Sumit Ahlawat
As the grinding Ukraine war achieves another grim milestone of completing 1000 days, military planners worldwide are taking notes and adopting their battle strategies accordingly.
This war has broken many myths about 21st-century warfare, like the misplaced belief that trench warfare and heavy artillery are things of the past, infantry will play no role in modern war, MIRV Ballistic missiles are only for deterrence, and wars stretching years and fought along hundreds of miles-long frontlines are unthinkable.
These are just some of the doctrines that were touted as gospel truths about the Art of Modern Warfare but now appear outdated. This war has pushed into oblivion weapon systems believed to be crucial for a swift victory and heralded the arrival of new low-cost technologies that will dominate warfare in this century.
The Russia-Ukraine war, variously described as a ‘War of Attrition’ and ‘A Meat-Grinder,’ is also unique in many ways, qualitatively different from the wars we have gotten used to in the twenty-first century.
Most of the wars fought in this century, indeed during the last more than three decades, were essentially asymmetric wars fought between two supremely unequal adversaries. The superior power was able to establish air superiority and capture most of the territory within days of the first strike. The other side had no option but to relent and retreat so that it could survive to fight another day.
Be it the twenty-year-long Afghanistan war, the Iraq war, the many wars of Israel in the Middle East, or even the last Soviet war in Afghanistan, one side simply dispersed and disappeared, only to regroup and come back stronger for guerilla warfare. There was no active frontline, no pitched battles for control of every inch of land, no recurring waves of infantry charges against unremitting machine fire, tactics we have now come to associate with the two great World Wars fought in the first half of last century.
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