BY PAUL T HORGAN

Perhaps it is because it was my teen years, but it seems to me as though the 1970s were the high-point in popular books about wars and militaries, not least because full-colour printing allowed illustrations of the weapons used to be depicted other than in drab monochrome. Certainly WHSmith was packed with these books and the stores were also packed with people. Now books on war seem to be limited, and the footfall in the High Street branches of the chain collapsed to such an extent that most people are in the shops for the Post Offices in the back, and little more.

Amongst all the books on war on offer there was a definite genre about Great Military Blunders. It is said that in a war or a battle, victory will always go to the side that makes the fewest mistakes. Napoleon also said it was good to have lucky generals.

Of course there have been military blunders since the end of the 1970s. Saddam Hussein invading Kuwait was a blunder, as this was the most blatant violation of the UN Charter by a country not ‘protected’ by a Security Council member’s veto since 1945. Saddam compounded this blunder by deciding to play a cat-and-mouse game with the UN over chemical weapons until the USA lost patience. It did not help that Saddam’s agents tried to murder the father of a US President.

While the coalition’s occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq may seem to be military blunders, they are not. No country, other than the UK in Malaysia, and, arguably, also in South Africa, has managed to prevail in asymmetric warfare, but the UK had to invent the concentration camp system to do so in the Second Boer War to great loss of civilian life, and did something similar but considerably more humane in the Malaysian Emergency.

So, if asymmetric warfare is not a military blunder, but just deeply unpleasant, taking on the worst characteristics of civil war, the number of military blunders in recent times are quite few. There’s Iran’s proxy war against Israel, which Hamas unilaterally turned hot in 2023 that saw the collapse of Hamas, Hezbollah, Assad’s Syria, and an impending doom for the Ayatollah’s regime in Tehran. This epic blunder by an out-of-control lunatic proxy has had a domino effect in the Middle East, not least exposing Iran’s military weakness in the region as Israeli planes had a free run in the skies over Tehran. As I write, this blunder by the lunatic proxy seems to have brought the Iranian regime into a violent terminal phase.

But the Blunder de tutti Blunders, the Blunderissimo of the 2020s has to be the botched invasion by Russia of Ukraine. The Russo-Ukraine War has now lasted longer than The USSR’s ‘Great Patriotic War’ which is what Russians call World War II. Russians deliberately ignore the events before June 22, 1941, not least because between August 23, 1939 and that date, the Soviet Union was a de facto ally of Nazi Germany. With considerable help from the Western Allies, the USSR, at great human cost, managed to defeat the bulk of Germany’s land forces and move the front line from the gates of Moscow all the way to Berlin to end the war in Europe. 

These days, Russia cannot even defeat a smaller country on its own border.

How such mighty power could be so humbled is a story for the ages.

The Blunderissimo was not a single Blunder, but a series of Blunders that have had a compounding effect.

The first Blunder was in Putin ignoring how a modern war is meant to be fought. When invading a country, it is a good idea to start suppressing defences well before any boot hits the ground. D-Day was preceded by months of aerial attacks all across Europe, but most particularly in Northern France. Normandy was not specifically attacked to prevent the German General Staff from working out that this was where the landings would take place. Putin decided to instead coincide the aerial attacks with the first boots on the ground, which was insufficient to suppress resistance. The liberation of Kuwait in 100 hours of ground force action in Desert Sword was preceded by over a month of coalition airstrikes in Desert Storm.

The second Blunder was the failure to concentrate sufficient forces at the hinge of the invasion, which was the Antonov Airport at Hostomel. Putin’s plan was to land a heli-borne force to take the airport before airlifting in thousands of troops and heavy equipment using the captured runway. Russian strategy was to have thousands of troops in Kyiv, the capital, to overwhelm the government and swiftly install a puppet regime. Russian paratroopers had actually been dropped near the Presidential Palace to kill or capture Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelenskiy but were defeated by Ukrainian ground forces. The Soviet strategy of decapitation strikes, used in Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, was well-known enough for precautions to be taken.

A way of understanding the plan is to imagine if Putin sent special forces to capture Heathrow Airport, flew in thousands more troops onto the now Russian-controlled runways, sent an armoured column down the M4 to London to take control of Downing Street, Whitehall, Buckingham Palace, and the Palace of Westminster, having previously dropped a snatch squad in St James’s Park, and made Jeremy Corbyn Prime Minister in a ‘Government of National Salvation’, all in a few hours, while expecting the British people to go along with this rapid regime change.

While Putin’s forces managed to eventually capture Antonov Airport, they did not have the mass of forces to be able to dominate the area decisively or to interdict counter attacks before they took place. Ukrainian artillery started bombarding the airport and rendered it unusable for the heavy cargo planes full of reinforcements and supplies. 

It all went downhill from there.

The third Blunder was a failure of intelligence. The Bohemian Corporal in 1941 against the USSR, and Saddam in 1980 against the Ayatollah’s Iran both believed that all they had to do was to kick in the front door and the whole rotten edifice would collapse from within. Putin was also led to believe this about Ukraine from intelligence curated to please him, but which had limited connection to the facts. 

Ukraine was not a well-run country and corruption was rife. Its political stability was open to question. This may explain why the mass of troops sent in to subjugate Ukraine was relatively small. It was regarded as only necessary to topple the government and deal with what was thought would have been token resistance. But nothing unites a country so much as external threat. The Britain whose Oxford Union in 1933 voted not to fight for King and Country was, one decade later, sending nightly one thousand bombers to devastate German towns and cities with the intensity of a tactical nuclear strike.

The fourth Blunder follows on from the third. The support column that snaked its way from the Belarus border had only three days of supplies, and it seems that logistical support was limited. Corruption is rife in the Russian military, and it seems that while the numbers in the column of tanks and other vehicles was formidable, its quality was open to question. The wheeled vehicles had not been properly maintained and managed. Poor-quality tyres had been damaged by prolonged exposure to sunlight and rapidly deteriorated with use. Tracked vehicles seemed unable to manage the winter mud, which is ironic, as this is a permanent feature of the terrain at this time of year. It is not unreasonable to believe that all Russian vehicles with off-road capability would be designed to accommodate this. 

So the support column suffered from being restricted to roads, suffered numerous breakdowns and ran out of fuel before it could reach Hostomel in a timely manner. This relief column of armoured vehicles found themselves stuck in a massive traffic-jam and had elements picked off by Ukrainian drones, and anti-tank missiles supplied by Britain and the USA which were wielded by small Ukrainian combat teams in a manner recalling Minutemen sniping at British redcoats in the American Revolution. The Battle of Kyiv lasted for over a month before defeated Russian forces withdrew.

A country that had previously been able to march across half a continent to confront and defeat its enemy in their capital could not, almost eighty years later, win a war fought in its own backyard. The fabled ‘Russian Steamroller’ had become, in the post-Communist years, a broken-down Trabant.

The fifth Blunder was a failure of organisation. The Russian Army has a top-down hierarchy that prevents initiative. It lacks a cadre of professional non-commissioned officers (NCOs). When the advance airborne force was being shelled at Hostomel, it would have been logical for some counter-battery operation to be launched, or indeed a column of troops to be sent out to search and destroy the artillery. But since the units had no choice but to stick to the plan, they could not adapt to circumstances. New orders had to be sought from above rather than decisions made on the ground. Senior officers had to be far closer to forward positions than they would like to be so they could issue relevant orders. Later in the war, this led to a series of deaths of generals as Ukraine used American-supplied precision missiles to knock out command centres located using signals intelligence.

The sixth Blunder links from the fifth, which is the toxic culture in the Russian military. It relies on violent bullying and torture as a form of discipline, where ordinary soldiers are regarded as disposable. While Russian military philosophy emphasises the use of a ‘Deep Battle’ tactic to attack back from the front line to disrupt supplies and communications, this theory relies on a level of professionalism in the Russian Army that seems not to be there. Instead troops were simply sent forward to objectives, and if those objectives were not taken, a fresh set of soldiers would be sent until they were. This didn’t work for the Zulus at Rorke’s Drift and it did not work to subjugate Ukraine in the vital couple of days after the invasion started. By attaching limited value to the ordinary Russian soldier and bullying them instead of instilling an esprit de corps and providing decent training, Russia sent a rabble to face off against a Ukrainian army that had been trained to Western standards in the 8 years since Putin annexed Crimea and eastern sections of the country.

There are numerous other Blunders in this Blunderissimo that has ensnared Putin. A war he thought would be completed in one week has now lasted over two hundred times as long. But the enduring Blunder has to be that Russia has failed to learn from its mistakes. Its current strategy is one of attrition, sending inexperienced troops with limited training as ‘meat sensors’ to locate the gunfire from Ukrainian defenders on a fairly static front line, so that further attacks may be focused on them by more professional soldiers. The kill-to-loss ratio varies between 7-1 and 23-1 in Ukraine’s favour. At present this is just about sustainable for Russia, which has been press-ganging foreigners, and also largely recruiting soldiers away from the sparse eastern portions of the country. Instead of sending people to Siberia under Stalin, Putin is recalling men from Siberia to be his disposable troops. Once Putin needs to obtain replacements from the Moscow/St Petersburg area, then he will start to run into domestic problems, as the populations there have been largely insulated from the physical nature of the war and the casualties.

The Blunderissimo echoes that made by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who believed his armies could defeat France in weeks by striking through Belgium before turning on Germany’s major enemy, Imperial Russia. The irony is that Germany successfully defeated Russia, which was its main objective all along, but was so embedded in Flanders and France that the war had to continue until Germany lost through decisive military defeat in the field, famine, mutiny, and ultimately, revolution. The Kaiser also ignored the rather important fact that a violation of Belgian neutrality guaranteed by Britain would bring the British Empire into the war against him. It never pays to make an Englishman angry.

Russia has avoided the Kaiserreich‘s defeat in the field but is now in a deadlock with Ukraine that belies Russia’s alleged military superpower status. Its war economy is unsustainable in the long term. There has already been one major mutiny. Russia’s war machine is regressing. It is running out of tanks. Its strategy has been reduced to human wave attacks and hard pounding on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. 

There has to be a limit to how much Russia can send rabble to be slaughtered. The USA under Donald Trump is seeking quick peace based on the facts on the ground, which is being resisted by Ukraine’s leaders. While Russia is not near collapse, it seems to be like Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy. It happens slowly, and then all at once. Just as Kremlinologists missed out on the collapse of the USSR, it is likely their modern counterparts will miss when the war catches up with Russia all at once. 

At present Russia seems to be avoiding the inevitable, but all there is right now is a race to see which country will collapse first. And thousands of Russians and Ukrainians are set to die before the race is ended one way or another. That is Putin’s biggest blunder of all.

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Paul T Horgan worked in the IT Sector. He lives in Berkshire.