Here's What I Don't Understand About HIMARS

A big problem I had throughout the 40-mile convoy phase of the Russo-Ukraine War was the daily YouTube posts of Russian armored columns being defeated in detail by small Ukrainian units with anti-tank missiles. These were just everyday occurrences, and I kept wondering why the conventional wisdom kept asserting that these somehow didn't happen or weren't important. And they weren't important until the Russians simply abandoned their whole northern offensive.

The YouTube indicator has been changing lately. Throughout May and June, while the attritional battle in the Donbas was under way, there were far fewer YouTube posts from the front of any sort. But since early July, we've been seeing several things. The first is that there have been almost no retired US general talking heads prognosticating on the course of the war. Isn't that strange? You couldn't keep them away from the camera during the halcyon days of the 40-mile convoy. Now, zilch.

The second thing is we're seeing new YouTube posts daily showing Russian ammunition depots exploding spectacularly as a result of HIMARS attacks, credibly backed up by Ukrainian announcements:

On July 13, the Armed Forces of Ukraine destroyed 5 Russian ammunition depots in the following towns:
▪️ Luhansk
▪️ Chernobaivka
▪️ Makiivka, Donetsk region
▪️ Chaplinka (district), Kherson region
▪️ Horlivka, Donetsk region pic.twitter.com/PfEEIwWBb7

— UkraineWorld (@ukraine_world) July 13, 2022

This brings me back to the question I had during the 40-mile convoy phase: how come all those tanks and trucks are being blown up every day, but the retired generals are saying this doesn't matter? There are only so many tanks. Even if the Russians have a gazillion tanks, you can only deploy a fraction of that, a gazillion over n, in Ukraine. And a gazillion over n is a finite number, let's call it t. Every day, we're seeing t reduced by x tanks portrayed as blown up on YouTube, as well as on the Oryx site. Why doesn't this have an effect?

And of course, it did have an effect, just the retired generals never quite recognized it. To everyone's surprise, the Russians abandoned the northern offensive.

So now not only do the Russians have eight gazillion howitzers, but they have 42 bajillion artillery shells. It's the Somme, it's Verdun, it's hopeless. All we see is YouTubes of let's say five depots each night going up in explosions that detonate for hours. We're hearing very little directly about how this may or may not be succeeding, except:

The U.S. Defense Department and other U.S. agencies fed HIMARs into Ukraine slowly, officials said, waiting to test Kyiv’s aptitude on the system, reflected by Germany and Britain, which handed off multiple launch rockets mounted on Bradley tank frames four at a time. But U.S. and European officials have been impressed, they said, by Ukraine’s systematic selection of targets, interdicting Russian supplies and attacking command posts in a bid to grind the Kremlin’s war effort to a near-complete halt.

So all of a sudden, for no reason at all, Biden says we'll send Ukraine four more HIMARS launchers over the original eight. And not just Biden:

Mariusz Błaszczak, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defence of Poland, has made a statement about the transfer of another batch of Polish-made Krab self-propelled artillery systems to Ukraine during his visit to Kyiv on Tuesday, 12 July.

. . . Zelenskyy did not specify how many howitzers Ukraine had received.

The Russian response is unclear -- the current conventional wisdom is that Iranian drones will cancel out the HIMARS and other NATO weapons.

[T]here remain growing fears that Russia will begin to find countermeasures from the HIMARs rockets. And the potential arrival of up to 100 Iranian combat drones, which U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said Tehran had agreed to sell to Russia, is creating fears in the Ukrainian ranks that the HIMARs batteries will be left helpless to an aerial onslaught[.]

Except that as of this morning:

Iran has no plans to send military aid neither to Russia nor to Ukraine, the Iranian Foreign Ministry said.

Earlier U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said Tehran was planning to supply military drones to Russia. However, the Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Hossein Amir-Abdollahian denied Sullivans’ claim, La Repubblica reported on July 13.

Iran avoids any actions that could lead to further escalation in Ukraine, including the supply of military equipment, Amir-Abdollahian said.

Who knows what's up here? Nevertheless, this does nothing to make me change my usual contrarian viewpoint. The current conventional wisdom is that while Ukraine may be able to stall the Russians with HIMARS and other NATO weapons, they won't be able to push the Russians back in a counteroffensive. But earlier this year, they didn't even need a counteroffensive to make the Russians abandon their whole northern campaign. The US strategy being implemented in Ukraine is explicitly asymmetrical -- the weaker side wins with defeat in detail; it doesn't employ a symmetrical counteroffensive.

After all, that's how Ho Chi Minh won in Viet Nam; it's how the Taliban won in Afghanistan. I don't understand how credentialed professional military analysts are missing this, except that I was in the Ivy League with these guys. Heck, two of my closest friends were in Russian Studies. Maybe that's kind of the point, huh? I should one day tell a story.

Somehow I trust what I see on YouTube.