The Russians and Ukrainians aren't yet able to teach us lessons about a modern battlefield because they simply accept the positional warfare and seek to cope with that as best as they can. Unless we accept positional warfare is the new normal, can we really learn more than what we get from weapons performance data from the Winter War of 2022?
The war goes on. Talks to end the war go on, made difficult by Russia's insistence that "peace" means "victory"--over Ukraine and NATO. Russia resumed its effort to break Ukraine's energy infrastructure.
This isn't new, but it confirms what I've been observing for a while:
The Russian military command’s focus on light vehicle production and provision further demonstrates ISW’s ongoing assessment that Russian forces have optimized themselves for positional warfare in Ukraine and that Russian advances will likely remain constrained to a foot pace in the near to medium-term.
The Russians aren't innovating to restore maneuver to the stalemated battlefield. The Russians are just trying to cope with the stalemated battlefield to make the best of positional warfare.
This is what I described in an Army article about the Western Front of World War I. The Allies introduced a lot of novel weapons and equipment during the stalemate. But all they really did was cope with a stalemated, defense-dominated front. It took years before Allied tactics dramatically expanded in complexity to include all the new stuff and exploit them--and the traditional weapons--to begin to restore maneuver to the battlefield.
The German army cracked before the Allies could really mature their innovations in equipment and tactics. And so Allied innovations stalled. The Germans picked up the ball and from 1939-1941 demonstrated that they had developed expanded tactics to open up the battlefield far better than the Allies had since 1918.
Mind you, I don't assume that in the short run we would have done better in similar circumstances in Ukraine. We could have entered an era of figurative phalanxes that batter each other into submission as we see Ukraine and Russia trying to do. But if we do face that, innovations will--as the Germans did--break that paradigm of force and operations design.
Can either side in the Winter War of 2022 make the leap from coping with drone-driven stalemate to incorporating their new weapons, equipment, and procedures in new tactics to make operationally decisive advances?
NOTE: ISW updates continue here.
NOTE: Also, I put war-related links and commentary in the Weekend Data Dump on Substack. You may read my posts on Substack, at The Dignified Rant: Evolved.
NOTE: I made the image with Bing.
