Russia is directing its military campaign against Ukraine from Moscow, with no single military commander in place to give orders and make decisions.
The West, which gave Ukraine only 2-3 days to defend itself after the attack by Russian troops, is trying to understand why the fighting lasted for 37 days. The Western nations admitted that they overestimated the strength of the Russian army and were trying to examine what had gone wrong with it. For example, The New York Times identified three major problems for Russian troops simultaneously.
Who is in charge?
Russia is directing its military campaign against Ukraine from Moscow, with no single military commander in place to give orders and make decisions. This conclusion was reached by representatives of U.S. government agencies studying the course of the war, which continued for five weeks, The New York Times wrote.
This centralized approach, they said, could explain why Russia’s military campaign has collapsed in the face of tighter Ukrainian resistance.
The absence of a military commander in Ukraine means that Russia’s air, land and sea units are out of sync. Their fragmented combat operations suffer from poor logistics, falling morale and the deaths of between 7,000 and 15,000 troops, senior U.S. officials and independent analysts say. Ukraine, on the other hand, estimates the losses of the Russian army at more than 17 thousand people.
The deaths of at least seven Russian generals are also partly linked to this problem, as senior officers are pushed to the front line to solve tactical problems that Western military forces will entrust to more junior officers. or senior enlisted staff.
A senior US official noticed that Representatives of NATO and the intelligence community have been waiting several weeks for the emergence of a top Russian military leader in Ukraine. No one showed up, so Western officials concluded that the decisions were being made by people far ahead in Moscow: Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu; General Valery Gerasimov, Chief of General Staff of the Russian Army, and even President Vladimir Putin.
However, campaigning from 500 miles away is difficult, U.S. military officials say. By itself, such a distance could already lead to incompatibility between the fighting troops and the military plans that Moscow is pursuing. According to them, instead of streamlining the process, Russia has created a war machine that cannot adapt to Ukraine’s fast and flexible resistance.
Officers are slaves
Another senior U.S. official said Russian soldiers, trained not to take a step without clear instruction from their superiors, were left on the battlefield in confusion, while Putin, Shoigu and General Gerasimov continues to develop increasingly unrealistic strategies.
This vertical approach meant that Moscow sent instructions to generals on the ground, who then passed them on to the troops, ordering them to follow those instructions regardless of the situation on the ground.
At a lower level, the Russian military has no right to point out shortcomings in strategy that should be obvious.
Military analysts argue that a complex set of events led to the deaths of Russian generals, rooted in a crumbling command structure that originated in Moscow.
“I don’t see the coherent organizational architecture you’d expect in months of training and probably longer planning (war) before the invasion,” retired Gen. David Petraeus, who served as head of Central Command, in the New York Times Military of the U.S. and commander in chief of forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In an American military command structure, a four-star military commander in the field will coordinate and synchronize all of his or her subordinate air, ground, and naval forces, as well as special and cyber operations. The campaign will have a primary goal, a kind of center of gravity, and other operations will work in support of this goal.
Whereas in the case of the deaths of several Russian generals, the cause of all the problems was far from the battlefield, because Moscow did not respond quickly (to the operational situation) against the background of the fact that Ukraine had turned -jam in Russian communications. .
Source: korrespondent
