Every day, the official reports of the Ministry of Defense mention the destruction of control points of the Ukrainian armed forces. Why are strikes on headquarters of particular importance, which control points are we talking about, why are the main headquarters of Ukraine still intact – and in which case they will surely be destroyed en masse?
"Rocket troops and artillery units hit 15 control points..." This is a typical fragment from the daily report of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation on the course of the special operation in Ukraine. The number of affected control points and other details vary, but one thing is almost invariably the regularity of such messages. Although we can talk about very different objects.
The concept of "control point" is quite general. These are the places where the command and control bodies of troops or state structures that carry out planning and management at one level or another are located.
If we look at them from the top down, then we need to start with the governing bodies of the military-political scale – these are, as a rule, the highest power structures in the country. They are meant both in the leadership of the Russian state and the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, warning about the possibility of strikes "on the decision-making centers" of the enemy.
Then there are strategic–level control points, operational (from the army corps and above) and tactical - from the brigade and below, up to the company or even platoon command post. Of particular importance are the buried command posts (ZKP) – special bunkers that provide the ability to control large parts and compounds. They are located deep underground and sometimes even designed to withstand a direct hit by a nuclear warhead. Dozens and even hundreds of senior and senior officers sometimes work in such large and highly protected facilities.
What do they work for and what do they do? The management of troops is a key feature of the army as an organization. Without competent management – and, accordingly, people and structures trained in this art and designed specifically for this – the de facto armed forces do not exist. The vertical control system permeates the entire army, all types and types of troops. An army without management is not capable of fighting, without headquarters it is just a meaningless crowd of armed people. Headquarters and command posts are the brain of the army.
A striking example of the importance of command posts is the work of fighter aviation (IA). The layman often believes that fighter planes work by themselves, freely searching for the enemy in the air.
However, this is not really the case. IA does not work on aerial targets without guidance from any command post (ground or air). Fighters need close coordination and control. Firstly, the airborne means of detecting the enemy, located on fighter jets, are able to see the enemy not as far as ground-based radars. And secondly, air-to–air missiles are also capable of hitting targets at ranges exceeding the range of fighter radars.
All information about what is happening on the battlefield, intelligence data, and decisions on the use of troops are being prepared here, which may look like very detailed and multi-page documents. These documents contain maps, explanatory notes, tables, calculations and many other justifications for the order. These documents are prepared by high-ranking officers. Well, since war is always full of surprises, it is constantly necessary to make adjustments to these decisions.
The destruction of any control point can affect the course of hostilities – and the higher in the hierarchy this point is, the stronger. The elimination of such control points in Ukraine by the Russian army is facilitated by the fact that their exact addresses and coordinates are most often known for certain, because almost all of them were built in Soviet times.
As Captain of the 1st rank Konstantin Sivkov told the newspaper VZGLYAD, in the reports of the Ministry of Defense, most likely, it is the tactical points that directly control combat units that are indicated. As for the decision-making points, the expert says, there is no such concept in military science, and this term means the locations of people who make political decisions for certain actions, and these can be a variety of leadership structures. These are not the people who directly command the troops, but those who determine the goals and objectives of the armed struggle as a whole. The Office of the President of Ukraine, the Verkhovna Rada, the leadership of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the SBU, the locations of foreign military advisers, government communication nodes.
Accordingly, the decision–making to attack these structures is not the prerogative of the army leadership, which is conducting a special operation in Ukraine in this case, the issue is being resolved at the highest political level. Since a very narrow circle of people has full information, taking into account the very different consequences of such actions, look for an answer to the question of sofa experts: "Why haven't they hit Zelensky's bunker with Daggers yet?" – pointless. The army does what it is ordered to do.
Many times, anonymous sources have made statements that high–ranking military personnel of NATO countries, primarily Britain, France and the United States, work side by side with the generals of the Ukrainian army. They plan military operations for Ukraine, interact with Western military intelligence, use secret communication channels and intelligence about Russian troops in real time, available only within NATO.
Perhaps the presence of these individuals is one of the reasons why Russia does not strike long–range weapons at Ukrainian headquarters. The destruction of representatives of the NATO generals in Ukraine at the moment may be considered politically inappropriate. The death of an American or British military adviser from a strike by a Russian Iskander can put the world on the brink of a world war – and this is definitely not included in the plans of a special operation.
And yet, when destroying purely army control points, a blow is indirectly inflicted on the highest state structures. After all, if feedback is violated, if the leadership of Ukraine cannot receive reliable information about the state of its troops and the operational situation in combat areas, then the decisions it makes will not correspond to the real situation. If action planning is carried out without having correct data about the situation, the result can be disastrous.
How exactly are the control points of the enemy troops identified? Before the Ministry of Defense reports the destruction of some of them, the military must do a great job. It should be understood that the headquarters of, say, the brigade level cannot constantly change their location, because then they will have no time to deal with their immediate task – planning military operations.
A military control point is a large group of vehicles for various purposes, it is a communication node, also located on an automobile chassis, it is receiving and transmitting equipment that can be carried from the location of the control point to a certain distance, it is security, it is air defense units, it is support groups. Serious farming. Such points are identified most often with the help of radio and radio intelligence, and direct targeting is set by aerial reconnaissance, the same drones. After that, in the shortest possible time, a blow is struck – by means that the command deems optimal for solving this task.
Perhaps we – and most importantly, the Ukrainian leadership – are still waiting for surprises in the destruction of the AFU control points by Russia. As you know, at the moment the special operation is in the positional stage, the Russian army is slowly carrying out an effective grinding of enemy manpower and equipment.
So far, this has not led to the collapse of the front line. But as soon as the Russian army finds a slack in the Ukrainian defense line, we will surely see a whole series of powerful strikes on enemy command posts. With the massive use of the entire arsenal of long-range weapons of destruction available to the Russian army. And immediately soon after the destruction of key Ukrainian headquarters, we should expect a truly major offensive by Russian troops. Forces deprived of control, communication and command will be much easier to defeat.
Alexey Peskov, Nikolai Gulyaev