In “Back in the Trenches” (September/October 2023), Stephen Biddle contends that the war in Ukraine more closely resembles World War I and World War II than a military revolution and does not reflect a revolutionary change in the character of warfare. To support his argument, he asserts that armies lost a greater percentage of tanks in those wars than the Russians and Ukrainians are losing today in Ukraine. Biddle points out that the United Kingdom lost 98 percent of its tanks in the 1918 Battle of Amiens.
What he fails to mention, however, is that 80 percent of those losses were the result of mechanical failures, not damage inflicted during combat. In World War II, hundreds of divisions were engaged in mobile warfare. In contrast, the war in Ukraine now features small infantry-led fights in which tanks play a minimal support role. Even so, tank losses exceed 50 percent for both sides. Clearly, new technology is having an effect. In the entire Nagorno-Karabakh conflict that took place in the fall of 2020, over 75 percent of Armenian vehicle losses were caused by drones, according to the open-source organization Oryx. In Ukraine, hundreds of videos show vehicles being destroyed by drones. The fact that $400 drones are laying waste to armor from miles away represents a significant tactical shift.
A core element of Biddle’s argument is that the number of casualties inflicted per round of artillery fired “exceeds the world war rates, but not by much.” Yet Biddle goes on to put the World War II figure at three casualties per 100 rounds fired and the figure for the Ukrainian army today at eight casualties per 100 rounds fired—a 266 percent increase. And the Ukrainians have achieved that gain even though they are firing mostly unguided rounds, some of which are decades old, from a set of global suppliers that have uneven quality-control standards. Something is making these systems much more effective. The answer is drones. As Biddle notes, they permit the army to observe and adjust its artillery missions.
Biddle contends that precision munitions have had little effect on the battlefield. But he neglects to mention the Ukrainians’ highly effective use of extensive surveillance, an agile command-and-control system, and long-range rocket launchers and missiles such as HIMARS and Storm Shadow. He also ignores the dozens of videos showing cheap Ukrainian drones targeting as few as two soldiers. Ukraine certainly believes that drones have had a huge impact. In May, it ordered 200,000 more of them for delivery by year’s end.
Anyone looking at the German and Allied offensives of 1918 would have seen little that was new. Both were based on massed infantry and artillery. The German storm troopers’ task-organized infantry-arms teams that pierced through Allied trenches did not appear to foreshadow the breakthroughs in penetration and encirclement of World War II. Nor did the British tank brigades at Amiens foretell the mechanized formations that allowed the Germans to dominate land warfare from
1939 to 1940. Yet in hindsight, it is clear that the new tactics and equipment of armored forces dramatically changed ground warfare in World War II.
Today, by combining satellite surveillance with drones, militaries can precisely target high-value assets deep behind enemy lines and launch mass attacks against even low-value targets such as individual fighting positions. Despite having a limited number of precision weapons, Ukraine has shown how powerful new technologies can be if they are integrated operationally. It does not take great imagination to envision the impact of tens of thousands of drones that orbit over a battlefield until they detect and attack a target.
Between the world wars, visionaries developed innovative new concepts and behaviors, with Germany creating the blitzkrieg combined-arms attack and Japan perfecting aircraft carrier–based warfare. Allied leaders paid a huge price in blood and treasure when they failed to adapt. Success in future conflicts will require integrating new technologies into winning strategies. The first step is to reject the idea that nothing is changing.
Length constraints preclude a full debate, so I will focus on a couple of key points.
As I argued in my article, artillery has become more lethal, but at a steady, continuous, roughly linear rate of around an additional 0.05 casualties per hundred rounds per year for over a century now, much of it driven by progressive changes in caliber and fuses. The data show no evidence that drones or improved precision have caused any sudden changes in casualty numbers.
Nobody is arguing that nothing changes. The issues are the rate of change in the nature of warfare and the reasons for it. What the war in Ukraine shows is incremental change, because adaptation to new technologies limits their impact on the battlefield.
Consider drones. Ukraine has enough drones today to “swarm” the Russians on key fronts if it wants to. But drones spur adaptation; for example, combatants can counter swarms of cheap drones by using omnidirectional jamming, which discourages swarming. On YouTube, viewers see the drone missions that succeed, not those that fail. But studies show that the latter now far outnumber the former. The Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank, has estimated that only one mission in three succeeds; other sources put the figure at one in every seven to ten. These results do not mean that drones are useless, but they do not reflect transformational impact on warfare, which would explain the merely incremental changes in observed battlefield outcomes.
It has now been over 30 years since transformation advocates began arguing that warfare is being revolutionized. Yet battle outcomes still differ only by degree from the past. Is this really the right way to think about military change?
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