Ukraine Military History Institute
The list of units doing middle strike is long, and that is the problem
Rob Lee put the question carefully. Middle strike is a very promising direction, he said, but it is not fully clear to him whether all the units doing it are actually coordinating their campaigns. Ryan O'Leary answered before the sentence was finished: "Doubtful."
The roster Lee ran through explains the doubt. The 1st Center, Madyar's brigade, Nemesis, K2. Alpha. The National Guard's Omega. Then the corps, Azov Corps and 3rd Corps, and an assault regiment on top of that.
Lee is not arguing that these units should lose the capability. His view is that corps should have operational middle strike, and he welcomes corps now having HIMARS as well. His concern is not who holds the weapons. It is whether anyone is orchestrating them.
The coordinated campaigns are the ones with a single owner
Nobody in the conversation claims that nothing is planned. Lee says the strikes on tankers are definitely coordinated, and so is the Crimea campaign. O'Leary thinks the Sea of Azov and Black Sea work that the SBS is doing is probably coordinated too.
Below that level, the picture fragments. O'Leary's example is Azov striking a range of targets in Mariupol, "not even really their sector." He would almost bet, he says, that this is not coordinated at a decent level.
The pattern is worth stating plainly. Where one command owns a campaign against one target set, a sea lane or a peninsula, there is a plan. Where many units share a front, there are many campaigns.
Capability arrived faster than doctrine
O'Leary's explanation for the fragmentation is simple. Every drone unit is now receiving Hornets, Darts, RAMs and, in his words, "whatever, 20 other different types." Having the capability, they are going to use it.
That does not add up to a planned operation. He describes what a planned one would look like: a day on which every fuel truck in a sector is struck, or all the units in a sector focusing on one road to deny movement. He does not think it is being done like that. Some battalions and brigades talk to each other, he says, so the communication is horizontal but not vertical.
His sharpest example is two neighbouring units. One is hitting a road. Nobody is saying, "We're taking out this road, hit the new ones when they go down the next road." Dmytro Putiata agreed: "Most likely no."
Which drone a unit gets depends on which company it knows
Lee adds an important exception and, with it, the mechanism. Azov Corps has Hornet units at both corps and brigade level, and it does coordinate which level operates where. Azov had a very clear idea of what it wanted to achieve and is executing it itself.
Part of the reason is history. Azov worked with the Hornet's developer early, helped make the drone much better, and as a result got a lot of them. Other units worked with Fire Point, so they have a lot of FP2s.
"It becomes kind of a ad hoc thing," Lee says: the company you work with decides which drone you get, and which drone you get decides what capability you have. That is the finding underneath the whole exchange. Middle-strike capability is being distributed by supplier relationships, not by a plan.
Putiata's objection: maneuver brigades striking 150 kilometres deep
Putiata's complaint is narrower and blunter. He does not like that maneuver brigades are being given the ability to strike 150 kilometres deep, which for him "absolutely makes zero sense."
His example is the National Guard's Spartan Brigade. Operating Hornets is fine. Striking 150 kilometres from the front line is not. He describes a brigade with a decent UAS regiment, built to support an army corps at the operational and tactical level, striking 120 kilometres behind the front. His question is why, and where it leads. In his view it is a decision about here and now, taken without thinking about the future and how forces should be deployed.
O'Leary's counter: trade range for payload
O'Leary sees a case for keeping the large platforms in these units, and it is an arithmetic one. A deep strike drone that can fly 1,000 kilometres with a 100-kilogram payload because it carries 80 litres of fuel can, if it only needs to go 300 kilometres, carry 200 or 300 kilograms instead. He offers the figures loosely, as an illustration rather than a specification.
His instruction to those units would be: "Increase your payload weight, decrease your fuel, hit at your depth." Do not launch an FP2 at 500 kilometres, and do not worry about Alabuga.
Where the argument converges: divide responsibility by depth
Putiata accepts the point but holds his line. Strikes at that depth belong under Army Corps command, not with a maneuver brigade that looks at its area of responsibility and decides to strike Luhansk. "The main thing here," he says, "is that responsibility should be divided."
O'Leary ends in the same place. Having the assets everywhere is good, but there is no reason a combat brigade should be launching 200 or 300 kilometres deep. Each unit should be told: this is your depth, don't go past it.
Lee adds one mitigating detail about Spartan. It is not operating with the rest of its corps. Hornets are sent to the corps, the corps distributes them to its brigades, and Spartan is on its own, away from the rest of the corps. The deep brigade strikes may partly be a product of a detached formation rather than a deliberate policy.
What to watch
- Written depth bands. A rule that brigades strike to a set depth and corps beyond it is the fix all three speakers describe. Whether one appears is a direct test of whether this was heard.
- Sector-level denial campaigns. Several units in one sector concentrating on one road, or on one class of vehicle such as fuel trucks, would show the vertical coordination O'Leary says is missing.
- Maneuver brigades still striking 120 to 150 kilometres deep. If those strikes continue, Putiata's objection has not been acted on.