It shows the importance of dispersal, firepower and stockpiles
is ever as good or as bad as the first reports of excited men would have it,” remarked William Slim, a celebrated British field marshal in the second world war. From the moment that Russian troops crossed into Ukraine on February 24th this year, pundits offered sweeping pronouncements about the future of war. Thewas declared on the basis of snatched video footage. Turkish drones were hailed as unstoppable game-changers. Western anti-tank weapons were thrust into an early starring role.
The invasion failed, but it was not foreordained to do so. Russia’s army had 12 soldiers north of Kyiv for each Ukrainian one, and Russia attacked 75% of Ukraine’s stationary air-defence sites by air in the first 48 hours of war. A Russian cyber-attack successfully disrupted Ukraine’s satellite communications.
That means armies need to fight differently. Concealment is one option, but it is “exceedingly difficult to sustain”, concludes—such as optical cameras that pick up movement, thermal ones that sense heat and electronic antennas that pick up emissions of radios—can be “layered” on top of each other to spot even well-hidden troops. Another solution is to use hardened structures, like concrete pillboxes and bunkers. But these tend to fix soldiers to one place.
Ukraine maintained “artillery parity” for around six weeks, far longer than almost any Western army would have managed under the same circumstances. Then it began running out of shells, giving Russia a ten-to-one advantage in the volume of fire by June, an imbalance that persisted until Ukraine received an influx of advanced Western artillery systems, including the American. “[C]onsumption rates in high-intensity warfighting remain extraordinarily high,” note the authors.
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