Thread by @MNormanDavies

🧵UKRAINE’S ARTILLERY. An Order of Battle study

The AFU’s main indirect fire arm has an unusual “deconstructed” quality which defies normal military organization (like much of the AFU)

TLDR: AFU artillery brigades have not deployed as actual brigades

Some background first...

The Russia-Ukraine War shows a prevalence and importance of artillery, a term usually meaning mortars, howitzers, rocket tubes, precision-guided munition and some long-range missile strike

This thread discusses mostly the 2nd & 3rd above, but not exclusively

It’s institutional

Artillery assumed high status in military cultures since its birth. The destructive technology of indirect fire nearly always dwarfed and out-ranged that of main rival arms infantry and cavalry

It attracted huge investment

and loathing: overrun gun crews could expect no quarter

Artillery’s importance as a device for victory meant that it could develop some of the best personnel, whether by selection or experience

Whenever the infantry claim the greatest work ethic, get them to dig, camouflage, and haul ammo and water beside the gunners!

The arm’s importance and technical sophistication mean that artillery officers and NCOs are often an army’s smartest

Whenever the intelligence cell gets exclusive or lazy, or too clever by half, get an artillerist commander or chief of staff to scrutinize their work!

Bonaparte was an artilleryman

Napoleon could intuit movement for several corps' troops across a continent, knowing fully the destructive force at hand in a given time and place

He did this the way experienced builders, plumbers or plasterers can quote a week-long job at a house

Reinhard Gehlen was an artilleryman

Whatever the Scharnhorst-born virtues of the German Wehrmacht, intelligence was rarely among them

Gehlen reformed a weak, chaotic intelligence network, practically from scratch, to establish vast coverage of a fully mobilized & deployed USSR

How does this relate to the AFU artillery situation?

The AFU artillery arm’s importance is confirmed by its size, one of the largest ever formed

To trace the fate of such an entity takes time in a more challenging analytical task

We can start with obituaries, or “blood trails”

One problem is that “artillery brigades” and rocket brigades (together called RFA), show a sparse casualty tally that is very discreet and displaced

Anomaly is clear from quick comparison to line infantry brigades’ KIA traces, which would overlap to make map placenames illegible

A note on sources. This study used obituary, funeral & a few MIA reports

It also drew on aggregators, variously reliable or thorough, with or without links to press & government statements, some on this platform too

It’s NOT exhaustive: if you have further detail, please advise

But sources’ detail on casualties show that public releases have a disproportionate weight of officers and NCOs compared to common soldiers i.e., 24 to 34!

These ratios are conspicuously suspect, even by standards of Ukraine’s obvious under-reporting of own casualties in general

In a war of such scale and intensity, casualty ratios for officers, NCOs and other/common ranks should weigh far more to that last category

As a rule of thumb, lieutenant colonels command formations of between 350 & 650 troops (casualties mean they often take higher levels too)

Payscales & formation command (battalion & up) offer useful measures

NCO ratios are also important to gauge casualty rates. Clearly Ukraine’s reporting has skewed into mere samples

Overall Ukrainian reporting on this narrow focus may cover just 5% or fewer of actual casualties

But we must define “AFU artillery formations”

There are RFA brigades & BrAGs

In fact, AFU howitzer & rocket formations feature in most AFU maneuver brigades, as for tradition “artillery groups” in an old established Soviet pattern

These “BrAGs” comprise most regional artillery

When we examine the actual artillery & rocket brigades per se, or RFA (NOT BrAGs), we find that they disperse as battalions (the actual term is, perhaps confoundingly for westerners, “divisions”/дивізіони per local parlance)

Here is a color-coded dispersal map for a clearer view

This behavior has precedent too

The AFU’s ATO (“Anti-Terrorist Operation”) Donbas war pre-2022 saw improvized battalion-level artillery RFA formations

Some disciplined Russian OSINT (transferred to this map here) identified “28 оабр”, which is not on the AFU establishment. Why?

ATO brought limited mobilizations for systematic troop rotation into the Donbas, parallel with restructure and expansion via the Territorial Defence Force and other reserves

This increased the availability of trained and operationally experienced troops amid wider militarization

The wider AFU (+ NGU and volunteer) force showed similar dispersal and dissipation of brigade strengths at the start of Russia’s SMO on 24 February 2022.

Mechanized, Motor Rifle, Airborne and Marine brigades mostly deployed by constituent battalions far apart in frantic reaction

This is all very reductionist reconstruction from snapshots in time

The AFU doesn't exactly publicize such deployment detail on its single-most important & expensive arm

But it is clear the artillery brigades are more local fire brigade than mobile strike arm in a front reserve

Some may assume this dispersed reporting shows AFU artillery formations energetically traveling the front like a tour by band Metallica

But it’s hardly advisable to play musical chairs if fighting the Russian Army

offering easier-to-spot targets & drastically reduced fire plans

Artillery needs to move very efficiently and stealthily, with minimal disruption from relocating dispersed maintenance points, or from rotating units and equipment

Redeploying far away brings risks of errors in navigation, and adjusting to new areas, networks & chains of command

And so the brigades break up by battalion to work into maneuver brigades’ fire support plans, adding to BrAG firepower or simply integrating as near-permanent attachments

This would be already challenging enough without complicating further by an extra brigade-level headquarters

And this piecemeal allocation of the AFU’s indirect-fire RFA reserve may well occur down to battery or lower levels too

That would be more likely if called upon to help depleted Motor Rifle, NGU or volunteer formations where resource allocation set fewer organic artillery assets

Therefore, taken together, evidence indicates that AFU artillery and rocket (RFA) brigades act as reserve for replenishment and refit of the BrAGs

It seems the AFU did similar with its UAV forces too

The RFA’s 15th Regiment indicated this role mid-2022 in the Severodonets area

Apparent integration of RFA brigades’ battalions at the front would help explain extreme under-reporting of their casualties

It is likely they appear internally as losses within BrAG formations, albeit as non-organic attached personnel - like TrO losses in line infantry brigades

Such dispersal and echelon functions seem deliberate

The 32nd Marine Rocket Regiment had just 2 battalions, but one was reported over 500km away from its regimental base near Odessa

This bizarre case shows the battalion’s base was an arbitrary allocation to simply spread assets

NATO weapon aid is another aspect ensuring dispersal of AFU artillery brigades, and their at best very short-term reliability as an offensive strike arm, or front-level fire reserve

Such mixed calibres and even charge types portend poor endurance for a reported AFU Reserve Army

Even greater variations exist across the wider force

A jamboree of NATO-supplied indirect fire platforms means the AFU can hardly concentrate to sustain fire support and interdiction roles at the front just in normal defensive tasks

let alone for prolonged offensive effort

NATO-Ukraine supporters would probably laud such improvization and mixture as proof of a bespoke or boutique army’s “flexibility” ergo superiority

But inconsistency and irregular supply chains make for sclerotic circulation, and an organization increasingly inflexible due to its array of logistical anomalies

Besides, improvization is often a sign of desperation, and one of the most dubious & overrated of military “virtues”