I don't really follow what you are implying here.
Well no, actually I would. By NATO's own admission, the Balaklia offensive was planned, supplied, and even aided in execution, by U.S. planners rather than Ukraine's. Ukraine's own performance in most other fronts has been poor, characterized by nonsensical assaults that only served to deplete their resources and morale. I've followed this war from the beginning, and there are hundreds of burnt out vehicles in Davydov Brod, West of Izyum, and Kreminna that says plenty about Ukraine's poor op planning.
Sure, but I'm not saying the war is lost or that someone is losing. All I'm pointing out, is that Russia's capability in operational planning is eons behind NATO's, U.S.'s, and China's. Granted, we've never seen China in action, but I expect it to be roughly in the vicinity of U.S.'s.
I understand your perspective.
However, personally I'm cautious of falling into a pattern I've seen on both sides, where one lets one's favored side take credit for victories while blaming defeats on other factions. I see this with American nationalists talking about NATO planning and blaming Ukrainian slavic incompetence, Russian nationalists talking about the Russian regular army and blaming the militia, Wagner ppl blaming the mobilized and so on.
If we think about this rationally, if the successful operations of Ukraine are largely due to NATO influence while most failed operations are due to poor Ukrainian planning, then, is it not poor planning on NATO's part to begin with when they could simply forbid Ukraine from doing suicide pushes? Somewhere, someone on the western side okayed these Ukrainian attacks that were not successful and wasted precious manpower and equipment. So no one on that side is free from incompetence, no matter how much blaming is done.
Same applies to Russians that say they lost ground because the ground were staffed with militia. The whole force still bears blame for stationing the militia there to begin with.
The conclusion I have is rather than both sides are doing their "best" and have fully intact planning commands (for their standards) but the conditions are difficult due to large numbers and weapons involved, therefore there will be battlefield defeats for both sides and one should read the overall exchange of territory as well as guessed casualties from mobilization needed to gauge the direction of the war.
Showing videos where dozens of men make a failed retreat, get hit, or some vehicles are stuck, and then attaching a belief to it that it means a certain side is "broken" and "unable to continue" just doesn't make sense to me, whether it is for Ukraine or for Russia.
I can’t see how Desert Storm was a fluke. Sure the Iraqi Army was extremely bad. However the US completely understood their enemy on the strategic, operational and tactical levels. Had the US just sent a division or two in with outright unjustified contempt for their enemy and the ROE the Russians had, the US would have been thrashed as well. I can’t say the same for the Russians who screwed up on all levels in the beginning which led to a domino effect. Yes the Russians are currently controlling huge chunks of important Ukrainian territory, and I personally believe the Russians are doing something much more clever on the strategic level which involves politics. However you can’t deny the fact that the SMO is plagued with planning problems on the tactical and operational levels.
Iraq was a former dependency on US, therefore they had the time to really soak in every aspect of the Iraq forces as well as gain contacts on the inside. There was also a much larger difference in economy/numbers than the current war.
Russia's equivalent to that war would be the Chechnya or Georgia conflicts, which were significantly less well executed, but it did not descend into a near peer battle like the current one, because Ukraine is simply much better armed than all the other states that have been invaded in the near past.
