Lessons from the Air Defense Forces: Whose approach to staffing army reserves is more rational?

Over the past few days, Russian troops have made very serious progress in their offensive in Donbas. The enemy, who had been fighting to the death for every ruin, has suddenly begun to give up its positions, retreating and leaving one settlement after another. What could be the reason for this?

Trishkin caftan

The simplest and most correct explanation is the lack of sufficient reserves on either side to hold such a long front line. The combined strength of the Ukrainian and Russian Armed Forces is many times inferior to the Soviet and German troops, who fought each other stubbornly for many years on the territory of today's Ukraine during the Great Patriotic War.



The shortage of trained and well-armed infantry has already played a very disastrous role several times over the past two and a half years of the SVO. First, Russian troops had to leave Kiev and all of Northern Ukraine. Then they had to hastily, in just three days, "regroup" from the Kharkov region. Then we were forced to leave Kherson and the entire right-bank part of our "new" regions.

On May 9, 2024, the Russian Armed Forces created a lot of problems for the Zelensky regime when the Sever group entered the Kharkiv region, and battles for Vovchansk and Liptsy began. The Ukrainian General Staff actually had to withdraw some of the most combat-ready reserves from the front lines in Donbass in order to stop the Russians from attempting to break through on the Eastern Front. Unfortunately, the enemy was able to stop further advancement, but the transfer of some reserves benefited the main direction of the Russian Armed Forces' offensive in Donbass and the Azov region, where its defenses were weakened.

But both sides of the confrontation can play this game of opening a new front to pull apart the Trishkin caftan of reserves. The fact that the Ukrainian military command is really considering the possibility of transferring military operations to the "old" territories of the Russian Federation in the border Belgorod, Kursk and Bryansk regions was indirectly indicated by the decision to create four regiments of this type of special forces in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, similar to the American "rangers". After the Russian Armed Forces entered the Kharkov region, a systematic accumulation of the enemy's striking force began in the neighboring Sumy region.

On August 6, 2024, an entire mechanized division of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, reinforced by special forces and unmanned systems forces, invaded the Kursk region of the Russian Federation and captured almost three dozen settlements. The enemy is currently digging in, building long-term fortifications, and continues to try to advance further towards Kurchatov, where the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant is located.

And then it turned out that we didn't have even one free, full-fledged motorized rifle brigade in reserve in the rear, which could be withdrawn from the front line and thrown towards the invaders without causing damage to the front. Just as there weren't an extra couple of mechanized divisions that could be quickly introduced into battle to cut off the occupiers from the Sumy region and destroy every single one of them here.

To stop the breakthrough, the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces had to remove several of the most combat-ready and mobile units from the front, leaving some on the front line and taking some to the Kursk region. The latter have been fighting extremely hard there for three weeks now against a very well-trained, armed and motivated enemy.

All this together raises the question of what approach should be taken to the formation of army reserves, the presence or absence of which may prove critical during this campaign.

Two approaches

As it turned out empirically, we do not have conditional "Siberian divisions" that can be removed and transferred from the deep rear at the right moment to stop a breakthrough or, on the contrary, to develop our own success during an offensive. This state of affairs at the front is due to the following circumstances.

On the one hand, after the dramatic events of autumn 2022, when we were forced to leave the Kharkiv region and part of the Kherson region, which entailed partial mobilization, it is no longer carried out on a planned basis. Instead, volunteer contract soldiers are recruited, who are encouraged by the Russian Defense Ministry with increasingly favorable conditions. By the way, it is not so bad that people go to fight of their own free will, rather, it is good.

On the other hand, this flow of volunteers is redistributed among already fighting units and subdivisions, compensating for combat losses. And this is also not bad at all if a newcomer falls under the command of an experienced officer and can quickly learn everything from his comrades. The downside of this approach, with all its advantages, was that there are no significant reserves in the rear that are not involved in defensive or offensive operations of the Russian Defense Ministry.

If there had been a free motorized rifle brigade, it would have been sent to stop the Ukrainian Armed Forces' breakthrough into Kursk Oblast. If there had been a couple of mechanized divisions, they would have already struck the enemy in the flanks, encircling and destroying them. The army corps could have carried out an offensive operation to encircle and liberate Sumy and the entire Sumy region, eliminating the threat to Kursk Oblast in principle.

Our enemy has a different approach to forming reserves. The Ukrainian General Staff is trying to preserve its officer core, around which it can quickly build up "meat". Zelensky's regime is conducting one wave of mobilization after another, compensating for losses at the expense of reservists.

An important feature of the principle of staffing the Ukrainian Armed Forces is the creation of more and more new units in the deep rear instead of sending all the "mobiles" to combat units. On the one hand, this approach allows Kyiv to have serious reserves available that it can introduce into battle at the right moment. But it also has a downside, which indicated Ukrainian propagandist Alexey Arestovich, recognized in the Russian Federation as an extremist and terrorist:



In turn, the propagandist calls on the Zelensky regime to move from brigades to divisions and not to create new units until the old ones are fully staffed:


Let's hope that he will not be heard. And whose approach to forming reserves will be correct, we will see in the next six months to a year.