Petraeus on Russia's disastrous invasion of Ukraine

Incompetent Russian military chiefs developed “an abysmal campaign design” for invading Ukraine, one of America’s most experienced combat commanders has told The Times. General David Petraeus who led coalition forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan, has watched the war in Ukraine with an increasing sense of bewilderment. “There certainly does not appear to be the kind of unity of command and effort that we achieved in Iraq and Afghanistan where one commander exercised operational control over all US and coalition forces as well as over 100,000 civilian contractors in each theatre,” he said. He predicted that Russian command and control in Ukraine would get “even more muddled as units are withdrawn from around Kyiv, reconstituted, replacing personnel, tank and other vehicle losses, moved and committed to reinforce the modest gains in eastern Ukraine north of the Donbas”. The war was being run from Moscow, he said. “Presumably the leaders in Moscow thought they could do a better job,” he said. But this meant troops on the ground in Ukraine had to wait for their orders from the Kremlin hundreds of miles away. “Unlike in Iraq and Afghanistan where the directive was: ‘in the absence of orders, figure out what they should have been and execute aggressively’, “Petraeus said. For months before the invasion the Russian forces deployed to the border with Ukraine had carried out live-fire exercises and appeared to be engaged in extensive armoured manoeuvres as if rehearsing for D-Day. However, Petraeus ridiculed the Russian pre-invasion rehearsals. “It is a complete mystery to me what the Russian forces were doing during the many months of training exercises on the border. It is starting to appear that they were camping, not training,” he said. There were innumerable reasons why the Russian forces had failed. Petraeus listed some of them: “vast overestimation of Russian military capabilities, considerable underestimation of Ukrainian capabilities, lack of unity of command, abysmal campaign design, wholly insufficient lack of forces required for the tasks envisioned, lack of a professional non-commissioned officer corps [a crucial component of western armies], and a vastly inadequate logistics structure to support the forces deployed once the rail system was not available”. Petraeus outlined other basic weaknesses. He said the Russian troops suffered from “a lack of standards for performance of the most basic of tasks” For example, failing to stay dispersed when either moving or in static positions., making them vulnerable to attack. The Russian troops had also failed to achieve combined arms effects, another key element of the forces under his command in Iraq and Afghanistan. In other words, failing to employ armour, infantry, engineers, mortars and artillery together. Petraeus said he had seen no evidence of any proper integration of air and ground operations. There had also been “abysmal tactical communications” which was why so many generals and colonels had been killed, forced by confusing signals to move to the front to try and sort out logistical and operational glitches. Another mystery was that the invasion force was equipped with armoured vehicles and weapons systems “that are certainly not the cutting-edge models Russia was supposed to have been fielding”. On top of all that, up to 25 per cent of the Russian forces comprised of conscripts who had yet to complete one year of service., and they had inadequate kit. Was it possible that Vladimir Putin was not being kept abreast of all these disastrous military mistakes, as has been claimed by both US and British intelligence chiefs? Petraeus who became director of the CIA after completing his command in Afghanistan in July 2011, replied: “It has to be inescapable to Putin that Ukraine has won the Battle of Kyiv and Russia has lost., and also that Russia has failed to encircle Kharkiv, failed to break through at Mykolaiv and hence be unable to take Odessa, fallen far short of getting to Dnipro in central Ukraine and has made only modest, very costly, grinding gains around the Donbas [in the east].” “Beyond all that there can be no hiding the reports of the enormous losses of soldiers, weapon systems, armoured vehicles and commanders,” Petraeus said.