Not Enough Soldiers

As casualties mount, it is a shortage of trained manpower that presents the greatest limitation for both sides at this critical phase in the war

The Ukrainian counter-offensive currently underway, represents the final push by either side before pressure steps up from the international community for a negotiated settlement.  Only a successful showing --- which means at the very least, driving a wedge between Russian forces south and east, and placing an unassailable amount of combat power within striking distance of Crimea – will preempt that pressure by creating new facts on the ground.  

All indications are that the Ukrainians have yet to commit their main effort to the fight, and it may be weeks before we get a real feel for how this offensive is progressing toward these goals.  In the meantime, they can at least rest assured that nowhere on the 1000-kilometer front are the Russians in a position to launch a counter-attack – let alone a full operational level counter- offensive.  They lack the manpower to do such a thing – and at this stage, no mobilization efforts, however draconian, can get them to where they need to be in time. 

 Putin’s partial mobilization effort last September was intended to provide trained manpower to fuel Russia’s upcoming offensive – and in this it was largely successful, providing over the course of the next few months an estimated 300,000 fresh soldiers for the offensive.  The problem is that the offensive turned out to be a damp squib.

What Offensive?

The Russian decision to launch its offensive back in February with Bakhmut as its objective, was perhaps predictable – as was its failure to gain momentum. The Russians are grappling with logistics problems.  Morale among their rank and file is at rock bottom – even among its better units.  But their most debilitating limitation is manpower.

Grim Math

A largely successful mobilization effort launched last September produced some 300,000 soldiers, who were sent through training post-haste to bring units in country up to full strength.  Many of these soldiers manned front line units in Russia’s offensive launched back in February, and now stalled in Bakhmut. It was the highwater mark of Russia’s manpower fortunes, but the gains made by the first mobilization effort were rapidly squandered in Donbas, where, by the most conservative estimates, the Russians have been losing 500 soldiers a day.  If you add to those numbers an additional 1,000 wounded or captured, then 300,000 men will last between 200 and 250 days. It has been more than that now since Putin’s mobilization announcement in early September, which suggests – by grim math alone – that the Russians are now in the same position as they were back then.

Same Problem – Different Cause

For different reasons the Ukrainians are grappling with the same problem – and despite the focus of media attention being on weapons systems and platforms, it is a shortage of trained manpower that presents the greatest obstacle to their plans to take back all of Ukraine.

Note that I say trained, because what is missing on both sides isn’t a shortage of recruits – volunteers and impressed –but rather the finished product.

Regeneration

Without sufficient training cadres in place, Ukraine lacks the institutional capacity to support mass mobilization. This is a process called regeneration:  the ability to deliver soldiers, as units or individual replacements to the front.   Recruits have to be trained – preferably somewhere other than the front – by instructors upon whose experience and competence their lives will depend. In the United States our military can rely on this resource during a major conflict. 

The Sound of the Guns

From the outset of the war, Ukraine would have been hard put to preserve a cadre of instructors from the immediate risk of death to maintain this capacity. In the early days, the officers and NCOs manning Ukraine’s military training establishments volunteered or were called upon to fight: any argument that they should stay to preserve the Ukrainian military’s ability to regenerate would have seemed preposterous.  Over the course of the last year, this pool has undoubtedly dwindled in consort with Ukraine’s casualty rates – which though lower than the Russians are by any other measure, staggeringly high. As a result, front line commanders find themselves having to conduct on the job training for new recruits.

As the Mozart Group delivered training to front line units in the Donbas and Zaphorizhzhia, we estimated from our pre-course surveys that some 80% of front line soldiers had received little to no training.  We didn’t need to extrapolate those numbers to arrive at a conclusion about training readiness in general – it was a situation openly talked about in the media.

Putting Gas in the Tank

It is this factor – the loss of so many of Ukraine’s best young men and women – that must weigh most heavily in the deliberations of Zelensky and his advisors.  It’s not just a moral burden: even if the most conservative estimates of Ukrainian casualties are correct, the armed forces are taking a punishing that will be hard to replenish even under the best of circumstances.

The Ukrainians have had some much-vaunted successes:  In April the Russians pulled back from their attack on Kyiv, in September the Ukrainians seized almost 6,000 square miles of territory, east of Kharkiv, and in November the liberated Kherson.

Each of these victories gave rise to optimism that the Ukrainians had found a breakthrough and that they had a fighting chance of winning the war sooner rather than later. In each case, however, in they lacked the manpower – trained, equipped, tasked, and organized -- to exploit a breakthrough. Since then, they have raised 9 additional Brigades from scratch – training and equipping them for this offensive.  It will be weeks if not months before it becomes apparent whether these are enough.

In the meantime, the Ukrainians will be preparing for the next phase – and unless they can figure out how to replace infantrymen with unmanned platforms that can seize and hold ground – one task will be at the top of their list: training more soldiers.