Monthly Archives: February 2023

By Michael F. Duggan

Watch Bakhmit. Some of the most significant battles of the World Wars involved salients, promontories jutting into enemy territory, and this may prove to be the case in the Russo-Ukrainian War.

The first large-scale offensive of the independent American Expeditionary Force in the First World War was launched at the St. Mihiel salient in September 1918.  In December 1944, an unexpected German offensive created a burgeoning “bulge” in the Allied lines in the Ardennes Forest in Belgium, France, and Luxemburg.  You destroy salients by nipping them off at the base combined with direct assaults elsewhere.  In both cases, these salients were reduced in part by coordinate attacks on either side at the point where the bulge joined the line (the Germans were withdrawing from St. Mihiel at the time of the American attack, so the task for the U.S. forces was perhaps less costly than it might have otherwise been).

The Bakhmut salient is somewhat different from these historical examples. Rather than denoting a previously quiet sector (like St. Michiel and Verdun) or a the result of surprise offensive (like the Ardennes) into Russian-held territory, the protruding nature of the Bakhmut salient is the result of Russian pincer movements on either side of the city, an encirclement conducted largely by the Wagner Group (whose December strength of around 50,000 is the approximate equivalent of two corps). Following the fall of nearby Soledar in mid-January, it has been the result of ongoing Russian attacks and the magnificent defense of the small city by Ukrainian forces (the town has been under fire since the middle of last May).  The Russian goal is to presumably cut it off, force its surrender, or destroy it outright as an enemy pocket.  The strategy appears to be one that was favored initially by the Wehrmacht and then the Soviets on the Eastern Front during WWII.   

During the second half of the war, the Soviets became expert in large-scale pincer movements: pin down the enemy in the front, encircle on both sides, and then close the circle or wait for its defenders to capitulate.  The Eastern Front moved westward by a series of these battles, some of them in Ukraine.  It became the signature operational strategy of the Red Army, and some of these actions were among the largest and most costly battles in history. The Germans never developed an effective counterstrategy to this approach, and encircled areas became kill zones before being completely reduced. The present offensive around Bakhmut has the characteristics of a WWII pincer/encirclement offensive and a slow, grinding WWI offensive with gains measured in meters. To date the casualty rates are supposed to have been horrendous.

In a war that is going well, encircled units may be relieved before destruction.  This was the case of the 101^st Airborne Division at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge (the Screaming Eagles were surrounded within an enemy salient that was quickly reduced). If relief or withdrawal are not possible, encircled units,—besieged and cut off from supply lines—have three choices: a fighting breakout to the rear, surrender, or destruction.  On the Eastern Front, the Soviets used combined arms attacks supported by massed rocket artillery, Katyushas—the horrifying, shrieking area weapons that the Germans called “Stalin’s organ”—to reduce encircled sectors.  If the present Russian offensive grinds on, as it is expected to do, and an orderly withdrawal from the area becomes impossible, then these three options may become the only choices left for the Ukrainian defenders of Bakhmut. If the town falls, it could spell disaster for the side that fought so well to defend it. The best option therefore, may be to abandon the city and fall back to stronger defensive positions, as the Russians themselves did at Kherson.  

Although the Russians will press their offensive at multiple points along the front, the town is seen by both sides as a linchpin of the war. Russia and Ukraine are both committing massive resources to the fight. Why?  Except for the fact that it is an administrative center—perhaps the equivalent of an important county (raion) seat (with a prewar population around 71,000, it is slightly larger than Rockville, Maryland)—in a salt mining area and a crossroads town (like Borodino, Gettysburg, and Bastogne), what is its strategic importance? 

From what I understand—and accurate information is hard to come by—both sides may consider the town to be the gateway to western (i.e. unoccupied) Donetsk.  Taking Bakhmut would therefore allow the Russians to move on the larger cities of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk and securing the rest of the Donetsk oblast. Some commentators have speculated that a Russian victory at Bakhmut could mark the beginning of the end of the war—a latter-day Stalingrad on a smaller scale. But again, it is hard to tell. At least one observer (Scott Ritter) has pointed out that Bakhmut is a strategic strong point in the line. Thus the Russians appear to be violating the Napoleonic precept to avoid an enemy in a prepared position. If the Russians do break through there, it is difficult to say how the U.S. and NATO would respond, but it might signal a new and extremely dangerous phase of the war.  The town has also become an important symbol for the brave Ukrainian resistance, and winning there appears to have become a matter of national pride for both sides.  Casualties are supposed to be horrendous. It is a microcosm of the war.

Postscript, May 13, 2023
Over the past few days, Ukrainian forces have made gains to the immediate north and south of the Bakhmut salient. The Russian strategy of the past few months now appears to have been similar to that of the Soviets at Stalingrad: to bleed the other side white.  

Postscript, May 21, 2023
Russian sources are reporting that Bakhmut has fallen.

By Michael F. Duggan

By June 1864, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was tired of war. The 23-year-old brevet colonel, formerly of the Twentieth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers, had twice been shot within an inch of his life—through the chest at Ball’s Bluff on the Potomac near Leesburg, Virginia, and through the neck at Antietam—and almost lost his foot to a ball from a Confederate canister shell at Chancellorsville. He had seen many of his friends killed or wounded in the war (Holmes was convalescing in Boston during the battle of Gettysburg, where the 20th would lose 10 of its 13 officers, killed and wounded). In almost four years of fighting, 20th suffered 409 killed, the fifth highest number of casualties of all regiment units in the Union Army.

In January 1864, Holmes was made aide-de-camp to General Horatio Wright of the second division in the Union’s VI Corps (Wright would become corps commander on May 12). His job as a staff officer turned out to be almost as dangerous as that of a combat officer, and he was frequently on the firing line. By late spring, with his period of service nearly up, Holmes decided that he had had enough.

More than anything, it appears to have been Grant’s Virginia Overland Campaign of May and June that got to him. On May 11, Holmes wrote to his mother “Today is the 7th day we have fought, not pitched battles all of the time of course, but averaging a loss I guess of 3,000 a day at least.”¹ In six weeks, the Army of the Potomac would lose just under 55,000 men. Holmes would muster out at Fort Stevens in Washington, D.C. on July 17, 1864. He had more than done his share and would go on to become the greatest legal thinkers in U.S. History and our greatest Supreme Court Justice.

With 110,000 men, Grant realized that he could sustain twice as many casualties as Lee (with 60,000-65,000 men) and still win the war. Union battlefield defeats—although significant—were secondary relative to the overall strategy of destroying Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. The idea was to latch on to Lee like a bulldog and not let go. In spite of significant losses at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor, the greater numbers of the Union Army ultimately prevailed. One hundred seven years ago this Tuesday, the Imperial German Army attack Verdun, knowing that the French would defend it to the last man. Such is the hideous logic of attrition.

The population of Ukraine is now estimated to be below 37 million, and is perhaps far lower. The population of Russia is around 145 million, almost four times as large, with a traditional industrial/extractive economy capable of autarchy and supporting a war effort indefinitely. If Russia’s offensive takes on the slow, grinding character of a 19th or early 20th century offensive with modern weaponry, as it it expected to do, it seems likely that even with heavy casualties, they will win.

When I think of a war of attrition, it is the Western Front of the First World War that comes to mind. It was a tragedy—a catastrophe. But it was also a crime. The politicians on both sides knew what was happening in Flanders and Picardy. The final campaigns of the Civil War were judged to be necessary measures in what had become an existential war. By the end of the war, the South was in ruins but would eventually win the peace after the failure of Reconstruction in 1878. Grant was called a “butcher” by some. We can infer that the war in Ukraine is heading into a particularly destructive phase and one that could easily morph into a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia. Larger numbers are not always the determining factor of a war, but in Ukraine, they may be suggestive (and some independent Western sources are reporting that Russian losses to date may be considerably lower than the numbers reported by the mainstream media). If the war remains limited to Ukraine and Russia, the side with the greater numbers will likely prevail. The other alternative is a festering war of position.

At this point, the only position for a rational person is one favoring peace talks.

Note
1. Mark De Wolfe Howe, ed., Touched with Fire, Civil War Letters and Diary of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 114.

By Michael F. Duggan

The worst battles and phases of battles often take on grim nicknames. There was the “Hornet’s Nest” at Shiloh, “Bloody Lane” at Antietam, the “Slaughter Pen” at Gettysburg, and the “Bloody Angle” at Spotsylvania. During the Spanish-American War, U.S. forces were for a time pinned down at “Bloody Ford” at the base of San Juan Heights. The operational name for Verdun was Gericht, or “place of judgment.”¹ And in Vietnam, Hill 937 became “Hamburger Hill.”

For several weeks, I have been listening to interviews of former U.S. military officers on the Russo-Ukrainian War. What seems to be emerging is a consensus about the nature of the much-discussed Russian winter-spring offensive. Rather than a front-wide blitzkrieg or an American-style “shock and awe” campaign, they anticipate an inexorable but targeted offensive that grinds away at key points on the Ukrainian lines as it steadily builds to a breakthrough. Such a campaign would be have elements of a First World War attrition offensive like the German assault on Verdun in 1916, and the Soviet offensives on the Eastern Front during the later phases of the Second World War. These ex-military men expect the Ukrainian Ground Forces to be effectively destroyed by this process. The battle in and around Bakhmut is already being called “The Grinder.”

One of these officers, Douglas Macgregor—a former tank commander, famous for the U.S. armor victory of the Gulf War called the Battle of 73 Easting—believes that not only are we watching the death of the nation of Ukraine (a point on which former Marine intelligence officer and United Nations weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, agrees), but the beginning of the end of NATO.

Note
Jay Winter and Blaine Baggett, The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century, 157-58.

By Michael F. Duggan

Last night the Russian political scientist and nationalist, Sergey Karaganov, was the remote guest on the BBC program, HARDtalk. What could have been an interesting interview quickly became an exercise in condescending badgering by the program’s host Stephen Sackur. If you can get past Sackur’s abysmally conventional interpretation of events, you can glean some insights on Russian thinking from Mr. Karaganov’s answers to the questions thrown at him.

In crises, diplomacy, and war (and especially in the run up to wars), it is imperative to try to see events as your opponents see them (what the Quincy Institute called “strategic empathy” in a discussion that aired a month before the Russian invasion). This does not make you an agent or a “dupe” of the other side. It makes you a sensible, honest broker who is far more useful to your team than zealots and true believers mouthing cliches while dehumanizing and demonizing the opponent and ignoring the possibility that the other side has legitimate security interests too.

Reflecting Russian suspicion of the West and a sense of betrayal, Karaganov compared NATO to a spreading cancer and said that to date “persuasion,” “therapy,” nor “surgery” have worked. His implication was that a more aggressive kind of surgery was soon to be at hand. He hoped that a “radiological” approach would not be necessary but that nothing was off the table. He said that NATO was “ramming the doors of “Hell.” The implications could not have been clearer.

Sackur saw this as mere saber-rattling and pointed out that previous Russian threats of escalation had not been actualize. In other words, rather than acknowledging Russian restraint to date, Sackur was taunting his guest over what he characterized as bluff and bluster (can we presume that Sackur would he have preferred a disproportional Russian response to Western escalations?). Rather than acknowledging the danger of the situation, the host seemed to shrug off the possibility of a wider war as an irresponsible but ultimately empty threat. This is exactly the kind of dismissive attitude that could trigger a wider war.

Karaganov repeated a number of times that Russia will not lose the war under any circumstances. This statement and the by “all means” implication of a nuclear threat lends insight into how Russia sees NATO expansion and the escalating proxy war. They see the latter as the inevitable consequence of the former, an effort to surround European Russia for the purpose of degrading and humiliating it (as Jeffrey Sachs, recently observed, NATO’s long-term strategy against Russia is essentially akin to that of Palmerston and Napoleon III during the Crimean War). The Russians see NATO expansion as aggression, and since the Bucharest Accords of 2008, have been on the record saying that movement toward Ukrainian or Georgian membership in NATO would be regarded as an existential threat, i.e. tantamount to an act of war.

Taking these observations at face value, how does all of this play out from here? We know from Karaganov’s statements, as well as those from the speech given by Putin on the anniversary of the Soviet victory at Stalingrad, that they will not accept defeat and are willing to resort to nuclear weapons. At this point, it is unlikely that they will negotiate short of an agreement of unconditional surrender by Ukraine. In other words, Russia is committed to victory, whatever it takes. The danger is that the neocons and allied liberal interventionists in the foreign policy Blob may be similarly committed.

Suppose that the anticipated Russian winter offensive is launched sometime this month. What will happen if the brave Ukrainian Ground Forces are eventually defeated and Russia has secured its territorial ambitions in the east, leaving a Ukrainian rump state? Suppose also that Ukrainian generals inform their government that the war is over and overthrow the Zelensky administration if it does not acknowledge defeat.

At that point, what would the United States do? Rationally there would be nothing it could do. And yet if the Biden administration does nothing, the defeat will be characterized by the Republicans as a Democratic foreign policy debacle. If the administration does not commit the U.S. and NATO to an all out war against Russia, the Democrats could face defeat in the 2024 election. And yet if the U.S. does intervene directly in the war, it will be a world war that will most likely end with the use of nuclear weapons. Some choice, huh?

Ironically, some Republicans have shown a more sensible and realistic understanding of the conflict and the massive spending that has kept the Ukrainian in the fight to date. Is a right-wing House of Representatives the only possible brake on events whose momentum appears to be pushing the world toward a nuclear war, or will cooler heads prevail without them?