- Russian military bloggers criticized Russian tactics in Ukraine, a US think tank said.
- They said Russian troops continue to gather in large groups, enabling drones to target them.
- Ukraine has used drones to counter Russia’s manpower and equipment advantages.
Russian troops are continuing to gather in large groups to attack Ukrainian positions despite it making them an easy target for drones, Russian milbloggers said, according to a report.
The Institute for the Study of War, a US think tank, said that influential Russian milbloggers were expressing frustration at tactical blunders by the Russian military.
According to the critics, Russia is forming groups of armored vehicles and troops to attack Ukrainian positions that are easily blown up from the air by exploding drones, said the ISW.
This is just the latest change in which an invention changes the nature of warfare. You saw it happen with crossbows, which allowed unskilled troops to shoot people far away, gunpowder weapons, which negated armor and castles, rifles, which removed much of the need for long lines of troops using volley fire, the machine gun, which made an infantry charge much less effective, air power, which changed the nature of naval warfare, and more than I care to list.
The problem is for the very impactful changes, you have two generations of military leadership who have learned tactics and strategy based around technologies that are becoming rapidly outmoded. WWI shocked people with the level of slaughter seen.
It’s easier to adapt to using a new weapons system than it is to figure out how to respond to it, because the uses were defined as the system was being developed and just need the actual applications to be refined and optimized, while the responders have a much larger search space.
I’ll always be the first to come down on the crappiness of the Russian military - I could go on for pages about what they do wrong - but to some extent this is something all armies are vulnerable to. Look how long it took for the US to adapt to IEDs, for example.
Well said! I think this is largely a case of the Russian command structure’s authoritarian nature. If field commanders had more independence, they probably wouldn’t be massing like this.