The Kursk offensive is not about jamming Russia with a single problem. It's about introducing as many problems as it can in quick succession. It's about destabilizing Russian politics around Putin. It’s about increasing casualties when Russia is having difficulty with recruitment. It’s about creating problems with transportation and coordination. It’s about international politics seeing Ukraine as capable. It’s about increased Ukrainian morale and decreased Russian morale. It’s about creating confusion. It’s about forcing Russia to fight so it is less able to bring its advantages to bear. There’s the chance Russia will screw it up and this will be over quicker than most imagine. When it’s all over it might look like one or two things were key to Ukraine’s success but the cumulative effect was the true purpose of the Kursk offensive.
As people continue to seek, debate, and process the goals and meaning of the Kursk offensive there seems to be a constant desire to find a singular goal or reason for it. While some people (myself and others) have certainly offered that there could be “multiple” goals for it, I wanted to reinforce that having a multiple of moderate effects can be as important as any one single big effect. This is due to how armies, nations, and people can end up collapsing.
I’ve written about collapse before here in August of 2022, it was back in that first summer before Kharkiv and Kherson. In it, I likened the buildup to collapse as taking out walls in a house. The first few walls to come down don’t cause the building to collapse. But at some point, one of the walls coming down will cause the whole house to collapse. It looked like the last wall was the culprit, but in reality it was the combination of losing several different walls which together brought the house down.
The title of the article “Long Slog vs Sudden Victory” put this in a context of how quickly Ukraine might win and I challenged folks to provide the reasons as to why it would go on a long time. Clearly, the war has gone on to be by some definitions a long slog, though compared to many wars it’s still rather short. I won’t pretend at that time that I meant 2 and a half years was “sudden victory.” So I clearly wasn’t completely correct. But I also wasn’t completely wrong. We saw two minor collapses in the Kharkiv and Kherson offensives. Unfortunately, Ukraine had run out of gas by November and couldn’t finish the job. Had they had one more offensive in them to get to the Azov sea and break the land bridge in Late 2022, when Russian troops were in disarray after Kherson and the fortifications were not yet set up, perhaps I might have been correct. But for a variety of reasons we’ve argued elsewhere (and I won’t go into here), Ukraine didn’t have that last push.
Instead Russia had critical time to regroup their existing soldiers, build up new forces, build up fortifications, and otherwise recover from their 2022 setbacks. Then in the summer of 2023, Ukraine launched their offense to a giant fizzle. Mines and drones made their presence felt as the dominating factors of the war that summer. But even with the failure to make progress, there were some promising trends such as a significant depletion of Russian artillery shells and tubes such that a noticeable difference in Russian artillery was noticed. Even with suicide drones and glide bombs taking up some of the slack, Russia remains highly dependent upon artillery. Sadly, at the end of the summer US Republicans blocked US aid for 6 months which almost instantly turned the artillery advantage Ukraine was creating around on its head. Russia had a chance to restock as it increased its own production and also purchase large amounts from abroad.
Part of what the house metaphor for collapse lacks is both a time dependent aspect and a repair aspect. Damage done to the enemy is not always permanent. Armies can adapt and repair. The rate of taking out walls needs to be faster than the rate of repair.
So I’d like to offer a different metaphor today. Each side in the war is facing a series of challenges. Each challenge can be solved in a variety of ways and seldom is any single challenge make or break. If we imagine Russia as playing a game of Tetris, the challenges it faces can be portrayed as the different Tetris blocks appearing at the top of the screen (and this is happening for Ukraine as well, but I’m going to examine just one side). As the blocks land, how any single block lands doesn’t have a great affect. But, as more blocks come down placement starts to matter more. Well placed blocks allow a line to fade out just as the Russian Army might figure out a new means of coping with some challenges. The lines of Tetris fade when the row is complete. For the Russians, some problems and stress are solved.
However, sometimes blocks come in a bad order, or too fast, or the player doesn’t see the best move. At that point a space may be trapped in the rows. This increases the “floor” of the space you are working with making everything harder. In the war, you might see this as a variety of problems coming together to reduce the amount of artillery available to the army. Or perhaps significant losses of soldiers. Every new block that appears has less space and therefor time to find a best fit. The challenges become harder even though the shape of the blocks remain the same.
Sometimes, due to different pressures, a block may end up very poorly laid. (In Tetris, usually something tall near the center blocking your ability to have sufficient time for thought and movement to get blocks to the side). Frequently, once a really bad block is placed, it can spell doom pretty quickly as the difficulty of future challenges skyrockets as space and time become severely limited. Finally, the last block appears to seal off the game.
Now ask yourself, which block caused the player to fail? Was it the final block? As technically it was the one to actually cause the game over? Or was it the poorly placed block in the middle that suddenly upped the difficulty to near impossible levels? Or was it an early block which started that initially subtle difficulty increase but the effects added up over time to cause everything to fail later? Or was it all of them?
Historians, and people in general (myself included), really love to be able to pick out “the one” thing which won or lost us a game, or a war. Did the player who fails to score the winning points in the final seconds cost the team the game? Or did the team as a whole not play well enough to put the score out of reach in the final moments?
Russia is playing a game of Tetris with challenges constantly coming at it. As Ukraine does better, it’s able to send blocks at Russia at a faster rate. Combined with aggregate small mistakes leading to spaces in rows the difficulty of Russia finding the right moves increases. However, when Ukraine is unable to keep up the pressure (Spring of 2023 and later with US aid disappearing), the speed of the challenges slow down. Russia is able to keep up with the blocks coming at it, while also even being able to catch up with earlier mistakes and fill some of those whole further down. So it’s not just about the number of challenges, but also the speed at which they come.
Over the course of 2024, Russia has been on a long offensive. Several sources (such as ISW) have been predicting a culmination of their offensive in the next month or so. Ukraine started receiving US aid again allowing them to mostly stabilize a few months ago to get us to today. What we didn’t know was that Ukraine was receiving enough to secretly store some excess in preparation for their own offensive.
Military culmination, sometimes called “friction”, can be likened to the buildup of Tetris rows at the bottom of the screen. It takes some slowing down of challenges and focusing on fixing them to clean up those rows. In military terms it’s reorganizing. It’s getting news supplies and replacement soldiers. It’s giving rest to those fighting. It’s time to examine new strategies or techniques or technology you haven’t had time to look at in the heat of the battle.
Russia was coming to a place in its Tetris game where it was going to turn the game speed down and fix those rows. But then Kursk happened, and the Ukrainians cranked that game speed up to the max they could. Suddenly Russia has blocks coming fast and furious and they don’t have a lot of space to move those blocks.
Blocks of similar shapes coming repeatedly can actually be easy to solve sometimes. Think of repeated 2x2 Tetris blocks which stack quickly and easily without much thought. But when it’s a variety of blocks it becomes more likely to make a mistake and those mistakes can start to pile up.
The Kursk offensive is not necessarily about jamming Russia with a single type of block. It can be about introducing as many DIFFERENT problems as it can in quick succession. It's about destabilizing Russian politics around Putin. It’s about increasing Russian casualties at a time when Russia is having difficulty meeting recruitment quotas. It’s about forcing Russia to move troops creating problems to solve with transportation and coordination. It’s about international politics seeing Ukraine as still capable. It’s about increased Ukrainian morale and decreased Russian morale. It’s about creating confusion in command structures. It’s about forcing Russia to fight in a manner in which it is less able to bring its advantages to bear. It’s about that and a whole lot more.
Now one of these things may end up being a really bad mistakenly placed block. Perhaps it’s Putin putting the FSB in charge of the “Counter-Terrorist Operation” one day and the very next day replacing the leadership again. Or maybe one of the generals will really foul up the response. We don’t know. There’s always the chance that Russia calmly and correctly places all the blocks coming at it successfully and outlasts Ukraine here. And there’s the chance Russia will screw it up royally and this will be over quicker than most people imagine. We won’t know till it’s all over. At that time it might look like one or two things were key to Ukraine’s success and everyone will talk about how that was the true purpose of the Kursk offensive. But don’t forget to look at all the problems coming at Russia from this one move. Russia may solve a bunch of the problems, but while they were solving those they just couldn’t solve this other set fast enough. It’s not always about the single block that gets you (though sometimes it can be). Sometimes it's about which block you just can’t get to and it really could have been any of them.
These things can take time, or it can be over quickly. What would have happened if the Wagner mutiny had ended in civil war instead of how it shook out?
So let’s hope Russia’s Tetris playing days are soon over. Let’s hope they make some colossal mistake to get this done fast. And let’s support Ukraine to throw blocks at Russia as fast as they can so no matter how well Russia plays they just can’t cope.
1 comments:
Eggy Car gameplay can promote a growth mindset. The more you play, the better you get, reinforcing the idea that improvement comes through practice and persistence.
Post a Comment