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https://warontherocks.com/2022/03/the-wargame-before-the-war-russia-attacks-ukraine/?fbclid=IwAR01hcsc1oe0SwfErmb-qBUANilGVayeHRHQnBHnxwzatBd8_oEc370VoGs

Marine Corps University wargaming the invasion of Ukraine scant days before the real thing. Interesting discussion about our expectations, how to model (or not) different aspects and a comparison of the game vs reality.

I mean... that's an actual job, the Russians weren't shy about their pre-invasion positioning, and the US was shouting to the skies (admittedly in a daft and overtly comical matter that was verging on 'boy who cried wolf') that it was 'any day now' for 2-3 weeks.

It'd be weird if everybody's military analysts didn't spend February doing this.

Couple weird notes:

Once the Russian offensive began to roll there was a wide expectation of a rapid armored descent on Ukraine’s key cities — Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, and Odessa

I hope him means 'rapid armored descent' just in terms of getting there fast. Armor assaulting cities isn't recommended.

This is in contrast with nearly every expert and pundit on the airwaves, who are expressing astonishment at how this conflict is unfolding. If this wargame had been played at the Pentagon or the White House in the weeks leading up to the war, no strategist or policymaker would be shocked by any event so far seen in the war.

Another weird statement, just because these guys know how these things work (which makes me wonder if its an editing insert). The astonishment is from journalists and politicians. Actual military folks aren't all that shocked (just like the authors), they're just not playing armchair general on the 6:30 or hourly news channels.
They're passing on their evaluations behind the scenes, not giving Russians advice and intelligence as the war unfolds.

The only truly shocking turn of events is how incompetent the Russian logistics have been, which really is surprising even to actual experts. I mean, its always been known the Russians probably wouldn't be great at logistics, but nobody in their craziest dreams would have thought them this incompetent.

Yes I had read a lot of this sort of thing goes on. Most militaries will have strategy or analysis groups that will be doing this sort of thing all the time, even in peacetime, and especially now that an actual invasion has taken place.

From a wargaming perspective, personally speaking I was working on some WWIII stuff for Battlegroup and I have to say it has completely taken the wind out of the sales for project. It seems I am far more comfortable with either hypothetical conflict (be it sci-fi or WWIII), or even with historical warfare that took place at some distance in the past, than I am with current affairs and thinking that those same Hind helicopters I am painting are currently taking human lives.

It highlighted something else - numerous times the Ukrainian defenders tried to sally forth and hit Russian columns. Resulting in much death. That is something wargamers (even military ones) are happy to 'have a go' at. Even if Ukrainian generals were as cavalier with their divisions, would the formations themselves be up for it?

Certainly there is looming disaster in the east and the longer the army is pinned the worse breaking contact to make for a city is going to be. At this point I wouldn't expect any heavy weaponry still in the field to be able to join urban defenders.

I know some wargames try to represent this by needing order or motivation rolls before you can activate a unit to do something. Then you can factor in a 'reluctant' unit, and the probability that it won't be willing to follow an order that looks foolhardy or extremely dangerous to them. Most historicals covering 'modern' warfare also try and factor in the effect of 'pinning' too and units coming under fire, then being reluctant to move. (Incidentally, a couple of GW games had this mechanic too - Necromunda and Epic Armageddon, I'm not sure there are any more)

And then wargaming generals complain that the units don't follow their orders and do what they tell them to do!

I know that for armour at least Russia tended to leave a lot of their stuff parked up and only put serious amounts of mileage on a limited number of vehicles in a unit to reduce wear and tear, and stretch out the amount of time between major overhauls,

so even if they have been maintaining the parked up stuff having a bunch of things go wrong once they start to put the miles in isn;t too surprising in the same way that a car that's garaged most of the time and only taken out on the odd weekend in the summer never seems as reliable as the car thats used every day of the week, brakes sieze, rubber fuel/cooling/etc line perish etc and you often only find out there's a problem when they blow

The Russian Military is notorious for over-estimating their strength. They might boast a 1.4 million man/woman military, but only about 1/3 of that is actual capable front line troops that are worth a squirt in a stand up fight. The rest are either pensioners, weekend warriors, or flat out conscripts. Their airforce and army leadership is comprised of sycophantic idiots who have no business planning a war. The first actual numbers back from the Ukraine front say that Ukrainian pilots in Mig-29s were outflying and shooting down Russian pilots in Su-27s and 37s. Their airforce got punched in the mouth. Then without air superiority, their land forces went in (Worst mistake a army leader can make) and got absolutely curb stomped by dug in and well emplaced anti-tank troops. There are tons of media reports about entire russian convoys of soldiers just flat out quitting the field and abandoning their vehicles. It's not WW2, this is why they had Commissars. To shoot people fleeing, in order to "boost" morale.

Russia had overwhelming superiority in every military facet. And still got held up by civilians with rifles. This is why an all volunteer military like in most democracy based countries will always be superior. Troops who volunteer are trained, and take their work seriously.

The fact that they are even trying to spin this as a great Russian victory is astonishing...

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:
I know that for armour at least Russia tended to leave a lot of their stuff parked up and only put serious amounts of mileage on a limited number of vehicles in a unit to reduce wear and tear, and stretch out the amount of time between major overhauls,

so even if they have been maintaining the parked up stuff having a bunch of things go wrong once they start to put the miles in isn;t too surprising in the same way that a car that's garaged most of the time and only taken out on the odd weekend in the summer never seems as reliable as the car thats used every day of the week, brakes sieze, rubber fuel/cooling/etc line perish etc and you often only find out there's a problem when they blow

There was an interesting Twitter thread I read earlier analyzing the amount of blow-outs Russian vehicles were having in the mud. Blamed it on these vehicles sitting in a lot and having maintenance deferred for years: The automatic tire inflation systems weren't maintained and stuff starts living in the tubes, which means the tires are underinflated, which means they shred once they get to any sort of muddy terrain.

since this thread seems to be the place people intrested in it would be, here is a link to a youtube commentary on the matter of russain logistics, given by a ex naval officer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g0B47alAkY

and here is one talking about the "failure" of the red air force to dominate the skies over ukirane.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WGcfkqzUI4


both are based mainly on "open source" intelligence data (ie publically available, nothing classifed), so it might not be the whole picture, but still, it might be intresting to you guys.

I worked for 8 years as a 35D, All Source Intelligence analyst in the Army. They start you off in training by literally throwing the Russian Military handbook at you and seeing if you can properly predict (via wargame scenarios (Not table top, but actual old style with flags and arrows) a Russian attack scenario. We do this because it's widely known even by non-intel Weenies that Red Doctrine has not changed in the last 100 years. It's still as predictable as ever.

The biggest change in the last 40 years has been their creation of a cyber warfare division, which still isn't even listed on their regular warfare tallies. We estimated they had in 2005 between 5-10k active military personnel working on Cyber Warfare. Shutting down comms, playing hell with navigation satellites, and disrupting any and all RF traffic, like drones and air-ground missiles.

We have maybe 1-3k non-military people in a cyber warfare center based in Suffolk, VA. Just to illustrate the difference.

I must say I am surprised at the lack of a cyber component to the operations and the poor quality of their propaganda and messaging. My working assumption is on the messaging it is just internal this time so a lower quality is fine. No idea about cyber though and their normal deception stuff being apparently so absent.

The_Real_Chris wrote:
I must say I am surprised at the lack of a cyber component to the operations and the poor quality of their propaganda and messaging. My working assumption is on the messaging it is just internal this time so a lower quality is fine. No idea about cyber though and their normal deception stuff being apparently so absent.

Are you joking? They completely shutdown all communications and their stock market within 4 hours of starting the actual invasion. They essentially killed their cellphones, emails, and banking networks as cleanly as if they'd cut the wires. Granted it was back on within 24 hours, but even 4 hours of black out is enough to sow chaos, and let the troops take down strategic sites. The Ukrainian Guard had to resort to RF communications in order to mobilize and interact. That's pretty Cyber.

I expected rolling attacks I guess. A lot of analysts seem to think they are keeping back their day one exploits as they simply aren’t needed yet.

https://youtu.be/K5BAZ2bBUzM

This chaps videos are quite entertaining. The possible invasion plans shown off and that timeline would apparently show they are doing fairly well schedule wise.

I agree that Russia is holding back, although that wouldn't make a ton of sense unless Putin has literally gone insane. By dragging this out, he's shooting himself politically and economically. He's pissing off his bosses, and wasting billions on Military funding per day. Especially if Ukraine goes to ground and makes this a Afghanistan style guerilla war for the next decade.

Not to mention each day he doesn't announce victory, he's getting politically punched in the dick on the news back home.

I am really surprised President Zelensky hasn't been outright killed yet. Nothing about this strategy makes any sense. Unless you were to tell me that Donald Trump was somehow the architect behind the battle strategy. That would explain the Russian Heavy Armor firing shells at a Nuclear power plant that powers a large portion of Europe.

 Grey Templar wrote:
The only truly shocking turn of events is how incompetent the Russian logistics have been, which really is surprising even to actual experts. I mean, its always been known the Russians probably wouldn't be great at logistics, but nobody in their craziest dreams would have thought them this incompetent.

It is but I'd also argue it really shouldn't be that shocking.

History is riddled with the armies of shall we say, strongmen, who focused on how cool their hardware was and paid very little mind to how they were going to keep it running. With how poor Russia is relative to the size of its military. At least according to what they claim, the Russian military is bigger than the US military at less than a 10th of the US military's budget. A lot of that is in their reserves, but they're also doing a lot of force projection into the Middle East and Africa the brute force way. When you think about it it, the Russian military has been operating on pennies while trying to pretend it can go toe to toe with all of NATO.

So yeah... maybe we shouldn't be so surprised that the whole thing turned out to be quite the mess.

To an extent for sure, but I would still expect even a penny pinching military to at least be able to handle stuff as basic as food and gasoline. It's pretty basic stuff and has been for hundreds of years. Failing at extremely basic logistics is tier F random bum-eff-nowhereistan performance, not rank 3 super power.

At this point, I wonder how many of their nukes can actually get launched?

Its not like WW2 where the Germans had so overextended their supplylines far beyond what they could do. There are people who commute daily longer distances than what Russia has to ship stuff and they can't do it. It's a pathetically short distance and they're struggling for no good reason.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Its not like WW2 where the Germans had so overextended their supplylines far beyond what they could do.

Even in France and Poland Germany was struggling with logistics. Not this badly to be sure, but they were struggling.

This is fairly comparable to the performance of Imperial Japan though. Their logistics were basically shoving things into boxing and sending them 'somewhere.' That was a gak show and that's where my mind goes watching the stuff going on over in Ukraine.

There are people who commute daily longer distances than what Russia has to ship stuff and they can't do it.

You know when you put it like that...

If anything, this shows how poorly wargaming a scenario can work, because everyone in the West was caught off guard by this and are now scrambling to say they knew it was going to happen all along.

Historically, this is how Russia has always performed. Russia does not have a great track record in war, the only two real exceptions were invasions of Russia and even though they were victories, they were long, bloody and protracted.

I think what a lot of people don't really consider is that the current RU forces are all mechanised, so this was standard doctrine. When you're extremely mobile you are expected to push when you have the opportunity. The Navy and to a lesser extent, the RUAF have not seen a lot of funding and there's a heavy land force bias which has had a negative effect on the invasion. Air superiority was a key objective early on which the Russians completely failed at. I think it's clear the RUAF is far more cagey about losing assets and when you have to strike low on targets that are well defended by AA you're going to pay the price.

The other key problem is that the Big Plan was to roll through the Ukrainian cities day 1 and 2 and be over and done with it after immediately crushing the Ukrainian army. That didn't happen and there was no clear plan. Backed up with the fact that you are sending soldiers in who were basically starving, had no idea it was even a war and a logistical nightmare that has led to this current situation.

The trouble is the Russian Oligarchy, capitalist yesmen for a dictator that replaced the soviet yesmen for a dictator. There's not many people offering critical analysis and those that do keep it to themselves for fear of reprisals. That being said, I read a great article that cited a former Russian general who wrote an open letter saying that an invasion of Ukraine would be a catastrophe and that Putin should resign for even considering it. And basically every single thing he said has come to pass. He cited immediate Western sanctions as a result of the invasion which would badly affect Russia.

To be honest, for a successful end to hostilities, the US wants to be offering better ways for the Russians to climb down while still having some face. Going in too hard will only strengthen Russian resolve.


EDIT: hey my 1000th post.

It should be borne in mind also that there's a precedent for this war, albeit one which the world barely noticed at the time (my father said it was hardly reported in the papers in the UK) and certainly drew no lessons from. Namely the Sino-Vietnamese conflict of 1979.

China's goal in that particular conflict was to amass a huge overwhelming army of tanks and men (about 200,000) for a 'limited attack', then rush them into North Vietnam whilst the Vietnamese army was engaged against the Chinese-sponsored Khmer Rouge in Cambodia abroad. The thought was that they'd quickly seize all of the North Vietnamese cities, forcing the Vietnamese army to come home. They could extract concessions, then pack off back to China in time for lunch (metaphorically). A quick war of overwhelming force with specific political objectives which would make the Vietnamese roll over and do what they wanted. Sound familiar?

It...did not work out like that. It was the first Chinese combat operation since the Korean war. All their fancy new equipment was virtually untested, all their soldiers were unblooded, their High Command had never moved troops on this scale before, and political interference was rife at every level. Vietnamese resistance was a hundred times more competent and intense than expected. The result being that logistics disintegrated. The war quickly bogged down with the Chinese losing momentum and being forced to clump their soldiers together for fear of guerilla attacks. Communications failures along the frontline were commonplace. What was supposed to be over within days turned into a slow meat-grinder, with the Chinese inching their way towards their objectives.

After three weeks of fighting, the Chinese finally managed to occupy the cities they were after, but the Vietnamese army was almost back home, and casualties had been horrendous - with at least several thousand dead and a thousand vehicles trashed. The Chinese only controlled the ground they stood on, and the Vietnamese were gearing up to do to them what they'd already done to the Americans. At that point, the Chinese declared victory and ran off home, burning and looting everything as they went. Because to stay would have been to repeat America's mistake, and the entire campaign had been such a massive cluster-feth, they had no desire to hang around whilst casualties escalated. The Vietnamese meanwhile declared the Chinese were scared and ran away. Relations between the two countries were utterly destroyed for the next decade.


With us being a week and a half into the Ukraine conflict now, the parallels between the two conflicts are striking.

To piggyback off of Olthannon's post.

What struck me most about the wargame was the difference in Doctrine between the marine Russian team and the real world Russians especially where it concerns airpower. If air superiority was truly a key objective early on then the Russians put together a gakky plan to achieve it. Otoh the Marines of all people put together a plan to do exactly that and that change ripples through the rest of the wargame and shows why it wasn't actually a very accurate foretelling of real world.

The article seems to go out of its way to try to present what we are seeing live as being congruent with the wargames. The wargame deviated substantially in the Russian players apparently very American approach (because the Russians either cant or don't see the value in doing so themselves) of precision striking Ukrainian infrastructure for 4 days in order to obtain air superiority and decapitate Ukraines command and control infrastructure - something which as of day 10 Russia has still failed to achieve and doesn't appear to be making any headway against it. Likewise, theres no mention here whatsoever of Russias degraded combat capabilities resulting from widespread desertions and surrenders by conscripts (likely because the wargame assumed the use of Russian professional soldiers, as Russian law forbids conscripts from serving overseas - a technicality that is all well and good until a corrupt government and military bureaucracy finds ways to circumvent that law). I have questions and doubts about how the wargame modeled the conflict based on the following statement:

"So, although the number of actual strikes made by the Russians in the conflict’s first 24-hours tracked almost exactly to what was employed by the Russians in the wargame, the impact was substantially different."

The first 24hrs of the invasion saw the employment of between 100 and 180 missiles and 75 bombers against targets across Ukraine. By comparison, in the 2003 invasion of Iraq (a country with half the population and a third the population density and area, and a significantly weaker military and a virtually non-existent air defense capability) saw the employment of about 500 missiles and 1700 air sorties (harder to identify exact number of bombers or other aircraft used, but it was definitely more than 75 bombers...). In general, the US invasion averaged some 500 missiles per day over the course of the first week. Some specific airfields and key components of Iraqs C3 infrastructure were hit with 60-80 missiles each, while others were hit with 2-3 dozen, whereas in Ukraine the Russians spread their missile and bomber barrage against 80+ targets. There is a very stark difference there, and I struggle to comprehend how the game could conclude that 100-180 missiles and bombers would be sufficient to achieve meaningful results except by maybe assuming that the Ukrainians wouldn't do anything to increase resiliency or harden their infrastructure or that the missiles were far far more capable than they actually are (or anything that the US had access to in 2003). Hell, its only today, 10 days later, that Russia has exceeded the 500 missile mark - by this point in the invasion of Iraq, the count was over 4000 precision missile strikes. How would a wargamer or planner even dare to assume that 180 missiles in 24 hours could achieve the results that they indicated??

Beyond that, as we are now into day 10, based on public statements (and actual results observed), it appears that Russia has failed to achieve any semblance of air superiority as is suggested in the article, and the most recent statements are that Ukraines air defense systems are essentially almost fully intact and operational (as opposed to the articles claims that they are significantly degraded) - an even farther separation of reality from the wargame than the authors claim.

Another suspect quote:

"As the Ukrainian government made a political calculation not to mobilize or move units into defensive positions, this map likely represents where most Ukrainian military formations started the war."

Reports and statements made since this article was published indicated that the Ukrainian military had actually been quietly mobilizing and shifting its force posture for at least 2 weeks prior to the onset of hostilities. A big part of the reason why the "decapitating strike" may have failed to decapitate anything (aside from using far too few munitions) seems to be that the units and infrastructure Russia was attempting to target were no longer where they needed them to be (given heavy overcast skies in the weeks leading up to the invasion (including the day and evening of) its possible that Russia was largely relying on out of date satellite photography to guide its targeting - which would certainly explain why post-bombardment satellite photography had so many blast points in what were basically empty and open spaces (i.e. parking areas at Ukrainian airfields where no planes were present, etc.). The only Ukrainian units moving off the line have been those that were driven out by a Russian offneisve on the line in Luhansk, and thats basically it (for now).

Another major deviation - the Ukrainian forces on the line of contact in Donbas have remained on the line of contact and did not withdraw as the wargamers did. Also, while through the first 4 days the Ukrainian army held to Kharkiv, as of day 9 and 10 they have been in an active offensive against Russian troops outside of Kharkiv to push them back to the border - we have no verifiable or official results on how this has gone yet (hopefully better than in the wargame), but there are unconfirmed reports that Ukrainian units have reached the border near Belgorod.

Voss wrote:

Another weird statement, just because these guys know how these things work (which makes me wonder if its an editing insert). The astonishment is from journalists and politicians. Actual military folks aren't all that shocked (just like the authors), they're just not playing armchair general on the 6:30 or hourly news channels.
They're passing on their evaluations behind the scenes, not giving Russians advice and intelligence as the war unfolds.

Thats grossly inaccurate, plenty of active and retired personnel, professional defense and intelligence analysts, etc. have expressed astonishment (in writing, tweets, and on the news) about the conduct of the campaign and are absolutely mystified by some of the decisions that have been made by Russia. Lots of the issues we are seeing plague Russia were "unknown knowns" - as in we knew they were problems but didn't know how severe they actually were or would be in practice. By and large the performance of Russian military forces has been worse than even the least favorable projections.

REMOVED - NO POLITICS, DO NOT DERAIL ANOTHER THREAD.

Uhh, I think the formatting got screwed up so excuse me if I missed something. I think I misunderstood what you meant by "holding back" I thought you meant it in terms of force not in terms of speed.

Anyway, per various US and NATO intel reports as of today, Russia still does not have air superiority.

As for Kyiv, hard to say that its mostly held by civvies, snippets of info have trickled out showing the deployment of at least a tank brigade within the city (actual tanks, not what the media calls tanks). Also at least 2 mechanized brigades in and around the city, as well as an airborne infantry brigade (or detachments thereof). Seems like a heavy concentration of regular military.

Yeah, that's one thing that's being lost in the 'journalism' over here. The stories are about either the heroic (and they are) civilian militia (for lack of a better word) or the terrified refugees. But our news coverage is basically a void when it comes to the Ukrainian military.

(I say ours, but I mean the US and BBC, which tend to focus on the terrified and the heroic, respectively, at least on BBC America. The US news channels seem to be 16-36 hours behind events as well, which is fun)

Agreed, somewhat frustrating, thankfully theres a number of decent independent sources tracking the fighting. Militaryland has a good set of maps including daily updates based on OSINT. Number of other decent OSINT accounts that are trying to be as impartial as possible in their reporting. The wiki map also seems to be surprising decent.

Honestly the situation being what it is you can only get so much detail out of a map that shades 20% of the country as occupied. Seems things might be stabilizing a bit, but for a while the situation was fluid enough that there were steady reports of fighting, captured POWs and equipment, destroyed convoys, etc. coming out of areas that were deep within areas the maps indicated were "occupied". Right now it seems that is really only true in the areas north of Kyiv and north of Kherson as the picture in those areas doesn't seem entirely clear to anyone. The area between Chernihiv and Kharkiv seems to be relatively more straightfoward now than it was a few days ago, though still bordering on "clear as mud" territory.

Bit harsh on the Ukrainian military Fezzik.

I think if there's one country who absolutely saw this coming was Ukraine. 2014 was a disaster and in the intervening years they've done everything they can to update, rethink and modernise their forces. They knew fine well it wouldn't end with Crimea.

Let's not forget they have the second largest army in Europe and have basically had frequent combat training against the Russians around the Donbass. That war has never gone away and they've been actively engaged in it the whole time.

Up until the build up to 2014, the Russians and Ukrainians were on good terms and the Ukrainian intelligence agencies and military shared a lot of doctrine with the Russians.

I think it's been a little too easy to paint Ukraine as the underdog with an armed militia and clubs and pointy sticks. (I hope no offence to you Americans but you really seem to obsess over this underdog overcoming all odds gak which is a touch ironic really given American foreign policy, must be that revolutionary war thing?)
Ukraine is the weaker country for sure, but they weren't defenceless. A better organised Russian invasion would have had a slicker victory but it still would have taken losses. But a better organised Russia flat out would not have invaded in the first place.

My only hope out of this is that it reminds nations that war is a bad thing and I particularly hope China pays attention to how the Russians have floundered. Pushing folks around just because you have the numbers on paper doesn't equate to an easy win.

Yeah, to be honest I didn't pay attention to Ukraine military after the 2014 disaster, but some research show they are a whole different beast now. I mean, at the start of the invasion at least. And the country is kinda "big" for an European one. I believe Ukraine is likely to be easier to defend than France for example, if they switched place on the map (not counting for nuclear weapons) or Poland.
The wargame is very interesting because it is...so accurate ! Do we have any other recent wargames like this one made about potential events (tawain for exemple) ?

Chaos I think we would need more details on targets, weapons, desired effects etc. to actually make the comparison you are with 2003. Raw numbers don't tell the story For instance you could drop one huge bomb on top of a C3 Node totally obliterating it or you could drop multiple smaller bombs at targets nearby that result in it being completely isolated from the network for the duration of the campaign but actually able to be brought back up in a couple weeks once things are over. (Slight simplification but you hopefully get the point.) So its possible Russia had the ability to make a serious play at Air Superiority but failed to utilize it because their air force is defacto subordinate to the ground forces, although its also possible Ukraine put in some additional redundancies that no one knew about.

Also keep in mind MCU is a overarching term for several different levels of school, there's at least 4 different groups that could be involved in this wargame. It could be largely majors from MCSC and being run by the article writers who come from the wargaming center although given one of the authors is at the War College I'd guess its War College students and being run by the Wargaming group. I wonder how much of the up to date classified intel they have /shrug

chaos0xomega wrote:

I don't see how any reasonable or knowledgeable individual looks at this and says "Russia is holding back". We've seen them using pretty much all of their most modern equipment (no, not their cutting edge show ponies like T-14s and Su-57s, because they have something like 20 and 4 of them respectively and none of them are believed to be combat ready), largely to mixed or disastrous effect. They are actively besieging Mariupol and Kharkiv, including more or less intentionally targeting and murdering civilian evac points during what *should* be humanitarian ceasefires. They are dredging up obsolete equipment from Khabarovsk and Vladivostok and shipping it east, and impounding civilian vehicles and impressing them into service as resupply vehicles. They are basically throwing everything they have at the situation at this point to shore up a collapsing effort. Its pretty clear they don't have much left in the tank. Also bares mentioning that they only have ~250-300k personnel in the ground forces and about 2/3rds of that was apparently involved in the invasion based on our best intelligence estimates - its very likely that they have nothing left to really be able to support the war effort with, as they don't have the logistical capacity to support the use of the remainder and also need to secure their borders (mostly out of paranoia rather than from a realistic threat).

? They are absolutely holding back. Pretty much all of the internal Western staff college discussion is trying to work out why. The Russians are a fires heavy military. They have lots and its effective. But in Ukraine their airforce is rarely around and outside of a few limited areas they haven't done the 'level city' strategy they are renowned for.

Here are a few RUSI writers puzzling over it - modern war institute, west point, etc., all are publishing similar things.

https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/rusi-defence-systems/russian-air-force-actually-incapable-complex-air-operations