QUICK TAKES // BY BEN FRANKELUkraine War: Four Weeks On, Pt. 1
The end of the war is not yet clear, but certain patterns have emerged which are as clear as they are surprising, chief among them the sheer breadth of Putin’s miscalculations. The Russian forces have not been well-prepared for war, and they are patently inadequate for occupation. Moreover, the Russian forces have suffered an astonishingly high rate of attrition. But even if Russia can no longer engage in maneuver warfare at scale with a reasonable hope of success, it can still inflict enormous damage on the civilian population and infrastructure by continuing, or escalating, its use of artillery, rockets, missiles, and aerial bombardment.
In 1991, at a press conferences held a few days after the coalition launched its war to evict Iraq from Kuwait, General Norman Schwarzkopf, reflecting on the abysmal performance of the Iraqi military, said that it was clear that Saddam Hussain was “unschooled” in the art of war. Four weeks and four days into the Ukraine war, it is tempting to make a similar observation about Vladimir Putin.
The end of the war is not yet clear, but certain patterns have emerged which are as clear as they are surprising, chief among them the sheer breadth of Putin’s miscalculations.
In the first of this 2-part assessment of developments to date, I highlight the numbers: the inadequacy of the number of Russian troops for the purpose of occupying Ukraine even in the event of a Russian military victory, and the extraordinary high rate of attrition the Russian military has suffered. This level of attrition makes any large-scale operations to expand Russia’s military presence to the west of the positions already occupied by Russia less and less likely to succeed.
In fact, if the rate of attrition experienced in the first month of the invasion continues to the end of the second month, the Russian military faces the possibility of collapse, because such rates are unsustainable.
Let’s look at two sets of numbers:
Occupation
When a military is tasked with controlling an area which is home to civilians – an urban center, a rural region, etc. – the number of soldiers required for such control is a function of the number of people living in that area. A second variable is whether the population is receptive to the occupying force, or hostile. The technical military term is “force ratio.”
“In an orderly society like Britain, you need two soldiers per thousand people. In a disordered society, like Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles, you need about 20 per thousand,” Michael Clarke, a visiting professor in King’s College London’s Department of War Studies, told The Times. “If you assumed Ukraine was going to accept Russian occupation, and would only face minor insurgencies, you might get away with 20.”
This means that if we assume that the Russian army defeated the Ukrainian resistance, and we further assume that 44 million Ukrainians would then largely accept the occupying Russian forces with only minor instances of insurgency, then Russia would need 880,000 soldiers to control Ukraine.
