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Professor Edward Luttwak
is a strategist and historian known for his works on grand strategy,
geoeconomics, military history, and international relations.
August 10, 2023
Whenever Russian missiles strike a Ukrainian city, or Kyiv’s drones
target a building in Moscow, the attacks are inevitably followed by the
sort of media coverage worthy of a Blitz raid. Yet generating headlines
is just about their only achievement: precision missiles cannot deliver
much explosive, and drones even less. As for their great accuracy, it is
only effective when valuable targets can be identified — something
which is hard to do except against tanks on the battlefield and warships floating on open water.
Against buildings, small missile warheads and puny drone charges can
certainly inflict damage, but not of any real consequence. And this is a
key aspect of the entire war, especially when compared to the last
great conflict on the European continent.
From March 1942, the RAF’s Bomber Command was flying Lancaster
bombers with a typical individual bombload of 6,400kg, so that the first
Lancaster raid to feature 400 bombers dropped 2,560 metric tons — more
than the total tonnage dropped on Ukraine by Russian cruise missiles
since the war started. True, British night bombing was notoriously
inaccurate and much criticised in the aftermath. But by 1945, cities
such as Hamburg and Cologne were burnt out, while others including
Berlin were devastated. Nothing equivalent has happened to Kyiv, nor
could it, because Russia only has a small strategic bomber force while
Ukraine has none. All the military drones now operational across the
globe cannot deliver as much explosive as the Bomber Command could drop
in a couple of nights.
Thus the first serious war of the third millennium must be fought on
the ground — quite a comedown from the “post-kinetic” cyber and
information warfare that had been confidently predicted by both Western
and Russian generals. This is a war that must be fought by sheer,
grinding, attrition, just like the First World War on the Western Front,
with almost none of the “manoeuvre warfare” exploits that made
celebrities of Guderian, Rommel, Patton and Rokossovsky in the Second
World War, and Arik Sharon in 1967 and 1973.
All of these tacticians won disproportionate victories with surprise
offensives. Arriving in fast-moving columns, their forces greatly
outnumbered and overwhelmed a specific sector, while the bulk of the
enemy, distributed across an entire front, could not intervene in time.
In other words, “manoeuvre warfare” depends entirely on
surprise. Even in the Second World War, there was reliable aerial
photography, so that pre-battle concentrations of tanks, trucks and
artillery tractors could not escape detection as they gathered over a
period of weeks. But once the offensive columns moved, it was hard to
keep them under observation, let alone predict their destination.
Photography was impeded by night, clouds and enemy fighters, leaving
more than enough uncertainty to deceive enemies with decoys, simulated
radio traffic, and the false tales of double agents.
This is how it came to be that on D-Day, 6 June 1944, the strongest
German Panzer columns ended up being massed behind Calais to face
Patton’s fictional First United States Army Group, while the Allies were
landing in Normandy 230 miles away. Douglas MacArthur’s Inchon landings
in September 1950, which nullified a string of North Korean victories
in the preceding months, likewise achieved total surprise by very
elaborately simulating a landing at Kunsan, 100 miles to the south.
None of this could happen now. The Americans, Russians and other
military powers have observation satellites equipped with
synthetic-aperture radars, capable of revealing single tanks, let alone
any large grouping of forces, regardless of visibility, while their
returns are refreshed often enough to detect troop movements in hours if
not in minutes. Any other information drawn from intercepts, aerial
reconnaissance or ground observation merely supplements this reliable
intelligence. It is enough to make the battlefield transparent and
operational surprise impossible, killing off the manoeuvre warfare that
can win battles quickly and without mounds of casualties.
In early summer, when the Ukrainians deployed the precious
“operational reserve” they had built up, there was no great mystery as
to what they would do with it: attack somewhere south of Zaporizhzhia
and fight their way down to the Black Sea. This would cut off all the
east-west roads and rail lines that supply the Russian forces strung out
to the west below the Dnipro river. It would set the stage for a great
victory, with Putin forced to choose between continuing the war or
negotiating a cease-fire to rescue his stranded troops.
There were three possible routes to such an outcome. First, Kyiv
could launch a straight assault on Melitopol, which would involve an
ambitious penetration offensive over 90-miles deep. Alternatively, it
could aim for Berdyans’k with a 125-mile offensive that would cut off
more Russians and take more territory. Or, even more daringly, it could
march the full 150 miles to Mariupol, a movement that would have to be
Napoleonic in speed and concentration to reach the Black Sea shore
before the Russians could counter.
None of those options has proved to be workable. While the Ukrainians
were training and deploying, the Russians south of the Dnipro were
digging trench lines shielded by minefields that stretch roughly 625
miles — 185 miles longer than the Western Front at its greatest extent.
Napoleon called this style of linear defence a “cordon”, a thick rope made of infantry to hold the enemy along a long front. And, in his own time, he rightly explained why cordons
were the stupidest way of defending a front: the enemy would arrive in
columns and easily cut through the few troops holding the particular
sector they attacked.
But once again the transparent battlefield has changed everything.
Watching the Ukrainians advance in real time, the Russians could send
their forces to intercept them in equal if not greater numbers. And even
if the numbers were equal, the combat would be unequal because the
Russians would be shielded by their minefields and by their trenches.
It was also unfortunate that the Ukrainians had greatly overestimated
the combat value of the huge 66-ton Leopard tanks they had asked for,
begged for, and finally practically demanded from the Germans. The
Leopard is comparable to the US M1 and Israeli Merkava IV (all three
have some 60 tons of layered armour and high-velocity 120mm guns). But
it lacks one thing that the M1 and Merkava both rely on when facing the
Russian-equipped forces: Trophy, an Israeli active defence with radar to
detect incoming anti-tank missiles, and miniature guns to smash their
warheads.
The Germans are acquiring the device but insisted on testing it
themselves, delaying its shipment to Ukraine. Without Trophy’s
protection, the Leopards fell prey to Russian tank-hunters armed with
Kornet anti-tank missiles. While much simpler, less versatile and
cheaper than the US Javelin, the Kornet is all too effective with its
double warhead that defeats reactive armour. When Ukraine’s long-awaited
offensive started, it demonstrated this most unfortunately, with the
destruction of some of the precious Leopards that were supposed to lead
the way.
One might have hoped for a better outcome from the geo-economic
confrontation between the heavily-sanctioned Russian economy and the
much richer Western coalition that supports Ukraine — especially because
things started so well. Early fears that Germany and Italy would not
tolerate the loss of their Russian markets and Russian natural gas
supplies proved unfounded. Instead of defections, the coalition that
economically supports Ukraine has expanded across Europe and now
includes Japan and even South Korea, which sent a token $150 million
this year.
But initial hopes that Russia could be seriously pressured, perhaps
all the way to the negotiating table, by stalling both their oil exports
and their imports of Western goods soon faded. Unlike China, Russia is
self-sufficient in both food and fuel, and can manufacture all it needs,
except for micro-processors and other high-tech items that are easily
smuggled.
Turkey, while ostensibly a close American ally, is still the transit
point for many high-technology exports to Russia, and Turkey’s traders
and traffickers have plenty of competition in other countries. As for
the Russian economy, the news
is gloomy but not gloomy enough. A meagre 1.5% growth will be achieved
this year, but that still exceeds the German growth rate (which is
expected to be zero). Russia’s inflation rate of 3.3% is also around
half the Euro average. The war will not end because of Russia’s economic
capitulation.
There is, then, only one route forward: to fight the war in earnest,
as befits a struggle of national liberation. Ukraine’s population has
declined but still exceeds 30 million, so that the total number in
uniform could be as much as 3 million (Israel’s 10% ratio in 1948) or at
least 2 million (Finland’s reservist count today). With those troops,
Ukraine could win its battles and liberate its territory in the same way
as most of Europe’s wars of independence — by gruelling, attritional
warfare.