The shape of wars to come

Shashank Joshi on what military analysts have learned in Ukraine and what the conflict foreshadows for the future of warfare

In July, The Economist released an extended special report called “Battlefield Lessons,” authored by the publication’s defense editor, Shashank Joshi. Analyzing what makes the Russian-Ukraine war different from past wars, Joshi predicted that it would also have an effect on the warfare of the future. In an extended interview with Meduza, published in Russian, Shashank Joshi elaborates his insights from the special report, talking in-depth about the advantages and predicaments of the two clashing armies, which lessons from Ukraine could be adopted by NATO forces elsewhere, and why this might be far harder than it sounds. The original interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Traditional warfare, modern detail

The West’s wars of the last 20 years were small, expeditionary conflicts fought under conditions of technological superiority against very weak and limited adversaries, with no threat to the homeland and no real pressure on industrial capacity. And so, we have simply forgotten what conflicts of this scale and nature are like.

On the other hand, this war would be extremely familiar to an Iranian or Iraqi general who fought in the 1980s using Soviet hardware under conditions of contested airspace, with large numbers of shells being fired, and with ballistic missiles also being used in large numbers. We in the West may have forgotten that kind of demanding, costly, and highly attritional warfare; but this doesn’t mean that other countries have forgotten it. A Russian soldier who remembers the fighting in Grozny in the 1990s would also recognize some elements of warfare in Ukraine.

The critical difference is that the weapons and tactics we see today reflect today’s technology. So we see traditional Soviet-era missiles being used by both sides, but at the same time, at least on the Ukrainian side, there’s cutting-edge artificial intelligence, provided by Western companies like Palantir and used to identify the targets for those very same traditional missiles. Old Howitzers from the 1970s and 1980s are being used to fire on adversary positions, but the targeting information may be collected by cheap drones that didn’t exist at the time those Howitzers were manufactured.

Infantry, artillery, armor, and the importance of combining these are still essential factors, but the means of their application have been modernized and upgraded, to the effect that an essentially traditional picture of warfare has many modern details.

Technological imbalance across the frontline

It’s true that Russia has a great deal of advanced technology. We spend a lot of time looking at the Kropiva system of battle management for Ukraine’s artillery. But if we look at the Russian side, they have their Strelets computer system that effectively stitches together information from multiple UAVs, sending it to artillery batteries. If computerized strike reconnaissance is now used by both sides, this shouldn’t surprise us, since we already saw it in use in Ukraine since 2014, as well as in Syria. Similarly, if we look at loitering munitions, we see Ukraine using weapons like Switchblade, while the Russians are using systems like Lancet.

Russia’s military is technologically sophisticated. Russia’s problem is in organizing the implementation of these systems. Although the Russian army does, in theory, have the means of encrypted communication, the lack of encrypted radios where they were needed led to communications chaos in the first phase of the conflict. We saw a reliance on mobile phones and cellular communications, which made the Russian forces extremely vulnerable to interception and location, and ultimately to strikes. It’s not that they didn’t have the means of communication, it’s that it wasn’t reliably available at scale where needed.

Nor does Russia lack for intelligence. But we saw a situation in which Russian intelligence units on the ground might have identified targets, but, by the time that information went through a command centre in Moscow and got prosecuted by aircraft, the original target might have moved. There’s also a certain rigidity in the intelligence structure, which led to strikes on targets identified in databases that hadn’t been updated in years. So, the problem isn’t about technology, but in the institutional approach to its application, which has to do with a lack of flexibility inside the Russian military.

Ukraine as a ‘test bed’ for NATO technology

It would be a mistake to suggest that Ukraine’s armed forces are superior to NATO’s in every respect. Many of Ukraine’s new brigades involved in the counteroffensive are struggling when operating Western equipment, because of their limited training in combined-arms warfare. We see them struggle to suppress Russian artillery or Russian anti-tank squads before they advance into contested positions, and this is causing them huge problems. But it’s also true that no NATO armed force has conducted this kind of warfare, particularly without air superiority, in decades, which means that they don’t have that kind of experience, either.

Still, if we were to look at an American armored brigade and its training at the National Training Center in California, we would see them practicing this kind of warfare intensively and under very sophisticated training ranges. The skills gulf between the Ukrainians and NATO forces has been, in many respects, glossed over in our eagerness to praise the Ukrainians for their heroism.

With regard to innovation, though, there are two fundamental points to be made. One of them is that in wartime, traditional procurement breaks down. You can buy what you need, you can buy it when you need it, and you don’t need to worry about process. So if the Ukrainians need to acquire sophisticated artificial intelligence capabilities for their drones, there are Western companies who will provide this for free and help them integrate the new technology. European armies, in contrast, cannot do that in the same way, because of the nature of their procurement programs. They do it slowly, carefully, systematically, and in ways that are much, much more cautious.

There are some capabilities that people will give Ukraine but not to other countries. The most obvious one is Starlink, provided to Ukraine by SpaceX. When I spoke to the French military chief about a month ago, he said, look, we need something like Starlink. But of course, developing a constellation of several thousand satellites in low Earth orbit is a very big ask, and Ukraine is only getting these systems now because of its existential peril.

The second point about wartime innovation is best illustrated by the use of uncrewed surface vehicles, naval drones, and UAVs. Ukraine is able to test these directly against Russia in wartime conditions. They can experiment, collect the data, and improve iteratively to keep getting better at getting past Russian defenses.

Western forces cannot do this. They can’t even fly drones unrestricted in their own airspace because of civil aviation requirements. For example, if you fly a drone and try to practice electronic warfare against it, it might crash into a civilian village next door. The Ukrainians don’t have to worry about that. So the wartime ability to innovate is a huge advantage for Ukraine and something that western armies are just not going to be able to replicate, unless they drastically change their approach to risk.

Decentralized, maneuverable, and adaptive: can NATO learn from Ukraine’s logistics innovations?

NATO armies are now having to think about how they would fight a war on their own territory. At the NATO summit in Vilnius, we saw allies approve the first comprehensive defense plans for Europe since the end of the Cold War. This is effectively about defending the Eastern Front, as well as some other parts of NATO territory.

Still, there are some big differences between Ukraine’s situation and the one faced by the allies. One of them is that the West tends to view Ukraine as this kind of innovative, agile underdog who is nimble and quick and adaptive. While that might be true in some respects, it also implies that we’ve systematically underestimated the degree to which Ukraine is also a big industrialized European economy with a strong Soviet heritage: huge railway systems, and once again huge metal and steel industries that can be used for repair and maintenance.

How many European countries have such conditions? Not many at all, and this suggests immediately that Ukraine’s logistics system must depend on attributes it doesn’t share with other European countries, starting with its sheer size.

The second point has to do with Ukraine’s geography. Ukraine is lucky to have the Western borders that it does, allowing it to bring in military equipment across a large land border, from secure Polish depots and facilities protected with missile defense and watched over by European intelligence agencies who look out for Russian infiltration and sabotage. This is a huge advantage. If you were trying to apply these lessons elsewhere, like Taiwan, for example, you would have grave difficulties in the absence of that big land border and a secure sanctuary next door.

Third, Ukraine has been very lucky in that Russia has not been capable of dynamic targeting, that is, identifying and hitting moving targets. Had Russia been better at identifying convoys coming into the country and depots where military equipment was stored, Ukraine would have been in a far worse position. They would have struggled to import as many Western arms as they did.

What all this means is that we have to be careful about drawing the wrong lessons, by assuming that every adversary would be as incapable of this kind of targeting of logistics as Russia has been. I think there’s a real chance that China would be much more effective at choking off the resupplies to Taiwan than Russia has been at choking off the resupplies to Ukraine.

With all of those cautions in mind, there are certainly things we should be identifying and highlighting in terms of best practices to be adapted elsewhere. A lot of them, though, have to do with gaining a tactical edge. I’m talking about things like 3D printing of spare parts, or the flexibility of individual brigades. But these are things born of necessity rather than by design.

Flexible operations and the independent soldier

The idea of encouraging initiative and empowering small units to follow their command’s intentions, instead of waiting to be micromanaged, is something we can see as far back as the German military philosophy of the 19th century. If you look at the Second World War, the German term “Auftragstaktik” was the Wehrmacht’s idea of mission tactics. We also see it in the Israeli army, where small-unit initiative is highly prized. In that sense, flexibility, personal initiative, and mission tactics are not something new about today’s warfare.

But Ukrainians would be the first to tell you that mission command hasn’t exactly percolated into every unit throughout the Ukrainian army. Another challenge is that this army isn’t the same one that Ukraine started the war with. Its original army has already been destroyed and replaced with large numbers of mobilized people, who often have very little military experience and could hardly be expected to take on a lot of initiative. We should be careful about depicting Ukraine as some kind of Platonic ideal of mission command.

In terms of the guerrilla tactics, if you look at the defense of Kyiv, in many ways it was a very mobile defense. Instead of relying on big, heavy fixed positions, it used small units that could move around and conduct mobile counterattacks against Russian forces and then withdraw. That was absolutely one of the Ukrainian advantages, but it wasn’t anything new.

Another of its important aspects was the Ukrainian side’s ability to rely on civilian resistance. What was new about that, as I explained in the Special Report, was not civilian resistance as such, but the harnessing of mobile phones and the Internet to affect it in distinctly novel ways, even compared to other wars fought in this century.

Blurring the combatant-civilian distinction

In theory, the law requires armies to discriminate between combatants and noncombatants. It places particular burdens on combatants to identify themselves: for example, by wearing uniforms bearing the insignia of one of the relevant belligerents. The law is also clear that if you are a civilian who picks up a gun and starts fighting, this makes you a combatant, and you lose your civilian protections.

Although none of this calls for any fundamental revision, we have seen cases where the Russian armed forces in Ukraine did not abide by the laws of war. They have targeted civilians, including by extrajudicial killing. Around Bucha, Kyiv, and in other parts of Ukraine, we’ve also seen targeted killings. In circumstances like these, the law becomes irrelevant. If an army does not want to obey the law, it will not obey the law. No amount of legal discussion is going to change that. It’s not as if the Russian units in Bucha consulted the lawyers before starting to act as they did.

Civilians assisting the armed forces in ambiguous ways are one of the challenges to that traditional distinction between civilians and combatants. If you provide the specific coordinates of an enemy position to help correct shellfire from an artillery position, to destroy an enemy unit, you forfeit your civilian protections regardless of whether you use a landline or a smartphone app. The only difference that technology makes is the scale on which it enables that kind of civilian assistance.

But there are ambiguous cases. If you are part of a cyber activist unit conducting cyber intrusions against enemy military systems, what exactly does that mean? I think it depends on the circumstances. If you’re collecting tactically relevant information directly used to facilitate deadly attacks on the battlefield, you may be part of the kill chain and therefore forfeiting your civilian status. But if you’re simply conducting propaganda or harassment attacks that have no direct lethal effects, this turns into a much more hazy picture. We don’t need a new corpus of international law, but we do need more discussion of how existing international law applies in modern conditions.

Another thing we see is civilian areas becoming bound up with military activity, as in any war that places national survival at stake. Soldiers position military equipment in civilian areas. They requisition civilian facilities. They have to fire into civilian areas. All this presents a serious problem, and I’m afraid I’ve seen a large number of instances where the Russian army just doesn’t at all prioritize international law.

Private military companies in future wars

Private military companies were extensively used in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The United States relied heavily on military contractors, who died in enormous numbers during those wars. But Wagner Group is not a traditional private military company. It used to be, instead, a semi-deniable arm of the Kremlin used for acting in places like Africa without being too obvious in meddling with weaker states.

Being composed of a great number of former Russian regulars, including some from elite Russian units like the Spetsnaz and others, these private military companies proved very effective in battle. Although entirely dependent on the Russian Defense Ministry for their ammunition and logistics, they were able to avoid some of the command dysfunction that marred other parts of the Russian military. This is what gave them an advantage in Eastern Ukraine, particularly in Bakhmut, together with Wagner’s ability to use convicts as cannon fodder in human-wave-type attacks.

The Kremlin’s dilemma between giving this group greater autonomy in exchange for its effectiveness or else having a loyal and pliant force that would not present a threat to the regime played out in the creation of a kind of Frankenstein’s monster that then threatened them. What became apparent is the absolute importance of making sure that the military remains under the party’s control, and not having these private warlords develop independent power bases in ways that can completely and unpredictably threaten your own grip on events. By encouraging such divisions for short-term battlefield results, the Kremlin neglected the longer-term risks and costs.

NATO and the future of military security

Although NATO isn’t expanding into Asia, it is deepening its ties to countries like the AP Four — Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. China increasingly poses a security challenge to NATO, largely in Europe itself, partly through its relationship with Russia, but partly through other means like cyber activity and investment. But if NATO is trying to cooperate with Asian countries to address a common threat from China, this isn’t tantamount to NATO spreading into Asia or extending its Article Five guarantee to Asian countries.

There is a discussion about opening a Japanese liaison office with NATO in Tokyo, and allies have been unable to agree on that. But this would be a very small office that effectively is just designed to facilitate the flow of information, not conduct any ambitious military activity. So we will see more NATO–Asia cooperation, but from NATO’s perspective, it’s going to be overwhelmingly focused on the Euro-Atlantic region.

As for Ukraine, the G7 declaration at the Vilnius Summit was very important, but it wasn’t a set of security guarantees, because “guarantees” would imply a promise to come to the aid of another country if it is attacked. Instead, it was a set of security assurances that amounted to the G7 counties’ commitment to providing Ukraine with military aid over a longer period of time, not just month-to-month. It was a well-designed signal to Russia that it won’t be able to wait out Western support for Ukraine. The G7 statement also contains a set of robust postwar guarantees for Ukraine, in case Russia tried to invade it again. This isn’t quite Article Five, but it lays the groundwork for much more substantial security arrangements between NATO and the West.

Interview by Meduza. Adapted for Meduza in English by Anna Razumnaya.