Frederick W. Kagan, Kimberly Kagan, Mason Clark, Karolina Hird, Nataliya Bugayova, Kateryna Stepanenko, Riley Bailey & George Barros
The war in Ukraine is transforming the character of warfare in ways that will affect all future conflicts. This paper primarily aims to offer a new framework for Ukrainian forces and their Western backers to break the current positional warfare and restore maneuver to the battlefield. It also establishes a basis for discussions within the United States, NATO, and allied Pacific militaries about the implications of the current conflict for contemporary and future warfare.
Ukraine’s Kursk Campaign—a pivotal moment in the war with the potential to change its trajectory—underscores several critical battlefield aspects that the paper discusses. Ukraine has achieved operational surprise against significant odds, exploiting Russia’s lack of readiness in its border areas. This campaign showed that surprise is still possible even on a partially transparent battlefield where the adversary can observe force concentrations but cannot reliably discern the intent behind those concentrations.
The paper also argues that surprise can result from the exploitation of temporary advantages provided by deploying technological innovation at key moments coordinated with ground operations. It argues that Ukraine can take advantage of opportunities that come from its superior innovation cycle. Ukraine can also benefit from the fact that Russian forces have been attacking along nearly the entire front line for months rather than building extensive fortifications in depth. It concludes that Ukraine can restore operational maneuver by planning and conducting a series of smaller successive counteroffensive operations rather than attempting a single decisive blow.
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