I had been following the potential of energy weapons, and more recently the vulnerability of our carrier fleet, long before it occurred to me that we were witnessing a general shift favoring the defense over the offense in war.
I did not notice the broader point until the war in Ukraine began to degenerate into a bloody stalemate of a sort not seen since WWI. As of now, critical to the stalemate are the drones both sides are using to thwart even the most modest maneuvering by the other side. Even before the drones, advanced artillery such as the HIMARS missile system supplied by the U.S., was having a devastating effect on Russian armor, armor being the crucial enabler of battlefield mobility since the advent of effective tanks.
Tank destroyed by drone. (Shutterstock)
As I noted in a post back in October drones costing anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, and armed with explosive payloads, are destroying weapons costing orders of magnitude more sometimes including tanks. Mounted with anti-tank missiles the total package becomes much more expensive: the Javelin anti-tank missile runs as much as $240K; other reasonably effective anti-tank missiles can cost tens of thousands. Lesser drone payloads have apparently killed or crippled some tanks in the Ukraine war, but not reliably.
The current cost of an Abrams, the U.S. main battle tank, is circa $9 million. A Soviet T-90 costs very roughly a third of that. Thus, a drone with a good chance of destroying or crippling a main battle tank can be two-three orders of magnitude cheaper than the tank it kills. That’s a lot, but not so dramatic that we can expect drones to wipe tanks from the field. Drones themselves are far from invulnerable. The U.S. has developed an add-on, anti-drone gun for armored fighting vehicles that looks very effective.
Tanks, however, do not take the field without support vehicles and infantry. The important point is not that a drone may destroy a tank. More important is that both Ukrainian and Russian soldiers agree that with drones in the area no vehicle from a tank to a pick-up carrying an infantry squad is safe maneuvering in the open for more than ten minutes. The drones will find it in half that time and act to destroy it in the other half. If the vehicle is too tough for the drones to destroy, they can signal its location to a tank-killing weapons battery.
Drone launching missiles (Shutterstock)
Thus we are back to where we started this series…the rising odds against the hiders and in favor of the seekers.
All offensive warfare is maneuver-based. It is when maneuver become unacceptably costly that defense and wars of attrition come to the fore. Every great offensive commander in history: Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Jackson Patton (please add your own in “comments”) repeatedly defeated forces superior in number by their speed of maneuver, showing up when and where they were not expected. Even Washington, the great defensive strategist, won his most important victory by speed and surprise.
Speed and surprise. Surprise is the purpose of speed.
The WWI tank, amazing as it was, was too primitive to restore the war of maneuver. It was German storm troop tactics that finally began to break through the trenches by movement and surprise. The cratered battlefield, an obstruction to the classic closed-order assault, provided cover and concealment for open-order troops dashing from crater to crater. Line infantry and small artillery under brigade and even company command supplied covring fire for the stormtroopers’ movements. Eschewing rifles and carrying sacks of grenades, the storm troopers sneaked up to the flanks of a trench, tossed in their first grenades, waited for the detonation, and then jumped in themselves. Because the trench walls were angled back and forth to prevent enfilading fire, they now concealed the storm troopers. The troopers used the angled walls as cover from which to attack the next section over with more grenades and, horrifying to the enemy, flame throwers.
(For fellow buffs, a brilliant book on the subject is Stormtroop Tactics: Innovation in the German Army, 1914-1918 by Captain Bruce Gudmundsson, U.S. Army (Ret.)).
French alpine troops, accustomed to open-order fighting, helped spread similar tactics to the French infantry, which in turn taught them to the U.S. Army. By WWII some form of “fire and maneuver” was standard infantry doctrine for all players.
The point—lest I get lost in buff stuff—is that speed and maneuver are decisive mostly as they are used to achieve concealment and surprise. Concealment and surprise are what the drone deprives to modern ground forces even as the satellite deprives them to the fleet. It is the advent of battlefield reconnaissance costless in human life that is pushing the “advantage” (if one can call pointless bloodshed an advantage) back to the defense in land warfare.
This did not start in Ukraine. The Israelis, as Edward Luttwak point out in his new book The Art of Military Innovation: Lessons from the Israel Defense Forces effectively invented drone warfare almost 50 years ago. Nor are drones the only enemy of battlefield surprise. Satellites have already destroyed strategic surprise for land forces; low orbit satellites with ever better sensors and high-flying drones similarly equipped will at least hamper tactical surprise
Soldiers launching scout drone (Shutterstock)
Does all this make offensive land war impossible, or intolerable? Pretty close, for the moment. The Russian invasion of Ukraine should have been impossible. Recall the early days of the war when Russian columns were stuck in a gigantic traffic jam, unable to advance. That was thanks to a combination of Ukrainian soldiers disabling a relatively small number of Russian tanks and other vehicles, plus typically Russian poor maintenance. Poor logistics, especially fuel shortages made it all worse. With the drone forces and tactics Ukraine has now, the entire Russian column might have been destroyed, and the Russian army crippled for years.
As I wrote back in October: “The world marveled that the Ukrainians did so well in thwarting the Russian drive to Kiev. Now even we civilians know it was a marvel that the Russians survived at all. The war should have been over by early March 2021, the Russians hightailing it back home.”
Shame on the White House for encouraging the Ukrainians to fight and not giving them the weapons that could have given them victory.
To adjust to the resurgence of the defense we need not only new weapons and tactics, but a new strategy in which playing defense is to our advantage. Fortunately, this is within our grasp; unfortunately, our self-obsessed leaders have not a clue, nor apparently, a care.
This concludes the series on the waning of offensive war. Next: Strategies for a Defensive era.
Richard, How does your overwhelming speed and precision means “defense wins” theory, account for force concentration? In star wars terms -- overwhelming the defensive system with MERV weapons. America was the prodigal son after Vietnam. And it learned something. That’s not the same as defense.
I think the conclusion that offensive land warfare is changing back towards the defense is way off. There are two reasons why your conclusion is incorrect:
First, the character of the conflict in Ukraine is unique. Russia has made the conscious decision to dig in and rack up the body count because Russia thinks that they can outlast Ukraine. Ukraine has no choice, because Ukraine doesn’t have the capability to offset Russia’s attritional strategy (as an aside, I agree with you that Ukraine should have had western weapon systems sooner before Russia could entrench their positions).
The air war in Ukraine is also unique: an aerial stalemate. Your statement implies that this will continue to happen in other wars, and there’s no guarantee that it will happen.
Would things in Ukraine change if the USAF joined Ukraine’s war effort? Absolutely. Air power can and will wreck defensive positions given enough time. See the coalition air campaign in Operation Desert Storm. The Iraqis intended to fight a war of attrition, but were so damaged after weeks of bombing that the troops assaulting right into the teeth of Iraqi defenses were able to push past those defenses with ease.
The Russian ground-based air defenses and the Russian Air Force are no match for the USAF. The character of the war changes overnight, and it won't be because of the ATGM or the drone.
Second, you’re basing your conclusions off of incomplete evidence. You’re only seeing the situations where ATGMs/Drones are successful. This is sampling/survivorship bias.
Ukraine and Russia aren’t likely to post videos of their failures, but they’ll gladly highlight their successes for propaganda purposes. We don’t know if their successes happen literally every time they launch a drone, or whether they’re successful one time out of a thousand.
We don’t know. Drawing conclusions from something that we don’t know is inappropriate.
I'll save my own conclusions on what Ukraine tells us about the nature of war for another time.