Ukraine conflict - lessons learned part one

Speaker 1: Welcome to the World of Intelligence, a podcast for you to discover the latest analysis of global military and security trends within the open source defense intelligence community. Now onto the episode with your host, Harry Kemsley.

Harry Kemsley: Hello. Before we start this podcast episode, just a quick explanation that we're going to split it into two parts. So the first part, we'll play now, and then we'll invite you back to join us for the second part very shortly. Hello, and welcome to this edition of Janes World of Intelligence. I'm Harry Kemsley as your host, and as always, my co- host, Sean Corbett. Hello, Sean.

Sean Corbett: Hello, Harry. It's good to be back.

Harry Kemsley: Good to see you. So sadly, we've been watching the terrible situation in and around Ukraine in the last two years or more, and a lot of people have been talking about the fact that there are many aspects of that conflict that are worthy of review. Of course, we've seen the ICC coming out and talking about war crimes. But what I'd like to talk about today is the fact that there are, unquestionably, lessons to be learned from this campaign, from this conflict. And what I've done is I've invited a couple of colleagues from Janes, both of whom are expert in their own way, to help us understand that, particularly from the open source environment. So first of all, we have Dylan. Hello, Dylan.

Dylan: Hello. Good to be here.

Harry Kemsley: And Dylan, can you just say literally a couple of lines about who you are and your role in Janes just for the audience that don't know you?

Dylan: I am head of the OI3 Team here at Janes. That team essentially captures military capability data from forces around the world. And in particular, we also track Russian force movements and have been doing that heavily for the last three years.

Harry Kemsley: Perfect. Thanks, Dylan. And welcome. Thanks for joining us on the call. James, your second or third helping of podcast with Janes. So a couple of lines for you from the audience.

James Rands: James Rands. I'm on the country intel team. My official title, I looked it up after the last podcast, was Balkans and Military Capabilities Senior Analyst. Looking at the countries I cover, that's a pretty broad definition of Balkans, including Poland and Belgium. I'm on the country intelligence team, formerly C4ISR.

Harry Kemsley: Excellent. Good. All right, so let's set the scene then. We've been watching, with some disdain, the events in and around the Russian- Ukraine conflict. James, I'm going to come straight back to you. All the audience, many of whom, of course, will understand it completely, but let's just make sure we're all on the same page. What have we seen over the last couple of years in terms of the situation as it is then and is now?

James Rands: Well, I won't try and recap everything, and I won't try and recap the 2014 war. But in 2022, we went into the year with somewhat frozen conflict in the Donbas. There was occasional fighting in this occupied region of Ukraine. Russians claiming that it was ethnically Russian, but a highly dubious claim and trench warfare, but a very low level of conflict. In 2021, the Russians started building up a significant presence on the border. And then in February, they crossed the border at night and they advanced on four axes, supported by air assault, but mostly columns of fast- moving armor. One headed straight towards Kyiv, one headed into Kharkiv, both in the north. One headed towards Kherson, which sits on the Dnieper River. That made very quick progress, partly because of the betrayal on the Ukrainian side and captured the river on the Ukrainian side of that river. It's all Ukrainian, but on the side that would become the Ukrainian side. And then another column pushed down the coastline capturing Mariupol, presumably headed towards Odessa. Those attacks stalled fairly quickly with Kharkiv and Kherson captured and Mariupol besieged. The troops north of Kyiv formed a huge convoy, the traffic jam, which had to withdraw. And then in the autumn, the Ukrainians started to push hard around Kherson. And then having pushed hard on Kherson and drawn the Russians' attention, launched the Kharkiv offensive and took huge swathes of territory back. Two brigades only involved in that, chased out three or four brigades at least of Russian troops. In fact, they captured three brigades' worth of equipment. And then, of course, essentially went back to Kherson as they actually drove the Russians out of the city. Russia's executed a very, very well- executed withdrawal, which probably saved them. They got some of their best troops out of the city. Went into 2023. This was a year that lots of us assumed things were going to change. The Russians had developed a defensive line in the south called the Surovikin line after the general who put into place three lines of defenses. The Ukrainians massed about 40,000 troops, about eight brigades to form an offensive group to go there. They fought numerous armored battles. There were a lot of casualties on both sides. They found it very hard breaking through the lines. They did manage it. They did get through the third line of defenses in a town called Popasna, if I remember rightly. And they couldn't exploit that They broke through. They were there for a day, maybe two days. We know the Russians confirmed this, but they could not follow up, and we might want to come back about why that was later. 2023 did not need a strategic breakthrough. Russia had been pushing around Bakhmut, took very heavy casualties to take a town that wasn't particularly significant. And then, of course, there was the attempted coup attempt, which I don't think we're going to cover today because it's not directly relevant. Going into 2024, the Ukrainians seem to be in a fairly good position until their supply of Western ammunition and funding ran out between Christmas and New Year 2023. The first half of this year has been extremely hard for the Ukrainians. They've taken a lot of casualties, they've been pushed slowly back. They have not had the artillery to actually win that artillery fight. And so they've lost Avdiivka and a few others. And then in late spring, I'm forgetting the exact dates, the Russians launched a new offensive across the border in the direction of Kharkiv and captured a few villages. The latest development is we're seeing those being pushed back and that's where we stand today.

Harry Kemsley: Perfect. Thank you. A difficult job to summarize so much. So Dylan, let me come to you first then in terms of to start to explore some of the lessons that can be drawn out of that period that James has just summarized there. Let's look at those early days of the campaign where I think it's fair to say that everyone pretty much expected the Russians to roll across Ukraine, take the capital, seize power. In other words, and it would all be over in a matter of days. What have we learned from those early days of the campaign?

Dylan: Well, I'll tell you at first what didn't surprise me about those early days. It didn't surprise me that there was an invasion. It was shocking perhaps, but we knew at least a week prior with high confidence that this invasion was going to happen, and that transparency is something that's going to be important. It's going to be a theme throughout what I talk about today as we explore the lessons of the war in Ukraine so far. So that's what didn't surprise me. What did surprise me was the way that the Russians acted with almost a disregard for how you're supposed to operate in a war. They acted as if the simple things would be simple. But the simple things in war are, of course, hard and would take more than three days to get to Kyiv because that was oversimplification of what they wanted to do. And I think a lot of their mistakes stemmed from this idea that they didn't act as if they were at war, that this was a policing operation. Those mistakes being failure to move in appropriate strength for what their objective was. The size of the force was much too small to achieve anything. The failure to plan logistics in a way that could reinforce troops that were going to be engaged in combat. The entire convoy acted as if they were a convoy going to the front line, not recognizing the fact that they were the front line and they were set up in a very unfortunate position, being trapped on those roads, fighting an adversary that they didn't expect to fight because they didn't think this was going to be a war. So that was surprising that they didn't anticipate that the war would be a war, a tough war. Other things that surprised me were poor performance of the VDV, the failure to take advantage of some of the strengths that we do know that the Russian military forces have, like the strength in their artillery forces. But there was just a general failure to deliver that artillery at the right time, at the right place to protect those convoys, those logistic trains that were coming in. So clearly, that demonstrated failure that was years in the making, a failure to undertake combined arms operations so that artillery could support a force that was advancing forward. So all of those years where we thought that the Russians were starting to redesign their military to engage in a modern way of warfare and combined arms operations, all of those investments seem to have led to nothing. And again, maybe that was because they didn't treat this as if it was a war, that they were too flippant.

Harry Kemsley: Yeah. Dylan, I'm going to come back to you in just a second to look at how you assess that from open sources. And I'll probably have the same conversation with you, James, in terms of how do we see those things that surprised us from an open source. But Sean, I know you have a view on it.

Sean Corbett: Yeah, just to go right back to the start again, I agree with Dylan that they were going to do something was no surprise whatsoever. We were watching build- ups, we were watching Signature Equipment, so we knew they were going to do something. I think what did surprise us was the extent of the actual operation itself. I was talking to many think tanks at the time and a few of my ex- buddies, and the view was that they were going to try and take over the whole of the Donbas and probably that. So I think going downtown Kyiv was quite a surprise for us. And what that does for me, in terms of lessons, is that it is back to, I always mention it, capability plus intent, not understanding the intent. Why it went wrong though at that stage, and I agree with a lot of what Dylan said, was underestimating your enemy. Now that was for several reasons. Hope is not a valid course of action. I think there was a very firm belief that at whatever level that the Ukrainians would just roll over and say, " Yeah, actually..." And in some cases, actually facilitate them moving in. So know your enemy, there's some inaudible in there. I don't think they understood any way, shape or form the strength of feeling and the resistance that Ukraine was going to put up. And as I said, that's because they probably had infiltrators in there, they probably had their own tactical surveillance. And of course, particularly in an autocratic society like Russia, and we've got lots of ex- military right here, you tend to tell your boss what they want to hear as opposed to, " Hang on, this isn't going to go well." I do think another important element, which Dylan did bring up as well, is that for all the rhetoric in terms of exercising all combined arms operations, they've never done it for real. Vandalism seems to be the approach, and so they just were not equipped to do that.

Harry Kemsley: Yeah, I agree with that. I think there's probably more. We can dig into that in just a second. But Dylan, let's come back to you and then James. So we could see this was building up from the studies that your team are doing and other members of the team were doing in terms of more than just a few weeks before. We were watching this for a long time. So talk to just a couple of minutes there about the open source perspective that you were able to get of the build- up for Zapad, the big military exercise, watching huge amounts of armor coming across rail tracks that we hadn't seen before at that kind of scale for that kind of exercise. Give us some of the indicators that you were looking at from an open source environment that helped you understand what was more than likely about to happen.

Dylan: Sure. I'm going to discuss three things very briefly on it. First was the social media pictures, the pictures we were getting from social media. Those are important because they're coming in such large numbers, so many posts that were unprecedented. But you wouldn't be able to understand those without really being able to connect them to some foundational intelligence that we at Janes have, like the ability to identify tactical markings and link those to units because we'd seen those tactical markings at training grounds in other parts of Russia. And that helped us understand what was going on and understand what units were moving and what equipment they're bringing with them. So that was one thing, the level of social media information that we were getting and our ability to interpret that. The second thing was simply using satellite imagery. Satellite imagery that's available now at a commercial level allowed us to see build- ups in a way that previously would've been privy only to military intelligence organizations. And the third one that we had some amazing resources back in the early days before they were shut off. For example, one of them being the ability to look at rail cars and who they were registered to as they were moving across Russia. And we were actually able to look at, " This is the idea of that rail car, this one has been contracted by this military organization." And then we were able to spot those movements and track the movement of equipment from Siberia out into Belarus. So being able to track the movement of equipment and logistics via rail, which the Russian army relies on rail heavily for their logistics and their movement of forces, that was key as well. So those helped us put together a picture that led us to make the inevitable conclusion that this was real, this was going to happen.

Harry Kemsley: The interesting thing about that is that as real as it appeared to the open source analyst, there were closed source classified analysts who were telling us that it wasn't going to happen. The official line from certain countries in Europe was that this was not going to happen. And of course, it did. James, what about your experience in terms of sourcing open source?

James Rands: Well, I think one of the things was that the Russians actually wanted us to see what they had, and they were using their official media to push this message because what they wanted to say to you the Ukrainians is, " There's no point fighting. This is all the stuff we've got. We are just going to overwhelm you." And so we could do those pieces about looking what equipment they had, where it was. The classic tool for an intel officer is to pick out the signature kit, look for the fancy bit of air defense, look for the recce vehicle with a particular sensor on it. And you say, " Well, that is the enemy's main axis." We didn't quite get into that level of detail, but we could see what they were putting together. And actually when they built, I think it was three field hospitals on the border, that was the really big indicator. And that was supposed to be an indicator. It was like, " We are now preparing for mass casualties so we can take it." Also, there was other stuff that we could use. So shipping's got its AIS signals, so we could see how that was moving around and air traffic, et cetera as well. But I think that that was the really big thing, was the Russians telling us what they were going to do and showing us.

Harry Kemsley: Fascinating. All right, I can get buried in that. I'm not going to let myself get in too much detail on that, but we'll come back to the open sourcing in a while. Looking at the tactical level then, Dylan, what has the conflict told us about the conduct of modern warfare? Technology, for example, seems to be very much in the unmanned realm, for example. But what else have we learnt about? And what have we learnt about unmanned in terms of the conduct of modern warfare from this conflict in Ukraine?

Dylan: I think the biggest thing that we have learned in this conflict is the level of transparency that we're seeing both on the battlefield, tactical level, and in the rear areas. And that rear area is going all the way back out to Siberia. I think this transparency is both in the electro- optical realm, utilizing FPV drones on the front line as well as satellite imagery. And the transparency is in the electromagnetic realm as well, the ability to see electromagnetic signatures to a degree that we've never been able to see them before. And from this increased transparency on the battlefield, in particular, on the front line, the line of contact, I'm not saying the fog of war is gone. The fog of war has just changed. And we're seeing the level of transparency, what it means. All of the adaptations we've seen, all of the other features of the war, for example, the transparency has led to an inability to mass, an inability to maneuver. This is in combination with other factors as well. It's not just the transparency, but the transparency along with the heavy defensive fortifications, the defensive lines has led to that inability to mass, inability to maneuver. And these have led to tactical adaptations, in particular, a dispersion of forces. We have the dispersion, both of the logistic sites as well as the point of the spear. The first part of the war, we were tracking about 20 logistic sites, Russian logistic sites within Ukraine. Now, we're tracking about 200. So they're operating in a much more dispersed manner. And the other tactical adaptation is a level of concealment that we haven't seen before. And this concealment is both digging in, operating within the trees as well as electromagnetic concealment, taking your command posts and reducing them in size, moving them more often. So we have dispersion and concealment both a result of that inability to mass without being targeted by the sensor- to- shooter coordination. And all of that goes back to that transparency, that ability to see things in war that I think is probably the biggest change that I've seen.

Harry Kemsley: That's fascinating. I love the word transparency. And Sean, I'll come to you in a moment in terms of what that transparency might mean in terms of how deploying different kind of assets might be changed, because there's bound to be some impact there. James, what have you seen in terms of in the tactical environment, big things we've learnt out of this modern warfare environment?

James Rands: I think dispersal is... I will just add a little bit onto that. It's absolutely key. In the very early stages of the war, one of the Ukrainian officer candidate schools was hit. I think they lost something like 150 officer cadets. 150 soldiers lost is a big deal. 150 platoon commanders, who are just about to qualify, that's a big loss. I was talking to John Sweeney, the journalist who spent a lot of time out there, and asking him about how the Ukrainian forces actually function. Ukrainian forces, when they pulled guys away from the front line, will go into houses and stay in the houses, but they will never have more than seven people in the house. Because what they've learned is if you start putting lots of people in, it will be found, it will be a target and it will be destroyed and you will lose all of them. Now, that is clearly a challenge to platoon commanders because you're better now dispersed over quite a large area. And it's a bigger problem for the Russians who have lots of conscripts. And of course, you have these prison units where you can't really do that, otherwise they're going to escape or they're going to go looting and pillaging. I think also, tactically, one of the things that talking to people who are on Operation Interflex UK training to Ukrainian forces, marksmanship is key. A really obvious, common, really basic skill, the old Soviet mentality, which has not left either the Ukrainian or the Russian forces completely, is we put a lot of rounds down in the general direction of the enemy, win the firefight inaudible. It has been proven on the ranges that Ukrainian soldiers were simply not hitting the target until they could be retrained to actually shoot at the target with single- hitting shots. And when they did that, they were vastly more effective. It's not a lesson that we should need to learn, but it's one that we constantly need to reinforce. Looking at the battlefield, trench warfare clearly is extremely important. Urban warfare is extremely important, but urban warfare is not what Western forces were doing in Iraq where you're stacking up to go and raid someone's house. You are fighting through piles of rubble because towns do not exist by the time you're actually fighting in them. So storming trenches is hugely important. Getting to them is a huge tactical challenge. Down in the Surovikin line, the Russians put out these dragon's teeth, concrete bollards, which were mocked by a lot of people because they were pretty poorly made. They were pretty poorly made, and you could drive an armored vehicle over them, but it still slowed them down. It still caused problems. And that's the whole point of obstacle belts is that you slow your enemy down in an area where you can kill them. They have minefields. Anti- tank mines are very difficult to... They're not impossible to get out of the way, but you need bulldozers or you need explosive hose pipes to go and blast a route through. Actually, a fighting force needs lots and lots of engineers, and the Ukrainians were gifted engineering vehicles. But of course, these are some of the first things to be destroyed because they're up the front in the most dangerous part of the battle. And the use of SCATMINE, scatterable mines complicates this hugely because you can make a path through your minefield and the enemy fire an artillery shell full of mines that lands immediately behind you and then closes the route again. So pushing through and making a breach in the enemy lines is exceptionally difficult. Probably more difficult than we calculated. And in the West, we put more thought into it, I think, than the Russians or the Ukrainians had.

Harry Kemsley: Yeah. I'm not sure that many people I've spoken to in the military environment, before this conflict, really talked about trench warfare as the kind of thing you put up as being a formal form of warfare, not the current form of warfare. Sean, I come back to you then about the impact of this transparency that was talked about in terms of equipment on the battlefield.

Sean Corbett: Yeah. I think just wrapping all that up actually, is that we can't forget that you've really got to understand the environment in which you're operating in for any war. I think in the West, we may have been guilty of fighting the last war each time. We've always had air supremacy, which means we can get ISR, which means we can see everything that's going on and actually conduct operations at will. But when you look at this conflict where there was no air supremacy or even superiority, other than local at times, that ISR is very, very important. But I think it reiterates the fact that the war is not just a video game. It's messy and it's bloody, and we can't forget that. So in learning lessons, I used to work in a place called Jungle Warfare Training Center, where we went from, we used to call it lessons learnt because that was our job at the operation level, to lessons identified, and then just lessons. Because you try and learn the lesson, but no two conflicts are going to be the same. But back to your point on the ISR and just to reflect what has been said, actually, it did prove that local ISR, intelligence surveillance reconnaissance, at the tactical level, is still really, really important. But you've got to adapt again to circumstances. So I'm sure we'll come and talk about drones in a moment because we have to. But the sheer pervasiveness of all of the surveillance equipment is so important.

Harry Kemsley: Okay. We'll take just a short pause there. That's the end of part one. Please do join us for part two very soon. And thank you for listening.

Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us this week on the World of Intelligence. Make sure to visit our website, janes. com/ podcast, where you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts so you'll never miss an episode.