Weapons Designed and Built to Defeat Russian Armies are, You Know, Defeating Russian Armies
Weapons Designed and Built to Defeat Russian Armies are, You Know, Defeating Russian Armies
A historical perspective on the war in Ukraine
Which World War wore it better? Journalists reporting from eastern Ukraine in recent weeks described static defense and high casualties from indirect fire, drawing comparisons to the First World War. Now the pre-withdrawal looting has begun in Kherson; a major defeat for Russian arms looms in the southern center of the country, moving at comparative breakneck speed to the Dnipro. As in the First World War, the fight in Ukraine will suddenly turn fluid after prolonged immobility.
Although the eastern fronts of that conflict were never exactly the same as the continuous Western Front, they featured similar scenes of entrenched hell at various points, including parts of Ukraine. The Second World War was a more mobile, but even more destructive affair that saw both sides target the cities of Ukraine. Artillery warfare with high exposives was the defining fact of both conflicts, the chief creator of casualties, the undisputed king of battle, or in Russian wording, the god of war. It has an urban aesthetic in demolished buildings and a rural aesthetic in cratered moonscapes.
Perhaps it is not surprising that the war looks the same way, or produces a similar constellation of symptoms (“shell shock”) in some humans who endure artillery bombardment. Some recent stories sound bizarre until you know they have antecedents in the literature. A soldier is stuck in a hole as shells crash all around him, sound asleep until the drumfire stops, because that is when he knows to be alert for the enemy, and in the meantime he is too exhausted to be afraid anymore. The human endocrine and nervous systems are not capable of sustaining a state of alarm in the animal forever. Most habituate quickly.
Others are not so lucky: another soldier chain-smokes and seems on edge at every moment (“hyper-vigilance”). A noncom is profiting on misery and everyone resents it. PTSD is evident. There are grumbles and complaints about living under fire, the lifestyle of rats, the weather. At some point, our living war correspondents will take time away from Donetsk battlefields to read into the historiography and literature of the First World War, find a million parallels, and dazzle us with their reporting.
One thing they will discover in consulting the timeline of news back then is that abstraction helps. Paying too much attention to the 24-hour news cycle during an artillery war, or getting too excited about every lost or gained acre of ground, day after day, in a relatively static war of position, only inspires anxiety and depression while offering little insight into the underlying rhythms of battle. One must zoom out until the keening of the men in the trenches (they are still largely men) becomes inaudible before they can notice that electric tingle in the wind.
Zoom out into space, where Starlink satellite coverage is allowing American defense contractors to locate electronic warfare platforms so that howitzers and HIMARS can pick them off. Zoom back down to cloud level: with interference attenuated, Ukrainian drones return with a vengeance; artillery becomes even more effective; so do all their attacking ground formations. Every Russian headquarters wiped out means killed captains and colonels and a whole operational element numb to command. Every ammo or fuel dump exploding is a massive blow to the already-miserable logistics of the Russian Army. This week saw special attention paid to one of two bridges over the Donetsk, closing it to military traffic. A pontoon bridge was reportedly put in place, but just take a wild guess what will probably happen to it.
Zoom out into history. A shipment of 150,000 M777 howitzer rounds to Ukraine only sounds like a lot. Efficient German gunners punched out a million shells in the first nine hours of Verdun. That colossal battle lasted most of a year and cost almost as many German as French lives. Weight of fire is not everything; there is much to be said for precision. Efficiency of fire — judicious expenditure of munitions as opposed to massed battery strikes in the Russian style — has been a sincere virtue of Ukrainian combat culture by necessity, and now by design. Ukraine is increasingly armed with NATO weapons designed and built specifically to do exactly this kind of “deep battle” against Soviet forces.
All eyes have been on HIMARS, a wheeled rocket artillery system that is the lighter version of the heavy, tracked M270 MLRS. Expectations are building around longer-range MGM-140 ATACMS rocket that both platforms can use. Whereas Russian antiaircraft platform operators have proven unable to cope with the standard version, they will be helpless against a Mach 3 munition that is actually designed to fool them about its origins and intentions in flight. What gets unsaid in most commentary is that this is all last-generation technology. Whereas the United States and Western Europe built more than 1,300 MLRS systems, they went out of production in 2003. Nor has the “new” Russian Army really advanced its thinking beyond the last major land war they had to fight. As one Ukrainian commander put it after leading a successful defense at Cherniv, “since 1941, their tactics have not changed.” For students of the military history of the Cold War, this war seems stuck in a time warp, like a Tom Clancy alt-history scifi novel.
During the 1991 Gulf War, radar-directed MLRS counterbattery fire often responded to Iraqi artillery batteries within one minute. Not by coincidence, the HIMARS system was intended from conception to shoot rockets and move out in one minute — gone in sixty seconds like Nicholas Cage, escaping retributive fire. It takes one MLRS or two HIMARS to cover a whole grid square, one kilometer on a side, in high explosive blast trauma, so a Ukrainian commander planning an attack does not have to think too hard about how much of this precious supply of artillery support to ask for: look at a map, count the squares.
Morale has reportedly remained high despite all the stresses. Mainly, Ukrainians just wish the west would hurry up and send more guns, more ammunition, more of everything they can use to kill Russians. NATO states spent billions of dollars over decades designing the weapons needed to break up and annihilate more numerous Soviet armies during the Cold War; they saw an enemy with artillery and armor advantages, and planned accordingly. Ukraine now bears the fruit of all that high-tech taxpayer layout, and it is all working according to plan. By defeating the initial invasion in February, and holding off Russians through July, Ukrainians are now able to expand their ambitions of becoming a de facto NATO power.
In March, everyone dismissed the idea of sending F-16s and A-10s to Ukraine. Today, the Pentagon is signalling these very systems will show up in combat soon enough. Both of these aircraft were engineered from the ground-up for destroying Soviet armored columns: the fighters suppress air defense systems with radar-homing missiles, then the Warthogs mop up the armor. By design, either plane can land with damage and be repaired, or cannibalized to repair others of its kind. This was all built on the assumption that NATO would be outnumbered in men and tanks and planes, so they had to be better than Soviet weapons.
By the early 1970s, Soviet war planners developed an idea of the “Military-Technical Revolution” emerging in precision guidance weapons and sought to restructure their conventional forces accordingly. The plan was to break Europe before the western alliance could recover. Envisioning deep strikes by airborne assault troops, attack helicopters, and long-range artillery, they held exercises and discovered that Soviet logistics were a mess. The reader will note that Russian logistics remain a hot mess. As a result, Soviet planners forward-deployed as much artillery ammunition as possible in massive dumps exactly like the ones that HIMARS are targeting today. NATO planners had their own “Revolution in Military Affairs” during the 1970s. Aware of Soviet developments and looking to expand their non-nuclear options, NATO created all of the battlefield whizz-bang weaponry now changing the face of battle in Ukraine. Hey, it works!
Three weeks ago I listened to a Russian artillery expert say that key factories in the barrel replacement system were probably still not ready for wartime production levels; only a small number of the essential machine tools are on hand. No artillery procurement shortages like that exist in the west, at least none that flexible defense industries with experienced staff cannot overcome quickly. Due to high casualties among Russian artillerymen, contract soldiers are reportedly being rushed through a two-day training, with predictable effects on performance. Again, the similarity to Russian artillery shell shortages and training issues in the First World War is uncanny, the brutal irony being that all of this was supposed to prevent a Western Front from ever happening again.
Everyone had the best of intentions. Honest! Combatants of the First World War developed whole “blitzkrieg” tank and bomber fleets for the Second World War out of desperate desire to avoid another long war of attrition like 1914-1918. The second war was even bloodier and more destructive than the first one, however, and because of those new doctrines and technologies, not in spite of them. President Truman ordered the first atomic bombings hoping to cut things short. Then the conventional force revolutions of NATO and the Warsaw Pact in the 1970s and 1980s aimed at preventing nuclear attrition in a Third World War. Now here we are, wondering whether Ukraine can beat Russia with weapons that were exactly intended to beat Russian armies in a “conventional” Third World War, and speculating whether Russia will resort to nuclear options for ending their battlefield attrition.
It remains fashionable in certain intellectual and ideological circles to rubbish the notion that “game changer” weapons are capable of bringing the issue to a close in Ukraine, or else not enough to do so without incurring Armageddon. Some of them are even historians, but their narrow expertise has blinded them. Max Hastings never served in a precision-era US Army, so he has no idea how any of this works; it is not his field. Henry Kissinger was almost alive in the First World War and his mental map of the universe has never lacked a Russian pole star at its center. Craftsmen of contemporary military art understand what is going on.
Long-range artillery pushed Russians off of Snake Island; long-range missiles cleared the Gulf of Odessa; long-range rockets have sent the Russian Navy fleeing in terror from Sevastopol; not by coincidence, Russia is suddenly quite reasonable about reopening the flow of grain through the Black Sea. This negotiated outcome is a fig leaf for Russia, a saving of face, for they have been defeated. More defeats will follow. The game has changed, is still changing, will continue to change, because the “war machine” built to defeat Russia is working exactly as designed.
