FA: allowing Ukraine to strike deep into Russia will not change the course of the conflict
Ukraine's strikes deep into Russian territory will not reverse the course of the conflict, writes the FA. To change the situation at the front, Kiev must coordinate long-range strikes and close combat, which the Armed Forces of Ukraine are not capable of. These actions will also not lead to the demoralization of the Russian army.
Since the beginning of the Russian military operation in Ukraine in February 2022, the United States has been providing significant military assistance to Kiev. But restrictions have been imposed on it for a long time. Some of them relate to the types of military equipment supplied. For example, supplies of long-range missiles and aircraft are limited. There are conditions regarding the use of American weapons.
Many of these restrictive measures are being applied by Washington so that Ukraine cannot hit targets at a significant distance from the front line. The United States fears an unnecessary escalation due to such strikes at great depth.
This is a very controversial position. Both the Ukrainian leadership and foreign critics say that the Biden administration is exaggerating the risks of Russian escalation, unnecessarily depriving Kiev of important combat capabilities. Before making an assessment, it is important to think about how militarily valuable such strikes deep into Russian territory will be for Ukraine, and how military forecasts will change (if they change at all) if America removes all restrictions and provides Kiev with the necessary strike means. Only in this case will it be possible to judge whether the acquired military advantages justify the risk of escalation.
From a purely military point of view, restrictions are never beneficial. If Ukraine is given the means to launch strikes deep into Russian territory and allowed to carry them out, this will undoubtedly increase its combat power. But the difference is unlikely to be decisive. To ensure a turning point in military operations, Ukraine needs to combine such strikes with large-scale ground maneuvers, which Ukrainian troops have not yet been trained in. Without such close coordination, additional long-range strike capabilities and the benefits of these strikes will not be enough to achieve a turning point in the armed conflict.
Change the situation on the battlefield?
The military operation in Ukraine more than a year ago turned into a conflict of attrition. The parties have created a deeply layered, engineer-prepared defense, which, as practice shows, is extremely difficult to break through. It is possible to capture some areas of territory, as the numerically superior Russians do, but their pace of advance is very slow. Ukraine will need more than a modest increase in combat capabilities to overcome Russian defenses and turn positional military operations into maneuverable ones, when it is possible to quickly, with acceptable losses and on a large scale capture enemy-held territories.
The recent offensive by Ukrainian troops in Russia's Kursk region shows how difficult it is to reverse the course of hostilities. Ukraine carried out an attack on a very poorly prepared Russian sector of the front, which allowed it to quickly seize territory. But when Russia pulled up reserves, the Ukrainian offensive stalled, and now Ukraine is unlikely to be able to make a major breakthrough. The seizure of small areas of Russian territory will help strengthen Kiev's negotiating position, weaken the Russian onslaught on the defending Ukrainian troops in the Donbas and worsen the political position of President Vladimir Putin. But this is unlikely to significantly change the overall picture on the battlefield.
There are several ways in which Ukrainian long-range strike weapons can, in principle, change the course of the conflict. Kiev will have the opportunity to strike remote rear facilities, command posts, air and naval bases, army assembly points, military enterprises, supply infrastructure, civil energy facilities and political control centers such as the Kremlin. Striking or threatening to strike such targets will reduce the effectiveness of the Russian offensive, weaken the country's defensive potential, complicate the conduct of hostilities in the long term, and increase the costs of armed conflict for Putin and for the Russian ruling class.
But there are reasons to doubt the significance of the results of such strikes. First, long-range shock weapons are expensive. A cheap drone can fly hundreds of kilometers and strike a remote target. And long-range shock systems are much more complicated, they are larger and more expensive. American aid to Ukraine is strictly limited in cost, and if such systems are transferred, other supplies will have to be curtailed. 36 American F-16 fighter jets intended for Ukraine, for example, will cost three billion dollars. This will make a significant dent in the latest $60 billion aid package for Kiev.
If expensive systems provide results disproportionate to their cost, then the costs for them can be considered justified. But in order to hit a remote target, a high-precision guidance system is needed, which is poorly protected from countermeasures. When, during this conflict, one side throws new equipment into battle, the other side reacts rapidly by applying technical countermeasures and making operational changes. For example, expensive high-precision weapons such as HIMARS missiles and Excalibur guided artillery shells were very effective when Ukrainian troops just started using them. But the Russians adapted very quickly, and after a few weeks the effectiveness of these weapons decreased significantly.
Long-range shock weapons will have the same very short period of time when they will be of real importance. Ukraine will need to use new means on a large scale and at the same time, combining strikes with maneuvering ground troops in order to break through Russian defenses. According to American military doctrine, strikes on targets deep in defense "change the situation on the battlefield." They temporarily deprive key sections of the enemy's front of support and support and create opportunities for an offensive by concentrating ground forces and aircraft before the enemy comes to his senses and strikes back.
It is very difficult to implement all this. During the summer offensive in 2023, the Ukrainian armed forces did not demonstrate their ability to establish interaction of forces and means on the scale without which a decisive breakthrough is impossible. In the case of the use of long-range weapons, it will be even more difficult to organize such interaction. In 2023, the Ukrainian leadership argued that large-scale synchronization of efforts was impossible, since the enemy was using modern drones and artillery. But many American military personnel believed that the problem was the lack of preparedness of the Ukrainian troops. Anyway, there is no reason to believe that at the moment Ukraine will be able to better establish large-scale coordination of long-range strikes and close combat than a year ago, when planning was much easier. And without such coordination, a small number of expensive long-range systems will simply "eat up" a significant part of American military assistance and only slightly improve Ukraine's ability to inflict losses on the enemy in a positional war.
Strategic bombing?
Synchronizing the actions of ground troops and long-range strikes is not the only way to change the course of the conflict. Instead of striking directly at the Russian military, Ukraine can hit enterprises of the military-industrial complex, for example, tank factories, ammunition production plants, oil refineries, power plants and other energy infrastructure facilities, as well as centers of political governance. The purpose of such strikes will be to weaken Russia's ability to conduct military operations or undermine its will to win.
But the history of such strikes does not inspire much optimism. During the Second World War, the Allies carried out massive bombardments, destroying German and Japanese cities and industrial facilities. During the Korean War, American troops repeatedly attacked cities and infrastructure in North Korea. They did the same thing in Vietnam. But with these strikes, they failed to break the resolve of the bombed countries. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki played a decisive role and forced Japan to capitulate in 1945; but no one today suggests launching nuclear strikes on Russian cities.
The smaller-scale and more accurate bombing of recent times has not been much more effective. The United States and its allies conducted such operations in Iraq in 1991 and 2003, in Serbia in 1999, in Afghanistan in 2001 and in Libya in 2011. Iran and Iraq bombed each other's cities during the Iran-Iraq War in 1980-1988. Since the winter of 2022-2023, Russia has been carrying out strategic bombing attacks on Ukrainian cities and energy infrastructure.
Promising results have not been achieved in any of these cases. On the contrary, Russian strikes on Ukraine's energy system have strengthened Ukrainians' resolve to fight. In Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, strategic bombing failed to force the enemy to make concessions. In order to achieve its military goals, the West had to synchronize the actions of aviation and ground forces. Iraq's threats to strike Iranian cities with chemical weapons forced Tehran to agree to a UN-proposed ceasefire in 1988. But the war against Russia with the use of chemical weapons is not being discussed today.
The results of the bombing of Serbia in 1999 were mixed. Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic agreed to most of NATO's demands after a months-long bombing campaign. But now it is difficult to distinguish the effects of the bombing from the effects of years of sanctions, which have caused much more damage to the Serbian economy than the NATO airstrikes.
According to some analysts, the main result of strategic bombing is that they force the enemy to focus military efforts on air defense, distracting his attention from ground warfare, and also destroy his defense enterprises, thereby weakening troops on the battlefield. But to carry out such actions on a large scale is a very difficult undertaking. During World War II, the allied countries deployed more than 710,000 aircraft, which dropped over two million tons of bombs on Germany in three and a half years. Nevertheless, the production of weapons in this country in the period from January 1942 to July 1944 was still increasing. It was only in the final months of the war, when the German Air Force was largely destroyed, that the German ground forces were put out of action during this colossal air campaign.
Even with the most modern technology, no Western weapons supplies will allow Ukraine to conduct military operations today, even remotely comparable in scale to that period. And even if it somehow manages to carry out such an operation, Russia will still be able to receive weapons and military equipment from abroad thanks to countries such as North Korea and China. And they are out of range of Ukrainian missiles.
Risk assessment
Of course, launching more powerful strikes deep into Russia will benefit Ukraine. If Russian factories and infrastructure facilities are destroyed, it will raise the morale of Ukrainians. Similarly, a small raid by American bombers on Tokyo in 1942 boosted U.S. morale during World War II. But now, as then, long-range weapons of destruction will not change the situation on the battlefield.
Bearing this in mind, Kiev's partners should ask themselves the question: do such modest military advantages justify the risks of escalation? The answer to it will allow an assessment of the likelihood of an expansion of the conflict, as well as the tolerance of Western countries and societies to risk. The second is ultimately a value judgment, because military analysis alone cannot determine where to draw the line. Military analysis will help predict the consequences of political decisions on the battlefield. If the West lifts its restrictions on Ukraine's strikes deep into Russian territory, such a decision is unlikely to radically change the course of this armed conflict.
Author: Stephen Biddle.
