Scott Ritter Profile picture
Mar 29, 2022 16 tweets 3 min read Read on X
1/ Big Arrow War—a primer. For all those scratching their heads in confusion, or dusting off their dress uniforms for the Ukrainian victory parade in Kiev, over the news about Russia’s “strategic shift”, you might want to re-familiarize yourself with basic military concepts.
2/ Maneuver warfare is a good place to start. Understand Russia started its “special military operation” with a severe manpower deficit—200,000 attackers to some 600,000 defenders (or more). Classic attritional conflict was never an option. Russian victory required maneuver.
3/ Maneuver war is more psychological than physical and focuses more on the operational than on the tactical level. Maneuver is relational movement—how you deploy and move your forces in relation to your opponent. Russian maneuver in the first phase of its operation support this.
4/ The Russians needed to shape the battlefield to their advantage. In order to do this, they needed to control how Ukraine employed it’s numerically superior forces, while distributing their own smaller combat power to best accomplish this objective.
5/ Strategically, to facilitate the ability to maneuver between the southern, central, and northern fronts, Russia needed to secure a land bridge between Crimea and Russia. The seizure of the coastal city of Mariupol was critical to this effort. Russia has accomplished this task.
6/ While this complex operation unfolded, Russia needed to keep Ukraine from maneuvering its numerically superior forces in a manner that disrupted the Mariupol operation. This entailed the use of several strategic supporting operations—feints, fixing operations, and deep attack.
7/ The concept of a feint is simple—a military force either is seen as preparing to attack a given location, or actually conducts an attack, for the purpose of deceiving an opponent into committing resources in response to the perceived or actual actions.
8/ The use of the feint played a major role in Desert Storm, where Marine Amphibious forces threatened the Kuwaiti coast, forcing Iraq to defend against an attack that never came, and where the 1st Cavalry Division actually attacked Wadi Al Batin to pin down the Republican Guard.
9/ The Russians made extensive use of the feint in Ukraine, with Amphibious forces off Odessa freezing Ukrainian forces there, and a major feint attack toward Kiev compelling Ukraine to reinforce their forces there. Ukraine was never able to reinforce their forces in the east.
10/ Fixing operations were also critical. Ukraine had assembled some 60,000-100,000 troops in the east, opposite Donbas. Russia carried out a broad fixing attack designed to keep these forces fully engaged and unable to maneuver in respect to other Russian operations.
11/ During Desert Storm, two Marine Divisions were ordered to carry out similar fixing attacks against Iraqi forces deployed along the Kuwaiti-Saudi border, tying down significant numbers of men and material that could not be used to counter the main US attack out west.
12/ The Russian fixing attack pinned the main Ukrainian concentration of forces in the east, and drove them away from Mariupol, which was invested and reduced. Supporting operations out of Crimea against Kherson expanded the Russian land bridge. This phase is now complete.
13/ Russia also engaged in a campaign of strategic deep attack designed to disrupt and destroy Ukrainian logistics, command & control, and air power and long-range fire support. Ukraine is running out of fuel and ammo, cannot coordinate maneuver, and has no meaningful Air Force.
14/ Russia is redeploying some of its premier units from where they had been engaged in feint operations in northern Kiev to where they can support the next phase of the operation, namely the liberation of the Donbas and the destruction of the main Ukrainian force in the east.
15/ This is classic maneuver warfare. Russia will now hold Ukraine in the north and south while its main forces, reinforced by the northern units, Marines, and forces freed up by the capture of Mariupol, seek to envelope and destroy 60,000 Ukrainian forces in the east.
16/ This is Big Arrow War at its finest, something Americans used to know but forgot in the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan and Iraq. It also explains how 200,000 Russians have been able to defeat 600,000 Ukrainians. Thus ends the primer on maneuver warfare, Russian style.

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More from @RealScottRitter

Nov 21
As America and the West comes to grips over the fact that Russia has launched an ICBM-capable missile in combat for the first time in history, we all might want to take some time contemplating how we got to this point, and we might find a path that leads us away from the inevitability of nuclear war with Russia.
1/5
Fortunately, there is a book that does just that: Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika.
This is a history/memoir that details the story of the implementation of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, and the role I played in setting up and operating a monitoring site outside the Soviet missile factory in Votkinsk.
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The United States has walked away from arms control over the course of the last three decades; Donald Trump withdrew from the INF Treaty in 2019.
We faced a very dangerous situation in the 1980’s, with a nuclear arms race leading the US and Soviets on a path toward inevitable nuclear war.
The INF treaty saved us, and the world, from such a fate.
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Oct 31, 2023
Israel claims that a senior Hamas leader was in the Jabalia Refugee Camp when it was struck by Israeli bombs. Israel claims that the deaths of Palestinian refugees in the camp are collateral damage permitted under the law of war.

Israel is wrong.
Any discussion of collateral damage, however, must answer a threshold legal question whether or not the commander in question was actually inside the camp at the time of the strike.
Unless that question can be answered to a reasonable degree of certainty, a bombing operation of the sort carried out by Israel is unlawful, regardless of the level of collateral damage to surrounding persons and objects.
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Jul 2, 2023
1) For all those armchair generals who snipe at Russian military performance, reflect on what the US and NATO have and haven’t been doing for the past 20 years. Neither could survive long in the kind of war Ukraine and Russia are fighting today—it is beyond their imagination.
2) The use of massed fires is something NATO is incapable of doing—they lack the equipment and doctrine. The use of precision guided munitions is no substitute—the delivery systems will be rapidly attrited by Russian counter fires. Russian artillery supremacy is a game changer.
3) The perceived NATO air power advantage will melt away in the face of Russia’s integrated air defense network. Neither the US nor NATO has trained or operated against such a threat. And if Russia is able to nullify or neutralize US/NATO air power—checkmate.
Read 5 tweets
Apr 5, 2022
1/8 People are having trouble accessing this article given Twitter’s internal censorship. I’ve broken the article down into 8 images, which I will link in sequence. Image
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