Thread by @BrynnTannehill

Short thread on something I'm seeing in Ukraine: Russian ammunition dumps / depots within HIMARS/GMLRS/arty/drone range have been blowing up again lately. I have a theory why. This one was in Makiivka. 1/n

https://twitter.com/666_mancer/status/1676499206989545474

We're seeing dumps go up along the southern front and in Luhansk as well. They appear to be much closer to the front than in the past year. 2/n

Remember: after Ukraine got HIMARS, they focused on targeting Russian ammunition centers, to great effect. The Russian response was to pull their ammunition centers backwards out of range of the GMLRs missiles. 3/n forbes.com/sites/davidaxe…

This made supplying troops near the front harder and slower because the round trip was longer, and there's a limit on vehicles capable of transporting it in quantity. Which brings us to the second part: why did Russia move them forward again, only to see them get blown up? 4/n

Well, my working theory is that it is because Ukraine changed its tactics during the offensive to exploit these long round trips. Which is another short discussion. 5/n

Multiple sources in the past few weeks have described new-ish Ukrainian tactics for how to advance during their offensive, especially after the Zerg rush near Mala Tokmachka went horribly wrong. 6/n

The basics of the tactic are:

a. Advance to contact
b. Press hard enough that Russian artillery opens up
c. Rely on Russian arty doctrine to fire everything
d. Pull back / hunker down from arty
e. Use your own artillery for counter battery fire

7/n

f. Wait until Russians are low on ammunition to press forward again
g. Use armor / IFVs for longer range fire support before clearing trenches with infantry

8/n

Ukraine knows that they have a window of opportunity while adversary artillery is either in a duel, or waiting on re-supply.

The Russian response may have been to start surreptitiously bringing smaller ammunition dumps closer to the front again to reduce round trip distance. 9/n

Problem for Russia is Ukrainian ISR and C3I has only gotten better since last summer. So, these dumps are not only within GMLRs and artillery range, we're seeing drones hitting some of them in Luhansk too (per the CNN video). 10/n

This follows the move / counter-move pattern we're seen throughout the war at the tactical scale.

It also may show Ukraine's use of the Russian doctrine of "reflexive control". 11/n apps.dtic.mil/sti/trecms/pdf…

Basically, Ukraine knows that Russian defense doctrine relies on mines and heavy artillery barrages for defense. So, they're exploiting a known behavior to get the response they want (exhausting local ammo stores, exposing arty position to counter-battery fires) 12/n