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Long-Term Lessons from the Ukraine War
A few very important lessons have been learned from the war so far:
1: Big dumb platforms are dead. Anti-tank weapons have shredded the most advanced tanks Russia had, and there is little evidence that Merkavas, Challengers, or Abrams would fare much better.
For tanks, APCs, or other large vehicles to survive, they need to get much smarter. They need electronic systems to foil the countless tank-killers that float in the air or mount on a shoulder. Even so, they would not survive the overhead drone dropping a small bomb directly on top. I am skeptical that the future battlefield will have tanks — they are analogous to suits of armor meeting firearms.
2: Manned fighters and bombers are done. There is almost nothing left in their purview that cannot be done as well by a drone, missile, or artillery shell. All the governments that spend and spend to keep the guy in the cockpit will have to abandon those programs.
The best way to defeat drones or missiles, on the other hand, is to blind or confuse them. This can be done directly or by intercepting/hacking their signals. Warfare is going to become ever more electronic.
3: Artillery, with drone spotters, work extremely well. There are countless videos of artillery shells achieving incredible hit rates on vehicles hiding in forests or next to high buildings.
Knowledge becomes ever more important. Whoever has – and can keep – a dominant edge in real-time surveillance can, with intelligent and motivated troops, outfox a larger enemy every time.
Thoughts?
Published in General
I agree with your general analysis.
I never believed that Putin’s goal was to take over the entirety of Ukraine. Or, for that matter, Kiev. A heavily defended and fortified city of 3 million, being taken with just 40K troops? I think not. That move toward it, I believe, was pure tactics, meant to tie down as many Ukrainian resources as possible, thus making them unavailable in the South and East.
“End of the summer” can be reasonably interpreted as “by the end of Labor Day weekend.”
Today is June 5. It seems like Hodges could still be proven correct in his estimation.
Now, I can either believe some anonymous person on the internet (You) or someone with actual experience, Former General of US Army in Europe Ben Hodges.
I am not betting any money on this. But I think Hodges is likely to be correct, for the reason I have mentioned: Russia is likely to run out of high quality ammunition as the weeks drag on while Ukraine is likely to be replenished with more and superior ammunition from over a dozen different countries.
That’s where the 30 trillion dollars of GDP backing Ukraine compared to the 1.5 trillion of GDP backing Russia becomes important.
No matter how the invasion of Ukraine ends one simple fact will not. What does Russia have that its neighbors do not have? A good neighbor.
Ukraine, the Baltic States, Poland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and whoever else borders Russia have no desire to march on Moscow. They also have no desire to allow Russia to demilitarize them. Russia has never been a liberator, Russian Czars, whether old or new are occupiers.
First, why should the US care?
Second, what makes you think Russia wouldn’t become just as overextended and weakened as we are?
Third, considering the interference of the Baltic States and the UK in US elections, they can all go f@#$ themselves.
We could try isolationsism, which is what we tried in the 1920s and 1930s.
It didn’t work.
Evil people like Putin and Hitler only stop when they are stopped.
Lenin believed in probing with bayonets: If you find mush you push; if you find steel you stop.
Many people want to show Putin that we are made of mush. Fortunately those people aren’t being listened to and Ukraine is fighting back with our assistance and the assistance of numerous other countries.
Why should you care if there is a serial killer on the loose if the serial killer has, so far, killed other people? The question answers itself.
It seems like everybody in the world has sway on the US elections except Americans. Seems that way.
At this point, the Russians will be occupying whatever portions of Ukraine that they “liberate” for a considerable time to come. On top of that, the “liberated” portions appear to be just shy of uninhabitable.
Even then, I wouldn’t want to be a cop on the beat – Russian occupation or no.
The isolationist canard.
We are led by the serial killers.
I don’t think he really understands what he’s being told to do. At best he probably thinks he’s keeping the money taps open for his friends and family. Whoever’s cueing him probably wants Ukraine to be further US/ NATO/ Westernized and Russia to be weakened and diminished to be prey for globalization.
Regarding comparing GDPs, especially in light of war-making potential there’s this:
If you compare Russia’s gross domestic product (GDP) by simply converting it from rubles into U.S. dollars, you indeed get an economy the size of Spain’s. But such a comparison makes no sense without adjusting for purchasing power parity (PPP) … when you measure Russia’s GDP based on PPP, it’s clear that Russia’s economy is actually more like the size of Germany’s, about $4.4 trillion for Russia versus $4.6 trillion for Germany. …
… the service sector today is grossly overvalued compared with the industrial sector and commodities like oil, gas, copper, and agricultural products. If we reduce the proportional importance of services in the global economy, …“Russia’s economy is vastly larger than that of Germany and represents probably 5% or 6% of the world economy,” more like Japan than Spain.
This makes intuitive sense. When push comes to shove, we know there is more value in providing people with the things they really need to survive like food and energy than there is in intangible things like entertainment or financial services.
In other news, Saint Patrick has rid Ireland of snakes.
Also, the most Russophone of Ukrainians were transplanted there by Stalin to Russify the territory where he had starved millions of Ukrainians to death.
If GDP measurements either underestimate Russia’s productive capacity and overestimate the productive capacity of Ukraine’s allies, as you suggest in your comment, why are the Russians using ancient T-62 tanks?
If what you wrote above were accurate we would expect Russia to be using modern tanks, not rusty old ones.
Also, why are the Russian’s fighting over Severodonetsk and suffering lots of casualties in the process?
What did Stalin replace the millions of Russians he starved during collectivizarion with? Ukrainian special victims trope is baloney.
And Russians were settled there from the time of Catherine the Great.
There were votes in 2014 in areas that voted for independence and didn’t want to be Ukrainian either. Like Mariupol.
If the liberation is ugly, it will be because Ukraine chooses to wage war as they have since 2014 with American backing.
Yasha Levine has this interesting take on weaponised immigrants. He and his wife Evgenia Kovda have a podcast called ‘The Russians’ where they discuss that and more.
He migrated to the US with his family when quite young from Ukraine. She grew up in Moscow. Worth a listen.
Congratulations, Hang On! You have secured yourself a nomination for this year’s prestigious Walter Duranty Award.
Whatever.
The reason we “lost” in Afghanistan is that we weren’t willing to wait for a national cultural change. The Taliban just waited us out but we had pretty much control of most of the country. It would have taken a multi generational cultural change of the Afghan people for it to be lasting. We didn’t lose the war part of it. We lost the peace.
That last sentence is probably an exaggeration. They are going to hold on to more than that. But they will have lost the war.
True but Russia’s strategic use of their armor battalions is at least puzzling and at most down right dumb. To have them traveling in a que in constrained roads where if you take out the first tank the whole line of tanks get jammed behind it unable to advance is just unbelievable. Did they not have war games? Wouldn’t a red vs blue type of training have shown this to be the case?
It seems to me the Russians have mostly depopulated the cities in the east, or intend to. That’s one way of capturing territory and not have to fight insurgents. I think the Russians will be happey in the end to take territory and force remaining Ukrainians out.
Of course, you’re right, he doesn’t, but he knows what he and his kids were given by the Chinese, and his one focus is to keep China from turning on him.
Below is a 10 minute time-lapse video of the political map of Europe going back a thousand years (1000 – 2000 AD, to be exact). Scads of “occupiers”, nary a “liberator” to be found, well into the 20th century. Tough neighborhood, with a complicated history during which distinguishing between “occupiers” and “occupied” depends on when you freeze the frame, and during which the “occupied” became “occupiers” (and often back again) with considerable frequency.
What benefit does the US get out of this? A warm and fuzzy feeling of defending yet more European democracies who can’t defend themselves? More arms sales? Increased chance of war? Will Turkey and Croatia save us from our stupidity?
If you haven’t noticed, the US is collapsing and you want to take on more. Why?
I think it was Benjamin Franklin who told the 13 colonies that they needed to join together to defeat King George saying, “We must all hang together or will shall hang separately.”
One could take a similar view regarding liberal democracies joining together to oppose the Putin dictatorship.
If the liberal democracies of the world did not join together in military alliances and aid, the Putin dictatorship could defeat liberal democracies one by one. But if the liberal democracies join together the liberal democracies can repulse Putin’s military efforts.
It’s a bit like how one might react if one found out that a serial killer is loose in the state that one lives in. One could say, “Well, this serial killer hasn’t killed any of my friends or family or co-workers. Why should I care?”
But one could also make an argument that one should join with others in an effort to capture and incapacitate the serial killer before he kills one’s friends, family or co-workers.
That’s essentially the argument. I think looking the other way while Russia butchers Ukraine is terribly short-sighted.
Think you hit the misquote bug there, as my point with the meme was that this notion that NATO pushed Russia into invading by even considering offering Ukraine membership is hipposcat. Russia has been a violently paranoid state for the three-hundred-odd years, and the only way to not push them into preemptively invading their neighbors is to agree they have the right to conquer any people and territory they want.
But as for what I think we should do? Russia is a failing, dying state, and this invasion is one of its death throes. Look at their demographics. If their census data is accurate (and it isn’t, but they are almost certainly overstating, not understating, the numbers) the post-Soviet birth rate collapse means that they don’t have replacements for the soldiers killed. Russia may have attacked parts of Ukraine they didn’t want to bleed Ukraine white, but it’s having the same effect on them.
Their education system is a disaster that is not providing them the skilled technicians to take over from Soviet-trained retirees and deaths. Their male life expectancy is 56! In fact, it’s hard to tell what long-term effect Chernobyl has had on the population, as the problems caused by radiation are hard to tease out from the problems caused by poor nutrition, lifestyle, and non-nuclear pollution.
No, it’s not our war, but I’m fine with giving Ukrainians weapons to defend their homes, so long as our own security isn’t compromised. After all, the Russians invaded Ukraine both this year and in 2014, not the other way around. I support the right of self-determination, and I specifically support the right of an ethnicity to not come under the rule of another ethnicity that has a long history of oppression, including attempted genocide, against it.
Is Ukraine on the side of the angels? Of course not. They’re a corrupt kleptocracy like most of the former Soviet republics, and if they turned conquistador, I’d be just as happy to make them pariahs and arm their victims. I’m far less pro-Ukraine than I am pro-self-determination and anti-imperial. Though there’s also an element here of helping someone finish off a long-term geopolitical enemy as well.
We sponsored a coup in Ukraine. As a result, it was Russian-speakers in the east who rebelled because the Ukrainian Nazis were slaughtering them.
The idea that Russia is dying is nonsense.
To repurpose Hoosier George Ade’s crack about Indiana: A lot of bright young men come out of Russia, and the brighter they are, the younger they come out.
At least you recognize that western Europe has become one of our colonies. So my question is, why should we be in the colony business?
And the rest of your argument is that European countries can’t defend themselves and should remain infantile dependents of the United States.
What’s in it for us?