Small Wars Journal

Elon Musk, “Veteran Brain Banks,” and Satellite-Guided Ukrainian “Stay Behind” Units

Thu, 04/21/2022 - 8:19pm

Elon Musk, “Veteran Brain Banks,” and Satellite-Guided Ukrainian “Stay Behind” Units

By Chuck de Caro

 

When Winston Churchill thought that Nazi Germany would invade the UK, he selected Major Colin Gubbins to form the secret “Auxiliary Units.”   The Auxiliary Units mission:  Wait for Britain to be over run, and then rise from their underground bunkers and deliver absolute havoc among the German occupiers...forever. 

While the AU boys never got their chance to defend Britain, Gubbins went on to command the Special Operations Executive and used the principles of guerrilla warfare to organize and train partisans behind the German lines.

The American OSS went one better, creating the Operational Groups---direct predecessors of The Green Berets---who then parachuted into Europe to raise bloody old hell.  One group, OSS Mission Tacoma led by Captain Howard Chappell operating in the mountains near Belluno, Italy, even attempted to capture Field Marshal Albert Kesselring in between blowing up bridges, using bazookas on everything that moved and then bluffing the surrender of 3,500 Germans!

So effective were the tactics of SOE and OSS in Italy, that after the war Field Marshal Albert Kesselring stated that it was necessary to use the equivalent of two German combat divisions to attempt to control the rampaging OSS and their Partigiani.

That lesson was immediately implemented by NATO which created all manner of very secret stay-behind forces to compromise the Soviet rear areas in case of the expected grand invasion through and around the Fulda Gap.

Enter Elon Musk. 

In the three weeks since billionaire Musk challenged Vladimir Putin to “single combat,” he was so scathingly put down by one of Putin’s Chechen bubbas that he apparently gave up on dueling Putin, and pivoted instead to single combat with Twitter.

In those few weeks, the cobra-eyed Putin has called up the Russian reserves, replaced his generals, pulled his forces from the northern Ukraine area and is now concentrating them in and around Donetsk.

What is coming is a stupendous Russian juggernaut bent on taking the enormous Yuzivska natural gas fields, the gigantic ArcelorMittal steel complex, the water resources of the lower Dnieper River, and all the Black Sea ports of Ukraine.

Under those circumstances, Ukraine’s military would be slowly ground down to combat ineffectiveness under the sheer weight of Russian numbers.

What would remain would be the balance of 40 million Ukrainian civilians bent on evening the score. But how?  NATO has only limited numbers of Special Forces troops to train guerrillas, and any of them captured on Ukrainian soil could cause an escalation that might engulf NATO. 

However, if after getting his Tweets off Mr. Musk still wants to take on Putin, he might be well advised to help create a huge, lethal game of Whack-A-Mole ---an “Everywhere Guerrilla War”--- that the KGB-Guy-Who-Would-Be-Czar could not win.

Not exactly single combat, but Musk could aid in leaving Putin beaten and bewildered.

While Musk’s earlier generous provision of hundreds of Starlink communication units (along with the re-orientation of the satellite constellation connecting them) to Ukraine will enable it to maintain continuity of government, the gargantuan weight of the Russian onslaught eventually would render the Ukraine government unable to function.

Enter “Starlink Plan-B,” the Starlink-guided and very lethal “Everywhere Guerrilla War” which would create losses that Putin, and Russia, could not bear.

While today the Ukrainian Special Forces are  doing an honest-to-god stellar job, there are millions of Ukrainians who may be out of their reach for training and organization as partisans.

Therefore, this guerrilla-war-by-satellite is the ideal methodology for Ukrainian patriots in parts of the country who are cut off from everything. It would enable them to organize and continue to fight.  All that is needed is a large number of smuggled-in Starlink units, batteries, and solar panels.

Training those Ukrainian patriots can be accomplished by a “Brain Bank” of gray-haired US veterans who have already volunteered to assist.  They can lend their knowledge and wisdom---essentially with video classes and live advice quadraplexed by Starlink.

Two such organizations (and their friends) are already trying to help:  The OSS Society  and Bolotna Lysytsya (Ukrainian for Swamp Fox). The OSS Society has republished the 1943 “Simple Sabotage” manual in Ukrainian, and both sites have posted it. 

With Starlinks these veterans can instruct small, dispersed groups of Ukrainian partisans in “Guerrilla 101,” and then help plan attacks. 

Should Ukraine, in fact, become smothered by the bludgeoning of the Russian Army, the immediate focus of the partisan attacks would be the interdiction and destruction of the Russian Army’s most vulnerable asset:  Fuel pipelines. 

These are pipelines that are hastily emplaced by the Tactical Pipeline Battalions of the Material Technical Support Brigades. In simple terms, the Ukrainian partisans could run the bastards out of gas and then destroy them piecemeal.

Using commercial satellite images from companies like Maxar, American veterans could transmit photos and coordinates of the most vulnerable parts of the pipelines.

Given that the pipelines will be scores of miles long, they would be easy to identify and attack. The Russians would then have to dispatch inordinate numbers of troops to defend the pipelines, leaving their occupation forces in the cities under-strength and more vulnerable to attacks by partisans.

In addition, the diverse expertise of US veterans can assist in any environment:

In urban areas, they know how to use tire fires to block Russian thermal viewers; how to use captured anti-tank mines as flying suppression weapons in a built-up neighborhood; how to booby trap almost anything.

In woodlands, they know how to use a greased cable to initiate an ambush; how to lay out a “Z” type ambush; how to “imaginatively” use Semtex or other plastic explosives on enemy positions.

In port cities, they know how to use a “bubble charge” in and around harbors; how to find and cut underwater communications lines; they know where certain types of ships are most vulnerable.

Elon Musk’s quixotic single-combat challenge is admirable, but if he really wishes to lay waste to Putin there are a lot of American veterans who will be very happy to help him aid the Ukrainians in doing so. 

After all many of those gray-haired Veterans still fiercely believe in the motto:  De Oppresso Liber.

About the Author(s)

Chuck de Caro is an information warfare consultant and contributing-author of the Cyberwar series of textbooks used by US and Allied war colleges. He has taught at the National Defense University and the National Intelligence University, where he continues to lecture on SOFTWAR. He was educated at Marion Military Institute, The US Air Force Academy and the University of Rhode Island. He served with the 20th Special Forces Group (Airborne) and was later an outside researcher for the Office of Net Assessment, where he became the progenitor of the world’s first prototype virtual military organization called The 1st Joint SOFTWAR Unit (Virtual).