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On 17 February, Russian forces finally captured Avdiivka - once a city of 30,000 people - just ten kilometres from Donetsk. 110th Mechanised Brigade had defended the ruins for the last two years without relief. The end came when Russian forces infiltrated the south of the city using a concealed passage offered by a man-sized water pipe feeding Donetsk filter station.
More units advanced from the north in the area of the Terrikon (slag heap) and dachas adjoining the Koksokhim (Avdiiv chemical coke plant). With 80-110 glide bombs landing on the defenders every day, and with the threat of the city being cut in two, the Ukrainian command took the prudent decision to withdraw.
The next phase for Russian forces should have been an exploitation of the breach in the defence. In fact, the assault on Avdiivka which had started the previous October quite exhausted the attackers. 16,000 soldiers were killed according to a disillusioned Luhansk separatist. A staggering 531 pieces of equipment were destroyed, damaged or abandoned, including 169 tanks.
It was not until the end of March that Russian forces were able to resume the advance in an organised way (although small-scale and suicidal attacks never stopped across the front lines). This article reviews the action since and specifically examines the battle for the Durna river line.
Ukrainian and Russian dispositions
Ukrainian and Russian dispositions are shown on the map below. For both sides, unit and formation names do not correspond to actual size. A 'brigade' may be a weak battalion. 'Battalions' are commonly just companies. Russian prisoners routinely report how a company may start with 100 men but be reduced to as few as ten fit soldiers. Caution is also needed because units are rotated (withdrawn) when exhausted. This is especially true of Russian forces.
The map therefore represents all reported units/formations and where, but they may not have been present all the time, or in strength.
Russian troops on this front are referred to as 'Centre Group'. They are drawn from Central Military District (CVO) and 1st DNR Army Corps. Commander 'Centre Group' is the 48-year old infantryman Colonel-General Andrei Mordvichev. He has participated in the war from the beginning rising from army commander to army group commander.
CVO has been the best performing military district - ironically - as traditionally it is the reserve district in the Russian Federation and least favoured with resources. Ukrainian command in this sector falls under the Khortytsia Operational-Strategic Group (OSUV). The commander is a General Sodel [Sodol].
It is not possible to estimate troop numbers with any certainty. Both sides are depleted. The Russians continue to commit units to destruction further complicating estimation of strengths. Nor is it possible to estimate equipment numbers. With the exception of the battalion-level attack at the beginning, Russian attacks are typically platoon strength involving 1-2 tanks and as many as four AFVs. The ad hoc mix of vehicle types tells the story of Russian problems with replenishing combat losses.
Ukrainian counter-attacks typically involve a single tank or AFV. Artillery and rocket fire on the Russian side involves single guns or launchers that fire one salvo then scoot. Ukrainian indirect fire has been minimal due to 'shell starvation'. FPV and Mavic-style drones rule the battlefield and both sides go to great lengths to conceal themselves, in the case of vehicles, guns and rocket launchers; or to remain underground if infantry. Camouflage is insufficient.
The only true protection is total concealment. Saturated ECM has also become a prerequisite for survival.
Avdiivka front - Russian operational objectives
Cold War students of the Soviet Army probably remember the concept of immediate and subsequent objectives. This echeloning endures in the modern Russian Army. The immediate objective on the Avdiivka front was the Durna river line, just 10 kilometres from Avdiivka

Precision: A History of American Warfare by James Patton Rogers is published by Manchester University Press.
"Precision" is an intellectual history of America's pursuit of the titular objective - how to target adversaries, their militaries, and their infrastructure with pinpoint accuracy while, reducing harm to civilians and non-combatants. Author James Patton Rogers surveys the evolution of the American military's noble ambitions that often outreached its technological capacity and how that pursuit shaped the development and execution of strategy and doctrine.
Beginning with the First World War, Rogers seats the genesis of this pursuit in the horror of the First World War, which saw widespread and in many cases pointless slaughter. Morally abhorrent to American (and indeed European sensibilities), military officers sought to prevent the recurrence of such destruction by instead achieving greater accuracy. The advent of airpower began this uneven march towards a perhaps unattainable desire - to make war clean and efficient.
Military demonstrations against fixed, undefended targets with early airpower gave rise to the perhaps misguided belief that precision was indeed possible with the technology of the time.
The first test of this was the Second World War. In Europe, the United Kingdom's area bombardment stood in contrast with America's ostensible 'precision' campaign. Washington sought to target industries, military facilities, and logistics hubs as opposed to applying pressure to civilian populations. Aspirational again, the efficacy of such campaigns remains debatable given the accuracy of bombsights and the cost associated with waves upon waves of bombers pursuing well-defended targets.
In the Pacific, American military leaders managed to convince themselves and the public that the mass fire bombings of Japanese cities were somehow 'precise'. The apotheosis of this precision campaign was the use of the atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki that helped bring the war to a close.
Whether or not the bombings were necessary is explored by Rogers, the debate over which feeds into questions of precision - a single bomb for a single target (military in nature) achieved a strategic effect for proponents of precision.
The nuclear era that followed was, and remains, Strangelovian in the extreme. Rogers' recounting of the torturous debates about nuclear strategy and doctrine is riveting, if absurd. It is hard to argue that nuclear weapons, especially thermonuclear devices are 'precision' by any measure.
Yet, that destructiveness was the source of its precision for its advocates - fewer bombs or warheads per target, an idea that was naturally undermined by the presence of 'overkill' which would only make the 'rubble bounce' in the end. The American military's efforts to develop a Single Integrated Operational Plan and its component plans for nuclear targeting sought to reduce this overkill and increase precision.
It was not until the Vietnam War that technology arguably began to catch up to the ambitions of precision with the first use of laser-guided munitions. Still in its infancy, it was, of course, overshadowed by the widespread, if ineffective, bombing campaigns such as Operation Rolling Thunder. Where precision truly shined, if at least in the public's mind, was during Operation Desert Storm and the allied efforts to eject Saddam Hussein's Iraqi army from Kuwait.
Even here precision munitions were only a fraction of the total used, yet the widespread coverage on CNN of bombs and missiles striking their intended targets created the impression that the era of precision had dawned.
Precision-strike complex
Perhaps the apotheosis of American precision strike emerged in the wake of the events of 9/11 and the Global War on Terror that followed. America's precision-strike complex saw persistent surveillance and highly accurate missiles and bombs develop an extremely tight kill chain allowing the elimination of individual target

'The Russian man is glad to see death, including his own - it reminds him of the end of everything that exists. He contemplates the ruins and fragments with pleasure…'
This author has watched thirty YouTube videos of Russian soldiers committing suicide. This has been possible thanks to the revolution that has taken place on the battlefield with the proliferation of cheap drones fitted with cameras. One slit his throat. It took him almost a minute to die. Twenty-two shot themselves.
Seven killed themselves by detonating grenades: the first held the grenade at arms-length and looked away; the second held the grenade to his chest; the third detonated two grenades against his ears (the head vanished); the fourth also blew his head off; the fifth, a corpulent individual of Asiatic appearance, detonated the grenade under his body armour; the sixth was an individual hiding behind a vehicle wreck; and the seventh held the grenade in front of his face.
How many Russian soldiers have committed similar acts unrecorded by Ukrainian drones can only be speculated.
Historically, we might associate such extreme behaviour with the Imperial Japanese Army. More recently we think of the fanaticism of terrorist organisations such as ISIS or Al Qaeda. But we would not normally frame the Russian Army in this way. This article begs the question: is the Russian Army a death cult?
Suicide in Russian culture
In Russia, suicide, or more broadly disdain for life, is modern and rooted in the revolutionary tradition. The most famous suicide is the poet Vladimir Mayakovsy (1893-1930). The cause however was a love affair, not revolution. His funeral was attended by 150,000 people, the largest public mourning event in Bolshevik Moscow after the funerals of Lenin and Stalin.
Rejection of life - as revolutionary act - finds origins in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (1862) which popularised the phrase 'nihilism' through the character of Bazarov: 'At the present time negation is the most beneficial of all [acts] -and we deny…everything.' Nihilism mixed fanatical asceticism with self-mortification. Life mattered little or nothing.
Turgenev actually created the character as lampoon of the 'men of the sixties', but paradoxically Bazarov became an anti-hero to young Russians seeking change.
The nihilism became violent through the agency of the so-called 'new men' - Lenin's predecessors - the best known of which were Varfolomei Zaitsev (1842-1882), the archetypal nihilist but unknown in the West (and the character of Shigalev in Dostoyesvky's The Possessed); and Sergey Nechaev (1847-1882) (the character of Pyotr Verkhovensky, also in The Possessed).
The 'Nechaev affair' was the great cause célèbre in Russia of the period, but also remains completely unknown outside Russia except to Russian historians. The Tsarist authorities were so alarmed by the young man he was gaoled and deliberately starved to death, dying at the age of thirty-five.
Before he died he co-authored with Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) one of the most famous tracts of revolutionary literature in world history: The Revolutionary Catechism. It starts with the famous proposition 'The revolutionary is a lost man…no interests of his own, no affairs of his own, no feelings, no attachments no belongings, not even a name if his own.' It then goes on to describe a being who 'despises', who is 'hard with himself', who 'hates', and whose object is 'ruthless destruction'.
It could be a description of 'the Orcs', as Ukrainians describe the Russians they face on the other side of the trench lines.
While it is undeniable that a life-denying fanaticism coloured Russian revolutionaries (and radicals and anarchists across 19th century Europe), we must still ask, but were the revolutionaries born from a wider Russian cultural substratum that disregarded life, or were they atypical of their society.
Suicide in Russian society
Russian men die young. Roughly one quarter die before the age of 55, mostly due to two cause

Over the past two decades, enhancing human performance capabilities for those operating in extremis contexts (i.e., Armed Forces, Emergency Services, and First Responders) has gained considerable traction in policy-making and scientific circles.
To operationalise this concept, the term Human Performance Optimisation (HPO) first emerged within the US Department of Defence (DoD) in 2006 as a conceptual framework to develop the performance capabilities of the military's most important asset - its people. Military tasks, by their very nature, place unique and intense physiological, psychological, and cognitive demands upon all Warfighters.
In addition, the contemporary operational environment is arguably more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) than ever before.
Indeed, the return of peer-on-peer conflict and the emergence of unconventional, asymmetric, and hybrid threats, combined with the scale and speed of technological change, has, and will, continue to make conflict a challenging and ever-evolving affair contested not only in the land, air, and maritime environments but also in the electromagnetic, cyber and space domains.However, it is essential to note that while the character of conflict may change, its fundamental nature remains the same: it is
a human endeavour that is adversarial, dynamic, complex, and lethal.
Given this reality, it is vital that every Warfighter, irrespective of gender, age, rank, or trade, is prepared for the demands of the contemporary operational environment. The importance of developing human performance capabilities for such demands was succinctly put by US Army Colonel (ret.) John Collins who stated that "Humans are more important than hardware, and their quality is more important than their quantities".
This point was again highlighted more recently by the British Army Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Patrick Saunders, who stated that "We need 'warfighters' - whether they are cyber specialists, drone pilots or infantry soldiers - to be stronger, faster, more intelligent and more resilient." To achieve this laudable objective, the Armed Forces must develop appropriate training strategies to enable military personnel to perform to their full potential.
Indeed, lessons learned over the past two decades have been internalised, resulting in a considerable improvement in the training, competence, motivation, and overall combat effectiveness of the Warfighter.HPO represents part of this evolution and has been defined in the literature as "the process of applying knowledge, skills, and emerging technologies to improve and preserve the capabilities of military personnel to execute essential tasks".
Fundamentally, HPO aims to leverage evidence-based information and best practices to make the Warfighter as resilient, capable, agile, and lethal as possible. In addition, due to a reduced size and budget, the Armed Forces cannot afford large numbers of non-deployable personnel. Therefore, a secondary aim of HPO is to improve individual career longevity and reduce injury rates.
It is Nothing New
Preparing the Warfighter for success on the battlefield is nothing new. Indeed, numerous historical examples of military leadership emphasise the same ideas promoted within this article. However, our collective understanding of the optimal approach to achieve this aim has improved considerably, driven by developments in applied sports science, physiology, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. To conceptualise HPO, the Warfighter should be viewed as a human platform.
This approach allows for the routine monitoring, analysis, and development of critical human performance capabilities no different from traditional military platforms (i.e., weapon systems, vehicles, or ISTAR assets). However, to adopt such an approach, it is essential to define critical aspects of human performance. This typically is done using the Biopsychosocial model whereby human performance capabilities are split into three

"I don't want to get any messages saying, 'I am holding my position.' We are not holding a Goddamned thing. Let the Germans do that. We are advancing constantly and we are not interested in holding onto anything, except the enemy's balls. We are going to twist his balls and kick the living shit out of him all of the time."
The debt owed to those who liberated Western Europe from Nazi oppression will underpin the D-Day 80 Commemorations. Although D-Day was essential to victory in Europe, it was not an end in itself. Study of the wider war to liberate Northwest Europe places D-Day in context and helps the military professional understand the link between the operational and strategic levels of war.
One method of undertaking this study is through educational wargaming which enables learning through active participation, rather than passive receipt of information. This short read, part three of three of this mini-series, will outline how this learning experience can be achieved through use of a COTS wargame.
Success on D-Day allowed the Allies to secure a firm bridgehead. The resulting campaign was a brutal attritional struggle that led to the destruction of German forces in Normandy and a dramatic breakout across France. Subsequent attempts for a quick advance into Germany failed in the face of logistical constraints and German resistance - most notably at Arnhem in September 1944. A German winter counter-offensive in the Ardennes followed and achieved surprise but was subsequently defeated.
In Spring 1945 a deliberate Allied offensive breached the German defences, crossed the Rhine and the German Army surrender in May 1945. How did the Allies win? Interactive study using the wargame 1944: D-Day To The Rhine offers the military professional the opportunity to answer this question.
The map for 1944: D-Day To The Rhine extends from the French Atlantic coast to Western Germany. Units are armies or corps and turns represent a month. Set-up shows how the Germans attempted to defend the region. The Allies are not committed to invading Normandy. Other options are available but come with commensurate variations in air support and German responsiveness.
The Allied invasion will almost certainly succeed. This illustrates the immense and wide-ranging preparatory effort the Allies devoted to ensuring success. A subsequent breakout can be more problematic and will reflect player decision making. The Allied invasion of southern France - Op DRAGOON - opens up a new area of operation to the south of the game map.
Ends, Ways and Means
Balancing "Ends, Ways and Means" are integral to success and reflect the game's strategic level focus. Allied victory is determined by the "End" chosen. These range from the swift capture of Berlin through to securing Western Germany and isolation of the industrial Rhur region. In this way the game confronts the player with the historical choices the Allies faced. Central to the representation of "Means", is the use of resource points. These provide replacements and enable movement and combat.
A fixed amount is given each turn, mirroring the capacity of the invasion beaches. German occupied ports can be captured to increase this amount. The Allied player faces a decision on whether success can be achieved with the fixed capacity available, or if resources must be invested to first liberate ports and increase resources.
The game models "Ways" through the use of resource points for movement and combat. Units can move and fight in any order and this forces the player to think about sequencing of operations.
The overall effect of these game mechanisms forces the player to confront the tensions inherent in balancing "Ends, Ways and Means." Thus the player gains some experiential insight into the historical situation, such as the prioritisation of Op MARKET-GARDEN over clearance of the Scheldt estuary, which occurred in September 1944.
Chance
The "chance" inherent in the nature of war is provided by bespoke combat dice

Despite economic headwinds, China will still overtake the US in terms of real GDP
How can power be measured between states?
Key challenges in applying the power as resources approach
China manipulates and likely exaggerates publicly released data on its economy and currency
Net vs. Gross Metrics
While Chinese real GDP is a source of power, it is counteracted by a number of significant economic costs.
Utilising a net approach would account for the significant economic costs that China faces which counteract its large GDP, for example; an increasingly ageing population (contributing to a significantly declining working population); male-dominated demographics; overexploitation damaging much of its arable land; industrialisation and pollution causing substantial water scarcity and negative health externalities; huge welfare and internal security burdens; and increasing infrastructure and
education costs.
Spending money will always increase GDP even if THE money is wasted, as seen with China's ineffective infrastructure investments.
Moreover, GDP counts production costs as output; therefore, spending money will always increase GDP even if money is wasted, as seen with China's ineffective infrastructure investments.
Power Conversion Problems
The USSR reached its military peak in the 1980s despite its economy being in a "death spiral", demonstrating that military power is often a lagging indicator.
The USSR reached its military peak in the 1980s despite its economy being in a "death spiral"
Conclusion