It is not some new, revolutionary theory to say that Ukrainians need to be more effective at target engagement to force a Russian military defeat, but continuing to employ tools like artillery – with limited stockpiles and slow reconstitution – will inevitably create an injunction point that favors Russia. The present battlefield is suffering from egregious levels of collateral damage and casualties on both sides, owing to traditional weapons being employed across vast distances without thought to strategic payoff or how those attacks play into a long-term strategy.

(Leon Klein/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images) We’re giving Ukraine a scalpel that they are using to scrape gum from underneath the table.”Ī view of a destroyed armored vehicle during ongoing conflicts in the city of Mariupol under the control of the Russian military and pro-Russian separatists, on April 9, 2022. Joshua Huminski, a Russian strategy expert and Director for the Mike Rogers Center for Intelligence and Global Affairs, told me in a recent interview “provision of increasingly high-tech systems without a determination as to what the political objective is, and in the absence of that objective, it’s unclear whether these are the right tools for the job. Ukraine’s best hope is not to suddenly morph into something from a NATO doctrine manual, but by determining how it wants to win this war, so that it can be enabled to do so. Ukraine cannot hope to out-gun its adversary indeed by many estimates, Russian artillery out-numbers that of Ukraine by as much as twenty-to-one.

Most notably, artillery has served as the vehicle for this warfighting thesis, with such weapons that are only marginally more advanced than those which razed European battlegrounds in the First World War. But the great limitation, as is often the case, is the short-sightedness of how the West prepares itself for future conflict, where it has instead chosen to substitute military aid for coherent foreign policy.īut then the invasion happened, and the collective response from Western benefactors has seen fit to consolidate all aid for Ukraine into traditional westernized molds. In small doses, new tools of combat have been placed in Ukrainian hands which offer some measure of innovation and are appropriately suited to the sustainment capabilities of the non-NATO defenders components like Loitering munitions, Electronic Attack, and space integration, tools heretofore not used together in a modern war. But this remains, in no uncertain terms, a war between two powerful and functional states, requiring the appropriate tools of warfighting, and a grand strategy – a Ukraine-holistic grand strategy – that simply arming, and rearming will not produce. Granted, the use of open-source intelligence, commercial technologies, and other non-traditional mechanisms of national resources have been employed in the conflict. (Maxym Marusenko/NurPhoto via Getty Images) Absent a political solution to the conflict, there seems to be no functional grand military strategy.Ī man looks at a Russian T-72 tank that was destroyed during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. These efforts worked with low-tech systems as a tourniquet to staunch the bleeding early on, but now that this war has settled into a long-term attritional contest, it remains unclear what Kyiv, NATO, the E.U., or the United States. The impetus has been to throw everything at Kyiv since the initial invasion to stop Moscow, whose reputation as a villain has never been so clearly rendered. The West’s attempt to build a modernized Ukrainian army on the fly, without thought to long-term viability, will be hampered by Kyiv’s ability to sustain such a military force in an era of the re-emergent Russian threat. The continuing shipments of Western aid to Ukraine highlight a cold reality – that nations remain slow to adjust their war-fighting methods from previous conflicts, and there remains a lack of strategy as this crisis transitions from Ukrainian survival to a battle of attrition between Ukraine and Russia.

Small soldiers game all weapons