Ukraine

Why Has it Taken So Long for Putin to Blitz Ukraine’s Energy Grid?

This question is vexing me and the answer is not obvious

Invading a country?

Step 1: take out the infrastructure

We saw it in Iraq at the start of the First Gulf War. The Western allies hit Iraq’s power grid almost as step 1.

If you can do it without damaging the core generating facilities — say by shorting out power transmission lines by dropping cables across them —then so much the better. But that’s not always possible or practical.

In fact, that was not the objective of the Allies in 1991.

U.S. Secretary of State James Baker apparently warned Iraqi deputy prime-minister Tariq Aziz at their meeting of 9 January 1991 in Geneva, that is before the “Gulf war”, that Iraq would be brought back to the pre-industrial stage (sic) if it did not withdraw from Kuwait — aldeilis.net

but…

The other problem is that if you damage civilian infrastructure then that can be construed to be a war crime. So, the Allies in Iraq were treading a fine line.

So, what was Putin’s plan for Ukraine?

I think that most commentators think that Putin had been assured by his military that invading Ukraine would be a walk in park, just a 3 day jaunt for the boys to drive the tanks into Kyiv from Belarus and capture the country.

And capture that comedian Zelenskyy (best killed in the process to avoid embarrassing show trials).

Instead we have seen a war which has seriously bloodied the Russian bear and put Putin firmly in the camp of war criminals.

President Vladimir Putin:

• seriously overestimated the capability and readiness of the Russian military, riven as it is by generations of institutionalised corruption on an industrial scale
• seriously underestimated the will and capability of the Ukrainian people to fight and resist the attempted invasion
• seriously underestimated the ‘West’ (which term includes even Japan) to coordinate an unprecedented sanctions response and provide a military support pipeline Ukraine

On the other hand, the West has been overestimating Russian military capabilities for decades. A lesson to be learned.

Back to the Masterplan

How to invade a country?

Here’s a good template strategy, available online from — you guessed it — The US General Accounting Office (GAO/NSIAD-95–116 04/20/95). Just use cruise missiles. Putin had plenty of those but now he’s scraping the barrel.

This is not rocket science, although it uses them.

The US-government report entitled “Cruise Missiles: Proven Capability” identified five basic categories of target :

• command and control -
• industrial production
• infrastructure
• population will, and
• fielded forces

The report goes on to state: “Attacks on targets such as television and radio stations and electrical power generation and distribution facilities would degrade the will of the civilian population.”

No surprises there.

Listen Vlad, we have plenty of tanks and troops. Let’s save the cruise missiles. Kyiv will be like Paris in 1944 when the Nazis were ousted.

Shock and Awe

This strategy was developed after the first Gulf War by Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, although they use the term Rapid Dominance. It aims to:

…affect the will, perception, and understanding of the adversary to fight or respond to [an attacker’s] strategic policy ends through imposing a regime of Shock and Awe.

Further, rapid dominance will, according to the authors:

…impose this overwhelming level of Shock and Awe against an adversary on an immediate or sufficiently timely basis to paralyze its will to carry on … [to] seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at the tactical and strategic levels.

It has been argued that the First Chechen War and battle of Grozny was an example of Shock and Awe. Russia (Boris Yeltsin) had agree to a ceasefire following massive demoralization of Russian forces and significant dissent within the Russian population (Russia was at that time ‘freer’ than it has ever been).

It also led to the Second Chechen War which was run by Valdimir Putin when Grozny was reduced to the most ruined city on Earth. Shock and Awe again. And the one that earned Putin his hard-man reputation.

And of course, the Second Gulf War, when the term became widespread in use.

So what went wrong with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine?

Was it arrogance?

We’ll never know — I’m not expecting Putin to publish his memoirs and innermost thoughts anytime soon — or ever.

The fact is that he’s accused of war crimes on a grand scale, he’s wrecked a lot of the industrial capacity of Ukraine, and now — after eight months of war — he’s turned to wrecking electrical infrastructure when he’s low on cruise missiles and has to use Iranian drones to do it.

Iran. How that must have hurt him, going cap-in-hand to Ali Khamenei to beg for military assistance.

On top of all that he has comprehensively damaged the Russian economy. It will take a generation to recover.

Talk about putting the cart before the horse (with no food left for the horse).

Is Ukraine too close to Europe?

Ukraine is part of Europe and not some tiny fly-blown Caucasus tribal mountain republic where few Western tourists venture. It’s not one of the ’stans even further away.

But Ukraine? Even I’ve been to Kyiv (1995, work).

A Shock and Awe strategy would have attracted too much attention so close to Berlin and Paris. Annexation of Crimea went pretty well for Putin. So, the relatively ‘gentle’ approach should have worked again.

Oops.

Conclusion

Why did he get it so wrong?

Putin is obviously not concerned about war crimes — that was demonstrated in the first few days of the Ukraine war with the Bucha massacre.

If he’d followed the US’s shock and awe approach from the start then I believe that his planned invasion of Ukraine would have succeeded, at least militarily. NATO would not, could not have stepped in on a three day timescale.

Putin’s cruise missiles would have got through in sufficient numbers to take out Ukraine’s power grid in the first 72 hours. But now eight months into a grinding war he’s finally decided to take out the Ukrainian power grid.

And he’s making a poor job of that: more than 70% of the Iranian Shahed drones are being taken out with drone jammers, policemen with Kalashnikhovs and sundry other AA defences. However, the power grid is significantly damaged.

Cast you mind back to that US plan. Number 4 on the target list was ‘civilian will’.

In that respect Putin has failed miserably. His military has destroyed schools, hospitals, churches, cultural centres and historic monuments. And he’s targeted markets and apartment buildings, killed thousands of civilians. War crimes.

But in that criminal process Putin has brought the Ukrainian people together as never before.

Ukraine will never ever become part of Russia.

That will be Putin’s legacy.

And I’m still not clear why he chose the apparently easy road to Kyiv, but that was his undoing — and why he’s left the power grid till too late in the game.

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…major miscalculations

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