Part 2 of 3: Prep work to slow an advance & for urban war
Just as desperate and politically symbolic as the move to issue anyone with an assault rifle, even those who lack the training and who are above a certain age group.
4. My approach has always been keeping these discussions at a technical level. The Ukrainians lack communications, so they can’t have effective armed over watch and these gangs of armed but untrained men are not effective against armour. I see bravely without organisation — a lot of armed men walking around but not building fighting positions or running communications wires to command posts.
5. The available avenues of advance is predictable. There are lots of things civilians can do in an urban war zone, over a 72 hour period, without needing to take up a weapon, for example:
(a) runners can help with food, water and ammo delivery and medics can provide first aid to combatants;
(b) carpenters can build and prep. of hidden fighting positions in flats and houses, by filling thousands of sandbags, to reinforce walls, as primary and alternate firing positions for the Ukrainian Army in each defence sector;
(c) builders can help create holes in walls, for key hole shooting, to increase death toll of Russians in an urban fight;
(d) mechanics can help keep motor vehicles or IFVs running; and
(e) everyone can dig anti-tank ditches to reduce avenues of approach and funnel the enemy to a kill zone.
6. Some minimum effort fortification at avenues of advance will force the Russians to destroy numerous buildings (selected clusters of buildings), which is bad for Russian PR and optics. Finland has this figured out down to a science — on how to use civilians to aid the military effort. Not everybody needs to be a shooter.
7. I prefer to focus on technical solutions and not worry about the PR angle.
(a) What Ukraine really need are anti-tank, anti-personnel and area defence mines to augment their campaign relative to the Russian axis of advance. But using mines is bad from a PR perspective, so the Americans and British will not supply them.
(b) In any sector defence plan, I will use all the above, claymore mines and also make thousands of command wire IEDs of different shapes and sizes, to create kill numerous zones. In a kill zone, I will sprinkle nuts or other metal objects, on the ground, to give false positives to any attempted metal sweep.
(c) These IEDs can be prefabricated by Chemists to look like bricks or other common rubble, in a workshop, where someone dips, the ball bearings, nails and rags (to be packed in the explosives and petrol), into rat poison — which makes basic first aid insufficient. The rags will help stick to the skin and keep burning for longer. A 8-person IED workshop, in a 7 day production run, will kill more Russians than 100 untrained men with guns.
8. If at the last minute, a country decides to give guns to tons of civilians, you are going to have tons of friendly fire incidents, because they lack trigger discipline — PR moves do not save Ukrainian lives — technical solutions do.