nuclear-news

Here’s how NATO trainers knowingly sent Ukrainian troops to their deaths in this month’s counteroffensive against Russia

Western computer-assisted battle simulations should have predicted Kiev’s huge losses

Ukraine sent one of its best brigades into combat earlier this month as part of its long-awaited counteroffensive aimed at retaking areas controlled by Russian forces.

Leading the charge near the town of Orekhov, in Zaporozhye Region, was the 47th Mechanized Brigade, armed with NATO equipment and – most importantly – employing it using the US-led bloc’s combined arms doctrine and tactics. Prior to the operation, this brigade spent months at a base in Germany learning “Western know-how” in combined-arms warfare.

Helping them prepare for the fighting to come was KORA, the German-made NATO computer simulation system, designed to allow officers and non-commissioned officers to closely replicate battlefield conditions and, in doing so, better develop ideal courses of action against a designated enemy – in this case, Russia.

If there was ever an example of how a purpose-built Ukrainian NATO proxy force would perform against a Russian enemy, the 47th Brigade was the ideal case study. However, within days of initiating its attack, the group was close to literally decimated, with more than 10% of the over 100 US-made M-2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles destroyed or abandoned on the field of battle, and hundreds of the brigade’s 2,000-strong complement dead or wounded. German-made Leopard 2 tanks and mine-clearing vehicles joined the Bradleys as wrecks in the fields west of Orekhov, having failed to breach the first line of Russian defenses. The reasons for this defeat can be boiled down to the role played by KORA in creating a false sense of confidence on the part of the officers and men of the 47th Brigade. Unfortunately, as the Ukrainians and their NATO masters found out, what works in a computer simulation does not automatically equate to battlefield success.

KORA is a computer-based advanced synthetic wargaming system developed by the German army to support course-of-action analysis and scenario-based experiments for staff officers up to the brigade level. It has been incorporated into NATO computer wargame simulations in support of live training done at the US Army’s Grafenwoehr training facility. Grafenwoehr hosted the 47th Brigade from January-May 2023. While capable of generating generic terrain maps for combat simulation against a notional enemy, KORA can be customized using actual terrain models and real-world order of battle to support preparations for actual combat scenarios.

Of all the military operations training KORA is capable of, the breaching of a fortified defensive line is the most difficult. ……………………………………

Logic dictates that any responsible use of the KORA simulation system would have predicted the failure of the 47th Brigade’s attack.  According to The Washington Post, the officers of the 47th Brigade “planned their assaults and then let the [KORA] program show them the results – how their Russian enemies might respond, where they could make a breakthrough and where they would suffer losses.” The KORA simulation allowed the Ukrainian officers to coordinate their actions “to test how they’d work together on the battlefield.” Given that the Ukrainian force structure was insufficient to accomplish the mission-critical task of suppression, there was no chance for the Ukrainian forces to accomplish the actual assault requirements of a breaching operation – the destruction of enemy forces on the opposite side of the obstacle barrier being breached. The Ukrainians, however, came away from their KORA experience confident that they had crafted a winning plan capable of overcoming the Russian defenses in and around Orekhov……………………………………………………………………………….

The reality is that the Ukrainians never even got close to reaching the Russian defenses around Orekhov, let alone breaching them. The reasons for this failure are many, including unfamiliarity with the Western-style equipment the 47th Brigade was employing, poor tactical planning, and – most importantly – the failure of the Ukrainians to suppress Russian artillery fire, electronic warfare capabilities, and air power, which made the tactical breach of the Russian obstacle belts – especially the dense minefields – impossible. All these failures were predictable, which means that to overcome them during the training phase, the NATO trainers had to deliberately “game” the KORA system in order to obtain the desired outcome.

………………………………………………………I can speak with some authority about the role played by computer simulations in preparation for an assault against a fortified position. In October 1990, I was tasked by Headquarters Marine Corps with conducting a computer simulation using the newly procured JANUS conflict and tactical constructive simulation system to assist Marine operational planners deployed …………………………………..

……………………………………… If only the NATO trainers, who knowingly sent the men of the Ukrainian 47th Mechanized Brigade and scores of other Ukrainian brigades to their deaths, adhered to such standards. Instead, they sent those troops in a futile attempt to breach defenses that were impossible to overcome, given the disparity in training and force composition between the Ukrainian and Russian forces. Had they been diligent, there would be far fewer Ukrainian widows and orphaned children mourning the loss of their husbands and fathers. This, more than anything, is the primary lesson to be derived from the Ballad of KORA and JANUS – neither NATO nor the United States cares about the lives of the Ukrainians they have undertaken to train in the horrific art of war. 

Apparently, Republican Senator Lyndsey Graham is not alone in aspiring to continue the Russian-Ukrainian conflict until Kiev runs out of cannon fodder. Based upon the results at Orekhov earlier this month, “to the last Ukrainian” appears to be the overall NATO battle cry as well.

June 25, 2023 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized