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On nukes, order of battle, and chariots
bigserge.substack.com
Russia, however, was forced to experiment due to a variety of unique factors.
Russia’s force generation model is unique, as I mentioned in my
last post, utilizing a mixture of conscripts and contract professionals. This mixture, combined with fiscal austerity, creates a unique challenge. Suppose you have a brigade which is kept at only 80% strength during peacetime. Of that remaining force, a substantial fraction are conscripts, who legally cannot be deployed except to defend Russian territory. You are left with a sort of rump brigade that is actually deployable at any given moment. The solution for Russia was to create the 700-900 man Battalion Tactical Group - a smaller, derivative combined arms formation from the larger parent unit (the brigade).
This is key to understanding Russia’s performance in the war to this point. The BTG was devised as a temporary solution to the problem of being legally unable to readily deploy the entire parent brigade. The resulting formation is very high on firepower, with plenty of artillery and armor, but low on infantry. It is a powerful unit in short, high-intensity action, but it lacks the manpower to engage in protracted campaigns with full strength enemy units. A BTG will lack the ability to quickly regenerate combat power without cannibalizing other units.
What we have seen from Russia so far is entirely predictable given the type of force it generated at the beginning of the war. There has been a strong preoccupation with conserving infantry, because this is the arm that the BTG is most lacking. A unit that is overweight on ranged fires and low on infantry is not going to try to defend a tricky forward line - it’s going to pull back and impose a cost on the enemy with its fires. Is this ideal? No, clearly it would be better to have sufficient infantry so that it was unnecessary to hollow out portions of the front. However, the manpower fragility of the BTG necessitates this methodology - the BTG would prefer to retaliate with ranged fires from behind a proxy tripwire force - exactly like the national guard and militia that were manning the frontline in Kharkov Oblast. This leaves front lines vulnerable to penetration, especially when the Ukrainians use dispersed points of contact - but Russia’s tube and rocket advantage give it the ability to impose a foreboding cost when Ukraine pushes into those hollowed regions.
Why is this relevant right now? Well, Russia is in the process of a large mobilization drive which will radically alter the force deployment and organization scheme. The BTG is likely to disappear from the battlefield entirely, with mobilized personnel empowering a shift back to the parent formations (brigades and regiments) that do not have the infantry shortages that proved problematic for the BTG.
The Battalion Tactical Group was a novel attempt to solve a tricky force generation problem, which allowed Russia to keep potent combined arms formations in a ready state. They are high firepower units that proved capable of dishing out horrific punishment - but they are (and always were) temporary derivatives that are simply not designed for a war of attrition or manning a wide front. With mobilization underway, it seems that the time of the BTG has come to a close.