The American resource "War on the Rocks" has published interesting material by Stephen Biddle "Ukraine And The Future Of Offensive Maneuver" ("Ukraine and the future of offensive maneuver") about the prospects of maneuver warfare in the light of the lessons of the fighting in Ukraine.
Armored group of the Armed Forces of Ukraine during the advance in the Kharkiv region, 12.09.2022 (c) ReutersFor months, comments about the fighting in Ukraine have focused on the impasse and the prospect that changing technology heralds the advent of an era of defense dominance in military operations.
Russia's offensive on Kiev has failed. The offensive on Odessa stopped far from the city. The offensive in eastern Ukraine has stalled. Ukraine's long-awaited counteroffensive in the south has made limited progress, and Ukraine's defense minister has said his country does not have the material means for a large-scale offensive. In the spring and summer, intense fighting practically did not lead to significant changes in the control of territories.
Many perceived this picture as a harbinger of profound changes in military affairs. From this point of view, tanks, manned aircraft, surface warships and massive infantry formations were now just big, slow targets for small, cheap, precision weapons. As the weapons became more accurate and deadly, commentators claimed, concentrated units and formations operating in open terrain became unable to hold out long enough to break through enemy positions. Surprise has become impossible in conditions of long-range surveillance with the help of drones and air-based radar. Thus, a breakthrough became unattainable, and the development of success became impossible without achieving a breakthrough. Many argued that in the 21st century, such types of large-scale, decisive offensive maneuvers as the German conquest of France in 1940, the Six-Day War of 1967 or Operation Desert Storm in 1991 are a thing of the past.
Now this analysis seems premature. As a result of Ukraine's September counteroffensive in Kharkiv, more than 6 thousand square kilometers of Russian-held territory were recaptured in less than two weeks. Kharkiv was followed by significant Ukrainian successes in the north of Kherson in early October and the capture of the rest of the region west of the Dnieper in mid-November. Tanks and other armored vehicles played an important role in both offensives, and further successes look quite likely. Such a sudden change in military fortune pushed Russian President Vladimir Putin to a politically risky partial mobilization. Recent events certainly seem incompatible with expectations of epochal changes in the technologically driven era of defense dominance.
What is really happening in Ukraine, and what do these results mean for the future, as well as for defense planning in the United States and other countries? Of course, humility is necessary. Both the deadlock in the summer and the breakthroughs in the fall surprised many, and there may be more surprises in store. A lot of new technologies are being used, and both sides are learning and adapting quickly. Therefore, the conclusions made now, in the midst of hostilities, should always be preliminary and indicative.
But perception is still laid early, so it is important for analysts to form it as accurately as possible, even while events are unfolding. And at the moment, the best understanding is that the offensive maneuver is far from dead. In fact, the models seen so far are much more similar to the past than to any new model of revolutionary transformations. And the political decisions that follow from the interpretation of the transformations look correspondingly premature: calls for the withdrawal of tanks from combat in favor of drones or the revision of military doctrine in order to avoid offensive actions do not agree well with the real picture of the fighting observed today in Ukraine.
Differences in the use of forceFrom the very beginning of the war, this picture includes both a successful offensive and a successful defense.
Russia's initial invasion was poorly executed in many respects, but in less than a month it captured more than 110 thousand square kilometers of territory. The Kiev counteroffensive of Ukraine retook more than 50 thousand square kilometers in March and early April. Then the front lines mostly stabilized, despite the strong offensive pressure of Russia in late spring and summer before the autumn counter-offensives of Ukraine. But if the Kharkov counteroffensive in September led to a rapid breakthrough and drove the Russians out of a large part of the eastern theater of operations in a few days, then the Kherson counteroffensive of Ukraine achieved only limited progress during the month, despite great efforts and heavy Ukrainian losses.
These variations are difficult to correlate with any technologically determined era. All this - both breakthroughs and dead ends - took place against the background of small, cheap and accurate weapons of the XXI century. Tanks played a prominent role both in breakthroughs and in stalemate situations.
The real difference, apparently, was the significant differences in the use of forces at the tactical and operational level, combined with the mass mobilization of Ukrainian reservists, only a few of whom were armed with precision weapons. The Ukrainian defense, which was initially understaffed (on the northern front of Ukraine) and shallow and unprepared (on the southern front of Ukraine), allowed the Russians to move forward quickly. The Russians, who initially sacrificed safety for speed, moved in columns without support along the roads, ahead of their logistics and suffered heavy losses, which then made them vulnerable to a counterattack on their overstretched positions.
Conversely, deep and well-prepared defenses, such as Ukraine's positions in the east, were much less vulnerable and could only be overcome by those who advanced cautiously and with powerful fire support. Since the Ukrainian mobilization created a large enough army to fill the gaps and make up a significant reserve, the small Russian invasion forces were forced to take defensive positions in Kherson and Kharkov themselves and make a choice in the distribution of insufficient forces. They preferred to defend deep, prepared positions in Kherson with their best units and take the risk in Kharkov with a weaker, unsecured defense, manned by less high-quality units, continuing a slow offensive in the direction of Bakhmut.
This led to a slow advance of the Russians near Bakhmut and in the initial Ukrainian offensive near Kherson, but to a breakthrough and a rapid advance of the Ukrainians near Kharkov. The vulnerability of Russian logistics on the west bank of the Dnieper in Kherson contributed to the Ukrainian advance in early October and the fall of the city of Kherson in November. But throughout, neither side has been able to move forward quickly or make successful breakthroughs against a deep, prepared, well-motivated defense supported by significant reserves and reliable supply lines. On the contrary, both sides were able to advance much faster against shallow defenses, unsupported by the corresponding reserves behind it, and especially in cases where the defenders lacked commitment to the cause they were fighting for and when supply lines could not be maintained.
Repeating lessons from the history of land warsThis shouldn't be surprising.
In fact, this is the modern history of the land war. At least since 1917, it has been very difficult to break down a properly supplied defense, echeloned in depth, supported by operational reserves and prepared with forward positions covered and camouflaged (especially in the absence of air superiority). This combination led to a stalemate in the trenches on the Western Front in the First World War.
But this model persisted after that. In a popular image, World War II replaced the trench deadlock with a war of maneuvers. But offensives in the middle and end of the war against properly prepared defenses usually led to results that looked less like a blitzkrieg and more like a slow, expensive advance in the style of the "Hundred Days" offensive of 1918. Concentrated heavy armored battles for the "Mareth Line" in 1943, the Battle of Kursk in 1943, Operation Epsom,"Goodwood" or "Market Garden" in 1944, the breakthrough of the Siegfried Line in 1944 or the Gotha Line in 1944-1945 - all of them did not lead to rapid breakthroughs and turned at best into slow, methodical failures, and at worst into "deadly voyages of armored divisions" (as described by "Goodwood" historian Alexander McKee).
This trend did not end in 1945. Iraqi armored offensives were defeated even against moderately deep Iranian defenses in Khorramshahr and Abadan in 1980-1981, and Iranian offensives were unable to break through the prepared Iraqi defenses in Basra in 1987. More recently, in 1999, in the Battle of Tsorona between Ethiopia and Eritrea, during Israel's invasion of Southern Lebanon in 2006 and during Georgia's invasion of South Ossetia in 2008, a similar pattern was observed when mechanized offensive operations slowly advanced when they faced deep prepared defenses.
Of course, there have been dramatic offensive successes since 1917. The German invasion of France in 1940 knocked the French out of World War II in a month. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 destroyed more than 100 Soviet divisions and advanced to the gates of Moscow in one season. Operation Cobra in 1944 broke through the German lines and recaptured most of continental France in a month. The Israeli invasion of the Sinai Peninsula in 1967 ended in just six days. The American counteroffensive during Operation Desert Storm in 1991 drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait in 100 hours of ground fighting. The offensive of Azerbaijani troops in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020 drove the Armenians out of the Araks River valley in less than two months.
The use of forces and the results of hostilitiesBut this pattern does not indicate any epochal transition from the dominance of defense in the First World War to the dominance of offensive in the Second World War and after it to some new era of defense coming in the XXI century.
On the contrary, as I argue in my book Military Might: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Combat, the reality of war, at least since 1917, has been a constant strong relationship between the use of force - tactics and operational methods used by troops - and the results of combat operations in the face of increasingly deadly firepower. Where the defenses were deep, supported by operational reserves, and well-prepared at the front, the rapid success of the blitzkrieg was virtually impossible for more than a century of changing technology. A well-trained, well-functioning army with numerical superiority can retake positions from such a defense, but slowly and with heavy losses. Successful breakthroughs with the subsequent development and decisive conquest of large theaters of military operations for a long time required an "accommodating" enemy - that is, a defender who lacks depth, who lacks significant reserves, who does not provide a fortified front, and, often, whose troops have low motivation to fight hard to defend their positions.
Over the past century, defenders and attackers have differed greatly in their ability to apply these methods. Deep elastic defense is complex and difficult to manage. And those types of combined-arms methods that are necessary in order to achieve even minor successes in the fight against them are at least as difficult to implement in the field, especially where air and ground forces must work closely together. Thus, often the best single predictor of the outcome of actual fighting is the balance of skills and motivation of both sides. Where both sides can cope with the complexity of modern warfare and make full use of their material resources, the result is often slow, grueling attrition battles that are more reminiscent of 1918 than 1940 or 1967. But where defenders, in particular, do not have the skills or motivation to wage a complex modern war, and demonstrate shallow, unsheloned, poorly prepared or poorly motivated defense, then astute, well-trained attackers can exploit the shortcomings of defenders and win lightning victories - whether in 1940, in 1967 or in onethousandninehundredninetyone
The contours of the fighting in Ukraine do not yet give reason to expect the coming transformation of this model. Rapid early ground successes against shallow, unsheloned defenses, followed by successful counterattacks against overstressed attackers, are more like the past than different from it - just as the subsequent offensive disappointment against a deeper, better-prepared defense is not a radical departure from historical experience. Of course, Ukraine has a whole range of new technology, from drones to anti-tank guided missiles, long-range anti-aircraft missiles and much more. But every war brings new weapons. And in most wars, there are statements that these new weapons revolutionize military actions, radically changing them in favor of attackers or defenders - of course, this was the main feature of the debate after the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, the Gulf War of 1991, the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 or the war in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020. In Ukraine, so far, neither the fighting nor the debate over the fighting has represented a radical departure from these trends.
Long live the offensive maneuverWhat does this mean for the American armed forces in the future?
Part II of this series of articles examines this issue in more detail, but first it is worth highlighting a few general, preliminary conclusions.
Firstly, the offensive maneuver, obviously, has not outlived itself yet. Even in the face of modern weapons, a breakthrough is still possible, and especially in cases where well-thought-out offensive operations on the internal lines pose dilemmas to thin stretched defenses, as it has been since the middle of summer with the Russians in Kherson and Kharkov. These offensives would be even more successful with improved training and equipment of Ukrainian troops, but Ukraine's ability to succeed with what they have is a powerful demonstration that an offensive maneuver is still possible.
But, secondly, although forward attacks are still possible under the appropriate conditions, they are still very difficult to carry out against a deeply prepared defense with sufficient supplies and operational reserves. This is not a feature of new technologies - it is a consequence of the lethality of constantly developing weapons after 1900, which has been repeatedly observed over more than a century of combat experience. Undiscovered defenders are becoming increasingly vulnerable to long-range weapons and detection means, but hidden and hidden positions remain very resistant to high-precision defeat. Shallow forward defenses can be broken through by well-organized combined attacks, but deep defenses with significant reserves still present a much more difficult problem for attackers. Overstretched positions without reliable supply lines can be overcome, but fortified positions with reliable logistical support are still much harder and more expensive to defeat.
Thirdly, neither shallow, vulnerable defense, nor deep, solid defense are universal characteristics of modern warfare. Both have been happening regularly since 1900, and both, at different times and in different places, have been happening in Ukraine since February.
And this, in turn, calls into question the expediency of restructuring modern armed forces based on the assumption that new technologies have made offensive maneuver impossible or possible, depending on the situation. A successful offensive has been very difficult for a long time, and usually it required both careful preparation and inadequate preparation on the part of the defender. But it provides decisive results when conditions allow it to do so, and such conditions are repeated often enough to suggest that its requirements are worth satisfying.
Editor's note: This is the first part of a series of two articles by the author about modern problems of offensive maneuver, based on observations during the war in Ukraine.
Stephen Biddle is a professor of international relations and public relations at Columbia University and a senior fellow on defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations of the United States. And you can add a comment about this article from the famous American military analyst Michael Kofman:
There is a lot of good in this work by Steve Biddle.
It is balanced and well written, pouring cold water on some of the technical fetishisms and tendentious approaches that have spread since this war began. A few comments.
From my point of view, most technologies do not depend on the opposition of offensive and defense, and this is pretty much a dying view of war. I agree with Biddle that the deployment of forces determines the choice in this dichotomy much more, but I would add to this the composition of forces, which has a structural impact on their numbers.
This war shows that a good theory plus potential does not turn into a successful practice if you have not made appropriate organizational changes, have not formalized concepts or trained troops to implement them. All of this can quickly fall apart when trying to scale into real combat.
Therefore, the question is not only that the use of forces is decisive, but also whether they can be used on a large scale, or they will quickly fall apart, because the forces are extremely heterogeneous, and there are simply no organizational capabilities and experience.
What I disagree with this article is the consequences for offensive maneuver, because the argument seems tautological: offensive maneuver is possible where it is easy. What made his (offensive maneuver) in Ukraine possible was attrition, since it was largely a war of attrition.
So the maneuver is dead? Of course not. As neither the tank nor much else is really dead. While we should take care to summarize the lessons of this war, it highlights attrition as a defining feature of conventional wars and how difficult it is to avoid it.
