Sorry, I got a bit carried away with this one. Emphasis added to quotes.

Ukrainian military commanders have changed tactics, focusing on wearing down the Russian forces with artillery and long-range missiles instead of plunging into minefields under fire.

If I were sent to the US to train and the officer in charge started telling me that I should walk through a minefield, in the open, under artillery fire, I would politely tell them to demonstrate this tactic first and if they make it to the other side, I might consider following. I have read many stories about the benefits to soldiers of playing war games like Call of Duty. Good for the reactions, I’m told. Helps to get the troops in the right frame of mind. It’s one of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard but it seems to have infected West Point. I can think of no other explanation for teaching tactics like this except that the instructor has been convinced that you respawn if you get hit.

The complicated training in Western maneuvers has given the Ukrainians scant solace in the face of barrage after barrage of Russian artillery.

Exactly what Mearsheimer predicted, then.

“The counteroffensive itself hasn’t failed; it will drag on for several months into the fall,” said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who recently visited the front lines.

Senior fellow at the fucking what? Why would you ask him for an opinion about war, then? Anyway, he continues: “Arguably, the problem was in the assumption that with a few months of training, Ukrainian units could be converted into fighting more the way American forces might fight, leading the assault against a well-prepared Russian defense, rather than helping Ukrainians fight more the best way they know how.”

… the Western-trained brigades received only four to six weeks of combined arms training, and units made several mistakes at the start of the counteroffensive in early June that set them back, according to U.S. officials and analysts[.]

So teach Ukrainians how to fight then, when this fails, blame the period of training and the Russians. It couldn’t be that US tactics are dogshit, could it? Is it beyond the realm of possibility that tactics developed to make arms dealers as much money as possible aren’t going to be the most effective at ending a war quickly and minimising loss of life? Further, if you can’t supply Ukraine with artillery, which appears to be the major sticking point in all this, how can you conclude that it hasn’t failed? Just because it hasn’t failed yet; if you’re not going to be able to supply it with the one thing that might tip the balance, it will fail eventually. This rhetoric is that of a gambler who’s willing to bet with other peoples’ lives and property but not their own.

Turns out that the training officer and the senior fellow are the mouthpieces of the ghouls:

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has increasingly signaled that his strategy is to wait out Ukraine and its allies and win the war by exhausting them. American officials are worried that Ukraine’s return to its old tactics risks that it will race through precious ammunition supplies, which could play into Mr. Putin’s hands and disadvantage Ukraine in a war of attrition. …

Military experts said that using newly learned tactics for the first time was always going to be hard, especially given that the Russian response was to assume a defensive crouch and fire massive barrages of artillery.

Zelensky:

added that “because we started it a bit late,” Russia had “time to mine all of our lands and build several lines of defense.”

Which means the west and Zelensky knew what Russia planned and knew that it had months to prepare its lines to execute its plans. Worse, it means the Ukrainians were never trained to win and Zelensky didn’t care. It confirms, yet again, the story that NATO plans to fight to the last Ukrainian, as a way of destroying Ukraine and of witting down Russian supplies. NATO has a choice: attrition of troops or attrition of supplies. Then it duped the Ukrainians into believing that attrition of troops was the better option. The west is making no friends in this war and Europeans should be wary of so deeply betraying a trusting next-door neighbour.

Zelensky:

“We did have plans to start it in the spring, but we didn’t because, frankly, we had not enough munitions and armaments and not enough properly trained brigades — I mean, properly trained in these weapons[.]”

Is this a slip? Was he admitting that he knew the yanks hadn’t sent enough ammo. Then his handler gave the signal and he clarifies that he meant his soldiers didn’t know how to use the ammo that they definitely did have. (Off screen, there’s a pile of six shells, which an army of thousands is supposed to share once they have been trained to use them.)

Imagine trusting an ‘ally’ to train your troops when their key proposal is that you need to figure out a way to do it with courage but without weapons, as reported in the WSJ:

When Ukraine launched its big counteroffensive this spring, Western military officials knew Kyiv didn’t have all the training or weapons—from shells to warplanes—that it needed to dislodge Russian forces. But they hoped Ukrainian courage and resourcefulness would carry the day.

Back to the NY Times article:

Biden administration officials had hoped the nine Western-trained brigades, some 36,000 troops, would show that the American way of warfare was superior to the Russian approach.

Laughable if it wasn’t so tragic. I do wonder whether Ukrainian troops have access to western articles about the war. Probably not considering how fast it would likely demoralise the troops. The NATO strategy is so fucking blatant:

Western officials championed that approach as more efficient than the costly strategy of wearing Russian forces down by attrition, which threatens to deplete Ukraine’s ammunition stocks.

This provides fitting imagery for the US war machine—here’s $44 billion worth of support but there’s not enough ammo to last the month. It’s like getting a remote control car for Christmas but no batteries. And they admit it, again and again:

Much of the training involved teaching Ukrainian troops how to go on the offensive rather than stay on defense. … When Moscow began its full-scale invasion last year, Ukrainian troops put their defensive operations into play, denying Russia the swift victory it had anticipated.

NATO knew the Ukrainians knew how to fight and instead of supporting them with the only thing they needed—weapons—they propagandised them into thinking they could win without more weapons. How much do you think the training was watching Hollywood war movies where actors win they day with their own personal grit and determination?

This is why liberalism is terminal. Liberals are fundamentally unable to consider material reality and must always fall back on idealism. Their worldview does not invite any other way of thinking. Here, that means believing a US-backed Ukraine can hope to win despite the known impossibility of providing enough ammunition to do so. There’s some military accountant in the Pentagon pleading with their superior to listen as they explain all this before they resign themselves to another day of fudging the books. More:

Ukraine may well return to the American way of warfare if it breaks through dug-in Russian defenses, some military experts said.

And just in case this death cult idealism wasn’t clear enough, from the most ironically named officer in history:

General Breedlove concurred and said he still expected the Ukrainian counteroffensive to put Russia at a disadvantage.

They won’t break through without ammunition! Why report this as if breaking through is remotely possible? (I’m not saying will always be impossible, but under current arrangements I don’t see how anything will change.) Still, the reality won’t slow down Breedlove or prevent the reporter from using his words to present a conclusion that is entirely at odds with the evidence in the article:

“The Ukrainians are in a place now where they understand how they want to employ their forces,” he said. “And we’re starting to see the Russians move backwards.”

Now the west wonders why the Ukrainians are using their own methods? Maybe they’re starting to see that NATO is more of an enemy than Russia. Hopefully this means the Ukrainians tell NATO to fuck off and the war might be over soon. I always have been optimistic, though.

Personally, I wouldn’t be taking the advice of a military who recently stumbled into a 20 year war with a group of farmers in the middle east, and lost, despite a budget larger than the rest of the planet’s armies combined.

I find this is pretty funny in particular because another question this obviously raises is what reason is there to believe that a NATO-standard fighting force would do any better. Ukrainians have far more actual combat experience at this point and NATO pumped them full of everything NATO has to offer. I imagine countries around the world are looking at this and realizing that NATO is a paper tiger after all, and the west is now running around doing damage control blaming Ukraine for failed NATO tactics.

It raises questions about the quality of the training the Ukrainians received from the West and about whether tens of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons, including nearly $44 billion worth from the Biden administration, have been successful in transforming the Ukrainian military into a NATO-standard fighting force.

Some units failed to follow cleared paths and ran into mines. When a unit delayed a nighttime attack, an accompanying artillery bombardment to cover its advance went ahead as scheduled, tipping off the Russians.

Isn’t this literally a WW1 strat? Probably even older. Is this the cutting edge doctrine that US teaches and UA fails to implement?

Anyway, hindsight is 20/20, but why did the Americans bother to teach their way of fighting? Ukraine has different constraints and if I had to guess, slightly different army composition. I’ve heard that the US relies heavily on having complete air superiority, which UA doesn’t have. I suppose they know other ways of fighting too, but unless I’m missing something, this seems like a massive oversight from NATO, to the point of hubris.

US warfare doctrine works okay but it expects complete air dominance and the enemy is vastly underequipped. It’s used for imperialism against poor countries, not peer conflicts.

US warfare doctrine is pretty similar to Nazi and Imperial Japanese warfare doctrine: Die for the empire.

Hint: Ukraine is not the empire.

I saw a post the other day about western businesses starting to bid on part of Ukrainian industry and stuff. Does anyone have a link to more of that? I forgot to save it to my sources.