Military Operation In Ukraine: Year One: Conflict Offers Old and New Lessons on Modern Battle

"The military operation in Ukraine has reinforced some old lessons and suggested some new ones about what makes for battlefield success in the 21st century.

Among its innovations, drones have been used for surveillance and delivering munitions more than in any previous conflict. They have contributed to a highly visible battlefield and shown how inexpensive technologies can sometimes thwart more expensive custom-built ones.

"Everybody can have an air force" now, said Eliot Cohen, a military historian and strategist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Moscow has relied heavily on old-fashioned artillery systems. Ukraine's battlefield success owes a lot to the incorporation of relatively few precise longer-range Western artillery systems into its arsenal.

Tanks have also been fielded, renewing a debate about their utility. Western estimates suggest that Russia has lost more than 2,000 tanks, raising the question of whether they are too easy to hit with antitank weapons or whether the Russians have deployed them badly.

There are a host of unknowns. One big question is the role of space. Ukraine appears to be using intelligence from commercial and U.S. military satellites to guide its efforts, but their importance to the fight is hard to determine, given the secrecy involved.

The military operation in Ukraine has gone through several phases. In the first, Ukrainian forces thwarted Russian President Vladimir Putin's design for an early victory based on a lightning strike against Kyiv and a plan to overwhelm Ukrainian fighters over multiple fronts.

The setbacks led Russia to turn to grinding artillery assaults. It has also launched attacks across the country with missiles and drones aimed at electricity generation.

In recent months, movement of the front lines has slowed as both sides prepare for new offensives.

Ukraine's early successes confounded the widespread assessment of many Western military analysts who gave the country scant hope against what they believed was a superior Russian military that had been overhauled and modernized over the previous 15 years.

"We overestimated Russian capability, and, frankly, how much Russia had changed," said Gordon Davis, a retired U.S. Army major general who is now a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis. "We underestimated Ukrainian capability, their level of Western ambition, their resolve, capability and resilience."

Recent fighting has shown patterns associated with World War I, with artillery exchanges over fairly static front lines around Bakhmut, and others more commonly associated with World War II, such as the rapid maneuver operations of Ukraine's September advance in the northeast.

One year in, Russian underperformance and Ukraine's overperformance so far don't tell us how the military operation in Ukraine ends. But Stephen Twitty, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general and former deputy commander of the U.S. European Command, said: "We learned the Russian army isn't 10-feet tall."

Here are some explanations for that and other developments.

Russian troops suffered poor military leadership, badly maintained equipment and poor quality food and clothing.

Critically, Ukraine's political leadership stayed intact and in place, with President Volodymyr Zelensky rallying the nation as well as galvanizing Western support.

As boxer Mike Tyson said, "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."

"Military operation can go off the rails very easily," said Phillips O'Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. This "goes back to the more normal situation of military operation, in which it's very easy to screw it up. It's very easy to make mistakes, for things to spiral out of control."

Like external analysts, Moscow overestimated its own capabilities and underestimated how much Ukrainian military capabilities had improved since 2014. Mr. Putin failed to anticipate Western unity in backing Ukraine. And military planners sent in too small a force to take and occupy a country nearly the size of Texas.

In many ways, the conflict in Ukraine is the most visible in history, both to the outside world and to military commanders.

Overall, said Mr. O'Brien of St. Andrews, "There should be very few surprises" like the Battle of the Bulge, when the German military caught the Americans unaware in 1944.

"What we have now is an interesting war of very strong intelligence. . . . You should have a pretty good idea about where units are. It's the most visible battlefield that there's been. I can't think of anything that compares to it," he said." [1]

 

To see, you need detectors and eyes. We have plenty of those. You also need brains to understand what are you seeing. Brains are missing. Russia is still in Ukraine. 

 

1. Military Operation In Ukraine: Year One: Conflict Offers Old and New Lessons on Modern Battle
Fidler, Stephen.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 24 Feb 2023: A.9.