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Chapter 87: HIMARS and the Summer of Fire

The early summer of 2022 in the Donbas was a season of unmitigated, industrial-scale hell. The Russian army, having been humiliated in the mobile warfare of the spring, had reverted to the only strategy it had ever truly mastered: the "Fire Steamroller."

They had parked their artillery brigades wheel-to-wheel along the eastern horizon and were methodically grinding the Ukrainian positions into dust. The rate of fire was staggering—up to 60 thousand heavy shells a day. It was not precision warfare; it was grid-square erasure. For Sergeant Oleksandr, commanding a battered battery of Soviet-era D-30 howitzers near the doomed city of Lysychansk, the war had become a mathematical certainty of death. He was outranged, outnumbered twenty-to-one, and slowly going deaf from the relentless, concussive drumbeat of incoming fire.

Oleksandr’s men lived like troglodytes in deep bunkers, counting the seconds between impacts, their teeth rattling in their skulls. They were being buried alive by an adversary who possessed an apparently infinite supply of iron. The Russian logistics hubs, vast mountains of ammunition piled high in open courtyards in occupied towns like Shakhtarsk and Izyum, operated in broad daylight. Russian trucks ferried shells to the front with impunity, protected by the simple fact that Ukraine had no weapon capable of reaching them.

Then, in late June, the rhythm of the war broke.

Oleksandr first witnessed the change at 02:00 a.m. on a warm Tuesday night. Standing watch outside his dugout, he heard a sound he didn't recognize. It wasn't the thudding boom of a howitzer. It was a sharp, pressurized hiss, followed by six distinct tears in the fabric of the night sky. He looked up to see trails of white fire streaking almost vertically into the black canopy, vanishing in seconds.

Fifty kilometers behind the Russian lines, a Russian colonel named Valery was asleep in a commandeered hotel room in Perevalsk. He felt perfectly safe. His unit guarded the sector's main ammunition distribution point—a stockpile containing thousands of tons of 152mm shells, Grad rockets, and tank charges. He was well beyond the 30-kilometer range of Ukrainian artillery.

The first GMLRS rocket, guided by military GPS signals to a margin of error of less than one meter, punched through the metal roof of the central warehouse at supersonic speed.

The result was not a conventional explosion. It was a localized tectonic event. The warhead detonated the Russian propellant stacks. The night sky turned into a blinding, roiling artificial dawn as the entire depot went up in a sympathetic detonation. A mushroom cloud of fire rose thousands of feet into the air. Secondary explosions—rockets cooking off and spiraling wildly into the night—continued for six hours. The blast wave shattered windows twelve miles away.

The M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System—HIMARS—had arrived.

For the next ninety days, the war was transformed. Oleksandr watched from his trench as the nightly "HIMARS Show" systematically decapitated the Russian war machine. It was a campaign of ruthless efficiency. Russian ammunition depots, which had stood as monuments to their overwhelming power, began to vanish in towering fireballs, one after another, night after night. Command posts—identified by the intense electromagnetic signature of their radios—were erased, often taking entire regimental staffs with them.

Crucially, the launchers turned their sights on the Russian supply arteries. The Antonivsky Bridge across the Dnipro River, the sole lifeline for the Russian army occupying Kherson, was surgically stitched with craters. The rockets punched through the reinforced concrete deck with such precision that they left a pattern like the dots on a domino tile, rendering the bridge passable for pedestrians but lethal for heavy tanks.

The terror on the Russian radio nets was palpable. They called the weapon "The Witch's Broom." They couldn't hear the rockets coming until impact. Their boasted S-400 air defense systems sat helpless, their radars unable to lock onto the steep, fast-moving projectiles. And because the American trucks operated on a "shoot and scoot" basis—launching their six-rocket pod and speeding away at 60 miles per hour within two minutes—the Russian counter-battery radars were firing back at ghosts.

By September, the relentless Russian artillery barrage, which had seemed infinite in July, began to sputter. The guns were still there, but the shells were gone—vaporized in the rear or stranded on trucks that feared to approach the front. The steamroller ran out of steam. The silence that fell over the Donbas was the sound of the strategic initiative changing hands. The beast had been starved, and for the first time in six months, Oleksandr ordered his men to uncover their guns. The inbound fire had stopped. It was time to shoot back.

The Discourse 87: The Logistics of Strangulation

87.1 The Russian "Center of Gravity"
The arrival of the M142 HIMARS exposed a fatal, structural vulnerability in Russian military doctrine: an archaic reliance on centralized, rail-based logistics. The Russian army is, doctrinally, an artillery army. Its primary method of warfare is the massed application of firepower to level urban areas, creating a "moonscape" that infantry can then occupy. This strategy requires a logistical tail of immense scale—moving tens of thousands of tons of ordnance to the front every single day.

Crucially, the Russian military lacks a modern "palletized" logistics system (the ubiquitous wooden pallets and forklifts used by NATO). Instead, ammunition is transported loose in crates, loaded and unloaded by hand—a system humorously referred to as "conscript-powered forklifts." This inefficiency dictates that ammunition must be stockpiled in massive, static dumps located very close to railheads and typically within 40–60 kilometers of the front lines to minimize truck travel times. Before the summer of 2022, these dumps were safe because Ukraine lacked any deep-strike capability. They sat in the open, uncamouflaged, and massive. They represented the supreme "center of gravity" of the Russian offensive—a single point of failure that, if struck, would paralyze the guns.

87.2 Network-Centric Warfare vs. Brute Force
HIMARS represented more than just a new rocket; it represented the triumph of Western "Network-Centric Warfare." The system’s lethality lay not in the explosive power of the warhead (which is actually quite small), but in the speed of the "kill chain." The targeting process involved a seamless fusion of Western satellite intelligence (identifying heat blooms and physical supply piles), signals intelligence (capturing Russian command chatter), and on-the-ground Ukrainian partisans using encrypted apps to drop GPS pins.

This data flowed almost instantly to the firing batteries. The GMLRS rockets used military-grade GPS guidance to achieve "circular error probable" of just a few meters. This meant a target could be destroyed with one or two rockets, rather than the hundreds of unguided shells Russian artillery required to achieve the same effect. This effectiveness rendered the Russian strategy of "mass" obsolete against the Western strategy of "precision."

87.3 The "HIMARS Effect": Inducing Shell Hunger
The strategic impact of the "Summer of Fire" was immediate. By systematically destroying over 100 major ammunition depots and regimental command posts in sixty days, Ukraine induced a condition known as "Shell Hunger" (snaryadny golod). Russian artillery fire rates plummeted from a peak of 60 thousand rounds per day to fewer than 20 thousand. This disruption shattered the Russian operational tempo. Without their wall of fire, Russian infantry units were unable to advance and, more importantly, unable to defend against counter-attacks. This logistical strangulation directly enabled the stunning Ukrainian counteroffensives in Kharkiv (where star-ved and disorganized Russian units collapsed) and Kherson (where HIMARS strikes on the Dnipro bridges effectively besieged 30 thousand Russian troops, forcing their retreat).

87.4 Adaptation and the Price of Restriction
The success of HIMARS also triggered an inevitable cycle of adaptation. By late 2022, the "HIMARS Effect" began to diminish not because the weapon became less accurate, but because the Russians adapted their behavior. They forced their logistical backbone deeper into the rear, pulling major depots back beyond the 85-kilometer range of the GMLRS rockets.

While this significantly degraded their efficiency—forcing them to use fleets of trucks to ferry ammo over much longer distances—it saved their stockpiles from destruction. This shift highlighted the profound strategic cost of the West’s refusal to supply longer-range systems (specifically the 300km ATACMS) during this critical window. Had Ukraine possessed the ability to strike the new, deep-rear depots in late 2022, the Russian logistical collapse might have been total. Instead, the West’s "range restrictions" allowed the enemy just enough space to reorganize, survive, and dig in for the long war.