The Ukrainian commander's assessment of what Ukraine will need to break a stalemate is interesting. How did the countries in World War I break that stalemate?
I continue to worry about Ukraine's Avdiivka defenders getting trapped in a cauldron as Russia throws men and machines at the city's flanks seemingly regardless of losses. Unless the Ukrainians are drawing the Russians in so they can launch a major counter-attack, this bothers me.
While Ukraine was able to drive Russian forces out of nearly half of the land they seized in their initial invasion in a series of counteroffensives — surprising many military analysts — the general said “the war at the present stage is gradually moving to a positional form” where both sides can pin each other down. He provided his assessment in a nine-page essay published alongside the interview, noting the need to find “a way out.”
Well, for one, let's not get tunnel vision on the Western Front. There was an Eastern Front, and an Italian Front where the great powers fought. I'm going from memory here, so please excuse errors if they don't interfere with the big picture.
Let's look at the Eastern Front first. There the ratio of troops-to-terrain was low enough to mean that trench lines were rather thin.
There, the Germans initially preempted a static front by decisively defeating a big lumbering Russian offensive into northeast Germany by holding the attackers and counter-attacking the divided Russian armies on a large scale to destroy them.
The Russians were able to smash up the Austro-Hungarian army.
And then the Germans were able to push the weakened Russians back.
Eventually, the Russians ran out of trained troops and equipment to the point that defeats make their once-steady peasants wonder about surviving without the means to survive. Russia's population advantage, it should be noted, was not a decisive edge as had been imagined.
And the Germans sent Lenin into Russia to stir up trouble in a weakened Russia. Trouble was stirred. And the Russian turned on each other in civil war. The stalemate was broken.
The Italian Front was very narrow with a high troop-to-terrain ratio that led to an endless series of battles for the Isonzo River (check). That front just did not move significantly. The stalemate held.
The Western Front had a war of maneuver in the beginning as large German forces advanced through weakly held areas in northern France after rolling through neutral Belgium.
Maneuver was tried on the western edge of Germany's offensive until both sides reached the sea and ran out of room to outflank the enemy. Too many troops with too much firepower held too small a front. The troops dug in. Germany failed to knock out France. But France (and the Belgians in a sliver of land) held on with British help.
The efforts to break the stalemate included more and more firepower over longer periods of time with troops then flung at the enemy to overwhelm increasingly fortified positions. The firepower got heavier. Later analysis showed that only the biggest rounds did damage to the fortifications. The smaller rounds added noise and psychological damage. And cumulatively it all churned the ground too much to even think about exploiting. And the time taken in bombardments warned the enemy and gave them time to deploy reserves.
Poison gas was used. It was actually less lethal than other means of killing. But it was terrifying. But it slowed movement and both sides used it meaning neither could restore maneuver using it.
The British blockaded Germany to starve their war machine and people into submission. The Germans tried submarine warfare to do the same to Britain. These were new fronts.
The Allies flipped Italy. This added a new front that added Allied forces and stretched Austria-Hungary. But as noted, it remained stalemated.
The British attempted to achieve a decisive result using their navy to dispatch an expeditionary force to hit weak Turkey by opening a new front but failed to exploit the initial advantage. That front devolved into one more stalemated front.
The British led the way with tanks to lead the infantry across the no-man's land between the barbed wire-covered fortification lines that lessened the need to use long bombardments that churned the land and notified the enemy of an offensive. The tanks were unreliable but showed promise.
The combatants mobilized more and more of their own men. The British went from a small elite army to a mass army of less-trained soldiers.
Both the French and British added troops from their colonies or commonwealth.
The Germans added existing troops to the Western Front by finally defeating the Russians allowed Germany to shift troops to the Western Front. But while the Germans had tactical success, the offensive were costly in men and failed to have any real operational objective that could have won the war.
The Germans revised their tactics to emphasize infiltration of the enemy
first lines of defense rather than only battering at the enemy. This
too showed promise.
The Allies added fresh American troops to the war effort. And while the Americans proved to be resistant to learning the lessons of 1914-1916, were at least willing to pay the human cost to attack.
A combination of heavy German losses, a failure to break the Allies with their final offensives, blockade with hunger at home, blowback from sparking Marxism in Russia that threatened to topple Germany itself, failing troop morale, the prospect of a flood of American troops, and Allied offensives with tanks and airplanes that began to push the Germans back finally worked enough. The stalemate was broken.
The Germans agreed to an armistice and retreated from its western conquests before the army broke and turned into combatants in a German civil war. Germany lost the gains it had made on the Eastern Front and lost its ally, Austria-Hungary.
Battlefield Victory.
What does this effort to break the World War I stalemate mean for the Winter War of 2022 and breaking the emerging stalemate?
One side or the other needs to:
Find new weapons.
Or develop new tactics.
Or exploit a major enemy mistake.
Or get more troops--from outside of the current front or from new allies.
Or conduct decisive economic warfare.
Or expand the front so the troop-to-terrain ratio is low enough to allow movement and exploitation.
Or break the morale of enemy troops.
Or destabilize the other side's government.
Or flip an ally.
Or open a totally new front.
Any one or a combination of them could finally provide battlefield victory in the Winter War of 2022.
Germany's long siege of Verdun--while failing in its immediate objective to break the French army with attrition--bled France enough to push its army to the edge of the French troop morale crisis in 1917. Maybe Ukraine is doing this to Russia while under siege.
Whether such a battlefield victory leads to a real peace or mere reloading is another issue altogether.
UPDATE (Wednesday): Or just try more of the same:
Russian forces are likely trying to regain the theater-level initiative in Ukraine by conducting several simultaneous offensive operations in eastern Ukraine, although it remains unclear if Russian forces will be able to fully regain the initiative as Ukrainian forces maintain pressure on critical areas of the front.
UPDATE (Wednesday): It could just be an aggressively executed distraction:
Ukraine is continuing to grow its bridgehead across the Dnipro River in occupied Kherson Oblast, according to geolocated images published on social media.
Russia claims they are inflicting a "fiery hell" on the Ukrainians. Maybe.
Let me know when we see Ukrainian bridges across the Dnieper River.
UPDATE (Wednesday): ISW doesn't see a World War I situation here:
The positional war in Ukraine is not a stable stalemate. It is not the result of fundamental realities in modern warfare that can only be changed with a technological or tactical revolution, as was the First World War’s stalemate. Neither does it rest on a permanent parity in military capacity between Russia and Ukraine that will continue indefinitely regardless of Western support to Kyiv. It results, on the contrary, from self-imposed limitations on the technologies the West has been willing to provide Ukraine and constraints on the Russian defense industrial base largely stemming from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unwillingness so far to commit Russia fully to this war. The current balance is thus, in fact, highly unstable, and could readily be tipped in either direction by decisions made in the West.
Well, I'd only go so far as to say it rhymes. But my suggestions for breaking the stalemate are broader than technology or tactics. And yes, more Western help at a faster pace would have helped in the past and should help in the future.
But it is interesting that ISW doesn't think that the firepower-to-space ratio is too high for a war of movement if the attacker is well equipped.
UPDATE (Thursday): Of course, my "develop new tactics" option could include using Western combined arms tactics that Ukraine found it could not employ during its "big push" this last summer because of training deficiencies and the lack of replacement equipment in their Western-equipped brigades.
UPDATE (Thursday): The Kherson front. Thus far Ukrainian forces appear to be light, small recon units.
UPDATE (Thursday): A brief summary of the Battle of the Black Sea. It's great to protect Ukraine's shores and grain exports. But pushing the Russians back in Crimea and the western Black Sea won't really be decisive until Ukrainian ground forces can drive on Crimea.
UPDATE (Saturday): This could morph into a bridgehead for an offensive if the Russian artillery is pushed beyond the sites for building bridges:
Ukrainian officials stated that Ukrainian forces have established bridgeheads on the east (left) bank of Kherson Oblast and are conducting ground operations aimed at pushing Russian forces out of artillery range of the west (right) bank of the Dnipro River.
But unless Ukraine can do this relatively quickly, Russia could do what they did last winter--build lines of fortifications and minefield. And we saw how good those made even poor quality Russian infantry when backed by ample artillery support.
NOTE: ISW updates continue here.
NOTE: I'm adding updates on the Last Hamas War in this post.
