Every once in a while war fighting goes through a paradigm shift. I believe that this is true with respect to the current conflict in Ukraine. But cutting to the chase is no fun. So I am going to first drag you through a lot of history. I think it's interesting and informative history. I hope you end up agreeing with me. And in what may seem to some like an excessive move, I am going to start in prehistoric times.
The word "history" used to have a precise definition. If events got written down then those events were "historic". In the (it was assumed) time before written records were an option, any event that happened was characterized as a "prehistoric" event. Modern scientific techniques have made the situation far less cut and dried. As a result, the definition of "history" has gotten more fuzzy. But, generally speaking, anything that happened before about 2,500 years ago (and a lot that has happened since) gets categorized as prehistoric. So, . . .
In prehistoric times if circumstances were conducive, a tribe could double its population in about thirty years. What that meant in practical terms was that human populations grew to, and stayed at, the highest level the landscape could support, its so called "carrying capacity". So, most tribes were population limited most of the time.
And these population limited tribes lived in close proximity to other tribes that were also population limited. And that led to conflict because the only way a tribe could increase its population was to increase the amount of land it controlled. And the only way for one tribe to increase the amount of land it controlled was at the expense of another tribe.
During this period tribes lived in close proximity to the same other tribes for long periods of time. Then as now a minor injury can easily get infected. With the advent of modern medicine that's usually not a problem. But, to state the obvious, there was no modern medicine back then.
People of that period had no effective way to deal with infections, so an infection could easily lead to death or serious disability. Since fighters were drawn from the relatively small general population of the tribe, it was important to minimize their chance of an injury that could lead to an infection.
That concern often affected the way tribes of the period fought with each other. A popular tactic of the period is now called "counting coup". The side that counted the most coup was adjudged to be the winning side. A fighter was given credit for counting a coup if he just touched a fighter from the other tribe. He didn't have to hurt him. He just had to touch him and get away untouched (and presumably unharmed). Counting coup allowed warring tribes to agree on who was winning without putting the health of either tribe at risk.
And it almost doesn't need to be said. But weapons like knives and spears that were developed for hunting and killing big game could also be used when a conflict escalated to the point where bloodshed was called for. So, that's how more serious wars started out being fought. And little strategy or tactics were involved beyond those used to hunt big game. One fighter would use standard hunting tactics to stalk another fighter.
But over time population aggregates grew and specialization set in. City states developed armies consisting of specially trained fighters called soldiers. Strategy, tactics, and weapons got more sophisticated, but not by much. Shields were introduced. And knives evolved into swords. But even large battles generally involved the use of only the simplest tactics. They were usually fought melee style.
In a melee the each army charges at the other army. The armies soon intermingle and the battle devolves into a series of one-on-one fights. This is what we almost always see when we see a movie that includes a battle. In the movies, who wins the battle is invariably decided by a single mano-a-mano fight between the main good guy and the main bad guy. That's not what happens in reality, but it makes for compelling drama.
Relying on melee tactics, and your army's ability to win more one-on-one fights than the other guy's army, is not the best way to win wars. Too much is left up to chance. Lots of people in lots of places and at lots of times came up with better ways. But, in the interests of simplicity and brevity, I am going to focus on how things evolved in Western cultures. Bear in mind that things generally progressed along similar lines everywhere.
The Greeks were one of the first to figure out that there was a better way. They developed the Phalanx. They lined their soldiers up in rows. Each soldier had a pike (a long spear), a shield, and a sword. The front "rank" (row) of soldiers were placed close together so that there were only small gaps between their shields. The pike, with its butt jammed into the ground, poked out between pairs of shields.
An attacking army, presumably using melee tactics, would smash up against the wall of shields. In the case of any opposing soldiers who avoided getting impaled on a pike the Greek soldiers would stab the at them with their swords. The opposing soldiers had a hard time getting at the Greek soldiers because they stayed hidden behind their shields. Jamming the butt of the pike into the ground allowed Greek soldiers to fend off opposing soldiers even if they were mounted on horses.
Usually some of the opposing soldiers would somehow succeed in breaking through the front rank. But behind the front rank was a second rank. And behind that a third. And so on. The succeeding ranks could deal with any opposing soldiers who broke through. They could also step forward and replace any soldier in the front rank who got killed or injured.
Greek armies using Phalanx tactics were extremely successful against pretty much all comers. But eventually opposing armies figured out that the best way to beat a Phalanx was to use flanking tactics. You went around the end of the Phalanx and attacked the formation from the rear. Once opposing armies figured this out, Greek armies stopped having as much success.
But they still had a lot of success. That is until the Romans came along. The Romans came up with a better tactic than the Phalanx. It was called the Roman Square. What the Roman Square gave the Romans was an ability to defend against flanking tactics while continuing to retain the other advantages of the Phalanx.
The Romans organized their soldiers into squares. Each wall of the square was set up like a Phalanx. But the Roman Square did not have an end. It only had corners, which the Romans reinforced as best they could. Roman soldiers could defend themselves successfully from attack regardless of what direction it came from. There were only a few battles fought between Greek Phalanxes and Roman Squares. But that was enough to demonstrate the clear superiority of the Roman Square.
Eventually, the Roman Empire fell apart. It took a lot of organization and resource to create and maintain a large army that was capable of fighting using Roman Square tactics. Rome eventually lost the ability to field and maintain such an army.
That left an opening for various hordes using tactics that would not have worked against Roman armies in their prime. The hordes poured through the gaps that were opened up by the decline and ravaged the carcass of the Roman Empire.
Once things settled down, it was left to the relatively small communities that remained to figure out a way to stay safe. That's when castles popped up all over the place. When an invading horde showed up all of the peasants burned their fields, gathered up everything that was portable, but especially their livestock, and retreated to the local castle. The castle typically held enough supplies to keep everybody fed and housed for a couple of years.
The invading horde quickly denuded the countryside. But if the retreat to the castle had been done properly, they found only a limited amount of food with which to sustain themselves. If they could successfully storm the castle relatively quickly then they could raid the castle's stores and life would be good. If not, their best option was to quickly move on in search of better prospects elsewhere.
Early castles were essentially large piles of rock. All they needed were tall, steep walls and enough interior space to house the local population and store their supplies. The main tools for "reducing" a castle (punching a hole in a wall) were the trebuchet (large gravity powered slingshot), the catapult (large spring powered sling shot), and the battering ram. If the door was strong enough the battering ram was ineffective.
In theory, catapults and trebuchets could be used to knock walls down. In reality, they were only able to do this for poorly built castles with thin walls. Most often the stones they hurled, which were relatively small and had a relatively low velocity, could do little or no damage. So, in most cases the castle was sturdy enough to hold out long enough to force the horde to give up and move on.
So, for a long time the local castle was able to successfully keep relatively small communities safe. Not surprisingly, castles sprung up all over the place. But the castle and its surrounding population came to form a community. And each community was able to, and found a need to, support a small number of "Knights in Shining Armor".
You see, it wasn't only large roaming hordes that communities needed to be defended from. It was also small bands of brigands. The brigands did not need to storm the castle to be successful. With their small numbers they could live off what had been left behind in the retreat to the castle for relatively long periods of time. All the brigands needed to do to do very well for themselves was to successfully terrorize individuals or small groups in the community that surrounded the castle.
Since it was fixed in place, the castle could not defend the community against brigands. A small but powerful mobile defense was required. That need led to the development of the Knight. Knights had enough offensive capability to handle small bands of brigands.
They also had the defensive capability necessary to fend off whatever counterattacks the brigands could come up with. And the infrastructure necessary to build and maintain the castle was all that was needed to support one or more Knights.
As nations eventually re-emerged their kings organized groups of Knights into small but powerful armies. A group of Knights could easily overcome anything short of another group of Knights. So, periodic wars between groups of Knights became a common occurrence. And, since the peasants had no effective defense, it became easy for the family that controlled the castle, and with it the Knights, to use their Knights to oppress their local peasants and promote themselves into the aristocracy.
This castle/knight model prevailed in Europe for hundreds of years. What broke the stalemate was the Battle of Agincourt. English Yeomen (a kind of peasant) became expert in the use of the longbow. It was powerful enough to shoot an arrow that could pierce the strongest armor a Knight could wear. The English Yeomen were agile enough to stay out from under the hooves of the horses of the French Knights. The French Knights, on the other hand, had no defense from the arrows of the Yeomen.
But Agincourt turned out to be a one-off. English society changed. Soon, yeomen became unwilling to spent their entire youth training to draw the heavy longbow and then shoot it accurately. But that didn't stop the Knight from being doomed anyhow. Because at about this time the Crossbow came into common use.
Crossbow archers used a crank to load a bow that was every bit as powerful as a longbow. Crossbowmen could not load and fire as quickly as a yeoman could. But they were quick enough to easily handle a group of Knights. And the Crossbow did not require the strength or training the longbow did. So, it was relatively easy to field large numbers of Crossbow archers.
The Knight in Shining Armor soon vanished from the scene. Because hot on the heels of the Crossbow came gunpowder. A musket was complicated and expensive to construct. It was also difficult to operate and maintain. But not so hard that Musketeers didn't soon start showing up everywhere. Once they were available in large numbers, they quickly drove soldiers equipped with any of the previous weapons, up to and including the Crossbow, off the field of battle.
The grownup version of the musket, the cannon, also had a big effect on warfare. They rendered the traditional castle obsolete. You see, they were powerful enough to knock down the walls of even a well-constructed castle. This did not obsolete castles. But it radically changed their design. It quickly became apparent that the best defense against an attacking army that used cannons was to mount cannons on the walls of the castle.
The "pile of rock" school of castle design was quickly replaced by very sophisticated designs. Now sight lines and fields of fire were critically important. Geometry and trigonometry became critical tools in creating a successful design. Battles often featured castle mounted cannons duking it out with "field pieces", cannons mounted on custom designed carriages and towed around by teams of horses or oxen.
And battles between large armies of soldiers returned. But, as has always been the case, effective tactics follow from the capabilities of the weapons the armies are equipped with. And by now, soldiers were routinely equipped with muskets. That meant tactics needed to be developed that used soldiers equipped with muskets to best advantage. And a variant on the Phalanx turned out to fill the bill.
Imagine you are the general of an army that is lined up at one end of a field. All of sudden the other army, which is lined up at the other end of the field, charges. What do you do? In the pre-musket era, the answer is not much. Nothing much is going to happen until the two armies get to within arms length reach of each other. Then it's often melee time.
But if your army is equipped with muskets there is a lot your can do before the two armies get to within arm's length. You organize your army into a Phalanx of musketeers. Specifically, you line your soldiers up in three ranks that face the enemy. Then you wait until the other army gets to within a couple of hundred yards of your army. They you have your army start shooting at them. For best effect they have to shoot in a disciplined manner.
The first rank is the front row. They fire their muskets in a "volley" (all at the same time) then retreat back to replace the old third rank. The old second and third ranks each move up one rank. What was the second rank now becomes the first rank, for instance. They, in turn, set up and fire their volley. They too then retreat to the back.
The two back ranks again move up one rank causing what was originally the third rank to now become the first rank. They, in turn, set up, fire their volley, and retreat. If everything has gone well, the original front rank has had enough time to reload. They now resume their original position in the first rank where they are ready to fire their volley and retreat when their turn comes.
This evolution can be continued nearly indefinitely. Minor variations can be used to cause the army to move slowly forward or slowly backward. Done right this rank-on-rank setup provides a good rate of fire that can be maintained for long periods of time. So, lots of enemy soldiers are killed or injured well before they get to arms-length distance.
It becomes critically important that soldiers be extensively trained. They need to be execute the various "evolutions" reliably and to perform their tasks quickly. They also need to be able to shoot accurately and stand up to being shot at. A well trained and equipped army has a big advantage over a poorly trained or equipped one. Best of all from the general's perspective, the battle almost never devolves into hand-to-hand combat.
The process of loading a musket and preparing it for firing is complex, and to modern eyes, time consuming. But experience determined that three ranks of well trained soldiers was the right number to maintain a consistent and relatively rapid rate of fire. And this style of fighting lent itself to large armies. And colorful and consistent uniforms made it possible for talented generals to maintain control of the battle.
A well trained and led army that fought using these tactics was almost always able to overcome armies using other tactics. The colonials managed to have some success in the U.S. Revolutionary War using what we now call Guerilla tactics. But in the end that war was decided by battles fought along the lines I have just described.
But technology marches on. And the impact of the next generation of technological advance was first seen on a large scale in the U.S. Civil War. What changed was the widespread use of the rifled musket. A traditional "smooth bore" musket was accurate out to about 100 yards. An elite athlete can traverse 100 years in 10 seconds. Figure something like 30 seconds for a soldier carrying his gear.
In that 30 seconds an army using the tactics I just described can get off perhaps one volley. Often that is not enough to break the charge of well trained and disciplined soldiers. So, two armies using smoothbore muskets would slowly inch closer and closer together.
At something between 100 and 50 yards one army would charge the other and things would quickly get ugly. By this time it was standard practice to equip muskets with a bayonet, essentially a long, sharp knife.
Now back up and try the same tactic with rifled muskets. They are accurate out to about 300 yards. It takes more than three times as long to charge across 300 yards as it does to charge across only 100 yards. This gives the non-charging army time to get several volleys off. In practice, if they have been properly trained, the defending army is going to cut the charging army to shreds well before it can get close.
Robert E. Lee, the Confederate General, was the first Civil War general on either side to figure all this out. He was also the first to figure out what to do about it. Now, the defense had a substantial advantage. And the defense's advantage could be increased even more by having it fight from behind cover. The better the cover the bigger the advantage. The Civil War saw trench warfare used on a large scale for this very reason.
Lee was a genius when it came to arranging things so that his soldiers were fighting from cover while often also holding the high ground. This forced the Union soldiers to charge across open ground and often uphill. That was the secret of most of Lee's success.
The proof of this is to be found in the Battle of Gettysburg. There, the roles were reversed. The Union soldiers held the high ground and were fighting from cover. Lee's army was forced to charge uphill across open ground. The battle was a disaster for Lee and the South.
There were many other technical developments during the Civil War. Relatively instant communications thanks to the telegraph. Vastly improved logistics thanks to railroads. Improved battlefield surveillance thanks to tethered hot air balloons large enough to carry a person as an observer. The introduction of the "ironclad" warship, which completely obsoleted the entire British Royal Navy, then the largest, most powerful, and most feared Navy of the time.
But another big change was in the rate of fire that various kinds of guns were capable of. I watched a bunch of "frontiersman" movies and TV shows as a kid. They had scenes showing the process required to load the "flintlock" muskets of the Revolutionary War era. It was complicated and had to be done very carefully. The process required to get the gunpowder to explode at the right time was particularly finicky.
By the time of the Civil War the "cartridge" was in common use. It consisted of a small paper packet that contained a bullet, a measured amount of gunpowder, and a "firing cap". The firing cap (a tiny sticky package containing a small amount of Fulminate of Mercury, or something similar, that would catch fire whenever it was struck) was affixed to the firing pin.
The powder was poured down the barrel. The wad of paper was rammed down behind it with a "ram rod" so that the powder was held tightly in place. The bullet was then added and rammed home. The firing cap was affixed to the firing pin and gun was then "cocked". It was finally ready to fire.
It is easy to see why this cartridge based process could take thirty or more seconds. Flintlock muskets could easily take twice as long, so the cartridge based process sped things up quite a bit. And it was far less error-prone than the previous completely manual process that flintlocks required. That meant far fewer misfires. A faster rate of fire and far fewer misfires means more volleys fired at your opponent.
By the end of that war the modern "brass" cartridge was starting to replace the paper version. Here, a brass "shell" holds everything (powder, firing cap, bullet) in place. Now, you just "eject" the old shell, load the new cartridge, cock the gun, and you are ready to fire. This new process was easily twice as fast and had the potential to become even faster. It had little effect on the outcome of the Civil War because it wasn't widely used in that conflict.
The introduction of the brass cartridge enabled other advances. One was the "repeating rifle". This design included a "magazine" capable of holding several cartridges at once, and a lever that would perform the "eject, load, and cock" steps for you. All you had to do was move the lever down and back up. Repeating rifles were used by some U.S. Cavalry troops late in the War. They were not made available to anybody else.
Then there was the Gatling Gun. It was the first true "machine gun". A machine gun can fire multiple bullets at a high rate simply by having its trigger pulled once. The Gatling Gun had multiple barrels and a "belt feed" mechanism. That permitted a sustained rate of fire of more than one round per second. It too saw limited use on the Union side late in the War. The South had nothing like it.
The repeating rifle became ubiquitous in the American West in the late 1800s. The classic movie "Winchester 76" is built around one of the several models that were produced in large numbers by several gun manufacturers during this period.
The Gatling design persists to this day. But shortly after the end of that war machine gun designs were introduced by other gun manufacturers that used a single barrel. The single barrel design quickly became by far the most popular one.
Interestingly, European countries wrote the Civil War off as a minor skirmish between frontier bumpkins who lacked the sophistication of their European brethren. So, they didn't learn the lessons they could have as quickly as they should have.
Part of this was financial. The British, for instance, had invested a fortune over the years in building and maintaining a large fleet of wooden "Ships of the Line". Theirs was the top-of-the-line design prior to the introduction of the ironclad.
It took took a while for the British (and most everyone else) to figure out just how obsolete the ironclad had made the older design. Not surprisingly, it took several decades for the Royal Navy to completely switch over. Other navies were not much quicker.
World War I turned out to be the Civil War writ large. The submarine, a ship type that hadn't existed in any meaningful way in the Civil War era, played a large part. The airplane, an airship type that not even visionary and Civil War contemporary Jules Verne had envisioned, went from being a toy to being an important weapon during the four year period the War lasted . But it was the machine gun that ultimately turned out to be the biggest game changer.
At the start of the conflict both groups of combatants thought they understood how to fight a large land war. The Germans with their General Staff were widely acknowledged to be the best prepared. They created detailed plans that made heavy use of trains, just like in the Civil War. They also made heavy use of the telephone. But in terms of its effect, it was just a quicker and more convenient version of the telegraph. It was an improvement rather than a fundamental change.
And while the French and British had General Staffs, they were considered inferior to the German one. But that too was a matter of degree rather than something that conveyed an overwhelming advantage. Discounting the first few weeks of the War, the General Staffing on both sides was roughly equal, equally bad. Both side's military leadership reacted poorly to the fact that the War did not go they way they had envisioned.
And the reason, as I noted above, was the impact the machine gun had on strategy and tactics. The machine gun made a massed charge across an open field completely impossible. It didn't matter how many soldiers charged. If they had to charge across even a short distance of open field the rate of fire of a few, well placed machine guns was high enough to guarantee that they would all be mowed down.
It took years and millions of casualties to convince the military leaders on both sides of that simple truth. So, the Germans enjoyed quite a bit of success in the opening weeks of the War. Then the British and French got their troops dug in and their machine gun nests set up, and that was that.
From there on it was "trench warfare in the mud" for years. Both sides tried over and over again to overcome the other side's defenses by throwing massed bodies at them. All they got for their efforts were mass casualties. Famously, it was the Tank that broke the stalemate.
Specifically, a mixed unit consisting of infantry and tanks working in close coordination was able to defeat a defense consisting solely of infantry and machine guns. Tanks alone had been tried. They failed miserably. World War I also did away with the last vestiges of the colorful uniforms that had been such a prominent feature of European armies for such a long time.
World War I was awful. But the awfulness was mostly confined to the Western Front. World War II spread the awfulness out. There was nothing like the prolonged misery of trench life on the Western Front. But there were gas chambers, mass starvation, carpet bombing of cities and, of course, The Bomb. The death toll from all causes was estimated to be 80 million or more.
And, of course, World War II did not go the way the experts expected. But by this time there was less surprise attached to that development. One big surprise happened at sea. The dominant naval weapon was expected to be the Battleship. The Battleship was the many times descendant of the ironclad. It was a ship that mounted a few big guns and was so strongly built that it could survive considerable punishment.
But the Battleship is a relatively short range weapon. It can fire a round about fifteen miles. And it can do so with surprising accuracy. Nothing can stand up against a pounding by a Battleship except another Battleship. But an Aircraft Carrier can project force out to more than three hundred miles. If the distance between the two ships is say fifty miles, then the Aircraft Carrier can effectively attack the Battleship, whereas the Battleship can't do the same.
And it turned out that Battleships could be effectively attacked not only by airplanes but also by submarines. Battleships have little in the way of defense against either. That means that a Battleship must be surrounded by a fleet of smaller "screening" ships like Destroyers. An Aircraft Carrier also needs a screening force of smaller ships. But in addition to its offensive capabilities, an Aircraft Carrier can make a meaningful contribution to the defense of both itself and its screening vessels.
The many other innovations that War produced were more in the form of quantitative rather than qualitative changes. Cryptography, in the form of Bletchley Park, Enigma, and so forth, had an outsized impact on the War. But the interception and decryption of the Zimmermann Telegram led directly to the U.S.'s entry into World War I.
Similarly, the introduction by the Germans of the V-1 (first drone), V-2 (first large bomb delivered by a rocket), and ME-262 (first fighter jet) became hugely important in the Post War era, but had little impact on how the War itself played out. The same is true of the A-Bomb. It shortened the War (and was less costly in terms of Japanese damage and casualties than an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands would have been), but it didn't change the outcome of the War.
In terms of the subject at hand, the Vietnam War turned out to be hugely important. It reintroduced the American Public and U.S. Military leaders to the concept of a Guerilla War. The European experience with war taught that the only thing that could successfully oppose a large, modern military was another large, modern military.
The U.S. had a large, modern military. It's opponents did not. That was supposed to result in a quick and relatively painless victory by the U.S. It did not. I have spent decades thinking about why. You can find a number of posts on this subject if you scroll back through the archives of this blog. But I think I can boil it down to one simple idea. The Vietnam War was primarily a diplomatic conflict rather than a military one.
European military experience tells us that if you control the major cities, the countryside will follow. Modern (and here I mean any time in the last 500 years) European countries have complex, integrated economies. Control of the cities leads not just to control of the cities, but due to the integrated nature of the economy and the society, it also leads to control of the countryside. And that means control of everything.
Large, modern armies are the best instrument for controlling large cities. Ultimately, it was standard, European style tactics by the "colonists" (what later became the U.S.) and their allies that led to victory by the colonists. The British had a large, modern military establishment, but were hampered by long supply lines and an inability due to domestic British politics to go "all in". The Guerilla War tactics that were employed at some times and in some places were helpful, but did not decide the outcome.
If the U.S. had been willing to engage in a World War II "Total War" style of fighting in Vietnam, I believe that U.S. forces could have won that War. But for a lot of good and sound reasons, reasons that I agree with, that option was taken off the table. Instead, the U.S. military was forced to fight a limited war.
The U.S. played lip service to "winning the hearts and minds of the people", most of whom lived in the countryside and had little connection to nor reliance on the big cities. But the U.S. never actually implemented a strategy that had a real chance of winning hearts and minds. Instead they employed the usual "kill the bad guys and blow things up" approach. This lost hearts and minds in the rural areas rather than winning them. And that ultimately lost the war for the U.S.
One key mistake the U.S. made in Vietnam was in who they backed to run the country. The U.S. propped up one incompetent and corrupt regime after another. A relatively honest and competent Vietnamize government would have invested in winning and keeping the hearts and minds of its people. The regimes we supported didn't. And our military people didn't think it was their job to provide governmental services or to root out corruption.
After a few fits and starts the U.S. has managed to win the postwar in Vietnam. That's because we have relied on diplomatic and other non-military means to win hearts and minds. The U.S. now has good relations with Vietnam. But we have repeated the same mistakes we made in Vietnam in several other places. The most notable example is Afghanistan.
A simple rule I adopted after Vietnam was to ask whether the locals were willing to fight their own fight. The Afghan regimes we propped up were never able to convince their own people that the war was worth fighting hard enough to win. Not surprisingly, rampant corruption again played a role.
As a result, propping up the various regimes we supported required massive amounts of direct military support from the U.S. and its allies. The Afghan soldiers and officers we supported required extreme amounts of hand holding to get them to fight at all. Even so, little of the effective fighting was done by Afghanis fighting on our side. It's not that Afghanis were incapable of fighting effectively. Our opponents relied heavily on them and they achieved a decisive victory.
And that brings me to Ukraine. From the time the Russians first invaded in 2014 right up to the present day, the Ukrainians have demonstrated a willingness to fight, and fight hard. The Vietnamese and Afghani people were also willing to fight. They just weren't willing to fight for the U.S. side. The Ukrainians are. As a result, I believe that properly supported with equipment and training, the Ukrainians can beat the Russians. No U.S. troops need apply.
That's nice, or at least I think that's nice. But it not what this post is about. This post is about paradigm shifts in how wars are fought. And Ukraine demonstrates a paradigm shift that is like the WW II shift from Battleships to Aircraft Carriers, only more so. That shift was important, but it only affected a few components of how the overall war effort.
So, what's the seismic shift that's affecting how the war in Ukraine is being fought? Drones. They are everywhere and they are changing how nearly everything is done. The biggest but not the only change comes from the widespread use of cheap FPV (First Person View) drones. They, particularly when paired with artillery firing "smart" rounds, have completely upended battlefield tactics.
The Russians know tanks. Since WW II they have built their army around high quality tanks, and lots of them. But in Ukraine, their situation has turned out to be similar to that of Union soldiers in the Civil War charging uphill across an open field toward Southern soldiers who are dug in and equipped with rifled muskets. In both cases, things go very badly for the side using tactics that are now obsolete.
A cheap FPV drone can locate a tank, even if it well camouflaged. It can then "light it up" with what amounts to a laser pointer. An artillery unit can then fire a single smart round. That's often enough because a single hit is usually enough to destroy the tank. And when used in conjunction with a cheap FPV drone, it often only takes only one round to score a hit.
It took the Russians a while to figure this out. As a result they have lost a shocking amount of armor in Ukraine. The Ukrainians have succeeded in taking out almost all of Russia's modern tanks. Russia has been forced to resort to using tanks that are several generations old. These tanks were only still around due to inertia. They had been stored in warehouses with the expectation that they would eventually be scrapped.
But its not just the Russians that have been slow to learn. The top of the line U.S. tank is the M1 Abrams. Many commentators said putting these tanks into the hands of the Ukrainians would be a game changer. It was not. It may be a better tank than what the Russians are using, but it isn't enough better to be a game changer. Neither have tanks provided by various European allies like such as British, French, and Germans.
The combination of cheap FPV drone and smart artillery has also made running large supply convoys anywhere near the front line a big mistake. The same is true for large troop concentrations. Troops need to be disbursed and kept under cover at all times. The same is true of supply dumps, especially fuel and ammo dumps. They must either be kept well away from the front, or if located near the front, camouflaged and disbursed.
A small explosive, roughly hand grenade sized, can be carried by a "heavy duty" cheap FPV drone. It is capable of taking out a car, pickup truck, or other small vehicle that lacks armor. That means armored vehicles must be used wherever these drones operate. They also make housing frontline troops in tents that are out in the open a very bad idea. In general, it makes it hard to build up the kinds of concentrations of men and equipment that are usually required to make offensive operations successful.
The Russians have recently started trying out a new tactic. They put soldiers on motorcycles, ATVs, and the like. The idea is to allow them to move fast enough that they can't be hit by an FPV drone combined with artillery, or a heavy FPV drone carrying a small explosive. It's too soon to know how this will play out. But it is a stark indication of how much cheap FPV drones have changed things.
And that's just the impact of cheap drones. Drones come in a wide range of sizes and capabilities. Somewhat more capable drones, like those manufactured in Turkey for the U.S./Ukrainian side, or manufactured by Iran for the Russian side, are capable of taking out larger or better defended targets. Again, FPV control turns these into precision, often one shot, munitions.
Further steps up the size/capability scale eventually leads to the equivalent of a Cruise Missile. The Ukrainians only have access to a few of these. But they have managed to use them effectively. They have taken out fuel and ammunition depots hundreds of kilometers into Russian territory. The Russians have used similar devices to damage or destroy infrastructure across the length and breadth of Ukraine.
Drones in this size range have had a devastating effect on the Russian Navy. It has been effectively driven out of the Crimean Sea. This should be a giant wakeup call for the U.S. Navy. So far, there is no evidence that the message is being treated with the seriousness it deserves.
Imagine a U.S. Carrier Task Force operating somewhere in the South Pacific. There the "defense in depth" strategy currently in use would likely be effective. But the U.S. Navy, including Carrier Task Forces, frequently find themselves needing to operate in constrained spaces. These spaces are more similar to the Crimean Sea than they are to the South Pacific. And that means that the tactics used so effectively by the Ukrainians against the Russian Navy are likely to work pretty well against the U.S. Navy.
The Russians are currently trying to duplicate a feat attempted by the allies during World War II. Then the allies made a concerted effort to use "precision bombing" to destroy the German's capability to manufacture ball bearings. The idea was that almost all military equipment made heavy use of ball bearings. If the Germans ran out of them, the thinking went, then the German war machine would literally grind to a halt. The effort failed. When it came to precision bombing, the precision necessary to make the plan work was just not possible back then.
Now, the Russians are attempting to destroy the Ukrainian electrical grid and its associated power plants. The idea is to cast Ukraine into the dark. If successful, the results would mirror what the Allies hoped to achieve during World War II. With access to long range, high capacity, smart drones (i.e. precision bombing that actually works) they have had considerable success. Most of Ukraine's electrical infrastructure has been damaged. That has resulted in lots of outages and rolling blackouts.
But all drones have their vulnerabilities. Inexpensive FPV drones use a two-way radio link. TV pictures go from the drone to the operator. Commands go from the operator to the drone. No encryption or other defensive measures are used. So, a "jammer", a radio that broadcasts loud noise on the frequencies used by drones, renders these kinds of drone useless. Also, since they are slow, noisy, and fly at low altitude, all it takes to shoot one down is an AK-47.
The life expectancy of a cheap FPV drone when in use at the Ukrainian front is less than an hour of flight time. But they are cheap. They cost less than a single artillery shell and are easy to manufacture in large numbers. So, both sides put them up in large numbers and live with their short operational lifespan. This "cannon fodder" approach gets less and less appropriate as you move up the size/cost/sophistication scale.
A drone that flies higher and faster is harder to shoot down. A drone that uses encryption, stealth technology, or other defensive measures is harder to shoot down. But it is also more expensive and available in much smaller numbers. At the top of the line are cruise-missile-like drones that are capable of flying long distances, carrying heavy payloads, and doing their own navigation, and may include stealth features.
Since they don't depend on a radio link back to an operator you have to shoot them down (or jam the GPS signal they often rely on) to put them out of business. But such drones cost millions of dollars each. And adding stealth features jacks their price up even higher.
And then there's the air the not-cheap drones fly through. Traditionally that air has been full of airplanes and helicopters. Not so in Ukraine. At the start of the current offensive the Russians were using helicopters and jets, particularly fighters, extensively. But the Ukrainians were very successful in shooting them down. Helicopters have also completely disappeared from the skies over Ukraine. They are just too easy to shoot down using relatively cheap, shoulder fired rockets.
Russian jets are now used solely as "stand off" launch platforms. They launch drones and missiles into Ukraine from low altitude and from well behind the lines in Russia. Jets, both fighters and bombers, are the Battleships of the Ukraine war. They have very limited offensive value and they are way to expensive to send into harm's way. So, is this experience reflected in the U.S. defense budget? No!
Tanks are job creators. So, we keep building tanks. Even the U.S. Army knows that there are lots better ways to spend our money. But Congress keeps mandating that the Pentagon buy more. So, they do. The same thing is true of Jets. The Pentagon is still buying F-35 Fighter Jets at a cost of more than a hundred million dollars per plane. Now, the U.S. Airforce is run by pilots. And pilots like to have planes to fly. But the main reason they are being built is because of the jobs the program throws off.
You can buy hundreds of thousands of cheap drones for the price of a single F-35. You can buy twenty or thirty top-of-the-line drones for the price of a single F-35. You can buy thousands of midrange drones for the price of a single F-35. But we are not building drones in anything like those quantities.
Ukraine can get lots of cheap FPV drones because China turns them out in large quantities for the world consumer market. Midrange and top-of-the-line drones are hard for Ukraine to come by. So, Ukraine has started making some of their own. They have gotten pretty good at it, but they don't have the capability to turn them out in large numbers. They do what the can and hope for the best, and hope for more help from the outside.
And, while important, that is not the point of this post. The point is: what is the U.S. doing about its own defenses? The answer is not enough. Sure, we should be doing more for Ukraine. But for the purposes of this post the key point that has received little or no attention is that the U.S. should also be absorbing the lessons Ukraine can teach us. And those lessons should result in a complete rethink of what our military needs to do its job.
The Pentagon has been funding a pilotless fighter program for years. What most people don't know is that a major limitation on the performance of a fighter jet is the pilot. A pilot's body can only take so much. And the limitations imposed by what is survivable for the pilot means that the fighter operates at a far lower performance level than it could be capable of.
We've all seen Terminator, and a million movies like it. So, nobody wants to put the machines in charge. But we already have the solution to that problem, the FPV. In fact, FPV technology is being used in the current robot fighter program. And I suspect that one reason so little is said about it is that the project has been too successful. It's an Airforce project, and the Airforce does not want to take the pilot out of the cockpit.
But I have already argued, I think successfully, that the jet fighter is obsolete. So, maybe the robot jet fighter program is unimportant except as an example of a government boondoggle. The problem is that the thinking behind how decisions are being made around that program, and so much else in the military sphere, is all the same. And that's a major problem.
We need to increase our drone production capability by a factor of a hundred. We need to move to the forefront of drone design and construction. We need to do a top-to-bottom review of all of our military equipment and procedures. Unfortunately, that would flag more than half of defense production as a waste of money. We need to do a top-to-bottom review of U.S. warfighting tactics. That too will uncover many major shortcomings that need to be plugged as quickly as possible.
We should see Ukraine as, among other things, a lab. In the process of fighting for their lives they are learning what works and what doesn't. The Russians are no rag-tag band of amateurs. If something works against them it will likely work against everybody else too. On the other hand, if the Russians develop a tactic that works, we need to react accordingly.
None of his is happening. Various forces, not all of them political, have robbed the U.S. of its ability to focus on serious problems. But that fact does not make this problem any less serious. The only comfort to be taken at this point is that friend or foe, almost nobody is taking this problem as seriously as it needs to be taken. That's small comfort, but better than nothing.
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