Free Republic

If Donald Trump wins a second term in the White House in November, NATO may fall apart, a recent wargame found. As a presidential candidate, Trump has threatened to quit NATO unless European allies contribute more, and should he carry it out Europe may decide to go it alone on defense, the game suggests. "A US policy of frustrating NATO has the potential to cause the alliance to collapse, with the EU as a candidate for eventually replacing NATO's ultimate function — defending Europe from Russia," wrote Finley Grimble, the British defense expert who designed and ran the game. The...

The US Army's new manual on Russian tactics is an impressive-looking document. It's 280 pages packed with details and diagrams of how Russian soldiers are supposed to fight. It is also evidence of a major reason why Russian troops have often fought poorly in the Ukraine war: they are not following their own playbook. "A lot of the basic elements of that doctrine are sound enough that they could form a basis for successful operations," Scott Boston, a Russia military expert for the RAND Corp. think tank, told Business Insider. "But you do have to follow them." To be clear,...

In 1943, as the tide of war turned against the Third Reich, the German high command opted for a desperate strategy on the Eastern Front. Outnumbered and outgunned by the Red Army, the Germans pinned their hopes on a mobile, aggressive defense to stop a relentless series of Soviet offensives in Ukraine and southern Russia. As today’s Ukraine fights over many of the same battlefields of 1943, it has chosen a strategy that echoes the German approach from 80 years ago. After the failure of its much-anticipated summer counteroffensive, and running low on ammunition and stamina to fight off continual...

The slow progress of the counteroffensive Ukraine launched in early June led to criticism that Ukrainian troops were failing to apply properly the training they received from Western militaries. But what if the problem isn't with the Ukrainians but rather with Western tactics? Ukraine's woes may be an omen of what might happen if NATO armies have to fight without ample air support and logistics. Ukraine's counteroffensive was never going to be easy. Russian forces spent months building up their defenses, using a longstanding and still-effective Soviet-era approach to fortifications and adapting new tactics, such as bigger and more concentrated...

During World War II, German soldiers marveled at how skillfully Red Army troops used a shovel.At battles such as Stalingrad, the Soviets proved to be masters of entrenchment and camouflage. German commanders said that a Red Army bridgehead had to be counterattacked and destroyed quickly because once the Soviets were dug in, they would be a nightmare to dig out.Poor military performance in Ukraine has punctured Russian President Vladimir Putin's fantasy of reviving the Soviet empire. Yet Russian engineers seem to have lost none of their skill. They have created a dense system of fortifications that may stymie Ukraine's counteroffensive."Russian...

The heavy casualties suffered by Russian paratroopers in Ukraine has one Russian expert calling for a rethink of Russia's airborne units. Many of the recent criticisms about the performance of Russia's elite parachute force, known as the VDV, have been voiced about lightly armed airborne units since World War II. The problems range from poorly designed vehicles to parachute drops conducted without first suppressing enemy air defenses. -snip- Russia's huge airborne force, composed of 45,000 paratroopers in four divisions, is actually a separate military branch that serves as shock troops and a rapid-intervention force. Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February...

Amid indications that Russia is planning to resume offensive operations in spring 2023, Ukraine's allies are scrambling to provide Ukraine with sufficient artillery ammunition.But this requires scouring the globe for munitions to feed Ukraine's polyglot collection of Soviet-designed guns and the dizzying array of howitzers and rocket launchers supplied by various Western countries."Ammunition availability might be the single most important factor that determines the course of the war in 2023, and that will depend on foreign stockpiles and production," US defense experts Michael Kofman and Rob Lee wrote in December for the Foreign Policy Research Institute.The US has vowed to...

Cluster weapons—those mini-bombs that have cost many a civilian their foot or their life—are back. Russia has just unveiled what it describes as a stealth cluster bomb. This comes after the Trump administration scrapped a plan to eliminate cluster weapons by 2019, despite 103 nations signing on to an international agreement to ban production and use of such weapons. So far, 120 nations have joined the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions, of which 103 have actually ratified it. Unfortunately, the two biggest arms exporters in the world—America and Russia—have yet to join. Russia is testing the PBK-500U glide bomb, a...