks are telling me this! What evidence do you have? Well, I have a few data points in support of my theory.
1. Russia recently withdrew from the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe. The CFE treaty, originally signed in 1990 and adapted in 1999 to post-Cold War realities, sought to place national ceilings on conventional arms stationed in Europe and at first served to place a cap on the amount of hardware the Warsaw Pact could flood across the North German Plain on short notice. Serious Russia observers have long noted that, far from his characterization in the West as an unhinged autocrat, Vladimir Putin is a boring neoliberal with a highly legalistic approach to governance. Although the Russians suspended their participation in the treaty in 2007, their recent denunciation is, I believe, highly significant.
Under the treaty the Russian Federation was allowed to station some 6,350 tanks, 11,280 APCs (including 7,030 IFVs) and 6,315 artillery pieces west of the Urals. A force of some 350 BTG-equivalents deployed west would consist of approximately 4,000 tanks and some 10,000 infantry carriers as well as 6,300 artillery pieces. This strongly suggests to me that the Russians denounced the treaty because some dimension of their force build, likely either artillery pieces or infantry carriers, violated its limitations.
This is, by the way, an enormous army and explains the "all of the above" approach the Russians have taken to procuring war materiel lately. They wouldn't be simultaneously rolling large numbers of T-90Ms and T-80BVMs off the assembly lines while also doing deep modernizations of their T-62 fleet for use as frontline tanks unless they had a real need for a genuinely enormous tank fleet in the near term. Same story with APCs and artillery.
2. Contrary to what certain pro-Western analysts and officials have asserted, the Russian side of the northeastern Ukrainian border (the "non-active" front line on the prewar border) is packed with troops. What immediately struck me during the abortive Ukrainian raids on Belgorod Oblast earlier this year was the size, speed and ferocity of the Russian counterattack, with multiple Russian battalions quickly mobilizing to throw back the attackers. Russian forces responding to the attacks were often apparently from different brigades or even divisions, with different equipment sets and distinct tactical signs, and they arrived and deployed for combat in large, intact units with fresh equipment.
This same region would be the simplest area for the Russians to concentrate forces in without disturbing logistical efforts for the "active" front line to the east and south, and a large offensive from this direction would quickly carve through the thin screen of Territorial Defense units covering the border, turn the main Ukrainian army deployed in the Donbass, and lead to a rapid collapse of the Ukrainian position east of the Dniper.
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3. Last month, the Russians announced the actual units they intend to create as a result of this force buildout. The new ground force units announced were one Combined Arms Army (a corps-sized formation), one new Army corps, five new divisions, and 26 new brigades. It is unclear whether these units are entirely separate or whether they are intended to nest within each other matryoshka-style, but this would either be 78 new BTG-equivalents (if the units above brigade level are just new headquarters) or a whopping 177, very much in line with my calculations above (if all of these are complete units).
We haven't seen this "doom army" yet because the Russians are still pursuing their Fabian strategy of letting the Ukrainians and their NATO sponsors beat themselves bloody against their defensive line in the Donbass. The Russians can now be expected to launch a large-scale offensive at a time, place, and in circumstances of their choosing - given present circumstances at the front with a weakening AFU and wobbling Western sponsorship I would expect this move to come fairly soon.
We haven't seen this "doom army" yet because the Russians are still pursuing their Fabian strategy of letting the Ukrainians and their NATO sponsors beat themselves bloody against their defensive line in the Donbass. The Russians can now be expected to launch a large-scale offensive at a time, place, and in circumstances of their choosing - given present circumstances at the front with a weakening AFU and wobbling Western sponsorship I would expect this move to come fairly soon.
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Breaking Point - At what point will Ukraine have taken so many casualties that it goes into military collapse?
It's a common talking point on both sides of the proverbial barricade that Ukraine has a basically inexhaustible reserve of manpower and that even with arbitrarily high casualty rates the AFU will be able to continue putting men into the trenches for years. History, however, shows that things are far more complicated and even societies fighting existential total wars will run out of acceptable-quality manpower and collapse militarily long before they even begin to physically run out of people to connoscript into the ranks. Let's examine such a society - Nazi Germany.
Nazi Germany went into WWII with a population of some eighty million and lost - either killed in action or as POWs - a little over five million soldiers during the course of the war in Europe. This, however, overstates things: far and away the bloodiest year of the war in Europe wasn't actually a year, it was the five desperate months of 1945 before Nazi Germany was erased as a political entity. By New Years 1945, Germany was in a state of military collapse and the final battles turned increasingly lopsided as the Allies butchered a Wehrmacht that had run out of heavy weapons and resorted to filling out the front lines with armed civilians. In those five months the Wehrmacht lost 1.2 million men at a rate of approximately 10,000 per day.
The writing was on the wall, however, as far back as the end of May 1944, when the Wehrmacht was absolutely on the back foot but well before the many catastrophes of the last year of the war struck. Prior to D-Day and Bagration, the Wehrmacht had only suffered some 60% of the casualties it would eventually take - approximately three million men lost - and it still looked basically healthy. This was of course an illusion, it was a dead army walking and on the brink of military collapse leading to disaster. This gives us a yardstick to work with.
Nazi Germany, with a relatively young and healthy population of 80 million, started going into military collapse after three million combat losses - some 3.75% of the population. Ukraine is a far less populous country with much worse demographics - any country in Europe and most on Earth would give a great deal to have the demographics of Germany in 1939. Accounting for the fact much of its population lives in Russian-held areas and many more of its citizens have fled abroad, Ukraine realistically has a population of about 20 million to connoscript from. 3.75% of that is 750,000. However, this would assume Ukraine has the demographics of Nazi Germany, which it emphatically does not - it is an aging post-Soviet society with relatively few young people. As such it would be most reasonable to halve this figure to get a "collapse threshold" of some 375,000 personnel lost in combat, either killed or captured.
Most serious estimates of Ukrainian casualties thus far point to their having suffered somewhere north of 200,000 such losses at this point. As such it is doubtful whether they can sustain the current war effort much beyond the start of Spring 2024, even absent any major Russian moves to end things sooner.
It's a common talking point on both sides of the proverbial barricade that Ukraine has a basically inexhaustible reserve of manpower and that even with arbitrarily high casualty rates the AFU will be able to continue putting men into the trenches for years. History, however, shows that things are far more complicated and even societies fighting existential total wars will run out of acceptable-quality manpower and collapse militarily long before they even begin to physically run out of people to connoscript into the ranks. Let's examine such a society - Nazi Germany.
Nazi Germany went into WWII with a population of some eighty million and lost - either killed in action or as POWs - a little over five million soldiers during the course of the war in Europe. This, however, overstates things: far and away the bloodiest year of the war in Europe wasn't actually a year, it was the five desperate months of 1945 before Nazi Germany was erased as a political entity. By New Years 1945, Germany was in a state of military collapse and the final battles turned increasingly lopsided as the Allies butchered a Wehrmacht that had run out of heavy weapons and resorted to filling out the front lines with armed civilians. In those five months the Wehrmacht lost 1.2 million men at a rate of approximately 10,000 per day.
The writing was on the wall, however, as far back as the end of May 1944, when the Wehrmacht was absolutely on the back foot but well before the many catastrophes of the last year of the war struck. Prior to D-Day and Bagration, the Wehrmacht had only suffered some 60% of the casualties it would eventually take - approximately three million men lost - and it still looked basically healthy. This was of course an illusion, it was a dead army walking and on the brink of military collapse leading to disaster. This gives us a yardstick to work with.
Nazi Germany, with a relatively young and healthy population of 80 million, started going into military collapse after three million combat losses - some 3.75% of the population. Ukraine is a far less populous country with much worse demographics - any country in Europe and most on Earth would give a great deal to have the demographics of Germany in 1939. Accounting for the fact much of its population lives in Russian-held areas and many more of its citizens have fled abroad, Ukraine realistically has a population of about 20 million to connoscript from. 3.75% of that is 750,000. However, this would assume Ukraine has the demographics of Nazi Germany, which it emphatically does not - it is an aging post-Soviet society with relatively few young people. As such it would be most reasonable to halve this figure to get a "collapse threshold" of some 375,000 personnel lost in combat, either killed or captured.
Most serious estimates of Ukrainian casualties thus far point to their having suffered somewhere north of 200,000 such losses at this point. As such it is doubtful whether they can sustain the current war effort much beyond the start of Spring 2024, even absent any major Russian moves to end things sooner.
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To quote the 1993 classic Dave, "Do you have any idea how many different kinds of laws we just broke?"
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Ukraine is probably out of Storm Shadow/SCALP cruise missiles, or at least very close to out of them. They've been firing them for months now with very modest success thanks to formidable Russian countermeasures, frequently expending large numbers of missiles for limited results. Moreover they did not get a lot of them to begin with, because there were a very limited amount to give between British and French war stocks.
The plot thickens when we consider the Russian strike on the Starokonstantinov military airfield in Khmelnitsky on the night of August 5th, where Ukraine's small fleet of Su-24s modified to carry Western cruise missiles was based. Despite some online criticism of the strike as ineffective, massive secondary explosions were reported at the time and satellite photos of the aftermath show an enormous crater where the base's ammunition storage bunkers once sat. I believe that it actually hit exactly what it was aimed at: Ukraine's storage depot for its Storm Shadow missiles, placed exactly where they would logically be stored for most convenient use.
Ukraine conducted a large (and largely ineffectual) Storm Shadow strike on the road bridges connecting Crimea and Kherson on August 6th, but this is not inconsistent with the loss of the depot. The Ukrainians had warning of an incoming strike for hours beforehand and have made a practice of launching their aircraft during such attacks to avoid their destruction on the ground. The missiles fired on the 6th had likely been uploaded onto aircraft prior to the attack and were thus saved.
Now for the real tell - the next day, August 7th, the German Bundestag reversed their longstanding position on transferring Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine and authorized the move. This strongly suggests to me that this was done on an emergency basis as the Storm Shadows supplied earlier had been almost entirely destroyed by interdiction strikes such as that in Khmelnitsky or expended in combat. There are very few coincidences in war, and Germany authorizing the transfer of their cruise missiles a matter of hours after the Russians destroyed an ammunition depot at a Ukrainian base hosting cruise missile-equipped strike aircraft is an enormous red flag - presumably, appropriate pressure was brought to bear on the Germans after this disaster and they fell in line as they always have.
Let's actually look at the timeline here:
May 11, 2023 - Britain announces donation, British-model missiles begin to be used in combat
July 11, 2023 - France announces donation, French-model missiles immediately appear on the battlefield
August 5th, 2023 - Russian missile strike on Khmelnitsky
August 6th, 2023 - Ukrainian missile strike on Chongar
August 7th, 2023 - Germany approves transferring Taurus missiles to Ukraine
Expect to see Taurus missiles appear in Ukraine in the immediate future and the Storm Shadow rapidly disappear from the headlines. Unless the Germans modify their missiles to comply with the Missile Technology Control Regime's 300km range limit this will be a significant development - the unmodified Taurus has a 500km range that will bring the Kerch Bridge firmly into missile range from Ukrainian-held territory, and the Germans have hundreds of missiles to transfer. One German lawmaker suggested as many as 450. Although attacks on the Kerch Bridge are largely annoyances in military terms, they make for potent propaganda and as such the Russians would be wise to reinforce air defenses in the area.
The plot thickens when we consider the Russian strike on the Starokonstantinov military airfield in Khmelnitsky on the night of August 5th, where Ukraine's small fleet of Su-24s modified to carry Western cruise missiles was based. Despite some online criticism of the strike as ineffective, massive secondary explosions were reported at the time and satellite photos of the aftermath show an enormous crater where the base's ammunition storage bunkers once sat. I believe that it actually hit exactly what it was aimed at: Ukraine's storage depot for its Storm Shadow missiles, placed exactly where they would logically be stored for most convenient use.
Ukraine conducted a large (and largely ineffectual) Storm Shadow strike on the road bridges connecting Crimea and Kherson on August 6th, but this is not inconsistent with the loss of the depot. The Ukrainians had warning of an incoming strike for hours beforehand and have made a practice of launching their aircraft during such attacks to avoid their destruction on the ground. The missiles fired on the 6th had likely been uploaded onto aircraft prior to the attack and were thus saved.
Now for the real tell - the next day, August 7th, the German Bundestag reversed their longstanding position on transferring Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine and authorized the move. This strongly suggests to me that this was done on an emergency basis as the Storm Shadows supplied earlier had been almost entirely destroyed by interdiction strikes such as that in Khmelnitsky or expended in combat. There are very few coincidences in war, and Germany authorizing the transfer of their cruise missiles a matter of hours after the Russians destroyed an ammunition depot at a Ukrainian base hosting cruise missile-equipped strike aircraft is an enormous red flag - presumably, appropriate pressure was brought to bear on the Germans after this disaster and they fell in line as they always have.
Let's actually look at the timeline here:
May 11, 2023 - Britain announces donation, British-model missiles begin to be used in combat
July 11, 2023 - France announces donation, French-model missiles immediately appear on the battlefield
August 5th, 2023 - Russian missile strike on Khmelnitsky
August 6th, 2023 - Ukrainian missile strike on Chongar
August 7th, 2023 - Germany approves transferring Taurus missiles to Ukraine
Expect to see Taurus missiles appear in Ukraine in the immediate future and the Storm Shadow rapidly disappear from the headlines. Unless the Germans modify their missiles to comply with the Missile Technology Control Regime's 300km range limit this will be a significant development - the unmodified Taurus has a 500km range that will bring the Kerch Bridge firmly into missile range from Ukrainian-held territory, and the Germans have hundreds of missiles to transfer. One German lawmaker suggested as many as 450. Although attacks on the Kerch Bridge are largely annoyances in military terms, they make for potent propaganda and as such the Russians would be wise to reinforce air defenses in the area.
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By the way this has very serious implications for American war plans vis-a-vis Russia, China and even regional powers like Iran - we only have something like 5000 JASSMs and substantially more limited numbers of longer-ranged Tomahawks, C-ALCMs, etc. Judging by the extremely limited results the Ukrainians have gotten from throwing most of France and Britain's supply of Storm Shadows at Russia (and frankly the far from crippling results of much larger Russian missile raids on Ukraine), it's likely that hundreds of thousands of standoff missiles will be needed for any major war. This isn't a new realization - look at the difference between what war planners thought was an adequate bomber fleet in 1939 versus what was needed in 1944-45 to actually inflict serious damage.
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Forwarded from Slavyangrad (Gleb Bazov)
@PanzerWaffle analyses Ukrainian losses based on the number of amputees and recipients of prosthetic limbs among the Ukrainian fighters. @Slavyangrad has summarized the low and high estimates based on the calculations suggested by the channel in the chart above.
PART I | PART II
Despite all of Kiev's attempts to conceal the true number of military losses, some data still leaks through the filters of censorship. On August 1, 2023, The Wall Street Journal published a story that offered a minimum and a maximum estimate of the number of AFU servicemen who lost one or more limbs.
Importantly, this estimate is based on data obtained from medical institutions, non-governmental organizations and the German company Ottobock, which manufactures prosthetic limbs.
According to WSJ's estimates, the minimum number of amputees among the Ukrainian fighters since the start of the conflict is 20,000 and the maximum is 50,000. The figures are truly horrifying, and the article's author rightly points out that they exceed the scale of the First World War. However, the author emphasizes that these are estimated figures and that the real figures may be even higher.
...continued below...
@Slavyangrad
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Strategy and Analysis, Expert Community
PART I | PART II
Despite all of Kiev's attempts to conceal the true number of military losses, some data still leaks through the filters of censorship. On August 1, 2023, The Wall Street Journal published a story that offered a minimum and a maximum estimate of the number of AFU servicemen who lost one or more limbs.
Importantly, this estimate is based on data obtained from medical institutions, non-governmental organizations and the German company Ottobock, which manufactures prosthetic limbs.
According to WSJ's estimates, the minimum number of amputees among the Ukrainian fighters since the start of the conflict is 20,000 and the maximum is 50,000. The figures are truly horrifying, and the article's author rightly points out that they exceed the scale of the First World War. However, the author emphasizes that these are estimated figures and that the real figures may be even higher.
...continued below...
@Slavyangrad
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Forwarded from Slavyangrad (Gleb Bazov)
@PanzerWaffle analyses Ukrainian losses based on the number of amputees and recipients of prosthetic limbs among the Ukrainian fighters. @Slavyangrad has summarized the numbers based on the calculations suggests by the channel in the chart above.
PART I | PART II
► Why is this important?
Over the past century and a half, humanity has accumulated and tabulated a huge amount of data on losses in the two World Wars and in dozens of smaller conflicts. The number of soldiers with amputated limbs is an indicator which allows one to estimate the losses of the AFU as a whole.
For France in World War I, for example, this figure was about 2-2.5 percent of the total number of wounded. There is also more recent data. For example, the U.S. lost 7,076 servicemen killed (KIA) and 53,337 wounded (WIA) during the 20 years of the "war on terrorism" in Iraq and Afghanistan. Between 2001 and 2011, 2,037 US troops lost one or more limbs in combat. The total results in a killed-to-wounded ratio of 1 to 7.5 and an amputation rate of 4 percent.
The ratio has increased because the medical evacuation system and field medicine in general have evolved greatly over the last century. A significant number of those wounded in the battles of World War I did not survive to evacuation or hospitalization.
Among the first things that the AFU sought to change to approximate Western standards was the medical evacuation system. So the American figures can be used as a base for the calculations, with the caveat that the conflict in Ukraine is heavily dominated by the artillery, which is reflected in the number of casualties and the nature of injuries.
If we assume that the WSJ's lower estimate of 20,000 amputees represents 4% of all wounded, then 100% of the wounded will be 500,000 people. Applying the traditional one-to-three casualty ratio to the resulting data—since that is what would be typical for an artillery war in the style of WWI and WWII—we get 150-160 thousand killed AFU servicemen.
Thus, the sanitary and irrecoverable losses of Ukrainian armed formations can range from 550 thousand to 650 thousand people, using just the minimum estimated figures.
► Is this estimate realistic?
Quite. It is supported by the number of Ukrainian cemeteries that have grown over the past 17 months (and by their rampant growth), the desperate permanent mobilization in Ukraine, and the noticeably decreased quality of the military personnel. Mobilized men aged 45-50—without a military specialty but with a long list of chronic diseases—have become the norm over the past two months.
The last two criteria—age and quality—are clear indicators of the depletion of mobilization reserves, as well as one of the signs of the growth of another problem—the depletion of the reserve of specialists, without whom modern industrial warfare cannot be conducted.
@Slavyangrad
Join💜 💜 💜 🔺 Intelligence Briefings,
Strategy and Analysis, Expert Community
PART I | PART II
► Why is this important?
Over the past century and a half, humanity has accumulated and tabulated a huge amount of data on losses in the two World Wars and in dozens of smaller conflicts. The number of soldiers with amputated limbs is an indicator which allows one to estimate the losses of the AFU as a whole.
For France in World War I, for example, this figure was about 2-2.5 percent of the total number of wounded. There is also more recent data. For example, the U.S. lost 7,076 servicemen killed (KIA) and 53,337 wounded (WIA) during the 20 years of the "war on terrorism" in Iraq and Afghanistan. Between 2001 and 2011, 2,037 US troops lost one or more limbs in combat. The total results in a killed-to-wounded ratio of 1 to 7.5 and an amputation rate of 4 percent.
The ratio has increased because the medical evacuation system and field medicine in general have evolved greatly over the last century. A significant number of those wounded in the battles of World War I did not survive to evacuation or hospitalization.
Among the first things that the AFU sought to change to approximate Western standards was the medical evacuation system. So the American figures can be used as a base for the calculations, with the caveat that the conflict in Ukraine is heavily dominated by the artillery, which is reflected in the number of casualties and the nature of injuries.
If we assume that the WSJ's lower estimate of 20,000 amputees represents 4% of all wounded, then 100% of the wounded will be 500,000 people. Applying the traditional one-to-three casualty ratio to the resulting data—since that is what would be typical for an artillery war in the style of WWI and WWII—we get 150-160 thousand killed AFU servicemen.
Thus, the sanitary and irrecoverable losses of Ukrainian armed formations can range from 550 thousand to 650 thousand people, using just the minimum estimated figures.
► Is this estimate realistic?
Quite. It is supported by the number of Ukrainian cemeteries that have grown over the past 17 months (and by their rampant growth), the desperate permanent mobilization in Ukraine, and the noticeably decreased quality of the military personnel. Mobilized men aged 45-50—without a military specialty but with a long list of chronic diseases—have become the norm over the past two months.
The last two criteria—age and quality—are clear indicators of the depletion of mobilization reserves, as well as one of the signs of the growth of another problem—the depletion of the reserve of specialists, without whom modern industrial warfare cannot be conducted.
@Slavyangrad
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Slavyangrad
@PanzerWaffle analyses Ukrainian losses based on the number of amputees and recipients of prosthetic limbs among the Ukrainian fighters. @Slavyangrad has summarized the low and high estimates based on the calculations suggested by the channel in the chart…
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So let's look at the data points we have showing Ukrainian KIA in the 200-400,000 range.
- Population surveys
- Obituary counts on social media
- Cemetery construction
- Amputation disclosures
- Older, inadvertent official disclosures
- Endless connoscription but no army growth
It's all completely internally consistent, pointing to the same approximate number of casualties in the 2-400k range. This is exactly what you would expect if that was in fact the case - all these secondary indicators are consistent with each other and there is no countervailing data besides the obvious lies of Ukrainian officials.
Given that Mediazona's count of Russian KIA in the 30,000 range has recently been validated by another inadvertent disclosure on their side (of some 8,500 WIA returned to duty, total, in the entire VDV for the entire SMO) this also points to an absolutely brutal fact: for every Russian soldier killed in this war, somewhere between seven and thirteen Ukrainian soldiers die. That's apocalyptic for the Ukrainian Army and a disgrace for their Western advisors.
This also, by the way, aligns perfectly with the Ukrainian MoD's claims for -Russian- casualties. This suggests strongly that the Ukrainian MoD's infamously implausibly running count of Russian losses is, astonishingly, actually an accurate report of their own losses.
- Population surveys
- Obituary counts on social media
- Cemetery construction
- Amputation disclosures
- Older, inadvertent official disclosures
- Endless connoscription but no army growth
It's all completely internally consistent, pointing to the same approximate number of casualties in the 2-400k range. This is exactly what you would expect if that was in fact the case - all these secondary indicators are consistent with each other and there is no countervailing data besides the obvious lies of Ukrainian officials.
Given that Mediazona's count of Russian KIA in the 30,000 range has recently been validated by another inadvertent disclosure on their side (of some 8,500 WIA returned to duty, total, in the entire VDV for the entire SMO) this also points to an absolutely brutal fact: for every Russian soldier killed in this war, somewhere between seven and thirteen Ukrainian soldiers die. That's apocalyptic for the Ukrainian Army and a disgrace for their Western advisors.
This also, by the way, aligns perfectly with the Ukrainian MoD's claims for -Russian- casualties. This suggests strongly that the Ukrainian MoD's infamously implausibly running count of Russian losses is, astonishingly, actually an accurate report of their own losses.
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Forwarded from Cyberspec News (Veles)
Regarding the Russian advance in the Kupyansk direction, I'm hearing that the Russian Force is mainly infantry with Artillery and Aviation support but not many Tanks apparently....so perhaps it's not a full blown offensive
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I wrote a Twitter thread on the "empty battlefield" a while ago that I think is relevant here. Given the conditions of modern war, with persistent aerial surveillance and ubiquitous precision weapons, the army that is less visible on the battlefield and which can bring combat power to bear in a stealthier manner is generally going to be more successful.
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