Great Jomini's Ghost!

The Beltway Plays at War on the Map

A wave of hot takes on Ukraine arrived over the past week like DPICM bomblets.

Before I get into any of them I want to be clear: I’m only keeping an eye on Ukraine. While I do strategic analysis and research for a living, I am not assigned to do so on Ukraine. I have no more information than anyone else watching the conflict through the news, other analysts who are working on Ukraine and can publicly write or speak about it, and social media. I have a bit more background than most casual observers, especially when it comes to artillery operations, but I am just a casual observer nonetheless. Take that grain of salt on board.

That said, I’ll poke holes in analysis as I see.

Take this Financial Times piece for example. (gated) Shashank Joshi on Twitter posted excerpts.

"US officials have encouraged Ukraine to be less risk-averse and fully commit its forces to the main axis of the counteroffensive in the south ... Washington has also urged Ukraine to send more combat power to the south, and stop concentrating on the east"

This is a pretty shallow recommendation. Specifically, map thin. Looking at the conflict on the map stripped of context makes it seem simple: just in the East and push in the South. Easy!

This is the kind of assumptions made at the operational level of war, stripped of strategic and moral factors. Ukraine just finished bleeding the Russian Army white defending Bakhmut and then taking back some key terrain. Abandoning that effort now after it was bought at such cost could have dire effects both on the moral cohesion of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and negative strategic effects. Not to mention that pulling Ukrainian forces from the east would simply allow Russia to do so as well. If Ukrainian morale is dented by the slow pace of the counter-offensive, abandoning successes in the East might make sense tactically, but none strategically.

There are many more pieces like this, including this Washington Post one, all predicting doom because of a slow rate of advance and the lack of a large-scale commitment by Ukraine.

Despite a great deal of attrition, Russia still retains an advantage in terms of firepower. They are struggling with ammunition, but they can get a lot of guns blazing when they need. Ukraine concentrating large numbers of units in an environment with pervasive ISR against an artillery-focused army with an advantage in tubes would be suicidal. Not to mention Ukrainian units are not trained to operate at that scale and haven’t yet in this war. Smaller units on dispersed axes of advance, similar to the infiltration tactics developed during World War I, better fit both the situation and the Ukrainian skillset.

These factors aren’t revealed by sterilized wargame maps and Lancaster-style equations. Also, the fact that the still outnumbered Ukrainians should place a high priority on preserving the lives of their soldiers is so blindingly obvious that only an analyst huddled in some SCIF somewhere could possibly miss it.

Politico calls this an effort to distance the US from a potential Ukrainian failure. Maybe. But we can still talk about all the bad assumptions. Where do all these bad assumptions come from? From Jomini.

Jomini here looking like a guy who is not allowed within 50 feet of a school

Jomini is one of the most famous and probably the most influential proponent of deterministic rules-based military theory. In short, follow the timeless and always applicable rules of war and you’ll win. Oh and I just so happen to be the guy who discovered the rules.

Jomini himself boiled down his theory to this:

1. To throw by strategic movements the mass of an army, successfully, upon the decisive points of the theater of war, and also upon the communications of the enemy as much as possible without compromising one’s own.

2. To maneuver to engage fractions of the hostile army with the bulk of one’s forces.

3. On the battlefield, to throw the mass of forces on the decisive point, or upon the portion of the hostile line which it is of the first importance to overthrow.

4. To so arrange that these masses shall not only be thrown upon the decisive point, but that they shall engage at the proper times and with energy.¹

Just put your all your forces at the right place at the right time and you win. And yes, the checklist format is the way he wrote it in The Art of War.

This kind of mechanistic, anodized thinking leads to really false assumptions, like Robert E. Lee’s big blunder at Gettysburg. Lee was steeped in the Jominian paradigm of war by linear geometric lines and angles. The Army of the Potomac was strong on their right, strong on their left (thanks to Joshua Chamberlain), so ipso facto they must be weak in the center.

They weren’t.

This is a bit unfair to Jomini. Many theorists make the assumption that warfare is linear and can be reliably predicted by calculation, even Sun Tzu. But as perhaps its most fervent proponent, he stands in for all of them that make this assumption about war’s nature. But war’s nature is inherently nonlinear and complex, a foundational concept of both Clausewitz and John Boyd. If war were linear and predictable, we wouldn’t be discussing a Ukrainian offensive. Ukraine would be gone already.

All of this is not to say that Ukraine will win, just that it remains to be seen whether or not they will fail. It will come down to which side culminates first, and that culminating point comes down to moral factors as much as it does to material factors. The Ukrainians are fighting for their very existence and Russian morale ebbs every day, except maybe in the Chechnyan units assigned to execute Russian soldiers if they retreat. No man, wargame, or AI can predict if or when Russian (or Ukrainian) moral cohesion breaks.

P.S. Spotted this article after I wrote the above:

The bleakness of the Western commentariat’s recent output is striking — Ukraine’s counteroffensive has made little progress, they say. Major US news outlets cite intelligence agencies opining that things are “grim” and that hopes are fading that Ukraine can reach its (supposed) objective of Melitopol, more than 50 miles away.

This is simply wrong. Intelligence analysts may look at the map of Southern Ukraine and see distances; military planners will apply the military math and see something very different. They know that to crush the Russian army and strangle the troops in frontline fortifications, they don’t need to advance 50 miles. 10 miles will do it.

Why? Because although it would be great if Ukrainian troops broke through to the shores of the Sea of Azov, they do not have to. Instead, they can achieve a significant operational outcome by bringing Russia’s ground line of communication (GLOC) under their guns.

I’m not sure if this is really what the Ukrainians are going for, but it’s interesting. Maneuver in support of fires is a hallmark of the emerging reconnaissance-strike tactical regime. If this is true, it’s interesting to see the Ukrainians figure it out far before the U.S. Although maybe not surprising

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1. From the Mendell and Craighill translation.