Wherein the U.S. Department of Defense spills the beans...

They unwittingly confirm that the Ukraine military is on the verge of collapse...

Andrei Martyanov quoted an article from Politico today, to wit:

No breakthrough yet in Ukraine’s counteroffensive

In which the following was stated by an unnamed U.S. Department of Defense official:

Ukraine now has 150,000 troops committed to the operation across three axes of attack, including multiple Western-trained brigades...

Ah, now this is what I've been wanting to see - an estimate of how many Ukrainian troops remain available on the battlefield.

I disregard all those hiding in cities like Kharkiv and Odessa, hiding around Kiev, or patrolling the Belarus border. They aren't relevant, and people who talk about Ukraine having "half a million" or more Ukrainian soldiers remaining, or having "3 million" available manpower - like a couple million civilians with a week or two of training are of any significance in this conflict - don't know what they're talking about.

And guess what? This figure comes close to my estimate from my July 17 Substack estimate of Ukrainian casualties. In that article I concluded that the (very conservative) range of Ukrainian casualties was between 432,000 and 867,000. Based on various estimates I've seen of Ukraine's total mobilization efforts over the last 18 months, I then estimated what the probable number of remaining Ukrainian forces was as follows:

If we assume the lowest figure of 432,000 is correct, and that Ukraine had a maximum of 700,000 forces throughout the war, then we can estimate the remaining Ukrainian forces to be no more than 268,000.

If we assume the lowest figure and that Ukraine had a total mobilization of one million men, then we can estimate the Ukrainian forces to be no more than 568,000.

If we assume the highest figure is correct and that Ukraine had a total mobilization of one million men, then we can estimate the remaining Ukrainian forces to be no more than 143,000.

I also said that I did not believe that Ukraine had actually mobilized one million men during their mobilizations. My reasoning was as follows.

At what point of Ukrainian personnel losses will Ukraine no longer be able to conduct effective military operations at the battalion or higher level? It seems clear that Ukraine is already at that point, despite potentially having a remaining force of over 200,000 troops.

This fact also mitigates against the probability of Ukraine having anywhere close to 500,000 troops or ever having had one million men under arms. If they had that many men still available, their 2023 offensive probably would not have failed so dramatically.

If you had an actual 500,000 or one million men under arms, that would have been seen on the battlefield, even with a large logistics tail. I suspect that many of the civilians conscripted into the Ukrainian military were in fact devoted almost entirely to that logistics tail. They were assigned to loading transport trucks with equipment, fuel and the like while those with some actual training or previous military experience were assigned to the front lines.

Clearly the latter did not reflect a massive number of men available with either combat training, let alone combat experience, and most probably not even with adequate supplies of firearms, ammunition, man portable weapons and body armor, despite large shipments of these items from the West.

As Brian Berletic pointed out repeatedly on his Youtube channel, a few million rounds of ammunition sounds like a lot, but with a single battlefield casualty requiring literally hundreds of thousands of rounds to be expended, it's not.

So if Ukraine actually had a real force of 100 or brigades, that would have been seen on the field and it would have had some effect on the Russian lines, either during the summer offensive or before.

No such effect has been seen.

So we can assume either that 1) Ukraine never had one million men with actual combat deployment capability, and/or 2) the maximum number of troops remaining are between 143,000 to 268,000 - not counting an unknown number of western "sheep-dipped" forces which probably number less than 10-20,000 and are thus mostly irrelevant.

And now we we are told that Ukraine has 153,000 to be used in their so-called "offensive". So clearly my lower number was incorrect, no surprise there.

We are also told this nonsense:

But Kyiv is still keeping a number of forces in reserve, as soldiers continue probing heavily mined Russian defenses for weak spots.

As I've said before, the notion that Ukraine is keeping its best-trained troops "in reserve" means that they are using their less capable forces to try to breach the Russian defenses. Does this make any sense? How do you breach a defensive line with less capable forces so that your more capable forces can then take advantage of any breach? Yes, you can hold a force in reserve which is larger than your breaching force. But use ill-trained conscripts to breach a formidable Russian defense line so that your better-trained, i.e., NATO-trained (with apologies to Andrei Martyanov for referring to NATO-trained as "better-trained") troops can exploit any breach?

If Ukraine is keeping a combat-capable force in reserve, that force is unlikely to be several times the size of the main offensive force although it could be. At most, any Ukrainian reserve force is unlikely to be much larger than the offensive force, so the combination of the two is unlikely to be larger than the 268,000 troops I estimated as the total remaining Ukrainian forces in my article. So my 268,000 estimate is likely close to correct - again, not counting forces hiding in cities, in Kiev or patrolling the Belarus border.

Remember that Ukraine is currently losing forces at the rate of 30-60,000 per month. At that rate, the 153,000 "offensive" force will be dead in 3 months tops and combat ineffective in half that, if not sooner. Even assuming the entire remaining Ukrainian combat-capable force is 250-300,000, that merely extends the top estimate to six months with combat effectiveness cutting that in half to 3 months. Even if the total combat-capable force is my maximum of 568,000 - and that is extremely unlikely even if Ukraine had a million conscripts - that only extends the time to nine months and half that is 4.5 months.

So my estimate of Ukraine's army collapsing within 3-6 months is pretty much confirmed by the DoD's statement.

I reiterate that this war can not continue for more than 3-6 months and that Ukraine's army could collapse literally at any moment. The fact that it appears incapable of launching effective attacks of any significant size in this "offensive" - which is the definition of “combat effectiveness” - appears to bear that out.