On Fredericksburg and the Donbas
Thoughts on the battle for the Donetsk Basin from a historical perspective
War-making is fundamentally problem-solving, at the microscopic scale as much as at the grand strategic scale. Strategists are given parameters to plan against; tacticians develop their strategies into other plans; soldiers and their chains of command are given increasingly physical, increasingly concrete bite-sized problems to solve and develop plans against.
Perceived as a project to manage, or a business to run - as a problem to solve - a constant and pervasive gap between expectation and execution starts to emerge, when history is examined for analogues and instructive episodes applicable to modern problems.
This gap is spatial, and temporal - it is the number of miles you’re behind schedule, the number of days extra that everything is taking; and it is global and pervasive to the endeavor as a whole: it is as true for general staffs and logisticians as it is for foot-soldiers and sergeants. We have a way of putting it in app startups: everything takes three times as long as you expect it to.
Friction arises when problem parameters exceed individual, tactical or strategic problem-solving ability and expectation, not only parameters enacted by the enemy, but also by the sheer and inexorable force of unexpected events.
In a fractally complex kind of event like a human war, this friction - the gap between execution and expectation - becomes nearly a given. It tends to scale with size as well as time pressure, putting every army of sufficient size and urgency of action at exponentially increasing risk of unplannable, unexpectable catastrophe. This is particularly salient to consider when politics, troop morale and strategic outlook are all conspiring to put additional pressure on commanders to produce results.
Consider the disaster for the Union Army at Fredericksburg as an analogue for Russia’s campaign for the Donetsk basin.
The Civil War in general is extremely well-studied and documented; within this space, broad strokes suffice to bring out the relevant points of the Fredericksburg battle for this comparison:
it followed the battle of Antietam, where Union forces barely held back a Confederate advance at the cost of severe casualties
the Union commander for the battle, Burnside, was under political pressure from President Lincoln to attack and produce results
Burnside’s initial decision to attack across the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg would have worked, if his bridging equipment had arrived in time; as it stood, however -
Confederates had a significant amount of time to prepare defensive positions and pre-register artillery, with predictable results on the day of battle
Union forces repeatedly sent their units in piecemeal, one-by-one, with disastrous results across the line of battle, which worsened the already-bad situation that their tactical disadvantages created
The result was a historic disaster for Union troops, who conducted frontal assaults into prepared, entrenched Confederate positions and were mowed down repeatedly.
Union forces were actually able to break the Confederate line in one location that later became known as the “Slaughter Pen” for the intensity of battle that took place there; it was not called that because it was a success for the Union. And, with their backs to a river, Union forces had little space to retreat; it was, by most accounts, a bad, bad day for early America.
Consider now the map of the Ukraine war in Day 82, as Russian forces in the north start to reach positions where they cannot advance any further, while fierce battles for Kherson rage in the south, even as Russian forces integrate Kherson oblast’s agriculture into its kleptocracy via outright theft and expropriation. A few things should jump out as strategic parallels.
The scales of battle involved are quite different, and technology has advanced enough that at the tactical level, very little applies in terms of of a Civil War comparison.
But some things don’t change about war; flanking is still flanking, because no one likes to get shot at from the side while they’re getting shot at from the front; encirclement is still deadly to the force that gets encircled; and battle is still, to a degree, linear and spatial. Armies control “salients” or areas of terrain defined by drawing lines between their forwardmost units.
And Murphy’s Law, along with the friction that it creates as armies solve problems from the command level (“how do I take this town?”) down to the individual level (“how do I get the slowest soldier in my squad to move?”) still stalks the entire battlefield.
Russia appears to be committing an error akin to Burnside’s commanders, advancing troops piecemeal rather than committing a substantial mass to a single location to achieve overwhelming local superiority. Experts assess that there are a variety of reasons why this could be occurring, but it comes down to a pattern of slow, incremental advances, day after day, using artillery to reduce entire cities to rubble rather than taking them with infantry and armor.
Before Kyiv was getting billions of dollars in high-tech American weaponry designed specifically to counter Russian weaponry, this was, to a degree, fine from the Russian perspective, if suboptimal because of time pressure. Ukraine’s innate defensive advantages - akin to the highly prepared defensive positions from which Confederate troops destroyed Burnside’s army - along with the increasing amount of military aid it is getting makes this pattern of incremental advances even worse, now, because time is not on Russia’s side when Ukraine’s army is getting better-armed and better-trained every day.
The immense advantages created by intelligence-sharing with Ukraine makes the situation not only unfavorable, but also extremely volatile from Russia’s perspective. If Russia had actually managed a 15-day blitzkrieg, like the seized plans in the early days of the war seemed to indicate, all the American and NATO intelligence in the world wouldn’t have made a difference; we would have watched, powerlessly, from satellites as Russia flooded into the country and took everything over. Instead, as the war dragged out and the gap between plans and reality for Russia started to widen, more and more opportunities for intelligence to make a difference started to arise.
The Confederate general, Robert E. Lee, is reputed to have looked upon the battle at Fredericksburg, and said to his colleague:
“It is well that war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it”
Reading reports of Putin himself involved in company-level decisions in the Ukraine conflict; looking at the status of Russia’s war in Ukraine, and even its state-sponsored media now beginning to acknowledge the depths of the international catastrophe that it has created for Russia; and, at the same time, observing life start to return to normal in Kyiv and its outskirts, even as the battle of Mariupol finally ends…
Lee’s statement takes on additional ironies that are perhaps Fredericksburg’s real lesson for these times, I think.
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For additional reading on the Battle of Fredericksburg, see also:
Norman, Geoffrey, “‘It Is Well That War Is So Terrible’”, The Weekly Standard, Dec 17, 2012
The American Battlefields Trust, “Horror and Heroism at the Slaughter Pen Farm”, battlefields.org (official website), accessed May 17, 2022