As top Russian and Ukrainian generals assess the battlefield after nearly two brutal years of stalemated positional warfare, they draw the same lessons: Tanks, manned aircraft and traditional maneuver forces are sitting ducks, while advanced drones and digital battle-management systems can have a decisive impact.
Russia has come to realize what Ukraine recognized more than a year ago: This is an algorithm war, one where digital intelligence and targeting systems have rewritten the rules of conflict. The fog of war experienced by commanders for centuries has cleared. In the newly transparent battlespace, movements by large units are instantly visible and vulnerable.
This look into Russian and Ukrainian military assessments is possible thanks to commentaries published in the past two weeks by two veteran commanders, Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, a former chief of the Russian general staff, and Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, head of the Ukrainian military. They appeared, respectively, in Army Standard, a Russian publication, and on the website of the Ukrainian defense ministry.
The commentaries were flagged to me by Kevin Ryan, a retired Army brigadier general who served as U.S. defense attach in Moscow and then taught at the Harvard Kennedy Schools Belfer Center. He translated the articles and circulated them this week among Russia specialists. Zaluzhny made similar comments about the importance of drones in an interview published in November in the Economist, but the Russian analysis is new and startling.
These two adversaries see many of the same lessons, Ryan writes in an email summarizing the commentaries. The generals recognize that in the Ukraine battlespace, no concentration of troops, large or small, can escape the ever-present reconnaissance by unmanned aerial systems and satellites, he notes.
The tactical revolution underway in Ukraine underlines why a congressional failure to approve continued U.S. military support for Kyiv would be so devastating. As Russia gains increasing mastery of digital warfare, Zaluzhny worries that Ukraine is hobbled by exhaustion of our partners stocks of missiles and ammunition and the difficulty of our allies in determining the priorities of support.
Baluyevskys comments read like a wake-up call to his fellow Russian officers. He argues that the so-called special military operation in Ukraine has been an unprecedented test of literally all components of military affairs and military construction. His analysis came in the foreword for an anthology of essays about the war, which was then summarized in Army Standard by Russian journalist Sergey Valchenko.
Baluyevsky echoes many Western commentators who have argued that defense has trumped offense in Ukraine. Air defense has won an unexpected triumph over military aviation, which has lost the ability to operate en masse over enemy territory and even must fly with caution over its own territory.
The tank has become one of the main casualties of the combat experience of the last two years, he explains, since it was an easily detected and easily hit target and turned out to be very vulnerable to mines. Similarly, the impossibility of concentrating troops forces us to conduct combat operations with small units and separate combat vehicles.
Baluyevsky has some scathing comments about the performance of Russian weapons. The qualitative superiority of NATO artillery is evident, he contends. Ukraine has revealed a significant lag in Russian artillery and missile systems and requires their priority radical rearmament in the next few years.
The winners in this war are drones. Unmanned aircraft have rapidly and unconditionally conquered the airspace, Baluyevsky argues. Zaluzhny agrees that unmanned systems, along with other new types of weapons, are almost the only tool for getting out of the stalemate of trench warfare.
Zaluzhny bemoans Russias manpower advantage and Ukraines inability to improve the state of staffing of the Defense Forces without the use of unpopular measures, such as a nationwide draft. His disagreement with President Volodymyr Zelensky about the need for such an all-out mobilization is one reason for recent tension between the two men and Zelenskys reported readiness to sack his commander.
Ukraine, as I wrote after visiting Kyiv in October, is exhausted by war and slowly bleeding out. Zaluzhny implicitly recognizes this war fatigue in arguing for increased use of unmanned systems to reduce the level of losses reduce the degree of participation of traditional means of destruction [and] limited involvement of heavy equipment.
The lesson for the United States, beyond the simple but urgent need to continue military assistance for Ukraine, is to focus that support on the high-tech weapons that matter. The weapons that have generated endless debate, such as tanks and F-16 fighters, are less important than drones, antiaircraft systems and electronic-warfare jammers.
The best weapons today, agree the Russian and Ukrainian generals, might be small, cheap systems such as first-person view, or FPV drones that fly into targets like tiny suicide bombers and can be almost impossible to stop. The chilling fact is that these silent killers can be bought and used by almost any combatant, anywhere on Earth. It is, as the generals agree, a new day in warfare.
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Opinion | What a Russian and Ukrainian general agree on: This battlespace is different - The Washington Post