When a war breaks out, attention tends to focus on the ratio of combat forces in the presence and in the type of material with which each contender has. They are, of course, highly visible and even quantifiable elements; Hence, there are many who, from their mere mathematical calculation -with the addition of the defense budgets of each side-, intend to extract conclusive judgments about the chance of victory or defeat of each of them. To his misfortune, war is a violent confrontation of wills in which there are many imponderables and very diverse factors that will finally make the balance tip in one direction or another. And among them, in addition to the morale of the troops and the citizenry, logistics occupies a very special place.
Defined, along with strategy and tactics, as the third basic pillar of the art of warlogistics is the discipline that plans and executes the tasks necessary to provide the means required by the combat forces-human, material, physical and services- in order to guarantee their full operability and, if these forces enter into combat, victory. Hence, except in the case of a surgical action or a blow of the hand, any operation that lasts over time must have a solid logistics base to ensure a chain of transport, supply and repair to ensure that it is possible to maintain the war effort without interruption. A base that, measured in human resources, translates into the need to have at least three troops for each of those deployed in the front line.
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In view of the performance of the Russian troops in Ukraine, it seems clear that a good part of the failure they are reaping – which does not prevent their overwhelming superiority from allowing them to continue advancing – is a direct consequence of a poor planning and performance of the different logistics levels. Instead of planning the invasion taking into account the most dangerous scenario – a strong Ukrainian resistance – Moscow considered that with a blitz it could immediately achieve the fall of the Zelensky government and total control of Donbas. That would explain, in principle, why Russian military planners have not dedicated themselves – despite having months to accumulate troops and means both in their own territory, close to Ukraine, and in Belarus – in establishing a diversified and well-equipped logistics base to fuel a protracted war.
For this reason, when that first blow did not achieve its objectives and it was decided to move on to a war of attrition and indiscriminate punishment of the civilian population, Moscow found that is unable to provide its front-line troops with the personnel and means necessary to subdue its enemies. There they are, to make it more visible, the innumerable images of abandoned Russian media, soldiers stealing food from supermarkets and civilian vehicles moved to the front to alleviate the lack of sufficient military means with which to guarantee fuel, ammunition, food, repair of breakdowns or rescue and care for the wounded. It is enough to consider that each one of the approximately one hundred tactical combat groups deployed by Moscow for the invasion – with around 1,000 human troops each – needs to have about 40-50 vehicles to be really operational. That is the prose of war.