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The Bazaar of War Profile picture
@bazaarofwar
Mar 5, 2022 • 11 tweets • 8 min read • Read on X
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Updated side-by-side scaled comparison of the 9th day of Iraq & Ukraine (R map by @TheStudyofWar).

By this point, the Army's V Corps had made it ~600 km along the Euphrates and were attacking Karbala; 1st Marine Division had crossed the river at Nasiriyah and progressed >200 km.
@TheStudyofWar The closest comparison to the Marines' progress is the fighting at Kherson—like Nasiriyah, it guarded the crossing of a major river.

Kherson took 6 days to fall, Nasiriyah ~10. In both cases, other elements pushed ahead beforehand, but the Russians have only progressed ~80km...
@TheStudyofWar In the Russian case, they had to secure another river crossing, at Mykolaiv on the Southern Bug (Pivdenny Buh).

They have also begun probing a second crossing at Voznesensk (map from militaryland.net), >200 km over the Dnieper.
@TheStudyofWar The advance south of the Dnieper has been slower. In part this is because of fighting at Melitopol, which was over by 1 March, but the city was also bypassed by forces advancing along the coast and up to the river. Progress here has been >300 km past Mariupol (>30 km/day).
@TheStudyofWar This is about the same as the advances from the eastern border near Sumy to the outskirts of Kiev.

Meanwhile, progress to the west of Kiev has slowed as fighting in the suburbs and traffic jams in the logistics train delay progress.
@TheStudyofWar The biggest story is in the east. As some Russian forces are besiege Kharkov, others have pushed past to attack the Ukrainian position at Izyum, a major road junction which will make it difficult for the Ukrainians to withdraw their forces in the Donbas.
@TheStudyofWar At the same time, the Russians seem intent on cutting off both the Dnieper crossings at Zaporizhzhia & Dnipro AND drawing a tighter cordon around the Donbas forces.

Which might explain....
@TheStudyofWar ....the reported attempt to relieve Kharkov. EXTREMELY unlikely to achieve its stated goals, given the overwhelming firepower Russia has assembled there, but it might relieve the pressure on Izyum enough to allow withdrawal of the Donbas forces.
@TheStudyofWar The race is on for the withdrawal, if that is indeed what's intended. There are four major routes between the Donbas and the Dnipro/Zaporizhzhia crossings; the southern one has already been cut off in multiple places and the northern one is threatened at Izyum....
@TheStudyofWar ...so expect a race to Pokrovske and possibly Pavlograd. After that, the last major urban battle will be Dnipro.
@TheStudyofWar Around 45k soldiers from Ukraine's best units were stationed in the Donbas at the beginning of hostilities, so there is a lot at stake for both sides. So much so that we might expect Russia to increase its use of air, even in the face of air defenses.

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More from @bazaarofwar

The Bazaar of War Profile picture
Dec 12, 2025
Warfare is governed by two inherently opposing logics: the “economic” logic of optimization and balance, and the logic of decision—overwhelming force at a critical point that decides an outcome. This tension runs through all levels of war.
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The logic of economics encompasses purely attritional warfare, although it also extends far beyond: warfare by balance sheet, allocating forces to where they can get the best casualty ratios, while defending terrain whose capture might improve the enemy’s ratio.
This can apply to anything from tactical dispositions to force structure. Exploiting Ricardian advantage—itself a concept borrowed from economics—to maximize cost-effectiveness is an application of economic logic to grand strategy.
Read 12 tweets
The Bazaar of War Profile picture
Nov 6, 2025
FORTRESS MANHATTAN

It’s easy to overlook New York City’s military geography since it hasn’t faced a live threat in over 200 years. But it is perhaps the finest natural naval bastion in the world, one of the major reasons for its place as America’s economic capital.
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Any good naval base has traditionally had a few key elements: a defensible harbor, a large roadstead for assembling the fleet, and access to deep water. All major naval bases have this: Yokosuka on Tokyo Bay, Southampton on the Solent, Brest and Sevastopol Roadsteads… Image
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The eastern seaboard of the US is endowed with plenty of these: Boston Harbor and Newport on the Narragansett; Wilmington/Philadelphia on the Delaware Bay, Norfolk, Baltimore, and Washington on the Chesapeake—even Charleston Harbor, although small. Image
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Read 26 tweets
The Bazaar of War Profile picture
Oct 27, 2025
There’s a lot of overlap between the concepts of “small wars” and the “little war” of the 16th-18th centuries—the regular skirmishes and raids that took place during lulls in the action of major wars. Both in the nature of the fighting and their roles in the broader context.🧵
“Small wars” occupy a pretty wide conceptual horizon—from old-school colonial wars to large-scale insurgencies to periodic border skirmishes between large states. Yet in all of these, combat is usually limited to the tactical or lower operational level.
dispatch.bazaarofwar.com/p/the-chain-of…
The fighting in “little war” was similarly small-scale—it consisted mostly of smaller actions designed to spoil enemy preparations, impose friction, and test the enemy’s strength—but took place firmly within the context of regular large-scale wars. Image
Read 8 tweets
The Bazaar of War Profile picture
Sep 23, 2025
The strategic logic that governs tensions over Taiwan today is analogous to the British and French struggle over Antwerp: a sea power motivated by the need to protect allies and contain a naval rival vs. a land power seeking freedom of maneuver.🧵 Image
After French naval strength peaked in the 1690s, Britain was able to blunt the threat of an invasion fleet. She quickly gained an absolute advantage in sea power, and land wars consumed too much of France’s resources to actively contest both domains.
Although the French only had to get lucky once, their northern coast, despite having several fine harbors, lacked any protected roadsteads sufficient to assemble an entire fleet—southern England, by contrast, had excellent ports at Plymouth and Portsmouth.
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Read 15 tweets
The Bazaar of War Profile picture
Aug 29, 2025
Lots of focus on the difficulty of creating a breakthrough in a long-range precision strike regime, but that’s only half the problem. Assuming it can be done, pushing exploitation forces up from the rear would be another challenge in itself.
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A basic element of combined arms is their simultaneous offensive and defensive function. Hitting an objective in several ways increases the odds of success, while making it harder for the enemy to hit vulnerable troops at the point of attack—an overwhelming pulse of combat power. Image
LRPFs frustrate this by being harder to suppress and quicker to counterattack. Successful offensives require either extreme incrementalism (what we see in Ukraine), or an absurd concentration of deep strikes, AD, EW, artillery, etc. that exceed any current military’s capacity.
Read 8 tweets
The Bazaar of War Profile picture
Aug 26, 2025
Saltpeter, or crystallized potassium nitrate, was the most important component of gunpowder. It naturally occurs in deposits around the world, but for countries like Sweden that lacked them, it could be created through an involved and somewhat disgusting process.🧵 Image
Saltpeter provides the oxygen for rapid combustion, giving gunpowder its bang. Early formulas were more fast-burning incendiaries than explosives, with pitch or oil mixed in, until the optimal ratio was discovered: 75% saltpeter, 15% charcoal, 10% sulfur
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Europe as a whole had little naturally-occurring saltpeter: much of it came from the Americas, where it formed in caves from bat guano, and India, where it was refined from certain soils—this drove Dutch, English, French, and Danish colonial trade with India in the 17th century. Image
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Read 13 tweets

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